Brew Hacking

For the first time ever (while brewing), we had too much wort. Too much wort!!! That never happens. After filling the 5-gallon bucket up to about 6.5 gallons, we still had some left over. At that point (because it's just not right to waste any beer), we had to sanitize a carboy for the leftover.

However, in going through the supplies, we learned that we were missing a piece of the air lock. It's the little middle piece that prevents the back-flow of water into the fermenting wort. We were in luck, though. Amanda, being the pack rat that she is (;-)), keeps the old test tubes from liquid yeast. She brilliantly realized that the tube fits perfectly in the outer part of the air lock. I brilliantly realized that she has a circular saw. She brilliantly realized that the test tubes are not glass, but plastic.

A couple minutes later, she cut down the tube, and then I sanded the rough edges until they were smooth like glass, and we had a complete air lock!

The process, in less sarcastic detail, is to take the yeast test tube, cut it down to about 1-1.5 inches with a circular saw (carefully). Once that's done, pick off the extra plastic bits and then use some fine-grained sand paper to polish the edges smooth. It should fit in the air lock, and you're good to go (after sanitization, of course).

Wonderful Weekend Woes

Weekends should never have to end. The previous one doubly so.

Why, you ask? Well, maybe you didn't, but you're going to learn anyway if you continue to read.

Forrest came down. I always enjoy it when he does. He came for the Jonathan Coulton concert at the Birchmere on Thursday. What a wonderful coincidence that it corresponded with Memorial Day weekend.

For the rest of the weekend, the poor cars must have gotten sick of seeing Virginia. I had to work on Friday, but everybody else went sailing with Laura. Saturday, the Mini got to see both IHOP and Great Falls, VA. No, we did not drive the Mini into the IHOP, though it probably would have fit. It had to wait outside.

We also saw Star Trek, which was very awesome. It was like a masterfully played chess game. It took the future, full of old people, and turned it back on the past, full of young people, entirely changing history and paving way for remaking the original series (if the creators so desire). Just poetic in its execution.

The Girl's car also got to see Baltimore. Sunday, we went to Brew at the Zoo, which was nice in that we got to try a lot of local brews. Subsequently, we returned to Amanda's and began brewing a vanilla porter.

I really wish the girl hadn't been sick. I felt as though she was just chauffeuring us all over creation this weekend. She maintains that she didn't feel that way, and that she had fun too, but that doesn't change my supersensitive inhuman ability to feel things in a way that always makes me feel guilty or lessens my enjoyment.

Despite that, it was an awesome weekend. It ended on Tuesday, of all times, with Forrest and me playing Smash Brothers. I can imagine no better end to it. And with that, I take my leave.

Insanity Ensues

It's been two days of pure hilarity and insanity. As always, a few tears mixed in, but they've been the norm recently. The hilarity and insanity have not.

Yesterday was Sunday. The plan was, beginning at Amanda's house, to bottle beer, eat lunch, go for a walk, and brew beer. We got to her place, went to Safeway for supplies, and came back to prepare a tasty lunch of quesadillas.

Halfway through sauteing veggies, Amanda realized that we forgot to purchase one of the things necessary for quesadillas; black beans. So, back to the store. We then, after purchasing all sorts of ingredients, forgot to use half of them. Just forgot they were there. Avocado? Forgot it. Enchilada sauce? Forgot that too. Black beans in the first place? Forgot them? Wow.

We then bottled beer. Bottling sugar, you ask? Nope, I forgot to add it. Fortunately, Amanda caught it early enough that it wasn't a problem?

Walk time. We went to an arboretum in Columbia. It began with the Girl and Amanda saying something like, "Hey! Go run quickly down that hill!" I did, and proceeded to roll my ankle pretty badly no more than thirty seconds into our walk. Fortunately, it sorted itself out and only two of my toes are black and blue. No long term damage, I think.

Later on, I got to climb a few trees. That's a dying art, I think. Not nearly enough people climb trees these days. They're meant to be climbed.

Notice at this point that all that has happened and it's only about 4:00 on Sunday.

We had Chinese food at what might as well be called "Super Awesome Chinese Food Place" in Columbia, and then we went back to Amanda's and began brewing a wheat beer. That went relatively smoothly, and so we'll have the tastiness sometime around the end of April.

At some point that evening, something like this happened:

G: What are you doing?
J: Sitting in the bedroom that's not a bedroom. Because it has a window that's not a window!

This was in reference to the cat room.

We then watched a flick and went to bed. After all, it was a work night.

Even before the next day happened, weirdness hit. We were awoken at 4 AM by a police chase in Columbia. I'm pretty sure it was a police chase because I heard a siren, and I also heard an engine that couldn't have had more the four or six cylinders rev up prior to the peak point of the Doppler effect of the police siren.

A few hours later, I got up, got infused, and hit work for about an hour. I came back with lunch for the Girl and myself, and then we proceeded to fall asleep again (which sounds nice right about now). Amanda came home, and the true business began...

See, the reason we stayed over at Amanda's to begin with was that I didn't want to drive all over creation prior to taking the children of the Alleys climbing. So, we got to Earth Treks, took Lindsay and Lori climbing, and generally had a nice time. Afterward, the Alleys and we (the Girl and I) went to dinner at Cheeburger Cheeburger, where everything that could be thrown or spilled was thrown or spilled. Everybody enjoyed though.

At that point, we had to turn around and go back to Amanda's to get the Girl's purse. On the way back, we learned that the other missing item, Amanda's digital camera, had turned up... in her refrigerator?!?!? Not somewhere I usually put electronics, or anything other than food really.

Tomorrow, normalcy should ensue. It was a nice diversion from some of the rougher points in life recently, however, and it is yet another reminder among many that we are surrounded by wonderful people in our lives.

Differential Brewing

I'm not very good with subtlety; particularly when it comes to flavors. I can tell when something tastes different, but I can't necessarily identify why. If I could tell the difference in recipes with something other than the food analog to a sledge hammer, I'd be a much better cook. It would mean I'd be able to make Frankenfood. I could just mash the right ingredients together and rock the tasty buds. I envy Karina for this. She's very experimental in cooking, and it always tastes good.

I think I'd be good with differential cooking. If I could line up multiple, slightly different meals next to one another and eat them sequentially, I might learn something. I don't think this would work, though, because I don't think I ever want to eat three meals simultaneously, even though this is probably what happens whenever I eat Chipotle or Chinese takeout, or pretty much sit down at any restaurant. Even though trying to eat multiple meals to satisfy my scientific curiosity won't work terribly well, it doesn't mean that I can't apply this concept in other arenas. Amanda and I discussed this last night with beer. We're apparently both particularly fond of reds. The experiment lives! When things settle down, we're going to experiment with beer ingredients. After all, who can't drink multiple beers in a night? It's always a win when alcoholic beverages get to satisfy scientific and experimental tendencies.

The experiment! Batch one will be the control group. Batch two will be the group with the grains varied. Batch three will be the batch with the hops varied. The beauty of it is that drinking three beers can be nice, and should give us some insight into the psychology of beer. Time to put some beer on a sofa and pick it apart...

In Memoriam

Before this all happened, I decided that I wanted to make a beer for when our child was born. The girl told me that the only beer she really likes is a chocolate stout, so I decided that's what I was going to make so that she could partake.

I still want to honor him. I still want to celebrate the fact that we got to spend 42 minutes with our baby boy. We made the chocolate stout today. The girl helped brew it.

Rest in peace, baby boy. We love you. We miss you. We'll never forget you. Hopefully, we'll get to meet you again one day.

Pretzel Beer: Bottling

Well, the pretzel beer is done and bottled. I'm calling it "Four for a Dollar" because we added pretzels from Philadelphia. For the unindoctrinated, in Philly, you can stop at many street corners and pick up four nice, large soft pretzels in a brown paper bag for a dollar. It's tastiness at it's greatest (and cheapest). So, we made the American Wheat beer recipe from Maryland Homebrew and it's in bottles. Yield: ~28 bottles. We had a little bit of the uncarbonated, warm beer and it was pretty good. It's also a nice color red. I think, once it's carbonated, it'll be pretty tasty.

Experimental Adventures in Brewing: Part 1

While sitting in the office working, I had a side discussion about Philadelphia soft pretzels. Everywhere I've ever been except for Philly has no such thing as soft pretzels that are four for a dollar. The Philly soft pretzels are also nice and dense and tasty. Well, during this discussion, it also came up that I'm getting into brewing. My coworker wondered aloud how a soft pretzel beer might taste. I decided then and there that I'd like to try it!

The beer, which I'm dubbing "Four for a Dollar," is currently fermenting. We (Amanda and I) started with an American Wheat beer recipe and added Philly soft pretzels from our recent Thanksgiving trip up there to see family. Ultimately, I'm hoping I can taste the pretzel. If not, I think we'll have a pretty tasty wheat beer, so I guess we can't really lose on this one. Stay tuned...

A Day Off...

I have a reprieve from work. It's kind of nice. It's been a fun day. My keister has taken permanent root to the futon. I've learned a few things today, too. There are virtually no good free ERD (Entity relationship diagram) tools available for Linux or Mac OS. The only ones I could find are DBDesignerFork, MySQL Workbench (which doesn't work well for Linux), and a really weak plug-in for Eclipse called Amateras ERD. Edit: For ease of use and availability, SQLite Manager gets honorable mention too.

Apparently baby mandarin ducks jump out of trees...

I also made dinner for the first time in a long time; rice noodles with peanut sauce. A tasty, quick (15 minutes) meal, assuming you are obscure enough (as I am) to regularly keep rice noodles on hand, and could happily replace your blood with peanut butter despite the inevitable artery clogging that would ensue. I say it's worth it for peanut butter blood.

Fordham Copperhead is tasty...

The end.

Adventures in Brewing, Part 3 - AKA, My Strange Saturday

I wasn't expecting today to be anything interesting. It's just a rainy Saturday. It's also bottling day. I was a little trepidatious about bottling, so I decided to go to Amanda's house before climbing to get it over with, and to care for the puddies, who are very well.

So, here we go. I got there, started following the instructions, and all started off fine. The beer smells good. I cleaned it all, mastered siphoning today, and got the beer out of the carboy and back into the bucket. I then got the beer from the bucket to the bottles successfully (with priming sugar mixture :-) ), and capped the bottles successfully as well.

The cleanup is where things got interesting (though not bad), and where I typically need help in life. First, I cleaned out the bucket. That went fine. Then, the carboy. It's difficult to get detritus from the carboy when the neck is so small. But, I successfully figured out how to get that one going too. In the process, I feel like I got half the kitchen wet, but I'm probably exaggerating. It couldn't have been more than a quarter of it. But, it's all dry now.

I also discovered that iodine likes to TRY to stain countertop. Some of the iodaphore got onto the bottle, and I placed it on the counter and left it for a while, not having known that. I discovered the ioda-ring, panicked slightly, and then took to cleaning it. It wouldn't immediately come out, but Bon Ami seems to have done the trick. I successfully removed the stain from the countertop, thankfully. I'd have felt miserably guilty if I'd stained it permanently.

While there, I also performed an experiment of sorts. Since at no point has the carboy ever been been full to the neck, I decided to determine how full the bucket should be to get the carboy filled properly. It turns out the magic number is just a hair over the 3 mark. Hooray. Now I think we just have to make enough wort not to dilute it too much when putting it in the bucket. I'm betting the more wort, the more potent the beer. That might be obvious, but I learn a lot of obvious things the hard way. I've reinvented the wheel so many times, they might as well call it the "idjamamit greg."

Then, during the downpour that ensued on the way home, I stopped at Costco. On the way, while listening to the radio, an announcement came on for sneak preview tickets to the 98 Rock showing of Quarantine. I called in and won! I also won some tickets to Kim's Krypt and a chance to go to LA for the premier of the Quarantine in Hollywood. Awesome! I got to talk to Stash from 98 Rock. That was cool. He's a nice guy.

All that, and it's only about 2:00. What does the rest of the day hold in store? Oh, yeah, and I never did make it climbing...

Adventures in Brewing, Part 2

I successfully transferred the beer to the carboy... I think. Only time will tell. Siphoning beer from bucket to carboy turns out to be a tricky endeavor. Gravity is a great help. I believe (or I was told at one point) that air is not. I'm not sure I kept the air from the beer. However, all the rest is well. The beer is being dry-hopped, and it's in the carboy, and there are few particulates as far as I could tell.

It appears to be a tasty beer, too! I love pumpkin. It's potent, which makes me happy. I think, if it survives the next ten days, that it will be quite nice. I have ten days to prepare for part three, the bottling (with the priming sugar!).

And, for the sake of fun, an update on Amanda's cats. Lucy and Pinstripe are alive and well, and VERY well fed since I was the one doing the feeding today instead of Mandy.

A Quick Brewing Note

Something occurred to me. When brewing the pumpkin ale (specifically when making the wort), I was told it didn't really matter how much water to put in the pot. I was thinking about it, and I think it does matter. I think that the more wort you make, the more potent (read: flavorful) the ale will be ultimately. If you think about it, making beer is about making the wort and then adding water to it (i.e., diluting it) until your bucket is "full enough" to make your batch. So, I think next time I'll fill the pot as full as I can when making the wort.

Now, it's possible I'll feel like an idiot when my friends read this. It's possible that this is common knowledge and that this is yet another example of me rediscovering the wheel. Knowledge is like a shiny object to me. When I figure something out, even as fundamental as dilution, I'm dreadfully excited.

So, next time making beer, I propose an experiment. I say, make two batches (or two half batches). Then, make more wort for one than the other, and compare at them both at the end. I'm curious. Are you?

Adventures in Brewing, Part 1

So, I'm brewing now. Amanda has brewed a few times before, and so has Ken has even more than that. This was my first time to be "in charge." Appropriately enough, my first try at brewing is pumpkin ale, just in time for Halloween.

The evening began with a trip to the brew store. Not knowing anything about it, I was happy that Amanda told me to talk with Chris. She hooked me up with everything we needed. On the way back to Amanda's, my tires failed in a way, and I skidded into an intersection in front of a cop and nearly caused an accident. I'm lucky the cop didn't ticket me. My brakes locked, my ABS didn't seem to work, and I slid very slowly, and for about 30 feet, into the intersection as people were turning left across me. Luckily, no mangled people or metal ensued.

Back at Amanda's, I got the beer going, managed the recipe, and we configured a beer and ate Chipotle for dinner. It was tasty. The beer smelled awesome! So, in 5 days, it'll be ready to be transferred into secondary fermentation, and then 10-11 days after that, bottling time! I have to do these final two parts by my lonesome, so I hope I don't screw anything up. Knowing me, it's completely possible. I have instructions, though, and I'm very ready to do my best for a tasty beer!