Once upon a time there was a beer. A beer with bold flavor and character. A beer that was supposedly America’s first IPA. But then the 1970s happened. The tastes of the masses changed, and not for the better. A tidal wave of flavorless lager rushed in. And this unique, legendary beer was washed away in the tide. Until today.
Pabst is brewing Ballantine IPA again, based on some educated guesses about the original 1960’s recipe. I’m going to have to see if I can find a bottle or three.
Interesting–a history of why American beer is so bland:
Restrictions on grain use during wartime ruled out the widespread production of hoppy ales in the ’40s, and the palates of a generation of American soldiers grew accustomed to the weak beer that was standard in military rations.
Via: The Atlantic
Last night I did some consulting for a friend and then came home for a frosty beer. Looking at the half-full, unused Hefeweizen keg, I figured I might as well try fixing it, as I’ve known it’s been leaking for two weeks. I pulled the bad valve post and tried replacing the whole thing with one from my spare shorty keg, but of course it’s a different thread size. Then I remembered I had spare poppet valve stems, swapped the old with a fresh one, reinstalled it, and pressure tested it. It’s holding pressure finally! there’s a lot to be said for stocking spare parts.
I’m in love with the Canon f/1.4 lens we have at work, and I’ve been casually looking at inexpensive alternatives for the Nikon DX gear I’ve got. Most of Nikon’s really sharp AF-S glass is >$300, which is more than I’d like to spend, but it would be great to have a fully automatic lens if that’s what I’m going to pay. I have a 50mm f/1.8 lens which was inexpensive and works great; they make a 50mm f/1.4 for ~$300, but I like the 28-35mm range from a shooting standpoint. Nikon offers a 35mm f/1.8 prime for $200 which would be perfect, and my brother-in-law has one that I’ll have to borrow sometime to try out.
Nikon also made a bunch of razor-sharp manual prime lenses back in the day, an f/1.4 and an f/1.2, which are both compatible with my DX gear. I’m toying with the idea of buying one of the f/1.4s from eBay, if I can get the price down low enough, just to see what it’s like. One of my photographer friends says the local camera shop usually carries a few used copies, so I’ll have to ring them up and see what they’re charging. The f/1.2 is another matter entirely. It routinely sells for ~$300 on eBay, which is a lot of coin for a manual lens but I do see some examples for cheap here and there. I’ll just set up a Craigslist alert and wait it out.
A rough count on our YouTube page shows I’ve shot at least eight finished videos this year. Most of them are simple one-camera setups, which are pretty easy to bang out at this point. Now I’m learning about multi-cam editing in preparation for editing the Forest project videos I shot a while back.
I made a breakthrough on Tuesday after a few weeks of gridlock. I’d shot tons of footage and struggled with exactly how to start piecing it all together. At first I got hung up on the technical challenge of syncing everything together, adding B-roll, and timing it all. Then I realized I didn’t even know what I had, so I stepped way back and started cutting out the junk footage to where all I had was their answers, assembled in rough order. Using this method, I cut rough reels for two subjects and sketched out a workflow.
Then I installed Final Cut Pro on my home machine Tuesday evening so that I can keep working in my spare time, and set up a portable drive to move the project and all its files back and forth. I’m definitely enjoying this.
Friday morning I worked from home because there was a water main break at our office, and apparently they don’t have sprinklers or flushing toilets. Whatever! It was nice to chill on the couch and catch up on small things.
Saturday I spent the entire morning moving concrete from a pile next to the garage over to the dumpster in our neighbor’s driveway. It took a lot of time and energy, and by the time I was done, I was ready to be done. Luckily we had a low-impact evening planned with friends, and grilling food and drinking beer was a great way to cap off a long day.
While we were sitting in the backyard, this fox trotted brazenly into the yard, sniffing out some scraps under the picnic table, and made off with them before we could pick our jaws up off the ground. He was within easy throwing distance, and not the least concerned with us at all. I saw him again on Sunday afternoon cruising past the house, obviously looking for more picnic treats.
Sunday Finn and I took in the Farmer’s Market for some veggies, and we did some light chores around the house. I hung new hooks on the back of the garage for the second ladder my father sent me home with, and took the old rusty mailbox off the front of the house.
Then, Finn and Mama went to the park for a playdate with a friend, and I brewed up a batch of Session IPA with the propane burner.
After dinner, I helped Finn finish her homework, and then I took the girls out for some gelato to celebrate a fine weekend.
Last night I went downstairs to check on my kegs and found that they were sitting in about 4 inches of Hefeweizen. Careful application of some soapy water revealed the outflow post on the keg is leaking, allowing about two gallons of beer to fill the bottom of the kegerator. I pulled out my beer siphon, hooked up a tube, and cleaned it out manually.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had a flooded kegerator; this same keg was leaking from the main seal a year or two ago, and I fixed that with a new seal and some food-grade grease. It’s just annoying to have taken the time to brew the beer and then have it wasted by mechanical error.
We had a quiet Easter weekend as a family. Saturday was the neighborhood egg hunt, which was windy and a little chilly but still enjoyable. I brought my camera but only wound up taking about four worthless shots; such are the difficulties of having a six-year-old for a subject.
Sunday evening I brewed my thirtieth batch of beer, a hefewiezen, for the spring. I’m really enjoying the session IPAs I’ve been brewing, and so I think I’ll brew up another of those next. The Irish Stout has been sitting since November, which means it’s time to bottle (ugh). I’ve got about five cases of empties in the basement waiting, so it’s just a matter of timing an empty dishwasher correctly.
As it turns out, there was some reshuffling of classes at UMBC in the fall, so instead of teaching some kind of theoretical interactive course, they offered me a capstone design class in the evenings, which is right up my alley. I have yet to get the syllabus but I’ve seen some of the final work from past years and it looks like it’ll be fun.
I kegged the Conundrum IPA about a week and a half ago, and I’m very happy with the way it came out. It’s got a lot of flavor (with 5 oz. of hops, it had better) but it still finishes light–the perfect session beer. I think I’m going to have to brew this one again. In the meantime, though, I’ve got a Hefeweizen kit to brew next, in preparation for spring weather and sunshine. I figure by the time it’s ready to go I’ll have killed the IPA.
Work is going full steam ahead, and I’ve got a new designer starting on Monday. We’re doing some shifting around of computers, and we’re going to have to sort out some kind of workflow to make things run smoother day-to-day. We’ve played with Flow a bit, and we’ve used Basecamp, but neither really stuck. Slack looks cool but might be overkill for our needs.
Work is progressing on Scout seats, but I’m at a stopping point until I get some rust encapsulator delivered. In the process of cutting the seats off my old bases last weekend, my angle grinder crapped out so I had to buy a new one. Once that happened, I got the passenger side base cleaned up and ready for paint. Now I just need to wait for some warmer weather to pull the drivers’ side seat out and cut that apart.
Other than that, we’ve been keeping our heads down and trying to stay warm. This winter can’t be over fast enough.
…No, we didn’t actually buy a new car. On Friday morning, on the way to the train station, we didn’t make it more than 100 feet out of the driveway when we realized something was very wrong with the Accord. It turned out the passenger front tire was flat. We parked it on the side of the road and hustled back to the CR-V and Mama got me to the station on time. Later, she got it back in the driveway before the snow (and, thus, the plows) started falling. And there it sat. Today I pumped the bad tire back up, made sure it held air, and arranged for two new tires to be installed. Finn and I brought some reading material to the garage, and a painless hour later we were back on the road. The old tires were probably OEM, given their wear pattern, so I feel much better about driving it.
Later in the afternoon Finn and I transferred my Irish Stout to the secondary, and it measures out at 4.75% ABV. It tastes good too. It’s been sitting since early November, so another couple of months in the secondary and then conditioning until next fall, and it’ll be perfect. The IPA is done bubbling but I’ll let that sit one more week before I do anything.
The yeast in my session IPA kicked in with a vengeance on Monday night, which brings me a sigh of relief. There’s at least 2″ of krauzen at the top of the carboy and it hasn’t slowed down since it started.
Jen tells me my new iPhone is sitting in a box on my desk–just in time. I think my 4S knows its time is up, because battery life has plunged off a cliff in the last week or so. However, the case I ordered (and fancy touchscreen gloves) won’t be here until tomorrow.
Not much else happening on the home front. It’s been too cold to do anything on the house, and schedules just haven’t worked out to get anything done on the weekend. I’m getting itchy…