Improvised Blow Off Tube

Beer, , , ,

The quad is fermenting away nicely, and I was just thinking how smoothly everything’s going.  The brew went well and we hit our gravity right on the mark.  In fact, it went a little too well and we wound up with a little more than 5 gallons, but we figured there was enough head space in the fermenter, so why not keep it?

Now fermentation has started, and is going perhaps a bit too briskly — foaming up out the airlock and gumming it up.  I just cleaned out the airlock and two minutes later it was all gunky again.  So I rigged up a blow off tube.  Luckily, our normal tubing we use for siphoning is the same gauge as our airlock stem, so I just plugged it into the airlock hole and put the other end in a half-full gallon growler.  It’s bubbling very musically every minute or so.

The Tripel that Almost Wasn’t and the Quad that May Yet Be

Beer, , , ,

Well, we haven’t gotten around to blogging about the tripel because, well, we were too busy drinking it.  Because of the trouble in the brew, we weren’t quite sure what to expect.  But it turned out to be very nice, probably my favorite tripel.

It’s not quite as strong as a tripel should be, stalling out around 8.5% instead of the 9.5% we were aiming for.  But it’s nice and creamy, with a rich mouthfeel as a result of all the extra unfermented sugar.  So in many ways it’s a bit more like a dubbel.  So we’ve taken to calling it “Dubbel Axel”, since it’s more like 2.5x instead of 3x.

In any event, flush with quasi-success, we decided to brew a quad.  Well, I should say we were planning on brewing a stout, but even after trying a dozen or so of them, couldn’t agree on what we liked.  So we gave up on the stout idea and just made a Westy 12 clone.  Most of the recipes you see online have a ton of specialty malts that I know St. Sixtus doesn’t use.  So instead we went with a very elemental recipe: 16 lbs. of Pilsner malt, 3 lbs. of candi sugar syrup, Styrian Goldings and Hallertau hops, and White Labs 350 yeast.  Instead of paying a ton for the candi sugar syrup, I found a recipe online and it worked out pretty well.  It took longer than I expected to boil off the water and get the temperature up high enough to convert glucose to fructose.  But once that happened, it worked like a charm.

Unlike last time, things went off without a hitch.  The only small problem was that we had two old thermometers and they couldn’t bring themselves to agree on anything (even boiling water and ice water had 20°+ differences).  So we picked up a new candy thermometer.  Since we were also making candy, it worked out very nicely.

The Session #68: Novelty Beers

Beer, , ,

This month’s topic for The Session is novelty beers.  Several of the breweries I like make some weird stuff all the time, but I don’t think I count a regular saison made with cucumbers or with a ton of herbs added to the barrel a novelty beer.  Those are a little offbeat, but well within the normal range of beers, especially for saison.

No, I think of novelty beers as beers you’d pretty much only drink as a gag.  I remember going to a garlic-themed restaurant called the Stinking Rose — they had garlic ice cream on the menu, with a note saying they had it for completeness couldn’t really recommend it.

And that’s about what I think of novelty beers.  I’ve seen Cave Creek Chili Beer in the grocery store, but I was never tempted to drink it, even though I have a friend who grew up in the small Arizona town where it’s made.  When we went to the Chocolate Museum in Cologne, we picked up a bottle of chocolate beer that was just passable.  And I was pleasantly surprised by Bandwagon’s Raspberry Jalapeno Ale, which was very good for a novelty beer.

But I think the most novel novelty beer I’ve ever had, and probably the most interesting to drink, was Indra Kunindra from Ballast Point.  This is a collaboration with a homebrewer, that used Madras curry and a bunch of other spices.  The base beer was a stout, so there was a lot of body and sweetness, but the spiciness came through strongly, making for a very intense slow-sipping drink.  And it even had a little bit of lingering heat to it.

I don’t think I’m going to use curry in any of my brews any time soon, and I certainly don’t expect a big national trend of curry beers to get started.  But it was very different and thought-provoking.  And that is the promise I see in novelty beers.  Sure, they are often not very good.  They are sometimes just cheap crap to give dad something to buy at the gift shop.  But every now and again, they expose you to a new element you could see using in other beers, and make you think about a possibility you’d never have given a chance otherwise.

A Tale of Two Beers

Beer, ,

I opened a couple of bottles of Westy 8 last night, from my stash lovingly schlepped all the way home from Belgium.  And the first thing I noticed was that one of them had the expected creamy white head, while the other one was decidedly tan.  Possibly even beige.  But I went ahead with them anyway, giving Wind the better glass.

Turns out I was right to be suspicious.  Her glass was just the same as we had it back in Belgium.  Malty, rich, earthy, and spicy.  But my glass was still malty, but all the spiciness was gone and replaced by a kind of smooth creaminess.  It wasn’t terrible (I’ve had truly spoiled beers, like some Rochefort 10 that was a drainpour).  But it definitely wasn’t the same beer, by a long shot.

When I came back to the kitchen, I noticed the little ring of brown under the seal in my bottle’s cap.  So I guess there was some spoilage along the way.  All of the beer has had the same life — in my trunk on the way home, in our cellar in the Netherlands, in our baggage on the flight back to the US, in our winebeer fridge since we’ve been home.  So I don’t think we did anything to one bottle that we didn’t do to the other.  So it’s probably just the vagaries of living beer.

Fun With Refractometer

Beer, , , ,

A refractometer was on my list of shiny brewing equipment I might get.  And with my hydrometer in shards, I figured now was the time to try it out.  Amazon had a ton of options, many reasonably priced, and so one arrived at our doorstep in a few days.

I was excited about using a refractometer to do gravity readings, because I’d read about it being more precise, using a tiny sample, and not having to do temperature corrections (the tiny sample makes the temperature insignificant compared to the refractometer temp.).  However, I quickly learned two things:

1. You don’t have to do temperature corrections.  But once fermentation starts, you have to do some pretty complicated math based on the original gravity.  So I still need a computer to do gravity readings once fermentation starts.

2. While in theory the display is supposed to be very precise (it’s supposed to look something like this):

In practice, it looks more like this:

So I’m not sure it’s actually any more precise.  Still, the sample size really is just a few drops, and I’m looking forward to the next brew where I can do gravity readings with hot wort and not have to use a computer to do temperature corrections.

Brewing Like a Monk

Beer, , ,

Well, maybe with a little more swearing.

My fantastic mother-in-law got me the perfect birthday present this year — Stan Hieronymus‘ Brew Like a Monk.  We’ve been thinking about brewing a tripel ever since we did a big tasting in the Netherlands earlier this year.  And we finally got organized to brew a batch today.  I went to the homebrew shop after lunch and picked up the supplies.  I hadn’t really been planning on brewing today, but I looked at my saison brewing notes (where I actually kept detailed times for everything), and realized we would have time.

So, the mash and boil all went pretty smoothly, except the wort collection ran faster than I intended and so the gravity was low.  But there was enough wiggle room with the addition of candi sugar to the boil, and evaporation, that I wasn’t really sure that it would be a problem.

But, alas, it was a problem.  So I wound up extending the boil by 15 minutes and just barely getting it up to the target (1.080).  Then the fun part started when I turned on the hose for my wort chiller and remembered that I was going to get a new hose, because it leaked last time.  But I guess laying around in the yard for two months didn’t help, because it was leaking a lot more than last time.  So I come back into the house to see a geyser of water spewing from the hose, and the output hose slipping out of the sink onto floor.

I yelled for help and madly grabbed towels to contain the damage.  After some decidely un-monk-like swearing, we got it mostly under control and down to pitching temp.  But one thing and another, we only wound up with about 3 gallons of beer.

Coded Scarf

knitting, , ,

I have found a way to roll my nerdy, knitty ways into one single project, the Coded Scarf:

This is a scarf that is knit length-wise, and was a joint project design between Redbeard and I. Obviously knitty, but what about nerdy? The stripes in this scarf spell out Redbeard’s “real world” name in a simple, geeky code: Binary-encoded unicode. If those words only ring quiet bells, read the next paragraph (otherwise skip to the next one):

Everyone knows that computers really only deal in numbers, and this means letters and other characters, too. All characters are actually numbers to the computer, and over the years there have been many different mappings between characters and numbers. (These pile up and part of Redbeard’s day job is detangling the knots that this can sometimes create.)  The current standard is called unicode, but even within unicode there are different flavors (i.e. different ways to match characters to numbers).

Basically, we took the four letters of his name and got the unicode (UTF-8) numbers for them. Then, we just converted those numbers into binary. Then, I translated that into yarn by making the zeros light gray and the ones dark grey. Each digit (0 or 1) was given two rows in order to have each one have a ridge.

Here’s the pattern, in case you’d like a secret message scarf, too.

Coded Scarf

One 50g skein dark yarn – fingering weight (I used Regia 4-fädig)
One 50g skein light yarn – fingering weight
(This was just enough yarn for Redbeard’s four-letter name, so you will want to have more if you want a longer name.)

Size 2 needles (circular, long enough to hold the scarf)

First, go to Redbeard’s letter-to-binary generator – Use this first to get your 0’s and 1’s. He’s added a visualization that assumes a light color for 0’s and a dark for 1’s, so you can play around with different words and names and find what you like the look of. This particular pattern is going to work best for short words/names, between 3 and 5, maybe 6 if you really like wide scarves. We’re planning to design a project for longer names next, so all you Gwendolyns and Maximillians out there, we’re on to you next (if you’re too mature for Gwen and Max, that is).

Let’s say that you type in “hi” into Redbeard’s generator. That should give you a sequence of 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1. You will then take that sequence and do the following:

Cast on the number of stitches that you need to get the scarf length that you want in the light yarn (0 = light yarn).

Knit 2 rows of light yarn (one ridge)
Knit 4 rows of dark yarn (two ridges)
Knit 2 rows of light yarn (one ridge)
Knit 2 rows of dark yarn (one ridge)
Knit 8 rows of light yarn (four ridges)
Knit 4 rows of dark yarn (two ridges)
Knit 2 rows of light yarn (one ridge)
Knit 2 rows of dark yarn (one ridge)
Knit 4 rows of light yarn (two ridges)
Knit 2 rows of dark yarn (one ridge)

Finally, bind off using the dark yarn.

That’s it! You would now have a scarf that says hi, secretly.

 

Way, way, way off topic, but…

Food, ,

I need to think that I am not the only one who has ever asked:

Out of all the mammal options out there, what’s so special about cow’s milk that it’s practically the only kind we drink?

Maybe you phrased it differently – like “Why don’t we drink pig milk?” (followed immediately by “Why do I think it’s so disgusting to even ask that?”) or “Why do we eat sheep cheese but don’t drink sheep milk?” or “Do other cultures drink milk from other animals?” or “How do you milk a cheetah?”

Well, wonder no more – the answers to these questions, more or less, are given in this really interesting story on Slate.