My first fermenter explosion! (Not much of one…)

New Sixpoint in stores! Always cause for celebration.

Just preordered this. Huge fan of Stone Brewing and their whole philosophy towards beer so it was an obvious purchase. Along with the history of the brewery it shares something I wish Sam Caligone’s otherwise excellent book about Dogfish Head had- homebrew recipies for their beers. That, and recipies from their brewpubs. I know I’m going to take a wack at their Arrogant Bastard Ale Onion Rings, especially after tasting how delicious some french fries could be when you drown them in homebrew/craft beer. (Seriously. Make these.)

I haven’t been buying many print books in the last year but I’ve been steadily building up my library of beer books. It just doesn’t seem right to have a page that isn’t speckled with wert and beer, crinkled from having propped it open in order to read the recipies while I’m brewing.

Last night I tried my first batch of all-grain brewing, and it was a little bit of a disaster. I don’t have the equipment for a proper five gallon batch, so I’ve been set on doing a few little one gallon batches to get used to the thing and working on a recipe before upgrading my equipment. I was trying to make pale ale and couldn’t get the temperature for my mash to stay just right- always too high or too low. Should have been ok even so, but then when I was trying to cool down the wort after the boil I managed to spill a whole bunch of warm water right into it. Like two quarts. My OG was .02 lower than it should have been, and I’m worried what the thing will taste like.

If that makes no sense to you, that’s fine. In english- there’s too much water, not enough sugar. The yeast are doing their job right now but I have no idea how watery this thing will taste, if it’s drinkable at all. Dah.

Ah well, live and learn. Thankfully I have an easy extract kit from Northern Brewer that will produce me some nice beer. My first Saison- http://www.northernbrewer.com/brewing/petite-saison-d-ete-extract-kit-2.html

While recently I’ve been dorking out with games like Arkham Horror, Earth Reborn and the Game of Thrones card game, I’ve been also playing a bunch of party games. Not nearly enough of my friends are dorky enough to get into a game that’ll take you four hours to play and involve lots of plastic creatures, and it’s always easier to get a large group of people into something like Werewolf, Eat Poop You Cat, or Apples to Apples.

A good friend of mine picked up Who Would Win tonight and it’s an excellent little game. It’s basically a game where two people are given cards of famous figures and have to debate over how good that person/character would be at some randomly chosen activity, like Gardening, Boxing, etc. The rest of the group has to act as judges. 

You end up with fun fights like this-

Santa whupped her, just so you know. Quite badly. Also, Madonna was better than Karl Marx at Genocide, Tarzan beat Wayne Gretzky in a game of Chicken and Tiger Woods was a better Butler than Stephen King in a racism-riddled debate.

We played it at Rattle N Hum while drinking excellent cask beer. The only problem with that is that I ended up accidentally elbowing the girl sitting next to me a handful of times while I was gesticulating wildly. Arguing brings out my inner Italian, I guess.

Really fun game, can’t wait to see it at the next big gathering of drunken friends.

(Racking the beer from the secondary to my corny keg)

Good God, my honey Kolsch is delicious. Second draft beer after the pumpkin ale and I’m absolutely loving my keg. Definitely the best investment I’ve made for homebrew. The reasons that kegs are the way to go if you want to brew beer are simple- you get to drink your beer faster and you don’t have to clean up as much shit. Normally if you brew beer you have to find bottles to put it in, and since the usual batch is 5 gallons that means just over 53 twleve ounce bottles. You can help things by using 22s and champagne bottles but it’s still a huge pain in the ass, because you have to clean, sanitize, fill, and cap each individual bottle after mixing the beer with a little more sugar. After that you have to wait two weeks for the yeast to eat that added sugar and carbonate the bottles. With a keg you just have one container to clean and sanitize and after dumping the beer in it and chilling it you can carbonate it right from a CO2 canister, making your beer nice and ready in a day or so. It’s a beautiful thing.

This week I’m going to brew a brown ale and also try and grab some apple cider so I can make some hard cider. It’s really easy but seems like a fun little project to try.

More soon.

Had a lot of fun this weekend in Baltimore with the family. Went to the Aquarium, went to a beer fest, ate a lot of great food and walked around the city for hours and hours.

But it might be the strangest city I’ve ever been in. Friends warned me that you can turn down a block and suddenly be in a shitty area, but I thought that was exaggeration. It wasn’t. Multiple times during our long walks around the city we ventured from one absolutely beautiful block full of fancy houses to find a block full of bricked-up doors to abandoned buildings and people dealing right in the street. Never seen anything like it. We walked by a few projects and counted how many liquor stores were around (hint- LOTS). It’s just weird to be a place where there aren’t any “safe” zones. I always knew where to avoid or at least be more careful growing up in The Bronx but it seems like it would have to be on a block-to-block basis in Baltimore.

The “Heritage walk” didn’t help. We weren’t following it intentionally, we just ended up on top of it and were amused to note to note that it led through a really shitty area of town. Not exactly the place you’d want visitors to see.

Of course, our hotel was down near the touristy section near Inner Harbor, which was just as depressing. Reminded me of those tourist traps in Orlando near the parks, with the requisite shitty restaurants and colorful buildings to waste your money.

But hey, we saw that theater that John Waters is always featuring, walked through one of the most beautiful parks I’ve ever been in, tried some delicious new beers (and brought a few back) and really enjoyed exploring the city. It’s no place I’d like to live, but I’d love to go back one day.