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More Snow!

Published
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admin
on January 14, 2008
in Bikes, Brewing, Commuting and Life
. 3 Comments

So we’ve had a couple of big storms here in the last month or two. After today though, I can certainly say I’ve been through a Nor’Easter and survived. The weather forecast for today said 10-15″ of the white stuff. Out to shovel this morning and we had about 7 inches or so already and it’s supposed to keep on snowing clear through the next rush hour. A nice powdery 4 inches on top of a wet and heavy bottom layer. Sure makes shoveling a good workout.

Last Friday I ended up getting a bum foot somehow. The muscle on top of the foot just below the ankle area is really swollen and red and the tendons or ligaments or whatever the cables are that run down through the middle of your ankle and into your foot are tender to the touch. Tender meaning it hurts like F when you simply touch it. So I got a bit of a limp and I look a little gimpy, but other than that I’m hoping it will fade away fast. Hoping it was just from doing a lot of walking in my trainers (British enough for you Fletcher!) that are pretty old and used up.

Mounted up Aretha this morning and made a beeline for work. Only a few cars out there, which was nice. With some heavy snow still coming down I got to work with that nice covered in white look, but luckily I remembered the sun glasses to keep it out of my eyes and the scarf was a nice touch. Too bad that after I got to work I found out that both of the labs I needed to do some work in were off-line and closed until further notice. Right….nobody could send an email about that before this morning?

Hm, if I can figure out how to duct tape the camera to my head, maybe I’ll get some commuting video, ha.

Kristin’s parents made it into town this weekend. We had planned on heading over to Walden Pond and checking it out, since neither of us has been there yet. Instead we ended up playing Wii most of the day. It would have been nice to get outside, but it’s really hard to pull people away from the Wii the first time they end up playing. Bet they were sore yesterday!

I did manage to get two starters going. A smackpack of Wyeast 3787 Trappist ale yeast I had smacked a few days ago was now nice and swollen, figured I should step it up a little more, so it’s in the flask and showing signs of fermentation this morning. Hopefully I can quadruple the yeast by the end of the week. Also made a starter of Brettanomyces Bruxellensis. This is supposed to be a more mellow strain of Brett and it’s supposedly what is used in Orval. Hoping to do some experimenting as I also have a tube of Brettanomyces Lambicus, which is supposed to be much more funky. As the name says, this is the strain most often found in Lambic beers and is much more intense. I think it will be interesting to try and make two of the same beers and only change up the Brett strain that I use. Guess I’ll see if Brett can be stepped up in a starter like a regular packet of yeast…hope so!

New England New Year

Published
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admin
on January 8, 2008
in Life and Snowboarding
. 1 Comment

First weekend of 2008 and it ended up being really nice out. Not nearly as cold as it’s been lately, got all the way up into the low 40’s. We took the warm weather opportunity to do some snow hiking out in the PR. Looks like a few other hikers have been out there and packed down the snow previously, but not a whole lot of fresh tracks. Saw some cross country ski rails, but again, nothing fresh. We managed a few miles of rolling hills, saw some of the old cars buried under the snow, left over from when the area used to be car junkyard. Showed Kristin the over under, a rickety old tree branch bridge that has seen better days with a nice trail that dips under the bridge. Good stuff.

Also managed to get in two nights of snowboarding at Wachusett Mountain. Saturday night was a little packed, since it was in the 40’s and it wasn’t a school night. The lifts always clear out with about 30 minutes to go in the night and you can pack in a few clear slope runs. Sunday night was a lot less packed, so we managed to get in a bunch of runs in the 2 hours or so of riding. It’s funny, no matter how much I board, my first run of the night is always a relearning session, slow and steady carving. By the end off the night I’m back up to speed and really enjoying myself. Hopefully the skills will get better as I get more riding in. At some point I’ll also be selling off my board to get one more suitable for my size, since JB tells me I’m running a little big. All in due time!

Hope everyone is enjoying their weather, it’s just loverly up here today. Might get as high as 60 up in this place. At 40 something for this morning’s commute, it was like a Spring day!

Today’s Commute

Published
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on January 4, 2008
in Bikes and Commuting
. 0 Comments

After seeing the snow covered trail conditions this morning while walking Buster, I decided it would be a nice break this morning to cut through the woods and ride some snow before making my way to work. The packed snow and ice made for some nice riding, but proved to be a little too much when breaking off the main trail to get out of the woods. It was the sort of tenuous crust that could break at any moment and off the beaten path it broke quite often. Often enough that it was easier to just walk it out. A few more hikes on that exit and it’ll be good to go. For now though, if I want to get out on the trails, I’ll need to contain the ride to the main loop around the reservoir and enter/exit from the same spot. No worries, a static snow loop is still better than a strict diet of pavement and slush.

Again, I’m already behind on keeping track of my mileage. The magnet on my wheel got turned around and didn’t keep track until I noticed near the end of the ride. So I’m already back to guesstimating. Oh well, there’s always next year, ha.

Anyway, I think I’ve got a name for the Tricross fixie…she shall now and forever be known as Aretha. Why? Well just like the Queen of Soul, she commands R-E-S-P-E-C-T and is big in all the right places.

Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter

Published
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on January 4, 2008
in Brewing and Recipes
. 1 Comment
Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter
Recipe Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter Style Robust Porter
Brewer DT and Mike Batch 6.00 gal
All Grain

Recipe Characteristics

Recipe Gravity 1.090 OG Estimated FG 1.022 FG
Recipe Bitterness 35 IBU Alcohol by Volume 8.7%
Recipe Color 49° SRM Alcohol by Weight 6.8%

Ingredients

Quantity Grain Type Use
2.00 lb American chocolate malt Grain Mashed
1.00 lb Belgian Special "B" Grain Mashed
1.50 lb Crystal 120L Grain Mashed
0.50 lb Crystal 40L Grain Mashed
0.50 lb Crystal 60L Grain Mashed
2.50 lb German Munich Grain Mashed
12.00 lb Maris Otter Malt Grain Mashed
Quantity Hop Type Time
1.00 oz Galena Pellet 60 minutes
1.00 oz Kent Golding Pellet 10 minutes
Quantity Misc Notes
2.00 unit American Ale US-05 Yeast Dry
1.00 unit Makers Mark Bourbon Other 1 cup of Makers Mark Bourbon at kegging time
2.00 unit Vanilla Bean Other Scrape and cut beans and add to secondary for one week

Recipe Notes

Based off Denny Conn's BVIP recipe. Mike enjoyed this one so much that he wanted to brew up another batch. The homebrew shop out near Mike doesn't carry everything and they also aren't very good at making substitution recommendations, so we had to improvise on the day of brewing. No Brown malt was available, so we cobbled together a mixture of Special B malt, Pale Chocolate malt, Crystal 60 L, and Crystal 120 L. Who knows if it's anything like Brown malt, but it sure smelled good going into the bucket! They also didn't have any Magnum hops and the shop suggested using Northern Brewer instead. Problem was they gave him 1 oz. of 6% AA Northern Brewer to use in place of 1 oz. of 12% AA Magnum…um yea. So we did 1 oz. of Galena instead, since I've found Galena to be a good clean bittering hop.

Batch Notes

12/29/2007 :: This was Mike's first time brewing on the picnic cooler mash tun I made him. I'm grasping at temperatures here, because I didn't write them down, but I think we hit 155º for the mash and 167º for the sparge. We collected a total of 7 gallons of wort. Boil went as planned with no surprises. Cooled wort down 75º before putting in a carboy adding two packets of US-05 dry yeast and aerating with the wine degasser drill bit.

12/31/2007 :: Fermentation was strong enough to blow the airlock out of the carboy. Luckily towel on floor and towel wrapped around carboy contained most of the mess - nothing on the walls or ceiling.

01/02/2008 :: Waitied for fermentation to calm down a little before cleaning up the carboy and replacing the airlock. Still bubbling good.

Cyclocomputer Configuration

Published
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admin
on January 3, 2008
in Bikes
. 1 Comment

This is more for myself so I don’t lose this information, but who knows, you might find it helpful. I’m reprogramming a Blackburn Delphi 4.0 cyclocomputer, specifically, I’m setting the estimated tire circumference in mm. I’m running a 700×44c WTB Mutanoraptor tire (on the Tricross fixie), which means ISO 44-622. So a little quick math and we have 622 + (44 X 2) = 710, multiplied by pi (3.142) to get the circumference in mm 2230.53078, or you can just go to Sheldon Brown’s website, which gives me 2224 mm. Close enough for me!

If I wanted to be super accurate, the easiest thing to do would be to plop down some ketchup or mustard on the ground, ride through the blob for a full tire rotation, and then measure between two blob spots. That would give me the weighted tire circumference. But since I don’t have a ruler that can measure in mm AND I’m at work, the estimated tire circumference will work just fine.

Hopefully this will spur me to keep better track of mileage this year, something I’ve said I’ll do in the past a few times, only to break the cyclocomputer or ride one of my bikes without a computer.

Wool Jersey

Published
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on January 3, 2008
in Bikes
. 3 Comments

My boy Spearman tipped me off that New Belgium Brewing has another wool jersey up on their website. The last wool jersey they did was a brown medium weight wool with no pockets. The one that is up on their site now looks like they may have gone back to their original style, black heavy wool with 3 back pockets. A little more investigation is needed to make sure it has pockets though. But at the rock bottom price of $59, you can’t do much better for a quality wool jersey. It’s easily as good, if not better than many of the $110+ wool jerseys from other companies.

New Belgium Wool Jersey

I’ve got two of the New Belgium wool jerseys and they have really held up. In fact I’m wearing their last one (brown/no pockets) today for my -15° commute. Stylish enough to wear off the bike (good thing, since I left my work badge at home and couldn’t get inside the gym where my locker is), yet perfectly functional for most riding conditions. I say most, because even the medium weight wool is too hot for summer riding. But this is a damn fine jersey, so what are you waiting for?

Belgian Dark Strong

Published
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on January 3, 2008
in Brewing and Recipes
. 0 Comments
Belgian Dark Strong
Recipe Belgian Dark Strong Style Belgian Dark Strong Ale
Brewer DT Batch 6.00 gal
All Grain

Recipe Characteristics

Recipe Gravity 1.094 OG Estimated FG 1.024 FG
Recipe Bitterness 30 IBU Alcohol by Volume 9.1%
Recipe Color 23° SRM Alcohol by Weight 7.2%

Ingredients

Quantity Grain Type Use
1.00 lb Belgian Special "B" Grain Mashed
1.00 lb Belgian aromatic malt Grain Mashed
1.50 lb Belgian candi syrup, dark Grain Other
12.00 lb Belgian pilsener Grain Mashed
0.50 lb Belgian wheat Grain Mashed
1.00 lb CaraMunich II Grain Mashed
3.00 lb German Munich Grain Mashed
0.50 lb Melanoidin Grain Mashed
Quantity Hop Type Time
2.25 oz Hallertauer Pellet 60 minutes
Quantity Misc Notes
1.00 unit Belgian Strong Ale yeast Yeast No starter, 6 month old smackpack

Recipe Notes

Lost my original dark strong recipe, so I pulled up Jamil's recipe since I used it as the base for mine last time. This time I dropped the pilsner base malt to 12 pounds for a little less alcohol. Also used a full bottle of Belgian Dark Candi Syrup, instead of corn sugar. Used a little less hops (didn't actually weigh them out), since the Hallertaur I had came in at 4.7% AA.

Batch Notes

12/29/2007 :: Mike came over for the brew session and brewed the BVIP. He also brought his power drill, so we didn't have to mill the grain by hand, which saved a lot of time. I managed to clean and sanitize everything the night before. Milled up the grains, dropped them in the mash tun, heated the strike water to 163 and hit a mash temp of 152. Let it sit for an hour while we ate lunch, then pulled off about 4 gallons of wort. Sparged with 180 degree water to pull off the remaining 3 gallons. Wasn't paying attention while draining the mash into the boil pot and ended up collecting too much wort. Boil pot (7.5 gallons) started to overflow. Stopped the flow and used a measuring cup to lower the collected wort level down to 7 gallons. This probably is the reason I ended up with an OG of 1080 instead of 1090.

Brought to a boil, added bittering hops. Boiled for 45 minutes and then added the Belgian Dark Candi syrup, then boiled another 15 minutes. After hour long boil was over, cooled wort over a 10 minute period. Poured into bucket, strained excess hops, aerated, and pitched one smackpack of yeast (no starter). Yeast was bought at least 6 months ago and is having a slow start, might have to repitch some fresh yeast.

12/31/2007 :: Pulled my 6 month old smackpack of Trappist ale yeast out of the fridge, let it warm up and smacked it to see how bad it was. No sign of fermentation yet.

01/02/2008 :: Smackpack has finally showed signs of being alive. It's not super puffy, but enough to know there are still some live cells in there kicking out CO2. Doesn't really matter though, as the bucket finally started bubbling yesterday, 01/01/2008. Not a super fast bubbling, but it's steady and getting stronger.

Comments

Published
by
admin
on December 31, 2007
in Life
. 0 Comments

Time to answer some comments -

fat bob | cyclenut.blogspot.com

Yo fool, good to see you posting again. Nice crib, I’m gonna have to bring the wife up there in the fall so she can see how nice the NE is in the fall, we should hook up for a ride.

Anytime Bob! I’ll treat you to the grand tour of trails and homebrew on tap, ha. Only thing is you gotta share the guest bedroom with Buster…

CL

DT, what do you think of the Weyerbacher Double Simcoe IPA? I really dig the Simcoe hops.

Dogfish just opened a brewpub in Falls Church. JK and I tried it. Nothing special really, i think it will just be convenient for growler fills.

The Double Simcoe IPA is a great one, super hop aroma. Simcoe tends to be really floral and citrusy, a lot like Amarillo. Add in Centennial and you’ve got my three favorite hops. The Dogfish brewpub - I’ve heard mixed reviews. I bet it was nice when they opened it and had a ton of their vintage beers for sale. Like you said though, nothing super special about the place except you can get really good beer now in a location that was pretty lacking before. Not to mention it’s pretty much across the street from Derek’s homebrew shop (next to the Sears), makes for a good way to kill a couple of hours.

Rob L | rahlrob.blogspot.com

Yo! DT good to see you back and posting. Your new place looks pretty sweet but you forgot the most important foto’s, that of your bike area and beer brewing area in your basement. Hhahahaha!

Damn, I need to get out and try snowboarding again. I had a semi-bad fall last year out in South tahoe and I was sore for a couple of weeks. Ugh. Gotta find somewhere nice and easy. Any suggestions for down here??

Cheers on the brewing notes, I think my wife is finally getting me a kit for the holiday of commercialism. :)
Cheers and have a good one!
rob

Don’t let us fool you Rob, brewing is disgusting…disgustingly awesome! It’s a dangerous path, much like mountain biking, that once you start going down, there’s no coming back. Hope that kit treats you well.

Snowboarding isn’t that hard, it’s just kind of freaky to not be able to move your feet like you can on a skateboard or skis. My first season of boarding I had a few rough runs. Once I knocked myself out so hard that my head bounced off the snow/ice and bent all the way forward hard enough to severely bruise shoulder/chest. The kind of bruise that starts off black and ends up green/yellow. That was a hard one to come back from. Then there was my first time trying a table top ramp. Up the one side, got way more air than I thought I would, rotate backwards and fall 8 feet out of the air onto my back…breathing was a little hard that day. All that said, I’m still boarding, still pretty rubbish at it, and it’s still fun. Down in your area you’re probably looking at either Massanutten (down near Harrisonburg, VA) or Seven Springs in PA. Both are probably within 2 hours from you.

I’ll see if I can get some photos up of the basement area, particularly the brewing and bike area. I need to get some updated photos of the whole house anyway. Might take a few days to get the basement back to a state where photos are possible, ha.

I. Conoclasst | wrenchinthegears.blogspot.com

Fatty Dee, please come home, all is forgiven! I need my ridin’ buddy!

Hey man, get something up on this rusty cog of a blog, will ya? I’m askin’ nicely… ;)

The rusty cog has been cleaned…and it’s your turn to come up here mofo!

Fermentation Station

Published
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on December 31, 2007
in Brewing and Life
. 1 Comment

Holidays are almost over. We had a nice whirlwind trip, Boston to Killadelphia, where my brother and his wife took us to Monk’s Cafe. Our first time there and it was definitely impressive. The moules and frites were just as they should be and the Belgian beer selection was spectacular. It was a good night for sour beers! Next day we stopped off to visit with Kristin’s family, since they were all holed up in Philly this year. Then it was off to Ocean City, MD for the next few days. We got back late Wednesday night and took the next couple of days to get the house in order. We needed to caulk the bathroom and fix the fan so it actually pulled air, not to mention we needed to get out on the roof and break up the ice dams that had formed on the edges. All in vain though, as it’s snowing again right now and we’ve got another storm on the horizon.

Anyway, we took a break on Saturday from all the house stuff and set in for a full day of brewing action. Friday night I finished up making a second mash tun out of an old rectangular Igloo cooler, a ball valve kit, and an 18″ stainless steel washer hose with the vinyl tubing removed. A little caulk on the outside and it was water tight. So Mike came over on Saturday and we did two different batches. He wanted to do another Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter and I was feeling the Belgian Dark Strong. We made a couple of changes to his recipe since the shop was out of certain grains and hops. I also dropped the amount of base malt in mine to make a beer at the lower end of the Belgian Dark Strong category, instead of the very top of the category like I did last year. Last year’s recipe went on to the second round of the National Homebrew Competition and received a few comments of having a lot of alcohol, um yea, it’s supposed to! Brewing session went well, no major hitches. We ended up with some extra wort from both batches, so we put about 3 gallons of blended imperial porter and Belgian dark strong into a bucket and dropped a packet of T-58 yeast in it. Started bubbling about 2 minutes later and hasn’t stopped yet. Mike filled his carboy up to the tip top and as expected got enough blow off to put the air lock on the floor, check it:

At least everything stayed on the towels. Next we put our two batches of single hopped IPAs down in the basement to hopefully cool down and drop some crap out of suspension. We’ll probably keg/bottle them tomorrow. Finally, we took a sour starter I had been working on, a mixture of Roeselare and the dregs from a bottle of Orval, decanted and pitched into a carboy of double IPA.
Funny story about the double IPA. It’s a recipe I came up with more than a year ago for Mike. He brewed it, but ended up having too much unfermentable sugars (I think it finished at over 1030) and the bottled beers just never carbonated. So flash to a year later (he bottled this on 10/1/2006) and he still has an entire case of Hop Dog that is cloyingly sweet and fairly undrinkable. So we proceed to open all the bottles and pour them into a carboy. Out of the entire case, one bottle had carbonated and was at the perfect level. We split that one with dinner and damn was it a fine IPA! Glad at least one bottle turned out great, but it’s sad to know what the entire case could have tasted like. Instead we poured the sour starter into the carboy and we wait to see if the brettanomyces will take hold and chomp through the remaining sugars, yielding us a sour IPA…fingers crossed. Now we also wait to see if everything I brew from this point on ends up infected, ha.

Palisades IPA

Published
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admin
on December 20, 2007
in Brewing and Recipes
. 2 Comments
Palisade IPA
Recipe Palisade IPA Style American IPA
Brewer DT & MM Batch 6.00 gal
All Grain

Recipe Characteristics

Recipe Gravity 1.061 OG Estimated FG 1.015 FG
Recipe Bitterness 69 IBU Alcohol by Volume 5.9%
Recipe Color 12° SRM Alcohol by Weight 4.6%

Ingredients

Quantity Grain Type Use
0.19 lb British crystal 50-60L Grain Mashed
0.50 lb Canadian honey malt Grain Mashed
0.25 lb Crystal 120L Grain Mashed
12.00 lb Maris Otter Malt Grain Mashed
Quantity Hop Type Time
2.00 oz Palisades Pellet 45 minutes
1.00 oz Palisades Pellet 15 minutes
1.00 oz Palisades Pellet 0 minutes
Quantity Misc Notes
1.00 unit American Ale US-05 Yeast Dry

Recipe Notes

Grains were actually doubled and mashed at the same time in order to pull off enough wort for two 6 gallon batches. The idea being we would have the same wort and only change the type of hop for a single hop batch.

Batch Notes

Brewed Saturday, December 15, 2007. Drill died while milling grains, had to go it by hand. Mashed in basement. Started with 8 gallons of 168 degree water, poured grains into mash tun, losing a pound or two on the ground. Mash temperature was 155 degrees. Mashed for 60 minutes, then ran off a little over 5 gallons of wort. Batch sparged with an additional 8 gallons of 180 degree water. Stirred up mash and pulled off remaining wort, so each boiling pot had a total of 7 gallons of wort.

Brought wort to a boil (45 minute boil), added 45 minute hop addition, 2 ounces of Palisades at 9.7% AA. Boiled for 30 minutes and then added 15 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Palisade. Boiled for 15 more minutes, cut the flame, and added final zero minute aroma hop addition, 1 ounce of Palisade.

Cooled wort in about 15 minutes. Poured into bucket through a mesh bowl. Pitched 1 packet of US-05 American ale dry yeast and stirred with spoon to distribute yeast and oxygenate. Placed bucket on towel on first floor, which is usually kept at 60 degrees at 8:00 PM. Fermentation had begun by 8:00 AM.