Brews you can Use

I entered a couple beers in this year's Upper Mississipi Mash-out. This is kind of tricky, since I keg practically everything, and rarely have stuff in bottles that I'm willing to part with. This year, I had an Alt which was about to overflow the kegs, so I bottled the excess, the infamous "cheap cigar" IPA, and an old barleywine that's just about perfect, but it completely refused to carbonate just to annoy me. I had high hopes for the alt, and entered the barleywine and IPA for giggles and feedback. The IPA was too young for my taste, and the barleywine was way undercarbonated, almost perfectly flat.

Part of the reason I had high hopes for the alt has to do with my latest beer obsession. As I've said before, I really like alts. One of the most sought-after examples of the style is Zum Uerige. It's rather hard to come by in this country unless you know somebody. I've been keeping an eye out for it and asking around for the last year and a half or so, but came up dry. Until Thursday, that is. I got a new beer announcement from the Muddy Pig (one of the best beer bars I've been to), and they had Uerige! I was there in a flash, and, practically shaking with excitement, walked in and ordered one.

Frankly, the beer didn't match the anticipation. That wasn't unexpected, since Uerige's a German easy-drinking beer and my anticipation level was pretty extreme. It's a very rich and flavorful beer, but it's designed for patrons of the Uerige brewpub in Dusseldorf to down it in massive quantities so it can't be a mind-blowing beer like, say, Rochefort 10. When I took the first sip, though, still shaking with excitement, I found the aroma strangely familiar. It was the beer I have on tap back home! Wow! I had come very close to cloning a beer I never had based on second and third-hand descriptions of the beer and accounts of brewery tours. I wasn't completely on the mark. Uerige is actually a sweet beer, and surprisingly cloudy with a smooth yeastiness. Not at all like the "official" alt style, which mine matched better. Mine should do better than the origial would, I thought.

In addition to entering the Mash-out, I signed up to judge and steward (basically be a go-fer for the judges, and you get to sample the beers they're judging). I knew that my alt was being judged early Friday night, and I had entered it in some odd-shaped bottles and would probably recognize it, so I couldn't resist getting a little early information. I finished judging my early flight quickly, and sauntered over to where the alts were. I watched them pop open my bottle, pour it into cups, lift them up to take a sip and ... cringe, turn away... not the reaction I was looking for, to say the least. Ouch. I could write that one off. Dammit. At least I wouldn't need to go to the awards ceremony, unless I'm fishing for door prizes.

It must have been a bad bottle. After judging was over, I tracked down another bottle of my alt and cracked it open. That bottle was good, and the aroma was very similar to Zum Uerige. I shared it with a fellow judge who knows a thing or two about alt, and he agreed.

While further discussing alts and bad luck with him, I mentioned my IPA entry and how I didn't have much hope for it.

	Him: "English IPA?"
	Me: "Yes."
	Him: "There were only two English IPAs entered, and they came in
	first and second."
	Me: "!?!?"

I decided I wouldn't skip the awards ceremony after all... I had never gotten better than a bronze medal at the competitions I'd entered, so I was quite excited.

Since I judged both Thursday and Friday night, and also some Saturday lunchtime, I hadn't seen much of Grace this weekend and felt Jess could use a break, so I took Grace along to the awards ceremony at the Summit brewery. Surprisingly, she wasn't the only little one there. We hung out with a couple who brought their 6-month-old daughter, and let the little ones flirt with each other for a while. I didn't bring any toys for Grace, so she "borrowed" a stuffed moose from the other little girl, and talked to me about it for much of the evening.

So, I kept Grace entertained while I waited for the IPA winners to be announced. My IPA took gold! I walked up front with Grace and the moose to collect the medal and my prize, a "Town Hall package": Town hall logo T-shirt and Denim shirt, $25 gift certificate, a logo pint glass, and a couple coupons for a free pint. Most of the other prizes were homebrew ingredients and equipment, but hey, I'll take this :-)

At about this point, I was thinking Grace might be needing a new diaper. She was happy enough, though, so I her continue playing because I had this strange feeling about the Strong Ale category where I had entered my barleywine... It also took gold! Grace, moose, and I went up for another gold medal and prize -- another Town Hall package...

Then, to top it all off, I won one of the many door prize drawings that night. While I was in the bathroom changing Grace's diaper, no less. My pile just expanded while I was gone, adding about a half-pound of hops, a Barley John's logo hat, and a sampler pack of brewery chemicals.

I stuck around until the end of the announcements just on a lark, to see if the string of miracles would continue and one of my beers got best-of-show. The BoS prize is a really sweet hand-turned chalice made of exotic hardwood. That one, I didn't win. I packed up and went home with a should-have-been-sleepy toddler, a big bag full of prizes, two medals around my neck, and a big smile. What a night.

And I think I'll be heading to Town Hall sometime soon. Anyone with me?

Count me in the ranks of those quite impressed with KCMP. It just debuted today, and I've been listening to it much more than I usually listen to other radio stations. So far, only two songs I've recognized. I'm not a big music listener, so that's not saying much, but....

I almost never listen to commercial music radio. Even I recognize most of the songs on a typical commercial station, either because it's so mainstream I've actually heard it, or because I heard it once already a few hours ago. And the commercials just make it worse. I don't have the temperament for classical music, so my next stop was KFAI (local community radio station, which I used to listen to for a little orthodox old-left fix, "Democracy Now!"-style). Their music programming is pretty good, but they seem to devote large blocks of time to single genres. A little zydeco, for example, is cool every now and then but I can't listen to three whole hours of it, for God's sake. After a few minutes, it just seems that the band keeps playing while the singers switch off occasionally.

So KCMP was a huge breath of fresh air today. At last, a music station that doesn't make me want to kill the radio. Some of the music is a little ambient for my tastes, but there's enough engaging stuff in the mix to keep me interested. And no commercials, the source of most of my radiocidal tendencies.

Productive day today....

I brewed five gallons of a dry stout and another ten gallon batch of Alt. Yes, another ten gallons of Alt. I ran out of alt last year in early summer. That's perfect alt-drinking season, bad alt-brewing season. I had to wait until the dead of winter to get my next batch ready. I don't want to have that happen this year. It probably won't, with 25 gallons of alt on deck :-)

Of course, it wouldn't do for this last brew for a while to go too smoothly. The spigot clogged while draining the stout through the chiller, leaving a bit over a gallon of perfectly good beer behind. I briefly considered just leaving it, and making a sub-4 gallon batch of stout, or topping up with water and making an even lighter batch of stout (it would have been *way* too light). I opted to save that gallon by chilling it in a small pot in a sink full of cold water and pouring it through a sanitized strainer, just like back in my extract days. The things I do for homebrew... Ironically, the whole episode took about as long as a normal chill using my old immersion chiller. Technology rocks!

So now, I get to go a few months without thinking "what am I going to brew this weekend?" OK, it'll probably be replaced by "what am I going to brew in a few months?" but still, it's a change of pace.

You know, I might finally be getting close to uncharted territory: "Enough beer." I can't say I've ever been there, or heard from anyone who's been there. I've been in similar places -- the land of "need more fermenters" and wandered briefly in the "no free kegs" desert, but never been near "enough beer."

I was up until 3:00am last night kegging about 20 gallons of beer. That joined another 15 gallons of kegged beer aging in a cool corner of the basement. I plan to brew another 15 gallons tomorrow. Between what I drink and what I share, 10 gallons seems to last me about a month. If tomorrow's brewing goes well, I'll have about 5 months worth of beer stockpiled, so I shouldn't run low until June or so. Wow. June. It will be, like, warm then. It boggles the mind.

I think that's "enough beer" for me. I might knock out a quickie 5-gallon batch for added variety at some point and a Goldings version of my last IPA is definitely not something I can put off for too long, but other than that I don't see myself brewing much between tomorrow and when the stockpile runs out.

In the meantime, brewing activity will most likely be replaced by either laziness or woodworking. I'm giving 3-1 odds on woodworking, with an over-under of another crufty hack made out of SPF construction lumber and finishing nails :-)

If you've ever wondered why movies in general suck boulders through tiny straws, Query Letters I Love might shed some light. I can see how some of the modern-day stinkers seemed like a good idea at the time, knowing that such instant classics as this are their competition.

Through an odd series of mental tangents, I was reminded of a very silly little short story I web-surfed past a couple months ago, but never read. I managed to find it just a few minutes ago.

The story involves a reformation-era heresy called antinomianism. Antinomians hold that it's already been decided whether we're going to heaven or hell, so it does not matter what we do on earth. It's sort of the protestant/Lutheran "not saved by good works" idea reductio ad absurdum. At the beginning of the story, the progenitor of this heresy has been brought back to life by a modern scientst, except 50 feet tall.

If nothing else, it's a novel (well, "odd," at least) premise for a short story, and I'm all about the wierd premises...

Of course, I never bookmarked the link or anything. All I remembered was that the revived heretic was antinomian, and 50 feet tall. Googling "antinomian" turned up a "Catholic Encylopedia" entry on antinomianism. Aha! That got me the name of the heretic: Johannes Agricola. Next query:

50 foot Johannes Agricola

and the first link was the story: Night of the Antinomian.

Ah, success, and a nice silly ending to a crappy day.

Just upgraded to nanoblogger 3.1 -- all software should be this easy.

Brews should also display in IE now. The problem was an improperly closed <script> tag. Firefox did the right thing, but IE would stop rendering and display only one post. Enjoy!

And finally, Messieur Arafat is still dead. I thank you.

... And I just got my last laptop mishap fixed.

I was carrying Grace around, and tripped over a bag of diapers. I don't remember much of what happened, other than that Grace was freaked out from her "ride" (but unhurt) and I had a few scrapes (but was otherwise, unhurt). I must have done something acrobatic, since I fell forward but landed on my back at about right angles to where I would have landed if I were limp...

When things calmed down a bit, I picked up my trusty laptop, and noticed the latch was a bit stiff. When it opened and woke up, I noticed the screen was damaged. Shit. The warranty expired last August, and not even the "service plan" I declined would cover this. I must have dropped my elbow near the top center of the screen, where there's a nice little "star" of breakage. The break reaches all around the screen. It's still usable for now, but annoying. The cracks seem to widen every time I open and close the screen, though, so I doubt it will be usable forever.

Replacement screens for my model of laptop appear to run $400-$500 plus labor to replace it (for a part that expensive, I'm not going to do it myself, and probably be out the cost of the screen plus the rest of the laptop), so I'll also be pricing out laptops. I've said for a while now that next time I buy a laptop, it will probably be an Apple. I thought that would be a couple more years, though...

Quick way to lighten your mail load in MH:

% scan +cron
[snip computers carping about stuff over my vacation]
% pick -sub <name of noisy cron job>
% rmm pseq 
... sense that I did something a bit wrong here ...
% scan
scan: no messages in cron

At least it was just a bunch of computers whining. There'll be more where that came from...

On the beer front, this was quite a full week. On Tuesday (I think), I finally got around to purchasing one of the shiny ATC refractometers from Northern Brewer. These measure the sugar content of wort by measuring the refractive index of the wort. It's a very compact little device, taking only a few drops of wort for a sample, instead of a half-pint or more for a hydrometer. They are also much easier to use than hydrometers, more accurate, automatically correct for temperature, and are less messy. I've used it for a couple batches already, and sanity-checked its results against a hydrometer to make sure I'm using it right, and may give up the hydrometer in a little bit. It's a little bit of a hassle to estimate the gravity of fermented wort with one of these, so I just might keep a hydrometer around for that. If so, I'll probably be looking for a lab-grade one instead of the cheapie one I have with the scale printed on a rolled-up piece of paper, so you can "calibrate" it with a good whack :-)

On Wednesday, I brewed up a couple more lagers to use the yeast I collected from the Pilsner. That was a disappointing brewday. I had a few troubles with earlier batches coming out weaker than I had intended, which I thought was due to some inefficiency in my sparging technique. I generally fly sparge, slowly filtering hot water through the grain bed to wash the sugars into the brewpot. This is a somewhat sensitive and tricky procedure, and there are a lot of different ways to screw it up and leave precious sugars behind in the grain. For this brew session, I decided to try out a technique I'd used before called batch sparging, since it's more foolproof, and more efficient than whatever I was doing on the weak batches.

Well, batch sparging is quite foolproof, but it turns out I'm a better fool than I thought. The attempted dopplebock came out at 1.060 instead of the 1.080-ish I wanted, making it weaker than a plain bock. The Munich dunkel came out in the mid 1.040s instead of the mid 1.050s. These were record low for efficiency, which is kind of annoying. Not so much because I really wanted stronger beers (I can enjoy more of the weaker beers, and will generally put them on tap instead of go through the hassle of bottling), but because I used up half a sack of good grain and a bunch of it went to waste. Ironically, this wasted grain was most likely caused by impatience born of frustration with, yes, wasting grain. Oh well, the only solution for a disappointing brewday is to get right back on the horse and brew again, which I planned to do Saturday.

On Friday, I was filling growlers to go to panama777's party, and blew a keg of alt. I still had one keg left, but I also had my first stab at a smoked beer on deck, carbonated, chilled, and ready to tap. I put that on-line Saturday, and snuck a sample or two while brewing. Pure ambrosia. The smokiness is assertive, but not dominant as in a lot of smoked beers. It's balanced, refreshing, interestingly flavored, and absolutely delicious with the Zillman's summer sausage Jess's sister gave me for Christmas. It's also a kitchen sink beer, brewed to use up ingredients I had no other plans for. That's cool, but a bit vexing since I'd rather brew such good beers intentionally :-)

The party went a bit later than I'm used to, so I woke up at about 11:00 on Saturday, still planning to brew. I managed to get the water on to heat at around 11:30 to 12:00, and started to brew up another batch of alt. I really like alts. Can't get enough of them, and they're very rarely available in the U.S., so I have to either travel to Dusseldorf or brew them myself. Brewing's cheaper (I think). I'll probably knock out another batch before spring comes and warms things up too much.

This time, things went much better. I went back to fly sparging, which I find easier if a bit more fiddly. I was more careful with the process this time, and appear to have made my efficiency problems disappear. I designed the recipe to hit 1.045 - 1.055, based on the range of efficiencies I had with fly sparging. Somehow I hit 1.060, a mistake I can live with. This alt will be a bit stronger than I intended, which means it will keep for longer, possibly into summer or even early fall, if they last (hey, a brewer can dream, can't he?).

Well, my nice long vacation is coming to an end tonight, and it was, all told, pretty nice. I didn't get too much done, or really too little, but just enough IMO. Brewed 35 gallons of beer, helped rearrange some furniture, did the family holiday tour, watched a bunch of football, and spent a lot of quality time with Grace.

Grace was really helpful with the football watching. I'm passing on the addiction to her, I guess. Whenever she sees football on TV, she yells "Touchdown!" ("twah dwah!" in Gracie-speak) and sometimes makes the signal for it. Field goal (or "fee guh") is accompanied with an odd forearm-pumping motion of unknown origin. She's even started doing a little play-by-play: on a typical running play, it's "gogogo!... mah! (Gracie for "boom", when the runner is tackled)... up!"

Today, Jess stepped out to buy some bookshelves for Grace's growing library, and Grace and I stayed home to watch the Packers game. She sat on my lap and snacked a bit, and I noticed her slowing down. She huddled up under a blanket to get a bit warmer, and grabbed both of my hands. I softly suggested that she could go to sleep if she wanted ("if it's not too much trouble.." :-). A few seconds later, I felt her go limp, and after few more seconds, the snoring started. She's not taking after me completely -- I usually stay awake for the Packers :-)