Blogtagged!

Spoon and Sickpuppy of the wildly popular Should I Drink That podcast blogtagged me with "5 things you didn't know about me". They made a video. I will do it in blog format. Afterwards I get to blogtag five other unsuspecting individuals. Here it goes:

1.) I can function without sleep for at least 36 hours. By my calculations based on a normal person's sleep patterns compared to mine, I have been conscious the equivalent of the average still alive 73 year old.


2.) My son's date of birth is the reverse of my daughter's. I predicted his birth date when my wife became pregnant. (Hence I am married to the most wonderful woman on the planet and have two not so tiny children).

3.) I have worked for the same company in some way shape or form for over the last 20 years.

4.) I am named (with others) on three patents associated with instruments in the field of industrial UV measurement.

5.) I was involved in a head on collision with an underage drunk driver in the early 90's and had to have my knee reconstructed. I have an Achilles tendon from a cadaver grafted in place of one of my posterior cruciate ligaments. It took three operations and over 2 years of physical rehab to become "healed". Yet I can't stand MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) with their stance of bringing back prohibition in the name of so-called safety. They should be wiped from the face of the earth and each and every one of their leaders sued into poverty. That's at a minimum. They offer no real solutions to problems. There will be a day when the BAC is legislated so low that a normal woman will be committing a crime by being in public after having 2 glasses of wine with dinner. MADD sucks ass.

Well there you have it. Five things and a rant against MADD. What a bargain!

Any event, CHEERS!
BuBBy

Racking to Secondary and Making the Mead

7 days have passed since pitching the yeast for the Belgian Golden Ale. This will be a slow fermentation and requires a secondary fermentation. This will prevent the dead yeast that will form at the bottom of the fermentation vessel from producing all kinds of off flavors as it decomposes. It will also remove a lot of the trub and hops that was in the primary fermenter.

Here is the beer moving into the secondary.

The primary, shown in a previous blog entry, is a "brew bucket" that is made of plastic. The secondary is a glass carboy. I haven't brewed in some years and when I inventoried my stuff I found I had 4 carboys, a brew bucket and a bottling bucket. The buckets were bought back about 3 years ago when I stopped brewing.

Now to digress: The event that caused the hiatus in brewing was due to UPS f*cking up the delivery of a beer kit. During a snowstorm (flurry activity actually). They delivered it to a house that was at the center of the zipcode. Left it in a pile of stuff dumped in the middle of some guy's driveway. I finally tracked down to where it was delivered and the guy wouldn't give me the kit. He had a ton of people's stuff and was trying to get UPS to pick it up and deliver it. UPS finally picked up the kit and when it finally arrived stuff was damaged inside the box. DME (Dried Malt Extract) was all over the inside of the box. I was freaking pissed and also out of time. I never made the kit. At that point I gave up. F*ck UPS. I went through a freaking pile of crap trying to file a claim. I came to the point of just cutting my loses with those as*holes. I still have what's left of the ingredients mixed in with my other beer stuff. In any event, I'm back to brewing. Now to de-digress:


Here's the what the primary fermentation vessel (brew bucket) looked like after racking the beer into the secondary. What's left is some hops, trub and dead yeast.



MAKING MEAD
Specifically Curt and Kathy's Saffron Metheglin kit from Northern Brewer. I actually purchased the kit back in June and ran out of time. Notice the time theme here. I typically don't have time for anything. Anyway. I go to read the instructions and I have two page ones that leave me in suspense on what exactly to do once I get the mead into a fermenter. Since Mead is another real slow fermentation it will also need to be racked into a secondary fermenter to prevent the mead from developing off flavors from the buildup of dead yeast. Hopefully someone at Northern Brewer will reply to my email and send me a new set of instructions. Mead for the most part is real easy to make. There is no hour plus long boils involved. This kits was extra easy. All that was boiled was 0.75 gallons of water.



Here is some of the stuff that came with the kit. The two things labeled LALVIN are packets of dried yeast. I am not a big fan of dried yeast but this is how the kit arrived and Curt and Kathy are award winning Mead people dammit. Top is two vials of "Go Ferm". Its some kind of dried yeast defribulator that gets it up to speed fast. The little dark bag below the vials is Persian (AKA: Iranian) Saffron (dried stigma's from a Crocus flower. And. Four packets of Curt and Kathy's yeast nutrients.


Here's the honey warming and becoming less viscous while sitting in a cooler of hot water.


This is what 0.75 gallons of water looks like just before it starts to boil.



Vials of Go Ferm were filled to 20mL with warm (105F) water, whatever that meant since there were no markings on the vials. The yeast poured in on top of the warm water. This sat for 15 minutes while a packet of yeast nutrients was dumped into the arboy loaded with 3 gals of room temp water. 15 pounds of honey were poured into the carboy and mixed. The Go Ferm yeast vials were shook until they mixed. The yeast was pitched into the must after the boiling water was mixed into the fermenter.


Mead ready to ferment!


Mead is to the left. Belgian Golden Ale is to the right.

CHEERS!

Gold-Fraking-Schlagger

Oh yeah this stuff is tasty but for me it comes with a price. Last night I had a couple small shots of the frozen hot cinnamon gold flakey goodness. Today I am now cringing in pain as my interior organs shift and gurgle. I think Goldschlagger is Italian for "alcoholic cinnamon laxative". Arg!

Finally, frigging B R E W D A Y

Picked up a turkey fryer a couple of months ago. This allowed me to overcome a major obstacle in my house which is pissing off everyone else in the family with sweet succulent scent of boiling malt and hops. Apparently, this alluring aroma does not have the same appeal to my wife and kids. Anyway. I assembled the fryer. Cruised to one of the many local 7-E's in the area and exchanged my empty spare propane tank for a full one. Cleaned and sanitized all the brew equipment. Set it up and started brewing!


The kit is a Belgian Strong Golden Ale from Northern Brewer.

Fire beneath the brew kettle:


Look at the boil! You can see the hops(green) in with the malt. When that stuff hits the boil the smell is incredible.


After an hour the wort (the stuff in the pot) needs to cool down. I used the stick the covered brew pot into the sink full of ice water method. Once cooled the wort was carefully poured into a fermentation bucket (first time starting off with a bucket). Water was added to get the total volume up to 5 gallons. The wort was aerated and the yeast pitched. An airlock was placed into the bucket to prevent nasty things from contaminating the beer.

Brew bucket with airlock:


Close up of airlock:


The yeast eats the sugars in the wort. In general this primarily produces alcohol and CO2. The CO2 builds up pressure and gets pushed out of the airlock. Currently this is "blooping" along fairly well. The bucket is acting as a primary fermentation vessel. After about 5 days or so the fermenting beer will be moved (racked) from the layer of dead yeast forming at the bottom to a glass carboy where it will continue to ferment at a slower rate for the next few months up to six months. After that it will be bottled. More when I rack the beer to the carboy!

Cheers!
BuBBy