In addition to the cider we just made, we also finally bottled (and kegged) our quad. Just in time for Christmas! Redbeard had made an additional mini-batch by adding some Bruxellensis to a gallon of our quad (Prometheus #11). So, we bottled that, and a few more bottles of the regular quad, and kegged the rest.
Now just waiting for it to be get bubbly enough to drink…
Merry Christmas, everyone!
Our first keg of homebrew kicked last night. Which was good timing, since we’re leaving the country tomorrow. I packed up the kegerator and cleaned out the keg today, packing everything away until we get back in June. There was a minimal amount of swearing and I only cut myself once.
Tomorrow we fly to Amsterdam, for a 5 month sojourn in the Netherlands. I’m really looking forward to easier access to European beer. Though I noticed that St. Somewhere just released a new beer, so I’m already missing Florida beer, and I haven’t even left yet…
The dubbel finally got done fermenting, after a good shake and another week in a warmer room. So I headed down to my local homebrew shop, and picked up a used soda keg. I was hoping to find a new one, because the price difference wasn’t that big and I’ve heard used soda kegs can have reliability problems. But they haven’t been able to get any new ones in stock recently, and only had two used kegs left, so I picked the one that looked like it was in better condition.
Getting the beer in the keg was much easier than bottles. It was easy to sterilize and siphon the beer into the keg. But that’s where the smooth sailing stopped. First, I found that I’d gotten ball-lock couplers and a pin-lock keg. So back to the homebrew shop I went and picked up the right couplers. Then I found that my store-bought 5/16″ gas line wouldn’t fit the 1/4″ pin-lock gas coupler. I had never imagined that they might use different gas line sizes (I’ve been fiddling around with kegs and plumbing long enough to know better, but for some reason I still expect things to work out by default). By the time I figured this out, the homebrew shop was closed and the Thanksgiving holiday was upon us, so the beer sat refrigerated but unpressurized over the long weekend.
Once back in town, the homebrew shop was still closed, but luckily my local hardware store helped me jury-rig an adapter. So I hooked it all up and pressurized to my normal serving pressure (8-10 psi), but the keg was leaking CO2. I tried reseating the lid and greasing the O-ring, with no success. I’ve also read that increasing the pressure will help the seal (and speed up the carbonation process), so I cranked up the pressure to 25 psi. As I increased the pressure, the sound of the CO2 leak changed in pitch, heading from a benign hiss to a worrying whine and then, just before making me truly worried, changed into a satisfying gurgle as the seal took hold and the keg started to pressurize properly.
It was then, crouched behind my kegerator, adjusting the pressure on the regular with a small screwdriver, feeling the frozen condensation on the gas line and regulator shaft, that it occurred to me that I should be worried about the whole Rube Goldberg contraption exploding. Just in time to rock the 25 psi keg around to help the carbonation get going. Standing on the other side of the kegerator made the CO2 canister less dangerous, so actually rocking a pressurized keg around on the floor didn’t seem so bad. Now that’s done, and in theory we should have drinkable beer in a few hours.
A rare occurrence – something to say about both of the topics of this blog at once. Alas, I have not yet figured out how to knit beer. BUT… Redbeard and I just took possession of a kegerator (did I just say that?) – thus completing our transformation from wine snobs in our 20s to frat boys in our 30s.
In hindsight, it was inevitable that we’d get a kegerator eventually. First, bottling is the least-good part of brewing, particularly because the yeast does insist on having CLEAN bottles to work with. So, now we can keg our own brews, which I am already looking forward to. Second, two of our three local breweries, including the one just a few miles away, don’t offer a lot of their brews in bottles. And our LBS (local beer store) stopped doing growlers recently.
No home brew yet, but you can’t leave a kegerator empty. Even though I’m new to this, I know that’s just not right. So, Redbeard went out yesterday and bought a keg of Swamphead’s Cottonmouth, which is one of my favorite summer beers. Light, but still full of tasty goodness. We made fish and chips for dinner, because, well – if there was ever a dinner that went with beer, this is it. But, we just got a lot of foam instead of actual beer. The crack team of experts we consulted (i.e. the tubes) suggested that the beer was too warm or over-pressured (perhaps this makes the beer too anxious?). The beer did seem a little warm, so we adjusted the pressure and will see tonight. With much willpower we resisted the urge to have beer for breakfast. Though, now that we have a kegerator, all things seem possible.
KNITTING! I have learned a very important new thing. Don’t tuck in your loose ends until you are 100% sure that you will not need them ever again. Which for me means do not tuck until 5 minutes before you give the project to its intended recipient. Luckily, I am a crappy tucker, and so it was irritating but not impossible to untuck as I frogged the handles on my felt bag project.
More happily, I have also just got Sandra McIver’s new Knit, Swirl! book and have been drooling over it, trying to maintain some sense of perspective on my knitting speed and free time (I found five sweaters in five minutes that I want to make for five people). I am torn between knitting one for myself first (selfish, but only I will have to suffer any mistakes) and knitting one for someone I love (who will thus have to love the sweater regardless of any mistakes). As far as I can tell the technique and pattern itself seems very straightforward – I will have to learn a couple new things, including how to cast on one billion stitches and how to join them into a round without twisting. But, this seems very doable, even for my meager skills.
So, I am knitting like crazy on my Magic Thief scarf (almost done!) so that I can justify starting a new project. Which I can do with an endless supply of beer to sustain me.