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Starter culture
Did my starter culture yesterday (Friday) evening. I brought 1 quart of water to a boil and added ¼ cup Breiss “sparkling amber” dry malt extract, then boiled for 10 minutes. I then chilled the wort to around 78° and got my yeast out of the fridge. It was at that point that I realized…
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Beer ingredients purchased
Just got back from Maryland Homebrew, and I think we’ve got everything we need to brew. OK, we might need a bag of ice for cooling the wort. I will check on our ice situation tonight. As noted earlier, I’m straying a bit from the original recipe. Here’s my list of substitutions: Substituted Cooper’s amber…
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Big Dig, brewing update, etc
Today was the Big Dig at our house, where we had our old, leaky water line replaced with a brand, shiny new one. The new line is polyethylene. It has the advantage of being lots cheaper than copper, and it’s a single, continuous run of approximately 250′ from the house to the meter. We got…
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O.C.
Here we are in lovely Ocean City, MD for Thanksgiving. You know you’re getting older when it becomes more appealing to go to O.C. this time of year than in the summer. It’s nice and laid-back here, although not surprisingly, a lot of the seasonal places are closed. Can’t wait to see what Avon, N.C.…
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Saturday update
Got a start on winterizing the pool today, with occasional breaks to shoo Andrew off the pool cover. I drained the water down below the tile line and added chlorine and algaecide. The water was nice and clean even after a month of neglect. Wonder if the algaecide I added last month helped. Anyways, tomorrow…
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Time to brew!
It’s been a long time since we’ve brewed a beer. Going by my financial software (which is going to be indispensable when I write my memoirs), the last time I bought homebrew ingredients was June 21, 2000, and according to Oracle Calendar, we brewed an Amber Ale on the following Saturday, the 24th. That’s practically…
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Bedroom wiring finished
Finished up the master bedroom fan switch wiring this weekend. It turns out that after I removed the downstream wiring from the box, I was able to fit the switch in the box just fine. No need to muck around in the attic pulling new wire. Five years ago, when I had more time on…
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Calendaring revisited
It’s been a year or so since I gave up on my home-grown calendar sync setup. It was nice for awhile, then we upgraded our Oracle Calendar server, it broke, I tried to fix it and didn’t get very far, and that was the end of that. Well, as it happens, there’s been some recent…
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Wiring: Plan B
As is often the case with these things, I hit a snag trying to fish wire from the attic to the basement for my bedroom rewiring project. I encountered some horizontal blocking in the stud cavity which prevented me from running the wire all the way through. That basically left me with three choices: Press…
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Drilling top plates
I drilled through another top plate yesterday. Every time I drill through framing, there’s always this nagging worry that I’m drilling through the last bit of wood that’s keeping the house standing, and this hole is going to be the one that makes the whole house come crashing down into a big pile of rubble.…