Brews you can use

… is the earth shaking from my happy dance. Three things:

1. I’m brewing tomorrow!
2. I have some beers on tap! (I’ve had only cider for a couple months)
3. Grafica Obscura is back online!

I haven’t finished all of the prep work for the brewing, as typical. Tonight was spent freeing up fermenters — I moved my Belgian Dubbel from this summer out of its secondary carboy and into a keg. I think this one’s going to be good — moderately dry, smoky, with almost a whisky character. I planned to force carbonate it before putting it on tap, but the liquid poppet started leaking, meaning it had to be hooked up to something, so it went on tap.

I also fixed the other beer, my 2003 Raspberry lambic, which has had a clogged dip tube for well over a month, because of the raspberry chunks and other detritus that made it into the keg. I replaced the dip tube with a shorter one that seems to end somewhat above the crap, so the beer is flowing free, clear, and sour This one’s quite tasty also, and I can’t wait for it to get a little fizzier.

The plan for tomorrow is 10 gallons of steam beer wort, half of which will become a steam beer, the other half will be dry-hopped, hopefully to impersonate an American IPA. I still need to weigh out ingredients, grind grains, get propane…

Grafica Obscura, although a bit dated by now, was always worth a read and re-read. It’s a collection of graphics and origami hacks, essays, etc. by Paul Haeberli, formerly(?) of SGI. The pages used to be hosted at sgi, but about 6 months ago, I was going to refer a friend (hi Dan!) to a couple elegant hacks on the site, but it came up 404, no forwarding address, and the wayback machine had very few of the example images. Now it’s back, and I’m happy.

Even though Grafica’s been static since the late 90s, I still find some inspiration there every now and then. Of particular interest is the (still-)inchoate “Futurist Programming” section, which first led me to the work of Henry Massalin, author of the Synthesis operating system, an OS which rewrites and optimises its own code at runtime. Massalin’s dissertation is an amazing work, and fun to read.

Yeah, 20 gallons is a lot of cider.

Our homebrew club’s cider enabler organizes an annual bulk cider buy and a cider pressing, the only sources of unpasteurized, preservative-free cider I’ve found. The purchased cider was delivered last Saturday, and the pressing was on Sunday. I bought 15 gallons and got another 5-6 at the pressing.

The pressing (pics) was a blast, even/especially for the kids. We had a pretty good assembly line going; a couple parties picking apples, washing, grinding, pressing, and collecting. The kids had lots of apples to munch on, and the adults had a lot of hard cider to sample during the day. Motivation!

Of the purchased cider, 5 gallons each are getting White Labs Cider yeast, Lalvin D-47, and natural yeast (still waiting for this one to ferment… might have to intervene…). I wanted to do the pressing juice natural also, but found some spots of mold on it the other day, so I skimmed them and pitched some Champagne yeast. Of course, the champagne yeast caused it to instantly foam, so it was probably about ready to start a raging ferment on its own. Oh, well…

Also, I recently discovered one of my co-workers keeps bees, and happily shared about a gallon and a half of “the girls’” output. Some of that will go into the cider as a little accent, and the rest will be a mead when I get around to it. Unless I get motivated again on the brewing front, I’ll actually have done more mead and cider than beer this year, a first for me.