Brews you can Use

I brewed today, pretty much on a whim. I had the day off, the weather forecast was absolutely beautiful: 70-ish, breezy, and sunny. There have been too many of these days I spend inside at work, coming home for dinner followed immediately by the kids "going" to "sleep" (these words do not mean what you think they mean) which usually takes the rest of the day's time and energy. Today ended about the same, but at least we all got to enjoy some time outside. Oh yeah, and I made some beer :-)

The beer was an adventurous one for me. I rarely do spiced beers, and have had some real hideous ones in my time. I pretty much stick to coriander, which has a surprisingly mild beer-friendly flavor. Today, however, I made a Belgian-ish golden ale with black pepper and mustard seed.

I have had a beer with mustard seed (Wostyntje, I think). I didn't like it at all, but the concept still intrigued me. Mustard seed is a favorite flavor of mine, especially in the summer sausage I grew up eating, from Zillman's in Wausau. Their sausage is dotted with mustard seeds which have soaked up the moisture that used to be in the meat, as well as smoke and other spices. The other spices include black pepper, to my taste buds, so I figured I'd throw some into the beer while I was at it. If the beer's a tenth as good as the tasty summer sausage mustard seeds, I'll be happy :-)

If nothing else, it should pair well with pork, which is always a plus for beer. If that doesn't work, I'll use it to torture judges at beer contests :-)

OK, so I now no longer have enough beer. Too many barleywine nights finally did in my barleywine keg last Friday, and I just blew another keg earlier tonight. The good: it blew right as I filled my glass; The bad: I don't have anything to replace it. Must brew! Suggestions and/or requests are definitely welcome.

We have fruit flies in the house. This makes it hard to enjoy beer, especially the, er.. "fruitier" ones. They love my cider, and are huge fans of my Witbier. One just went for a swim in the Oud Bruin I'm drinking. I tried to fish it out with my finger, but wound up dunking it instead. It sleeps with the fishes. My beer! With extra protein...

(The Oud Bruin is unfortunately not a homebrewed one, but a bottle of Petrus I picked up at Surdyk's a couple months ago. It's absolutely heavenly, and I think I need to brew up some of this style so I can have it ready in a couple years, i.e., this does nothing for my short-term shortage.)

Oh brother:
Satellite TV provider wants to lure Cable to Dish

Oh bugger:
Former Hamm brewery catches fire

I saw the smoke from the latter all the way home from work today. As for the former, well, it's just silly...

Well, at least my laptop's better now. The cable to the hard drive had jiggled loose. The contacts for the cable's pins are on the far side of the PC board, which means the cable has to be fully seated to make any connection. At the same time, the relatively springy cable is attempting to pull the pins out, and there's no apparent lock, only a marginal friction fit. Oh well, at least it's easy to get at the hard drive; ridiculously easy compared to most other laptops.

However, the fallout from the other five hard drive failures is starting to well and truly suck. I'm on the hook to estimate the cost of preventing future failures of this sort, which means either quoting a huge cost for the current solution, or at least having a design for a less-expensive solution roughed out in my head. By Friday.

On the bright side, it looks like the data is actually recoverable: some of the failed drives came back on a subsequent power cycle, so there were enough to run the RAID in degraded mode. Of course, moving the recovered data somewhere will require time I don't exactly have. So, ugh....

What a couple of days....

Last Friday, I got handed the on-call pager by surprise. I thought I was off the on-call rotation, but I hadn't been taken off the list yet. Oh well. It was either take the on call pager, or call abiku into the office for a surprise on-call week. I didn't want to do the latter, and on-call's usually pretty quiet, so I took the pager.

Unfortunately, the on-call gods also thought it was abiku's week, so I got what they had prepared for him. As in 5 drives failing within 8 hours on a RAID device. Everybody says a double drive failure is a rare occurence. Maybe if they said it some more, the disks would agree...

So after spending all night in the office, on and off the phone to the RAID vendor's tech support to see if they had any tricks to get the data back, writing off the data (at least temporarily), and getting back home at about 7:00am, getting some sleep, and then going about a rather pleasant (if delayed) labor day, I blew my keg of barleywine. All those barleywine nights added up to about 5 gallons, apparently. Now I really need to brew more, since I'm down to a half-case of my 2003 vintage now. My boss encouraged me to take an unofficial "comp day" for the work I did during the outage, so I may take that as an opportunity to brew a replacement. For now, though I'll make do with IPA.

But of course, this wouldn't all be worthy of a rant without noting that my cursed laptop also got in on the act, providing me with a sixth disk failure in 72 hours. At least I won't have to explain this one to management, but I may need to ship it to Taiwan again. Of course, it could just be a loose hard drive cable. I have my fingers crossed, but with my recent tech luck, I'm not too optimistic.

If this keeps up, I may have to take some time away from any technology not fixable with a length of 2x4 and a mouthfull of 10 penny nails....

A co-worker is planning to celebrate the end of his Triathalon season the way god¹ intended: with pork and beer. I'm bringing some of the beer, so I brewed 10 gallons of my favorite Oatmeal Stout today. This, and perhaps a keg of cider should go very nicely with pig.

This was also the first time I used a stir plate to grow the yeast. I had considered building a stir plate for several months, since they're quite expensive new, eBay deals are rare (you get killed on shipping), and there are several well-documented homebuilt stir plate designs out there. Mine got as far as picking up a DC fan and some magnets at a surplus store. Then I headed to Northern Brewer to pick up some stir bars, and happened to walk by the stir plates. It finally occurred to me that a homebuilt stir plate would involve a few more trips to pick up parts, a fair amount of tinkering time, and that after all that, it still might not work. So I broke down and bought one. I'll save such tinkering for when the kids are grown(tm).

For the inagural run, I grew some Essex ale yeast from a couple colonies on an agar plate to a pitchable quantity (well, hopefully pitchable -- I pitched it, after all...). For (my) future reference, the timeline was:

• Monday night: Boil up a quart of starter wort in a 1L flask, pour about 150 mL into a smaller flask. Add stir bars, cap with foil, sterilize (15 psi for 15 minutes), and leave out to cool overnight.
• Tuesday morning: Inoculate smaller flask and start it spinning.
• Wednesday evening: pour contents of smaller flask into larger flask (using magnet to hold stir bar in place), and stir large flask.
• Thursday morning: visible activity in flask, stirring is releasing bubbles. Would probably foam over if not for the squirt of Foam Control (like Mylicon for beer :-).
• Thursday evening: no more visible activity, take it off plate and put it in fridge to settle.

The brew went quite well, but I got hit by a few precursors to the proper praire thunderstorm that rolled through town later that afternoon, hence the name of the brew and title of this post. I would have just ridden it out, except that the toddler alternately wanted to go outside with papa and go inside to keep from getting her hair wet....

¹ Which god is unclear though. Presumably not Allah or Jehovah, both of whom appear to have accepted improper gifts from pro-pig lobbyists. Must be one of those non Ancient Near East gods.