Nearly Screwed a Brew!

Two weeks ago I brewed a 5-gallon batch of beer that was going to be a pale ale using Irish Yeast. I screwed up big time by letting the temperature run up to about 180deg F while it should have gone no higher than 160deg F. By letting it elevate that much I inadvertently locked the sugars in the grain. The whole point of the mash is to release those simple sugars for the yeast to consume.

I noticed I had a real problem when I took a sample and checked the specific gravity and it said 1.013, which is pretty much where the final gravity should be after the yeast has eaten the sugars. I went next door to my neighbor who is also a homebrewer and told him what my OG (original gravity) was. He said that was really low and brought out a couple of his brew books to the porch to see what I could do.

We found that adding honey would be a good option because yeast converts about 99% of honey into alcohol. I borrow his digital scale and got my old honey viscous again and poured 4.3lbs of Oregon wildflower honey, it should bring the OG back up to 1.060 (may need to recalc that) with a potential ABV of 3.5%. Oh yeah, this is going to be a light ale using Irish yeast, Irish Ale Yeast - Wyeast 1084. The reason I chose Irish Ale yeast is that when I rack this one into my spare carboy I am going to reuse the yeast immediately in the next batch which I will make during weekend Staycation. Gonna be an Irish Coffee Mint Beer, using peppermint/spearmint from my garden, espresso from AJ's (24oz espresso => ~37.5mg caffeine per 12oz!).

This is a shot of the batch, it volcanoed pretty violently after the temp in the kitchen activated the yeast, that slug of honey in the bottom helped! The airlock is super crusty, it probably won't come clean, but they're only a buck and I got the benjamins rollin' in!

The other reason to use this strain of yeast is because it's pretty versatile, here are some of the styles that Wyeast suggests:

• American Barleywine
• Baltic Porter
• Dry Stout
• Foreign Extra Stout
• Imperial IPA
• Irish Red Ale
• Oatmeal Stout
• Other Smoked Beer
• Robust Porter
• Scottish Export 80/-
• Scottish Heavy 70/-
• Scottish Light 60/-
• Spice, Herb, or Vegetable Beer
• Strong Scotch Ale
• Sweet Stout
• Wood-Aged Beer

So if I figure out how to store yeast rather than continuous usage I will be able to make quite a few different things.

Random Photos

Phil, a guy at work retired on April 1st, he left behind his 2010 Jackasses (and the funny things they say) Calendar. You should see Miss April!!














View west down the center line of Rosa Parks Blvd waiting for the bus at 5AM to go to the airport to go to Spokane. Got lots of comp time for coming back on the evening flight.













Some people from the neighborhood at the seed exchange.














View from the floor of my office lobby.

Fixin' Things

For a while I was living in two worlds, one was the post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert from Fallout: New Vegas and the other was real life. But, they connected when my dryer died, well, stopped putting out heat. I have a really old dryer, made in like the 60's, it is commonly known as the "halo of heat" because of the heating coil around the front of the drum.

I used the book pictured below only after I'd taken it pretty much apart - the controls, wires, top of the shell and tested the resistance going through each of the thermistors. I looked in the book and it had a step by step procedure, 1st was to examine the power coming in, which I should have done first. The power coming into the dryer had either vibrated or shorted apart, luckily I had a new connector and enough existing wire to fix that and it worked fine. I did end up with a few extra screws but they're only for the sheet metal shell.

In Fallout you can get books that will improve your skillz during the game, if you want to repair something like a robot or a set of armor you may need to use one of these books to temporarily improve your skill score like Fixin' Things (pictured below).

It turns out the Reader's Digest doesn't make these Home Repair books much anymore, probably because everything is so digital. But, it did come in handy for this old dryer.

Dave's Kill Mill

That's Dave Dahl from Dave's Killer Bread (and a friend) at an event tonight, him and Colonel Arnold Strong spoke tonight at a Bright Neighbor (brightneighbor.com) sponsored event. The topic was how to develop a thriving community supported business and they both spoke about their experiences and theories that lead them to where they are today.

I drew a lot of parallels to Dave's story of coming out of prison and wanting to find the thing that is organic with a short shelf life and improve upon it, it sounds a lot like a theory of technology innovation I learned about in my Engineering and Technology Management class last quarter about technology imitators. They are the people that will dissect an existing technology in the market to make it better. The benefit if it's already successful that a market has already been established for it and you don't necessarily have to reinvent the wheel to recreate the process, but its not an innovation.

Where Dave differs is that he's got a strong passion behind making bread and improving the quality of the bread. He was baking bread before his incarceration, so he already knew about bread and the business. Dave's story.

A quote from Machiavelli on Innovators:

"It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who should gain by the new ones."

Niccolo Machiavelli - From "The Prince", another great read!

After the end of the discussion Dave and his friend rocked out and played us three songs. We all sang along to Mustang Sally, it was awesome!