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Back to the grind
The holidaze are now in the rear-view mirror, I’m back at work, the kids are back in school, and we’re back to our normal, boring day-in day-out routine. For me, unlike the previous two years, the break didn’t feel too long. That may have been because it was only two weeks as opposed to 16-18…
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Today in review
Today marked the start of the 2-week Christmas break. I actually managed to get a few things done. First off, I came up with a temporary fix for the house’s grounding system, which faithful readers may recall was interrupted when we had our copper water main replaced with plastic. I realized that we had a…
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Beer bottled
I managed to sneak a couple hours this afternoon and bottle the beer, in the hopes that it’ll be carbonated and ready to drink by Christmas Eve. That completes the batch, for better or for worse. Final gravity was around 1.020, so with an initial gravity of 1.070, that translates to about 7.5% alcohol by…
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Tax Time Again
You know you’re a financial geek when you’re working on taxes a full 4 months before they’re due, and before the tax year in question has even ended. The People’s Republic of Maryland hasn’t even released its 2007 tax forms yet, so for now, I’m working on fed. This year, for the first time, I’m…
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Fast Fermentation
I racked the beer into my glass carboy this morning. Specific gravity was an amazingly low 1.025 (give or take a few thousandths), indicating that the beer is already almost finished fermenting. That was really fast, and it also may account for the lack of activity I noted in my post a couple days ago.…
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Fermenting away
The beer is fermenting away. I was a little concerned at first because there was no visible activity (bubbling airlock) after more than 48 hours. This seemed a little odd given that I had gone to all the trouble of making a starter, etc. Tonight I popped the lid off the bucket, and the beer…
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Brewing Notes
The brewing happened as planned today. I had forgotten what a mess it makes. No matter how neat you try to do it, the pot always finds a way to boil over and make a big, sticky mess on the stove. Straining the beer from the kettle to the fermenter is also a challenge. I…
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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…