878 IBU

In advance of teaching a homebrewing class next month, I need to do an extract with speciality grain brew to remember how to do i. (Really, to make sure I've re-assembled all of the needed equipment from around the Atlanta metro area.)

It's gonna be a classic "garbage pail" IPA, based on the hops I have in the freezer. Some of which date to 2007. And a five pound bag of extra light DME I've been carting around since 2008.

Hope this is good enough for you hopheads.

Too long

Heh. Only a couple of you get the reference in this post's title, but I'll keep it obscure. Simply said, it's been a while since I had a general information post, and I'm sure my loyal readership, all 5.38 of you, need some FOOD PORN!

And actually, check out the labels for this post: it has a little bit to please everyone! (food porn, travel, bikes, fundraising, onions, homebrewing)

It's been busy, but also pleasantly slow-ish (as much as I let myself take things easy, I have.) The fall protest travel season is on the near horizon, and I'm out of town every weekend in October, and at least three in November.

The travel starts with riding in the Wapiyapi Classic in Aspen next weekend, which I'm very excited about. (And which I'll throw out one last pitch for you to please consider donating, as I talked all about in this post.) I'll get invited to a pre-ride party hosted by Lance Armstrong and Anna Hansen if I'm one of the top 10 fundraisers, and currently, thanks mostly to the lovely and generous people who read this blog, I'm #8 9 (but by a thin margin.) Please consider donating: http://www.active.com/donate/wapiyapi2011, and type my name into the boxes at the top next to "Find a fundraiser to support".

Okay, okay, to make this worth your while, how about some images, including FOOD PORN, and ONIONS!

Due to popular reader demand, how 'bout some FOOD PORN, and ONIONS! Conveniently co-located with tofu, which almost deserves its own label on this blog, and featuring a visit by some freshly chopped sage leaves.

File this one under the "J is a genius" category. And not just at her chosen profession. So, our (apprimxtaley 8 or 9 year old) washing machine has increasingly been stopping mid-cycle. Basically, for no obvious reason, the lid got bent, and so the contact that tells the machine the lid is closed and it's okay to start spinning all the water out was regularly not engaging.

So I started feeling around in the works, and the craptastic plastic assembly literally started crumbling in my hands, out of sight. I pulled half a dozen pieces of plastic crap out, never again to be properly reassembled. I avoided dropping any of them in the washer full of water (clearly shown in the picture.) Oh, and I got lightly electrocuted.

Enter J's genius. And her small hands. She started feeling around, and determined it was basically a single crappy connection, and hypothesized (which fancyschmancy scientists do) that all we needed to do was pull it out, twist it together, tape it up, and stuff it back in.

I took this one level further easier, and proposed we just twist and tape it above the hole.


Which we did.

And it works a charm!


Non-sequitur #1: Grilling peaches, pineapple, and.... I can't really tell for sure.

Grilling peaches, pineapple, and pears!

No, those aren't vegan organic hand grenades. They're eggplants studded with rough-cut garlic and then baked, which infuses them in a truly extraordinary way to make baba ghanoush. Another shining example of "J is a genius."

Eating healthy. WOOT.

Drinking creatively, even if not, ummm, healthy. Friends and I did three all-grain batches yesterday, which was honeslty too ambituous, but I'd already smacked the yeast smack packs, so we'd have lost almost $8 if we didn't brew the third batch.

From left, that's a bourbon oaked imperial stout, then a spiced pumpkin strong-ish (7.7% ABV) ale, and a witbier.

I made an outstanding decision and didn't drive home after a long day of Rule #1.

Okay, need to ride to the library and drop off donations for Friends of the Library, then think about dinner. It'll definitely involve onions (I bought a ten pound bag today) and spinach (I bought 2 pounds of organic spinach.) Mission: cookbook shelf!

Kegerators

Kegerators are great, but they do need to occasionally be cleaned:

Those are actually just footprints from the bottoms of kegs, and the CO2 cylinder. (I used to have beautiful stainless cylinders, but had to exchange them for crappy steel ones at the shitass Airgas which is the only place reasonably close to me.)

Traveling extensively makes finding time for brewing tough, so, currently pouring: Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and He'Brew Bittersweet Lenny's R.I.P.A.. Life is good! Dear Readers: come and get some!

BEER

To make myself feel better after that last post, let's talk about BEER! I blew the keg of the Sherwood Forest the other day, and then shortly thereafter, the keg of Sam Winter blew, too. I blame this in part on the party for 20 we had, and in significant part on how damn good the Sherwood Forest was. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but it was off the charts good. I actually considered bottling four to six bottles for competition, but didn't even want to part with that much.

Fortunately, Mittelschmerz is starting to drink quite nicely, and in a lovely surprise, the local liquor store had 1/6 barrels of Hennepin Farmhouse from Brewery Ommegang in stock. So I spent an hour or so doing kegerator maintenance, including cleaning all of the lines and faucets, and the Hennepin is tasting lovely.

Come visit us to get some! Special limited time offer: all visitors get unlimited Hennepin and Mittelschmerz, while supplies last. Cannot be combined with other offers. Cash value 1/20 of $0.01. Contact offeror for additional details, terms and conditions.

Wind, and a pile of random updates

About fifteen minutes ago, I went out to the balcony to take a series of pictures to try to make a panorama (yes, yes, it's coming!) The wind is sustained at around 22mph, with gusts above 30, and presumably they don't measure these things on the 11th floor of a mostly unprotected highrise condo building.

Actually, the more interesting thing about the wind is how it's making the condo creak and crackle like a 100 year old house, rather than the 8 year old building it is.

Ran a little 5k this morning, and walked another several miles. It was mostly for entertainment value, and to see if it would help work out the sore right hamstring I've been irritated by for almost a week. Oddly enough, so far, it did. (But it might also have been the extensive stretching I did before and after the running. Ummmm, yeah. Probably more that.)

We threw a party for around 20 of J's work team on Saturday, and it was a rousing success, ending in good time for me to get to ABC's annual member night, which was also fun.

The Sherwood Forest is drinking beautifully, and the Mittelschmerz is coming along. It really needs another month of cold conditioning, I think. Both received numerous compliments from party attendees (not bad a party throw in mid-afternoon.)

About to knock out some work stuff, and then start setting out hiking equipment, to test weight and bulk, and see if my trusty Arc-Teryx Bora 30 will actually work for several months of long-distance hiking. More on this later!

Mittelschmerz was lonely

Mittelschmerz was lonely, so yesterday I brewed a companion, Sherwood Forest. "Woody" for short is an export/strong stout, and has French oak cubes soaking in bourbon for the upcoming secondary.

The fermentation, on the Mittselschmerz yeast cake (with Fermentis Safale S-04), has bordered on explosive.

Not a lot of pictures taken, but here are a couple of the lautering:

Basic lautering, pre-batch sparge.

Kinda looks like motor oil, eh?

My incredibly kind and understanding and accommodating partner

If any of you ever wonder just how great J is, and how tolerant of my, errr, eccentricities, here is a picture of what our kitchen floor looked like in SLC, in early 2007:

mittelschmerz

I don't J really believed me when I told her about six months ago that I was going to name the first beer I brewed in our new home "mittelschmerz". (Look it up if you don't know what it means.) This is halfway between an English strong stock ale and and American strong ale. Get it? Get it?

Alright, it's not that useful or accurate of a name, but that has never stopped me before when naming my beers, so why start now?

The beer was a bit of an experiment: using a lot of dated ingredients, and dialing in my brewing system for the condo, which is close to the smallest space I've ever brewed in. The first condo we lived in in SLC was actually smaller and even more difficult, as the galley kitchen was about 4' by 8', and there was no useful outside space to mash or boil in. I dealt with that by doing countertop partial mashes, and we moved fairly quickly to a better brewing space.

Recipe, with visual aids:

Safale S-04, in a a yeast starter with 1/2 teaspoon yeast energizer, and 1/2 teaspoon DAP yeast nutrient:
I know, I know: you normally wouldn't do a starter using dry yeast. But this yeast is five months old, and came from a suspect source that unfortunately treats their product really badly, and even more unfortunately, is the only brewing supply shop in Atlanta proper. So I wanted to be sure it was in good shape before brewing. For example: they keep the hops at room temperature in clear plastic bags which don't look to have been nitrogen flushed or even sealed well. The $3.80 (!) Safale dry yeast sits warm on the shelf. Boo.

Moving on with the recipe:

15 # British pale malt (Crisp Maris Otter), which dates to 2008 in Anchorage from a source that treats their product much better.

I used the lazy, low-efficiency no-sparge method, so here is 10 gallons of water going into the mashtun to be heated to 161, with a target mash temp of 148:



Here in ATL, we have a nice but smallish balcony, and a newer flat-top stove, so I was hoping to mash on the balcony and then boil on the stove.

Unfortunately, the mash temperature calculator lied to me, and after dough-in, the mash was at 154: As it happens, this is really a better temperature for an English ale: I just like to mash lower for a more fermentable wort.

Here is the lautering:
Which is the lazy step, since all I did was transfer it from the mashtun to the boil kettle. The yield was basically perfect: just over 7 gallons, with a starting specific gravity of 1.053. Everything is amazingly on track!

But then, my hopes for our stove being able to manage a full-volume boil were dashed:
The stove has a front burner with a dual ring that gets hotter than shit (hot enough to flash fry on) so I hoped it would work. But after 40 minutes, the temperature of the wort had only risen from 150*F to 180*F, so the likelihood of being able to maintain a vigorous boil was looking pretty limited. And the building heat was causing weird, scary popping noises where the kettle was contacting the stove, so back to the balcony.

Moving along to the 60 minute boil, which for some reason I didn't bother to take any pictures of.

Hop bill:
1.5 ounces of Warrior, 17.1% AA, at 60 minutes.
1 ounce UK Challenger, 7% AA, at 15 minutes.
(to be dry hopped in secondary with 1 ounce East kent Golding, 4.5%)

And on to cooling the wort to 65*F:
The bizarre sci-fi looking wort chiller is my own cobbled together double chiller: it's two wort chillers tied together to increase surface area. The real application of the double chiller is to drop the first ring in a sink of ice water to make the cooling even more rapid, but I didn't get my shit together in time for this, so it was just a double chiller dropped in the drink.

I rapidly stirred the wort using a wine whip on a portable driver while chilling, which resulted in the wort going from near-boiling to 65*F in about four minutes. Yes, really.

And here it is in the fermenting bucket, with a near perfect final yield of almost exactly five gallons. Significant airlock activity was obvious within a couple hours, and this morning I had to take out the airlock and put sanitized foil over the hole due to super-vigorous fermentation clogging the airlock with hop gunk and trub.

And for those of you who are really, really, really bored, here is a short video of the current airlock activity, which I just replaced:


For a random experiment to dial in a new setup with old and somewhat questionable ingredients, it went amazingly well. Now we'll just have to see how it tastes.