Starter powers activate

Sitting on my dining table right now just spinning it's heart out is my first ever starter. Used 2 2/3 cup bottled water and 2 oz of extra light DME. Found out about a few interesting problems that I'd not have known about had I not actually done this whole process. Namely, the flask I'm using isn't completely flat on the bottom. This becomes a problem because as that water boils, it forces the flask up. This happens over and over, causing the flask to vibrate inside the pot of boiling water. My solution was to use a slightly bigger pot and a bit more water so that the flask _just slightly_ is floating in the pot. That allows the steam to escape and prevents the vibration.

That all being said, though, after 15-20 minutes I wasn't able to get the flask to boil. So I dumped the starter into a smaller pot and boiled the starter directly. Way easier. Cooled it down over 10 or 15 minutes in an ice bath (it does cool very quickly), added my (mostly) decanted mead yeast cake, and added the sanitized stir stick. Around 10:30 last night I set the stir plate to on and by this morning the bubbling had all but stopped. Which is fine, though I did remember that I forgot (ha) the yeast nutrient. The starter is ~600ml, so I threw in 1/4 tsp of nutrient, and the bubbling spiked for a few minutes, but subsided.

If the bubbling doesn't increase tonight or by tomorrow evening, I'll be cold crashing the starter and leaving it be until early March, when I'll be bottling the vanilla and brewing the pomegranate. All in all the making of a starter was an interesting experience and I look forward to seeing the krausen-explosion from my porter brew in mid January.

Mead step 2

Just finished racking my mead to secondary, and made sure that I remembered to add the 6 vanilla beans. Tasting it, I found it interesting that it was actually slightly fizzy. I wonder if this is something that is dealt with with making wine, or because by using an airlock, it creates a pressure problem that keeps the CO2 in suspension. No matter, when I go to bottle I'll give it a hearty shake before I siphon into the bottling bucket, then another couple shakes after it's in the bucket. Then again, in three months, the CO2 might end up dissipating anyway. We'll see.

The taste was as expected, as it's fresh out of the fermenter it's still got a raw taste. In three months it should take on the flavor of the vanilla beans and be a bit more refined. Two months after bottling it'll be drinkable.

In addition to racking the mead, I took a sample of the yeast and put it in a sanitized flask, and sealed it as best I could with tinfoil. Hopefully the gross smell of the fridge doesn't get in over the next couple days. On Tuesday or around there I'll be purchasing a stopper for the flask and some DME so to make a stable starter for the next batch of mead, which is going to be pomegranate mead. I'll post again then for I'll be excited at making my first starter and getting to use the stir plate that I made.

Science and more science

Yesterday I finished building a custom stir plate for use with starters. Thanks to Chris, with his desire to build stuff and his connections to obtain cheap lab glass, I've a working stir plate.

Video!

A bit of warning, though, the video is a bit loud. The stir stick and the whine from the power supply unfortunately come through annoyingly. When there's yeast and sugar in the water it'll be much quieter.

Now with this built, the next project is building a mash tun. Just need to find a 10 gallon rubbermaid cooler (the round cylindrical kind) on sale and the rest of the parts are cheap and easy to find. But no rush, as I'm almost sort of slightly entirely broke. Hopefully I'll be able to find something before I leave for Christmas.

The idea for my next brew day (and the beginning of my 2012 brewextravaganza) is the second week of January. I'd like to order materials and yeast right before I fly back home, so when I get home I can make a starter immediately, and in 3 days brew a custom porter (and label it this time!). Soon after that I've a double IPA in the works. After the DIPA, my plan is to go through a cycle of beers that will become "house brews", and they'll be recipes I keep making over and over until I get them customized enough to warrant a name, and make them well enough that I always have them on tap and have a base of beers to gauge experiments and experience on.

I have a few styles in mind - Irish Red (have the recipe, needs tweaking as the last time I made it I tasted little of it as it exploded), Porter (next brew day), Pale Ale (don't have a recipe yet), Hefe (no recipe yet, going to use Sarah to gauge taste), Brown Ale (no recipe yet, something plain but notably different from the irish red and the pale ale), and the DIPA.

Thinking about it now, my cycle for the year will be Porter - DIPA - Red Ale - Pale Ale - Brown Ale - Hefe, the repeat. Seasonal brews will happen between these, and mead is going to be made every 6 months or so. People seemed to like my imperial harvest ale, so I'm going to tweak that and make it again next year, and in addition to the harvest ale I'll be making a pumpkin using real pumpkin...but I don't have a recipe for that yet.

Next weekend I rack my mead to secondary where it'll sit for three more long months, and the day after my Christmas Ale is ready to drink. Hopefully the cherry flavor has mellowed out, I'll post a review on it in a week or two.

Winter beer bottled!

Just finished bottling my winter ale, and it turned out to be rather ... interesting. I didn't realize the effect that cherries and oak were going to have on the beer, and I fear I may have used far too much. The beer starts off smooth and slightly sweet, then a bit of oakiness. The aftertaste is a sharp touch of cherry, followed by a lingering slight bitterness. I sort of like it, but the cherry flavor I'm hoping mellows out with a couple weeks in the bottle. Next year I may increase the ginger by 20% or so, and decrease the amount of cherries and oak by 20% or so. We'll see what it tastes like in a couple weeks and how it ages to make any recipe-changing decisions. Who knows? The ginger flavor could come out strong, only time will tell.

Updates on cider, mead, and the bottling to come.

So I had Greg try the cider last night, and though he was polite about it - he really didn't care for it. Which is fine for me, as the cider was an experiment and all I did was throw yeast into it to see what happened. However, the experience has taught me that the next time I try to make hard cider - essentially apple cider wine - I'm going to use actual wine yeast, and not Nottingham ale yeast, despite how much people seem to like it. I came to the realization of the yeast when I thought that when it was dry - it wasn't that dry. This is because, or probably because, I used an ale yeast rather than a dry-finishing wine yeast, like champagne yeast.

Next year my plan is to get four gallons, apply the new yeast to all of them, then backsweeten one and I'll have two gallons each of dry and sweet hard cider. Though I'm also wondering seriously if the flat taste came from the pasteurization of the cider. Which means I should have six gallons, or some multiple of three, two raw, four pasteurized, so I can see the differences between dry, sweet, and unpasteurized vs. pasteurized. Problem with that is six gallons of cider is expensive for an experiment. Hopefully I'll have a bit more cash laying around next year for further experimentation.

Mead is fermenting famously, though it seems to have slowed a bit since yesterday. The temperature range has been terrible - from around 76-78 ro just below 68. Hopefully it should be fine, though it's extremely difficult to regulate the temperature in my tiny, old apartment.

I should have another post tomorrow about the christmas ale I've been excited about, as tomorrow is bottling day and I should have somewhere north of 3.5 gallons or so. Bottles ready, can't wait.

Yeast nutrient? More like fermenter hyper-explosion.

Never used yeast nutrient before today, when I added 2.5 teaspoons to 5 gallons on the third day after yeast pitching. I had no idea what to expect, to put it lightly. Soon as I dumped the first teaspoon in the fermenter, it basically all dissolved immediately in a bubbling froth of insanity. 1.5 teaspoons later and I had a huge bubbling mess that threatened to breach the fermenter's top. Stupid me didn't realize what was going on, so I shut the fermenter only to have the airlock go INSANE, and threaten to shoot off like a bottle rocket. So, hastily, I reopened the fermented just to have a good pint or so of thick foam shoot out the side. Luckily I had the foresight to put a towel under the fermenter and move the bucket to the kitchen. After the bubbles quieted down I resealed the fermenter and gave it a couple nice good shakes, each time the airlock was notably more active, then subsided shortly after.

I'm sort of running in the dark here with this whole mead business, but we'll see how it turns out and make changes the next time after I've finished the full production of primary, secondary, and bottling. Thankfully, bottling is very easy, so there shouldn't be any problems or blips with that procedure, despite never bottling something without sealed bottle caps before.

Another interesting point to note - when I opened the fermented there was no krausen to be found. I thought this was odd, as the smell coming out of the airlock was notably fermention-ladeled, and the airlock was producing a "it's definitely fermenting" amount of air. With a quick google search I discovered that mead can run the range from no krausen to explosive krausen.

It's also more evidence and force toward every time in the future that I do not use a smack pack, I will be doing a starter. Cider with dry yeast and mead with dry yeast both have produced the same sort of ... slow, boring, and nondescript ... fermentation that hints to me that either I have too high gravity liquid (extremely not likely) or that I'm not treating my yeast with the respect it deserves. So in addition to building a water cooler mash tun, I will be obtaining materials (mostly just a flask) to construct a starter vessel.

I should also consider actually doing gravity readings....

Mmm, cider

Bottled my first cider just now, and I'm surprised at how easy the entire process was. From start to finish took two weeks, and the hardest part was sanitizing the buckets and bottles. Star san makes it easier to sanitize bottles, though, compared to one step.

When I first cracked open the fermenter, I didn't expect the cider to taste the way it did. I was expecting something much drier, and the taste was entirely drinkable and delicious. I still added 6.8 oz of lactose, though, to backsweeten the two gallons. It's .4 oz too much, but whatever. The sugar cut through the dryness with a light touch. The cider wasn't that much sweeter, but the dryness was considerably diminished and it became slightly easier to drink.

I like to use the test of something's tastiness by giving a small sample to my gf. She'll taste it, then if she goes for a second taste and won't give me back the glass I know I've succeeded in making something tasty.

Next time making cider I'm not only going to use much more, but I may try to referment some in the bottle to make sparkling cider or play around with different blends or types of yeast. Milburn's Cider and Nottingham Yeast make a tasty drink, though.

Mold? No!

Earlier today, a friend of mine asked me how I was doing my secondary, and if I've been checking for mold. Intrigued, I did some googling and couldn't find anything about mold problems with using fruit in a secondary. When I couldn't find anything, he linked me to the thread where first heard about mold. Curious, I whipped up some sanitizer and cracked open my secondary, only to find a light layer of krausen and a wonderful smell of yeast - no mold here! Whew! Christmas Ale is still on target for a bottling in just over a week and a half.

Mead supplies came today, and I'm hoping to bottle the cider Friday and start the mead either then or the following weekend.

Adventures in brewing

For the past few years, I've barely posted much. And many of my posts go something like this:

"Hey, I haven't posted in awhile, sorry about that! Here's some of the same claptrap that's been going on in my life that nobody is going to read, be back in a year to do the same thing again!"

That's sort of boring. So why not start posting about something that's meaningful to me? Like brewing! Keeping a brewjournal both in my personal stash and online is probably a way for me to post more. And have meaningful posts. Also, I tend to think of great ideas mid thought-stream, and most to all of everything I've written since high school has been entirely voice. It works for me, though I could never be an English major.

So where do I sit with brewing? I have two fermenters currently active, and a box of ingredients that should arrive tomorrow.

In primary (with a sweet cheap once-used bucket from How Do You Brew) right now are two gallons of cider from Millburn Orchards. It's more of an experiment, really. I've only brewed beer and have wanted to get into wine - but I've been worried that it's somehow more complicated than just warming the juice up and adding yeast. Turns out it IS more complicated than that, but if you just want to make wine (and I do love to hit the ground running) that's all you need to do. So I bought a packet of Nottingham, and promptly burnt the fuck out of it with 140F tap water. Oops. I pitched it anyway and the next morning I saw no airlock activity. So I went to buy another packet - got two this time. Pitched the yeast directly in, gave it a swirl, and from that Saturday until this past Wednesday or so it's been farting out nasty-smelling deliciousness more vigorously than I've ever seen. I hope that I can bottle it next weekend, but that may not happen. I am, though, going to taste it. Also got a pound of lactose for back-sweetening, because I'm pretty sure I won't like dry cider. I don't like dry wine (though chianti and merlot are good), so that makes sense.

In secondary is a Christmas beer I'm making partially for winter, partially for experimentation, and partially for Sarah for her birthday. It's an interesting beer, unlike anything I've done before. I used honey in the boil, and I'm using a secondary. It's 3-4 gallons and I used an ounce and a half of fresh ginger in the boil, and in secondary I've got whiskey-soaked oak and three pounds of frozen cherries. I tasted it while racking and it's definitely beer, but it's got quite a distance to go before it's done. Two weeks on the oak and cherries, then three weeks in the bottle. The recipe said it tasted like a gingerbread cookie, and given the ingredients I'm expecting it to be gingery, slightly aromatic (from the cinnamon), and with an earthy sweetness. I already have a name for the recipe, though in keeping with my recipe-stealing morals I do not name my beers until I modify the recipe. So I'll find some way of modifying the recipe to make it my own, then I'll name it.

The box of ingredients I'm (or should be) receiving tomorrow contains yeast nutrient, yeast, and 12 pounds of honey. I'm making mead! ... for next year. I don't have another airlock (stupid me should have bought a third) so I may have to wait until I bottle the cider or the christmas beer, but given that I'm using a 6 gallon carboy and making 5 gallons of mead, I may also just employ a blowoff. It might end up being a good idea, actually, as there's a lot of sugar in honey and I expect the fermentation to be extremely vigorous and take a week. Unfortunately the mead is going to take no less than 6 months to become drinkable. One month primary, two months secondary, and two months in the bottle. At least 2 months, anyway. This is another experiment, so I'll be using my brewday as a starting point and save at least one of the bottles for the next year's mead brewday to see how the aging process works.

Speaking of aging, I've a few bottles left of a porter I made, and bottled on September 3rd. If kept at proper beer serving temperature, the chocolate taste is slightly more pronounced. I'm remaking it with modifications for St. Paddy's day, and I'm very interested to find it's optimal aging time. I've six 12-oz bottles and two bombers left, though two 12-oz and one bomber are already accounted for, hopefully I'll be able to hold off drinking them all until I reach at least 6 months. Interestingly enough, 6 months (and a week or two) past the bottling say for this beer is st. patrick's day. So St. Patrick's day 2013 may end up getting it's porter made in August of 2012.

Beer is fun.

Sitting around, and cancer

Couldn't think of anything to post last week, was reeling from a diagnosis of skin cancer. Went in to my dermatologist to check out my moles and get a cyst removal appointment made, and the mole that the doc removed turned out to be stage 1 melanoma. Not serious, but it's something that I can't deal with with diet and exercise - it had to go. So last Friday I have the surgery and I've been moving around as little as possible while my back wound heals. 18 stitches in an S-pattern looks pretty gnarly. Might whore some karma on Reddit once it heals, we'll see. What I hope for the most is, during my appointment to get my stitches removed, that he doesn't find any moles that look at risk, and he tells me the samples he removed show that I'm now cancer free.

On the bright side, though, is all ten seasons of Stargate SG-1 are on hulu, so I've something to do/watch. However, now being unemployed is a strange thing. I'm not sure what to do with my time. Before, when I had off days I could use the excuse that it's an off day, and just do fuck all. Now, I've all my time to do whatever, and I find myself doing nothing constructive. Maybe I can use the excuse of my back is healing, but at the same time I really should get things done.

Yeah, I know, I'm blogging instead. Need to use a to do list, that should help.

The only outlet I have

Sometimes, things come up in one's life that they need to talk about. Sometimes it helps to talk to a third party, like a counselor or a friend, and sometimes it helps to not talk to anyone but the voice inside your own head. Most times, though, it helps the most to talk to the person that is the culprit or the focus of the problem bugging you or affecting your life or otherwise existing in such a way to throw you off the calm, peaceful existence that you'd like to call your life. And since I know the person in question won't read this, and the few (if they exist) that would read it won't say anything/can't say anything/etc. makes this a better medium for venting my frustration.

Suffice it to say, I don't think it's a normal thing to think on a weekly, sometimes daily, basis after 7 years of a relationship that you don't want to remain in the relationship anymore. Even less so that, and I put my future at risk by saying so, depressing thoughts enter my mind mixed in with the angry and confused and fed up ones. Nothing serious, but they're there and have been for quite some time. Now, you'd ask yourself, why can't I just talk to her? The answer lies in what I know would happen and what I know I'd fail to say. I've no idea how to open up the conversation. "Hey, babe, I'd like to talk about us." is probably not the best way to open up the conversation. It would, undoubtedly, be misconstrued as "I want to break up with you". Which ... I don't want to. 7 years (technically 6.5) is a long time for a relationship. Fixing it is the best course of action, but I don't know how. I feel that, regardless of how the conversation starts, it will rapidly degenerate into an argument (where I am the one at fault), or crying. The crying would make me feel terrible, as if I was making a mistake, the conversation would go nowhere, and I'd be right back where I was.

Halfway through that sentence I lost my train of thought and lost what it was that I was talking about, so I guess I'll leave it here.

Camping, Survival, the Rapture, and a New Beginning

This past weekend was supposed to have been the rapture. Very clearly I wasn't raptured, though given the severe lack of news follow-up, it's also clear that nobody was raptured, either. As I knew the rapture wasn't going to happen as described, I am a bit disappointed that nothing happened at all. Frankly I was expecting a riot, mass suicide, or other such outrage at the fact that nothing happened. Or aliens, that'd have been grand, really V-style. Alas, nothing happened. The time passed, 5:45 this past Saturday, while I was on the Cape Henlopen beach with Sarah and three of her friends. Watching an Osprey catch a fish, and some dolphins kill a shark. Nothing spectacular, though I did get a sunburn.

I thought it fitting that I was camping the weekend that the rapture was predicted to happen, and in my words i was "avoiding the rapture by hiding in slower lower". What I was really doing is testing my survival kit/camping kit. Turns out I missed a few things. Also, camping where were at wasn't so much "camping" but more "going to a hotel without any walls". That didn't stop it from being fun, however. The experience taught me a few things, and added another line to my "zombie apocalypse" rulebook. That rule is: "If you don't know if you need something or not, consider the consequences of not having it. If you are comfortable with the consequences, do without. Otherwise, do with.". This rule, as ambiguous as it seems, was borne out of my lack of sunscreen whilst I went for a run on the beach. I thought "I won't be in the sun for very long, I don't need any sunscreen". Totally wrong, I was.

It also taught me that my Bug-out-bag is just too big. What I have is more of an 'I'm never coming home bag', which for the purposes that I'd apply it to in the near and distant future, is hugely overkill. I'm planning on going for a 3-day pack and designing it for a "real" bug-out-type situation, also to take up much less space in my closet.

Today I told my boss that, officially, I'm going to grad school. When I told him that I'm essentially going tuition-free, the conversation went quickly to, and i'm paraphrasing, "I'd do the same thing in your situation". Frankly, I underestimated him. He expressed an observation of me that was more spot on than I even realized about myself. That I'm 50/50, one foot in this job, one foot in grad school. this, to him, explained why I wasn't totally focused on my job, and when combined with the fact that I still don't know what it is that I want to do, this makes more sense and, to him, grad school is the right thing for me to do. At the end of next week will be my final day here at NRG-Edge, hopefully I have enough cash to float myself until the semester starts and my loans get disbursed.

So I'm going, in the fall, to grad school for an MBA, which I've explained in previous posts. The only problem I'm going to have is that I'm going to end up digging into my savings. What I might do is accept all of the financial aid that I get, and defer interest, and stick it all in my savings account. Take what I need, then upon graduation, pay as much back as I can. Hopefully, over the course of two years, I'm able to get my internet presence up to the point of paying the bills...but I'm not holding my breath.

I don't normally like to plug my game, but Zombies at War is progressing nicely, and in the next few months I'm going to have a lot more time to work on it. I'd like to have it out of Alpha by the end of the summer, but as time has shown there's always a lot more to do than I realize.

Day in, day out

I thought, over the past few days, why I never post much. I think I've discovered the real reason behind it. That reason is the fact that I always have _something_ going on in my head that I'd like to post/share/etc., but I don't want to make a new blog entry for every single one. So these thoughts fade away, and time goes by and none of these ever make it to my New Post window. I think the solution is to just wait a few days between postings, then post whatever is on my mind at the time. Anyway...

Grad school is looming over my head, and I'm still conflicted as to staying/leaving this company. i had planned on having a conversation with my boss today, but he's out so it'll be Wednesday at the earliest, probably Thursday before I sit and have a conversation with him. I'll e-mail him next time I'm in the office and he's not, either Wednesday or Thursday. Thing is, I love working here. But, I also can't pass this opportunity to go to school, essentially for _free_. How awesome is that? College isn't a scam if you're going for free. Other than the $90+k in lost wages, but it's my plan to create an online presence by graduation, hopefully knocking out all of my student debt and ending grad school in the black.

That being said, however, I'm finding it very difficult to get myself back into the coding mindset, at least for Zombies at War. Part of me wants to scrap the project, but I know that's just both me giving up and me being lazy. It's my fear that it's never going to make any money, and that my future ideals as a businessperson are totally flawed and impossible. Maybe it's not possible to live a comfortable lifestyle without really working. Perhaps it's only possible to remain alive, with no extravagances, without working for only a short time. So far, things have worked out for me. Maybe they will work in the future, maybe they won't. But all in all I realized a few days ago that if i'm procrastinating _now_ because I'll "work on it during grad school", what proof do I have that I will actually work on anything related in grad school? I have the same free time now, I won't be moving anywhere, so why do i insist on putting it off until later? I should just do it now. And that's what I'm going to do.

...Almost a year?

So I've seriously lost track of time and haven't posted anything for...damn near a year. So what's been going on? Quite a bit, in fact. From my diet/body change perspective, I'm down to 166 as of yesterday The goal is 8% body fat, so I've still a few pounds to lose (around 10.8 as of this morning). My diet started June 15, so on that day I'll have pictures and fanfare and personal congratulations, etc, etc.

On a non-diet subject, I've learned to brew beer. A few days ago I received the ingredients for my fourth brew to date, my third all-grain brew and, if things go as well as they did the last time I brewed, my second successful from-scratch brew. It's going to be a red ale, and there should be enough for a case of pint bottles for Otakon.

I can't remember if I spoke of my job, but post-graduation I was offered a job for Hosting.com, which I worked from mid-June until Mid-November. At which point I received a job offer from another company, NRG-Edge. Love these guys. And...I'm going to be sad to go. Why? I've also been accepted into grad school!

UD's MBA program, I applied and was accepted, and for icing on the cake - I've received a fellowship worth 50% tuition. This means I pay no tuition for my first semester - and if my grades keep up the second one, also. It's an opportunity that I can't turn down, a $12k/semester MBA program for, assuming two semesters of fellowship, $12k TOTAL (in-state students get 50% off from the get-go).

Hopefully, combining my savings and on-campus jobs I can come out with paying $0 for grad school. With $22k in loans outstanding, I need some sort of financial wizardry to get this done.

I'm going to try to post more, I know I need to. Even if nobody reads anything it'll allow me to get ideas and thoughts and feelings, etc. out in a timely manner.