Botlling Fun

I bottled up the blonde ale tonight. It has turned a little darker over the last week and with the addition of the priming solution, but damn if it didn't taste good. I think the sharpness I had detected earlier this week may be coming off of my testing tube. I added chili peppers to 9 bottles, including one 22 oz. bottle, so well see how that goes. This leaves 34 bottles of non-chili blonde ale. Woohoo!

I really want to make a porter (or a dry stout if not) next but finding Munich extract is next to impossible, and partial mashing at this stage does not sound like something I want to do.

It is just about time to pull my dinner out of the oven, but I saw a good quote today, so I am including it here. Quotable Rogue:

It was beautiful and simple, as truly great swindles are.
- O. Henry


~Post-script~

I am on Twitter now as Zalaster, so follow me if you want!

Some Data

Here is some finished data on the blonde ale:

OG	FG		OPlato	FPlato
1.062	1.012		15.20	3.07
%ABW	5.335203		RE	5.261799
%ABV	6.800033		AA	0.79835
			RA	0.654008
	Calories	206.4312

Still looking to bottle this week sometime.

I tasted the first batch. There is a distinct medicine-like taste to this that is likely due to pitching the yeast while the wort was too hot. The plain portion may calm with age, but the cherry extract portion is just far too much like robitussin. Lesson learned on that one. The plain portion will be okay I think, and even if not, it will make good beer brats.

I tasted the blonde ale last night after final testing and it is a little sharper than last time, but I am really looking forward to how it tastes after carbing and also to see how the chili experiment works out.

Sydney's 5k River Run

My daughter has been participating in Girls on the Run this spring. This is an empowerment program focused on girls and healthy choices. As part of it, they train to run a 5k. Syd enjoyed the fall session so much (even though that 5k was during an ice storm in Dec) that she wanted to do it again this spring.

Today, or yesterday as I finally finish this post, she ran her second 5k. This time they did their 5k during a big event here in town, the annual River Run in Iowa City. It was pretty chilly at 9AM this morning, but all in all it was a nice day to run. Her and her running buddy started off at a decent pace and at an official time of 55 minutes (beating her time from Dec by at least 10 minutes) Syd crossed the finish line. She had a beaming smile that just showed just how proud she was of what she'd accomplished. I have to say that I am too!! Here are some pics from the run:

Starting Line

Finish Line

Second Batch Testing

I decided to use a secondary fermentation on this batch and I think it was a great idea. My SG was 1.013 when I racked it over a week ago. Today it was at 1.012. This means that the blonde is at 6.5 to 6.8% ABV. The more important thing is the taste!

It is smooth with a dry finish. Not a big hop taste or bitterness to it, but a nice hop aroma though. This one is not going to need much conditioning at all I think. Carb it up and it will be ready to go. I am going to do a chili pepper experiment with like a 12 pack I think and see how that turns out.

Off to find a SG scale by temp formula to tie up what my exact OG was.

I Believe

So I have always loved this passage from American Gods by Neil Gaiman. I am adding it here, even though it is not appropriately roguish.

~~

"Who did kill those men?" she asked.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"I would." She sounded angry now. He wondered if bringing the wine to the dinner had been a wise idea. Life was certainly not a cabernet right now.

"It's not easy to believe."

"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."

"Really?"

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.

Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, "Okay. So if I tell you what I've learned you won't think that I'm a nut."

"Maybe," she said. "Try me."

~~

Second Brew

Since my testing boosted my confidence last night, I decided to brew up my second batch today. I am making a blonde ale that may or may not have a portion become chili ale. It depends on how the ale itself comes out.

Anyways, the recipe thusfar: 5 gal batch, 4# Dry Light Pilsen Malt, 2# Dry Light Golden Malt, 1# 20L Crystal Malt, 2/3# cane sugar, 1 tsp Irish Moss, Safeale US-05 yeast.

Hops: 1 oz. Cascade 5.8 AA at 60 min, .5 oz. Cascade 5.8 AA at 3 min.

My OG is at 1.061 which is exactly in line with what online calculators predicted, so I seem to have done everything right. It's gone fairly smoothly so far, just waiting for the wort to cool so I can pitch the rehydrated yeast.

First Test

The bubbles on my beer have slowed to once every few minutes now, so I decided to use that as an excuse to test it. (Secretly I really just wanted to taste it, but the testing is important too.)

I had to rig something for removing the stopper since I had pushed it too far down inside last time, so I boiled a bobby pin bent up like an anchor (the wall type, not the sea type) and tied it off with dental floss, this allowed me to push the stopper inside the carboy without dropping it down into the beer. Yay!

I siphoned out a little bit of the beer into my testing tube. The aroma was strong, slightly astringent from the greenness of the beer and a bit of hops to it. The color was only slightly darker than I had hoped for, sort of a caramel shade. This was a pleasant surprise since it looks so dark in the carboy. I took the gravity and got 1.020. This means that the beer is currently 6.93% alcohol by volume. I'm only expecting around 75% attenuation so it has about 1-2% left to go.

It's flat of course - lacking carbonation - and it definitely tastes green. There is a bit more bitterness than I had planned for, but that's to be expected with my hopping mistake. There's a hotness to the alcohol too. Both of these improve with aging, so aging will do this beer some good. There is wheat note to it, but not as strong as say a boulevard. There's no off flavors that I could detect at this point, but I don't have the most refined palate. Overall I am very happy so far!

Maybe I'll start the blonde ale this weekend!