Not So Famous…

So why change after so long? Well, my rants page was…labor-intensive. When I wanted to write a rant, I had to fire up Word, and type it. Then, I had to copy it into my HTML editor and make sure it all looked right. I didn’t mind doing it when I had nothing to do other than edit my website, but my life is significantly busier now than it was, and if I want to continue to write rants, I had better do something about it.

In addition, my friend Eric pointed me toward blogging (though this is probably the last time you will hear me call it that, as I hate the term for some reason…nothing against the millions of people who do it. To me, I prefer to call it an online journal, or rants page, or whatever…) as a way to continue to write and not mess with the administrative overhead of keeping the darn thing running by handcoding the pages.

I’ll be entering my old blogs into this new format as time permits, and hopefully, I’ll be able to continue writing new ones.

There is a bucket of beer fermenting in my computer room as I type this. I could leave it at that, but I don’t feel the urge to write leaving me, so that must mean there is more to say. Let’s begin where I began on Saturday. (All times are approximate, as I determined the only way to properly brew beer was to be consuming beer at all times during the brewing and cooling process. And while I was not drunk at any time during the day, I had a distinct lack of regard for the time of day.)

1:30pm Saturday – I had planned on beginning the process much earlier than this, but Daniel wasn’t here yet, and he wanted to be a part of it all. No problem, my estimation is that the entire brewing process will take no more than 3-4 hours, which leaves plenty of time for…well…other things. I pour the water in the pot and put the grains in the grain bag for steeping. The instructions say that the grains should steep while the water is brought up to 170º F. (No more than 30 minutes.) So I drop the grain into the water. It immediately begins coloring the warming water, which is a good thing. I grab my brand new probe thermometer, drop the probe into the water, and begin monitoring the temperature.

2pm Saturday – I pull the grains out of the now very brown liquid, which is rather close to 170º F. Daniel determines that it would be very good to eat a nice heaping spoonful of the wet grain. Turns out he’s wrong. Steeped grains are very…well…fibery…and not much else. He told me I could throw them away. I did. Now I turn off the heat and add my malt extract syrup and powder. That went well. Now it must come to a boil, so I put the lid on and wait. (At this point it’s safe to put the lid on, as it’s not going to boil over if it’s not boiling yet, and I’ve got a thermometer to tell me when it gets to the boiling temp.)

2:15pm-2:55pm Saturday – I have achieved a nice boil, and my thermometer reads 215ºF…I think. (More on that later.) I take out the thermometer, add my hops and prepare for the first 40 minutes of the boil. However, I begin to notice that I don’t have the BTU’s on my stovetop to heat the full 6 gallons of wort to a full boil without the lid on. This is not good. Wort has a high surface tension, which means there’s always the threat of a boil-over. The key here is to watch it closely…a difficult proposition if you can’t see it. This time period is marked by me standing near the pot and lifting the lid periodically. (Result: No major boil-overs, but some minor ones that turned out to be exceedingly difficult to clean.)

2:55pm Saturday – I added my clarifier, and continued the boiling process.

3:15pm Saturday – Timer goes off, time to take the wort to the bathtub to cool it QUICKLY. Out comes the thermometer to measure the temperature. I put the pot in the bathtub with lots of ice water, and wait for the cooling. The goal is to cool the wort to 80ºF in a half hour or less. (The fast cooling brings some proteins out of suspension in the beer. It’s called cold break, and if it doesn’t come out of suspension, it could cause off-flavors in the finished product. At the very least, the proteins could come out of suspension when it’s put into the fridge in preparation for consumption.)

4:15pm Saturday – I am beginning to notice some funky things with the cooling wort. First off, my thermometer says the temperature has actually risen from 170ºF to 186ºF since I’ve moved it into the bathtub. It also says it’s still rising. Daniel has determined it’s because I’m using an inferior thermometer. He decides to try his. His thermometer reads 120ºF, which is also not likely. The wort isn’t even steaming, so it’s not even over 100ºF. My wife, genius that she is, gets out the thermometer manual and notes that the probe should never be submerged.

Crap.

So we run to my in-laws’ house to borrow their meat thermometer and determine that the wort is 76ºF. We pour the wort into the fermenter. We note that there’s close to 5.75 gallons of wort instead of 5. No big. We close up the fermenter and call it good for the evening.

11:15am Sunday – I walk into the computer room and notice bubbles coming out of the airlock. This means fermentation has begun. That’s a pretty good lag time, as it means that conditions were right for my yeast to begin fermentation immediately.

1:15pm Sunday – I walk into the computer room and notice yeasty foam in my airlock. This isn’t so good. It means that over-filling the fermenter wasn’t such a good idea. I drain off some of the extra beer from the bottom using the spigot, sanitize my airlock, and refill it with tap water. I do this about 4 times today.

6:30am Monday – There is a LOT of yeasty foam in my airlock. This means 1 of 2 things. Either I’ve still got too much beer in the fermenter, or else I’ve got a bacterial infection going on. I won’t really know for a little while, so I’m just going to keep cleaning the airlock until the yeast calm down, which my research indicates will be a couple days. As long as the airlock isn’t completely plugged, there’s no danger of the fermentor blowing the airlock out of the lid and spraying yeasty beer-goo on my ceiling.
In all, I’d say I’m happy with the way things went. I’ve tasted some of the beer I’ve drained from the fermenter, and it’s pretty darn good, actually. I can’t wait until it’s done. I expect the worst, really. I am hoping that it’s good, but expecting it to taste like fermented butt. Now if I can only find where to get replacement probes for my thermometer, I’ll be good to go.

So, it’s been almost 3 weeks since I wrote about the beginning of my beer-brewing journey. What has happened with it? Where am I now? Well, I’ll tell you.

When I first started, I thought I would have money left over from the various things I was doing so that I would be able to purchase a beer ingredient kit. I had all the hardware (mostly) already, and all I needed was the ingredient. Well, that’s kind of like having an oven, but not the ingredients for making bread. Not going to be able to make a lot of bread, are we?

Fast forward to last week. I had a couple trips that I needed to make for work, and everything was looking good. See, I get paid for mileage when I make trips, so I was going to get a couple extra bucks, even after gas and such. This is good, because all I needed was about $61 for bottles and ingredients. Add $94+Shipping for a 32 quart stock pot for the boiling, and about 50 bucks for the thermometers I needed, and I was set. Well, I AM set. So what about the brewing?!?!

Brew Day is this Saturday, and I am just stoked!!! I’ve got everything I need except the ingredients, which should get here today or tomorrow, and the pot, which should get here on Wednesday. Saturday, I’ll make a final trip to the store to get the water and ice, and things will be smokin’.

If you’re one of my friends, and you want to come by for the brewing, you are more than welcome! Come and watch me screw up my first batch of beer…and then laugh at my tears. (hahaha)
For everyone else who reads these things, I’ll be posting the results of my first brew day after it’s done.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of betrayal of late. A macabre topic, you say? Yeah…so? As a Christian, I can think on such things. I heard in a very good sermon by Ligion Duncan recently that the children of God will let us down and betray us more often than will those of the world. Is this true? To be honest, I don’t think so. I don’t think the children of God will screw up and make you feel bad more often than not. But I do think that we expect it less, so when it does happen, it hurts more. However, insofar as the person whom I feel has betrayed me is a Christian, that is really not the point. What is the point?

The point is that it hurt. I don’t know why this person felt the need to hide things from me. To be honest, there was really no reason for it. And it’s not like they just forgot to tell me. I asked questions specifically about the topic, and this person still hid the truth from me. Furthermore, I told myself when I was talking to this person that there was more to the story than they were telling me. I told myself to shut up and that I knew nothing…but it turns out I DID know. Would I have been angry at the truth? No. Would I have been disappointed at the truth? No. In truth, there is no reason for this person to hide this stuff from me, except that…well, it’s not the first time this person has done this. And this person didn’t just hurt me. You should have seen the look on my wife’s face, gentle reader.

Truth be told, I don’t know how often this person has concealed the “real” story from me. They do it a lot, I suspect. And why continue doing it? Well, I’ve not really confronted them, except for one really major time. For the most part, I get over the hurt I feel, and I treat them as though nothing ever happened. In fact, I don’t really even know how much this person knows that I really know, and I actually suspect this person thinks they’re getting away with it every time. Except every time, it gets a little harder to believe them. I’m sure they would argue that I’m being unreasonable…in fact, I have heard them argue that very thing to someone else I know when this other person didn’t trust them. Seems to be a popular argument: The past doesn’t predict the future. Well, that’s a load of horse crap, and if they’d think for one fleeting moment, they’d realize the ridiculous nature of that argument as well…but I’m not about to argue it with them.

So what do I do? Do I confront them with the fact that I know the truth and that I think they were being rather childish to try and hide it from me yet again? Do I tell them that they really need to grow up and act as though they cared about someone other than themselves and about something other than gratifying their own lusts and stoking their pride in their own intellect? Maybe I SHOULD do that, and if you think I should, go ahead and let me know. However, I’ll probably do what I always do. I’ll shake my head, mutter a prayer to God asking that He will grant them maturity and an earnest desire to read His Word, and then I’ll go back to being the gullible schmoe that they know they can always dump on. Because that’s what I’m here for, apparently, and gosh darn it…I’m good at it.