Cascade Dark Ale

Racked into the oak last night, and I had interned to dry hop in the barrel, then I realized how tiny the bung hole is and decided I'm going to dry hop later.

I think I'm going to call this beer The Hop burner, with just shy of 8oz of hops and only 63IBU's.  I found another open 1oz pouch of hop pellets in my freezer.  I'm apparently very wasteful with my hops.

Any way well see how it goes with the oak, when I put it in the barrel the coffee roasty flavors where the dominate notes. I'm thinking head retention won't be an issue with this beer.  In 10 days my yeast took it from 1.083 to 1.024 (I didn't temperature adjust so it may be lower).

Digital Short

Sometimes the Journey is the treasure. Some of the animation elements remind me of Aeon Flux and others of Ren and Stimpy. Taken together it's a pretty solid bit of animation with basically no spoken dialogue.




Via GAS

Beer Postings

Man beer postings just seem to lack their emotional punch without pictures don't they?

Well tough I didn't take any pictures so I'm just going to have to rely on my words to describe my most recent cockup in brew making.  I was on vacation for the last week, and thusly didn't have a beer ready to go back into the oak barrel when my "guest brewer" got done with it.  He did a wee heavy in it, and delivered it to my home rinsed and waiting for some beer to go back into it on Saturday.  Sadly I didn't have anything for the thirsty barrel so I went about correcting that.  I needed to compress the brew times and I wanted to do an IPA, so I settled on doing a Cascadian dark ale (aka Black IPA).  You can find my recipe here, it was a collaboration with my brew store beer savant and I did it extract for the convenience of time.  All said it was still about 4ish hours of work for a 1.083 syrupy mess.

Because it was a largish batch with high gravity I gave my yeast a head start with some corn sugar and yeast nutrient in about 1/3 of a gallon of water.  Over the course of the brew day I came to discover that my trusty digital thermometer had bit the dust and was reading inaccurately, so I was flying blind for a large chunk of the day.  When the day was done I had almost 7 gallons in my fermenter and that left and uncomfortably small amount of room for the krausen to work.  I stayed up until almost 2am listening to the airlock bubble away happily before deciding it might just stay in there.  When I woke up 8 hours later I had a huge mess, krausen gushing out the top of my bucket and filling my chest freezer turned kegorator.  In all I'd say I lost about 1/2 a gallon of what is going to be 8%ish abv beer.  It was a true day of mourning as I tried to clean it up, split the batch into a second fermenter to try and contain it.  All I can say is Danstar's Nottingham yeast is a monster, it powered through and as of last night was settled down, with the krausen almost completely collapsed, the airlock slowed to a mere bubble a minute or so.  I'm tempted to rack to the barrel just to be done monitoring the damn thing,  but first I have to come up with a way to strain out all the damn hops still floating around in there.  Whole leaf hops are such a pain in the ass.

Any how that's all I've got to say about that.

To ABFTS's question about how the american strong tastes, it's like doing a whiskey drop in a pale ale.  Scotch ales have a darker malt profile (and are offensively bitter), american strong is just a really high gravity pale ale.  Look at the grain bill, it's copper colored wort, and moved more towards amber from the char on the oak.  So far the feed back on it has been pretty solid, my gripe is the head retention is near nonexistent because of the whiskey and oak.  I've probably over compensated on the cascade dark ale, but I like some head when I pour.

Interesting Premise, I don't strictly agree.

The difference or line that I like to draw is that while I may appreciate things cherry picked from other cultures, I don't express that like by adopting it as my own.  Appreciation of a different genera of is not the same as trying to take ownership and combine with other things to make something unique.

The things Portlandia makes fun of really is the most extreme outlandish take on situations that makes them ripe for ridicule.  For instance insisting on meeting the chicken that you are going to eat for dinner.  It's applying absurdism to something the earnest desire to not be so removed from the production of our food.

We're playing a game right now

You what you loose.




You lost didn't you?

Philip K. Dick

I'm not sure why, but I never really read much in the "Sci-fi" genera when I was younger.  I read some of the expanded Star Wars universe, but really that was it for Science Fiction.  As an adult I've sort of stumbled into the genera largely by accident, but I'm enjoying my time here.

The first book for me was from Richard Paul Russo's Carlucci 3-in1[?]. It was in the book bin at work and caught my eye, so I gave it a whirl.  It's 3 books rolled into one and pretty excellent, thought my disclaimer will be the first book stands head and shoulders above the other 2.  The sci-fi book I read last year was Betahuman[?] by Ian Wood, I read it because it was written by a High School friend of mine.  It's a debut novel, written during nanowrimo follows familiar story arc's but manages to add something to the genera as far as I'm concerned.  Really other than smoothing out some of the dialogue, it doesn't need any work.  The last Sci-fi book I read last year was Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?[?] from Philip K. Dick.  I watched Blade Runner sometime last year so I was interested to read the book, but Adam Savage prattling on and on about his Blade Runner replica's in 2 separate video's this year really drove me to take the plunge.  The movie doesn't even hold a candle to the sun that is this book.  There are so, so many things that the movie doesn't even try to take on that draw together the plot that Blade Runner failed to make any sense of. If you liked the movie, but thought it was missing something I think you will love the book.

Any how I'm deep in the middle of a Philip K. Dick benge trying to read The Man in the High Castle[?] and I have a few more to follow, but if there is something I just have to read in the genera let me know.

Science Friday

I dig me some science and graphene is definitely a huge area of interest moving forward for the electronics industry, in some respects all industries if the charge profile is as good as they think it is.





via Geeks are Sexy