My neighbor, who I have inherited and/or purchased much of my kegging equipment from, has been bitten by the brewing bug hard. I have more than a little blame for this. We brewed his third batch of homebrew while his first went into the kegerator this past weekend. We’ve been trading notes on force-carbonating since I kegged my batch last month, and it looks like we’ve hit on a workable solution. When I put my batch in, I connected the gas feed to the gas post and outlet to the spigot at about 10psi with the valve open, as most of the advice I’ve read says. My neighbor swapped his gas feed to the output post, essentially forcing C02 down a long intake tube to the bottom of the keg to filter up through the batch. As a result, his batch is fully carbonated after about five days, while mine is only at 30% after almost three weeks.
Another thing he found out is that the gas and liquid posts (and their quick connects) are different sizes, so it’s not a simple matter of just swapping lines; in order to work correctly, I’d need to have a third line dedicated for adding gas to the liquid post. Which means I’d have to spend money on a 3-way manifold to add that line.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to make it out to the homebrew store this weekend to pick up a second keg, as well as a length of gas hose, some clamps, a spare liquid disconnect, and a couple of adhesive thermometers for my fermenters.
Update: I bought a short 5-gallon keg and two flared (threaded) disconnects for gas and liquid as well as a check valve and several barb fittings. I put the hose barb, check valve, and liquid disconnect on my second gas line and then connected that to the liquid post on my keg for 12 hours. Last night I poured a beer with 1/2 inch of head, which means it’s getting more gas through the solution. I’m going to take it off at 24 hours and connect it up the proper way to see how well it pours. Having flared disconnects means I can easily swap them out whenever I need to force carbonate a new keg, and then replace the fittings on their proper lines with a pair of wrenches.
My neighbor and I brewed up two batches of beer in his garage this afternoon: an Irish Red Ale (mine) and a Belgian Dubbel (his). It took us about four and a half hours to do both, which included using his swank copper chilling coil. It’s nice to have a batch downstairs in the fermenter.
I woke early this morning to the sound of Finn using the bathroom, and when she was done she crashed on the bed next to me. When we finally began rousing ourselves, she complained of a headache. She was running a fever, so I installed her on the couch in front of Nick Jr. and Mama made her some juice to drink.
This week has been a blur of sleep-work-home-sleep with no productive outcome. I spent about 3/4 of my work week in Photoshop compositing images for a client but we haven’t sold a concept yet. I broke up a three-week Scout drought for Wednesday’s commute, and was rewarded by a minor fender bender on the 395 onramp.
The keg of Dead Ringer IPA in the kegerator still hasn’t carbonated fully; there’s a hint of fizz in there, but not as much as I’d like. I have plans to brew with my neighbor tomorrow afternoon—he has two batches fermenting and a third to brew, as well as a propane-fired stove in his garage. He’s also my A/V expert, being an electrician by trade, so I’m going to finalize my television mounting plan with him.
I’m trying to motivate myself to start shooting pictures again. My commute has been a predictable figure-8 for the past three years, and as a result I don’t see new things for inspiration. The solution could be adding an extra ten minutes to my morning commute to find new routes into work, as well as more trips out with the girls to explore. I’m also considering the purchase of some 120 film to roll onto 620 spools so that I can shoot some black and white pictures of the girls.
This morning was pretty rough. I walked over to my neighbors’ place last night with a bottle of Heavy Seas Big DIPA (10.5% ABV) and walked home a few hours later with a strong buzz and my keg of homebrew. I put it in the kegerator, pressurized the tank, burped out any oxygen, and let it sit at 10psi. According to this site, I’m doing it the right way, which is reassuring, given my prior attempt. If all goes well, I should be able to pour some tomorrow evening.
Next, I want to know how to pour some out and transport it (given that I’m not bottling anymore). I have a growler I bought from DeGroens about fifteen years ago, and I’ve been dragging it from house to house ever since. Apparently, it’s the perfect vessel for this job. There are two methods of pouring, top-fill and bottom-fill, and both require turning gas pressure down to 2psi. I think the bottom-fill method makes the most sense, and a short length of tube should be an easy purchase.
I got a little package in the mail this afternoon with a blue box of wires inside. It’s a Johnson Controls A419, and it will keep my beer ~38° without slushing. After putting Finn to sleep, I hooked it up to the freezer, fed the sensor inside, read an inscrutable instruction sheet, and plugged it in. Within about five minutes it was hovering comfortably at the target temperature, so I cleaned out the inside, dropped the rest of my bottled beer in on the shelf, and closed it up for the night.
I’m going to try and shoot for brewing my next batch of ale this weekend in order to get another batch ready by the middle of February. Brian forwarded me a weblog post featuring a homemade hot/cold temperature controller, which he’s going to be using for controlled fermentation, but which could also be used for kegeration.
Meanwhile, I’m a mess. My neck, which has been giving me problems for a few months now, is in the advanced stages of stabbing with icepicks, made all the more painful after curling up next to Finn Wednesday night to ward off bad dreams. And being away from the keyboard for a couple of days has wreaked havoc on my wrists; I feel like they’ve been sat upon for a couple of hours and then thrust into chilled water. Apparently the neck thing has something to do with an orthopedic pillow and the vertebrae being pinched, so I need to consider some PT at the little Polish guy down the street and a special pillow for sleeping.
All of this leads me to my next problem, which has been how to fit time for regular exercise into our family’s schedule. I’m acutely aware of my age and the fact that I’m living on borrowed time—given the history of heart and circulatory problems in my family tree, I want to add 1/2 hour of cardio to my daily routine. The issue I have is that I need to get it in either before Finn wakes up or after she goes to sleep, and it has to be quiet so that I don’t keep her up. And therein lies the rub.
That picture is of a batch of IPA going into a freshly cleaned keg, which is now sitting in a newly constructed kegerator in the basement. There’s a tank of Co2 hooked up to a brass splitter and two shutoff valves, which will eventually feed two kegs. The brew I put in this afternoon is getting force-carbonated and should be ready by Monday afternoon. I’m currently without a temperature controller, but switching the keg on and off manually works just as well until I can get one.
For about eight months I’ve been unable to use Flickr’s built-in posting tool to add photos to my website. The content showing up on my site would be code minus the HTML symbol markup, so every post looked like Finn had started bashing on the keyboard in an open text field. The fix was to install this small plugin, which resolves an issue with the libXML2 version my hosting provider is running (and thus mangling my posts).
I’m a little (well, a lot) hung over this morning; I helped my neighbor fire up his first batch of homebrew last night, and we kicked it off with a bottle of something that kicked me. All I remember of the label was that it was 11.9% ABV, which is enough to make me silly; then we shared a bottle of Pearl Jam Twenty, which was tasty but not my favorite. The brew went really well; he has a new floor-standing propane burner and we stood around it shivering in the garage, then transferred it into the fermenter as the Ravens started losing in the second quarter.
In related news, my batch of Dead Ringer IPA is just about ready for a move to the secondary fermenter, and if all goes well I’ll finally have the hose and tank setup sometime this week. I have to buy a jar of commercial cleaner and get my keg washed and resealed for the batch when it’s ready, but that can wait until the week after Christmas.
This is the latest addition to the home computer fleet: a used (and free) Lampshade iMac, circa 2002. I’ve already had it torn down once to drop a new hard drive in, and it will need a new optical drive as well (the unit it came with is not reading discs). It can only run up to OS 10.4, but it recognizes large drives and has a built-in monitor, so I’m going to repurpose it as a music server and swap out the trusty old G4 tower sitting under my desk at work.
Sunday afternoon I started work in the coal cellar putting up studs for insulation. I noticed a huge temperature drop the first time I opened the door, so I know it’s still not sealed up properly. The first order of business was to mix up a bunch of hydraulic cement and plug numerous little holes in the foundation as well as a crack running down the wall from the corner of the coal chute. Once that was done, I installed studs along the east wall and got about 1/2 of the south wall done before I ran out of lumber. I figure about four more 2×4’s and two rolls of new R-19 should do the trick. I also stuffed the coal chute full of insulation and found a sheet of plywood to nail up over the opening to cut off the airflow. Once the wall batts are up, I can put the overhead insulation back in place and call that room sealed. Then, hopefully, the den will stay warm.
Well, I haven’t made as much of a dent in the huge to-do list written for myself as I’d like, but I’ve gotten some small things accomplished. Finn and I hit the steelyard to pick up supplies for my TV mount project on Saturday. Going to that place is like stepping back into the 1960’s—it’s a low-slung industrial building in the middle of the Rt. 1 corridor (the Interstate That Time Forgot) where nice old Baltimore Hons write out your order on a sheet of paper, tabulate it from a well-worn mimeograph price sheet, then add it all with a calculator. We got 9′ of 1.5 x 1.5 box steel for the pole and a foot of 2″ plate for the mounts. I’m going to cut it to fit, drill the holes and bring it back over to Chestertown for our welder to complete when he does the bumper work. I also bought a foot of 4×4″ box steel, hoping it will be the right size for the hinge as a backup solution.
Saturday also marked the first time I’ve dealt with leaves in the backyard since about 2006 or so; one circuit with the lawnmower made some finely-chopped mulch for next spring. The front yard still looks pretty good, although our hedges continue to collect and retain leaves from most of the surrounding counties.
Finn and I were on our own for dinner, so I took her over to the local Toys ‘R’ Us to scout out the Leapfrog lineup and judge whether or not it’s worth spending money on. Most of the merchandise I saw was 1-purpose stuff, made to do one or two things but not expand further which turns me off. Taking a chance on a $40 toy that might not help Finn read or learn numbers seems like a waste to me, especially as most of them spend more time highlighting other things—useless games, singing songs, etc. We fooled around in the store for almost an hour, and then went next door to the Panera for some dinner. Finn polished off a bowl of mac and cheese and then all of her yogurt, so I treated her to a cookie when we got home. After a shower, we read a few books together and then hit the sack clean and happy.
Sunday started with service across the street, and then a visit to the Gooch (our local thrift store in Irvington) for Mama to pick up some accessories for her christmas card design. Then, while my girls napped, I boiled water and got a batch of Dead Ringer IPA in the fermenter. While that was happening, I started pulling my keg apart to familiarize myself with the parts. I have new valves and O-rings ready but I probably need to buy some industrial cleaner to get the inside as spotless as I can. And, the pumpkin ale has had two weeks to condition in bottles, and tastes much better.
On the geek front, I spent a little time getting my old Powerbook 1400 online so that I could download and play a copy of ZPC, a freaky game from the middle 90’s that bent my head a little crooked. Describing it to my co-workers, I found a download of the CD image, and decided I needed to play it again. Getting the 1400 online meant I needed to bust out an older Airport Base Station that used 802.11b with no encryption, then find a way to get the files off the interwebs and decompressed correctly. (it took a modern version of Stuffit on my server and a burned CD, after I remembered I had a CD drive for it) but I have to rename the CD correctly to play the game. This got me thinking about playing some of my older games locally, and revisiting the issue of emulation on an Intel Mac. Looks like they’ve got it working in Lion with a few caveats, which is cool; it also reminds me just how much of my history is on discs that my current machine can’t read.
A busy weekend is behind us; we spent Saturday out in Easton with the Morris clan, eating delicious food and hiking through a nature preserve. Finn missed her nap on the way over (we left from her dance class) and crashed about mid-afternoon, which meant I carried her for most of the hike. The trees were in full color, and the entire trip was bathed with golds, yellows, and greens just beginning to turn.
Back at the homestead, we finally took a saw to the holly tree in the front yard, trimming the bottom 5′ back to the trunk; it’s amazing how much it opens up the front yard. I hauled brush, mowed the lawn, painted a cabinet, fixed the upstairs sink, and tore the passenger-side exhaust down on the Scout to find I need a new gasket above the heat riser; I think I’m going support my Light Line dealers and wrap that purchase in with new shop manuals.
I also tried the IPA on Saturday evening, and I’m very, very pleased with the results. It’s rich, full-flavored, and has no trace of caramel or molasses undertones. I brought some next door to the neighbors’ for the Sunday evening football game, and he agreed with me. I’m hoping this will be the motivation he needs to buy supplies to brew himself.
The big honkin’ HP LaserJet is now installed and running at work; after cracking it open, cleaning off the transfer drum and installing new cartridges the other day, it’s printing much, much cleaner and seems to be happier. I have to haul the Phaser back to the house and set it up somewhere quiet, but I’m not looking forward to humping it up the stairs.