Matt on 06.07.09 @ 01:54 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

(4 Gallon Batch)
Water: Filtered San Diego tap
Grain: 9.25lb Belgian Pilsner
Yeast: WLP570 - Belgian Golden Ale, 2L starter
Hops: 30 grams Czech Saaz @ 6.8% AA
Other: 1 Human Soul, crystallized, powdered.1

Mashed at 149 for 90 minutes. Boiled 90 minutes.

OG: 1.082

1 Oh, alright. It was actually 2.5lbs of cane sugar.

There seems to be something about the process of brewing - the long, long, exhausting, mind-numbing process of brewing - that makes me forget to post about it when I do it. Which is to say, I intended to post this last saturday when I did it, but thems the breaks.

So then, I've been meaning to do more Belgian-style beers since, um, well since I started brewing and for some reason I never do them. Except that I finally did. Anyway, this was a really easy recipe although the 90 minute mash and 90 minute boil definitely made it take longer than usual. I'm a little concerned that the mash temp got too low (cooler didn't seem to be holding the heat as well as sometimes... of course it was also for 90 minutes) but if my fuzzy memory serves all that means is that it'll finish out drier (since at 1.082, it definitely converted).

Brewing went mostly without mishap (though it would be good to remember that immersion chillers are made of copper, and copper is very conductive, meaning that within a minute of putting it into the pot, it's near 200 degrees...ouch). The finished wort tasted like a cup 'o honey. I pitched a 2L starter of WLP570 and it was foaming like crazy within an hour or two.

As for the name, The Inmost Light is an Arthur Machen story about a guy who removes his wife's soul and puts it into an opal. One of Machen's better, though that's not necessarily saying too much (I like Machen ok, but he's no Algernon Blackwood, or even a William Hope Hodgson in my book). It also sounded evocative of a nice, warmly glowing glass of Belgian Golden Strong, and of the nice warmly glowing feeling one gets from drinking one. So there you have it.

Matt on 06.04.09 @ 03:37 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Wow, gee, world. I mean it's been a month since I gave you the gift of joy and yet nary a single comment. I guess there's just no pleasing some people. Or else there are no people to please. Oh well, at least when Tim linked to the Tome, somebody in his comments said that a friend was going to base a whole D&D campaign off it. If that's true, then I have made the world a better place, and it was all worthwhile.

Other than that things have been kicking along as per specification. Work, home, escapism, geeking out, nerding it up, etc. Time is passes at a dizzying speed. I expect soon to wake up incredibly old with no accounting for several decades. Really need to get out and do something with the ol' life.

In site news, I've finally updated my current reading list. Which is not to say I'm no longer reading the Poetic Edda or the Complete Ambrose Bierce, but I have a vague suspicion I'll be reading those off and on for some time to come. And they'd already been up on the sidebar for a couple years or something. The current group will most likely cycle a little more quickly. Believe it or not, literary criticism of weird fiction is utterly fascinating for some of us.

Alright, well, there you have it. Bob's your uncle. Etc.

Matt on 04.26.09 @ 03:22 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

So then... this week in my spare time I, for reasons unbeknownst even to myself, decided to write a random text generator (it's actually based on a program called Rager, but that one was written in Lisp and I know nothing about Lisp, so I wrote my own from scratch in php. Rager is almost certainly much fancier).

And for my first dictionary (Will there be others, or will the concept quickly get old? NO ONE KNOWS.), I decided to go for a random generator of gods and heroes, or as I call it:



It's loads of dorky fun, basically.

Currently the dictionary for it is somewhere around 7.7k, which can generate a pretty darn large amount of randomness. I'll most likely continue to add to the dictionary as long as I can continue to come up with interesting words that I think fit the theme. I was aiming for Robert E. Howard kind of feel , with the occasional bit of humor, which I think I hit pretty well.

There are currently three sections: Gods and Heroes, Insults, and Battlecries. The battlecry section is pretty weak still, I need to do a bit more work on it. I'm also considering adding artifacts, since all the pieces are pretty much there.

Anyway, go, play, have fun. Name your D&D character, yell exciting things at passersby, or just chuckle at the occasional double entendre. And if you don't like it, well, may the Bastard Wolf of Xithoune of the Pulsing Belly eat thine crotch. There, I said it.

(Incidentally, I'll probably release the source at some point in case anyone cares).

Matt on 03.27.09 @ 03:03 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Water: Filtered San Diego tap
Grain:

• 7.5lb British Pale
• 0.40lb Black Malt 1
• 0.33lb Crystal 40
• 0.33lb Crystal 80
• 0.25lb Chocolate Malt

Yeast: WLP004 - Yeast cake from Irish Red
Hops: 50g Styrian Golding @ 60min

Mashed at 152 for 60 minutes. Boiled 70 minutes.

OG: 1.071

1 - This was a bit of a mix up... apparently there's such a thing as black roasted barley that's 500srm, which my recipe called for, as well as the standard black patent which is also 500srm, but is malted. Not realizing this, I got black patent (all the while thinking a stout without roasted barley was odd). So this may, in fact, qualify as a porter rather than a stout. Though at that level of roast, I don't know how major the difference in flavor will be.

Two beers in two weeks. Craziness, no? But it's actually in the 60s in our apartment, and I've got to take advantage. My usual fermentation temperature of 75-80 is less than ideal. If the weather keeps cool I might even brew again in early March... we'll see. It'd be nice to have a good stockpile of beer through the warmer months.

So, I said that the last beer I did was perhaps the easiest brew session I've had. This one was easier. In fact I pretty much just spent the day the listening to The Magnetic Fields (since it was Valentine's Day, they seemed apropos) and reading a manga I was in the middle of and just got up here and there to tend to whatever the beer needed and didn't really notice the whole brewing process. And as brewing tradition dictates that one should drink while brewing, once I had a can of Old Chub, I really didn't notice what was going on. And this time I landed absolutely dead on where my gravity was supposed to be. I love it when that happens. Tasty wort too... I have a good feeling about this one.

As far as the Dojibiron Red, I'm not so convinced that it's going to turn out that great. What I didn't consider was that when I diluted from a 3 gallon batch to a 4 gallon batch was that it was hopped for 3 gallons. So when I tasted yesterday when I racked it into the secondary fermentor it was really rather bland. Or rather, it had a nice bit of malty/roasty flavor, but almost no bitterness. I'm hoping that once it drys out a little more (it was still at 1.020 as of yesterday) and then carbonates, what little bitterness there is will come out a bit more. Otherwise, I guess I can always just tell people it's a mild or something.

Matt on 02.15.09 @ 02:02 PM PST [link]  [3 Comments]

Cripe, I meant to blog this beer last saturday when I did it. Oh well, better late than never.

Water: However much gallons filtered San Diego tap (probably 6.5 gallons total?)
Grain:

• 7.25lb British Pale
• 0.25lb Crystal 40
• 0.25lb Crystal 120
• 0.25lb Roasted Barley

Yeast: 1 Vial WLP004 - Irish Ale Yeast
Hops: 21g East Kent Golding @ 60min

Mashed at 153 for 65 minutes. Boiled 70 minutes.
Added 1 Gallon filtered water to top

OG: 1.070 - diluted to ~1.053

So, at least as far as non-Belgian non-sour ales go, I think Irish Reds are Lynnea's favorite, and yet I'd never made one (I really ought to work on a Belgian or two one of these days...). So, I um, did. I tried to talk myself out of it, insisting to myself that brewing is a huge pain in arse (I can say arse, it's an Irish ale after all) but in the end I was out and about on a friday for reasons unrelated and lazing out to point of not going and buying supplies from the Home Brew Mart seemed ridiculous. Plus it's actually cold in San Diego these days which means I can actually brew something and it'll ferment at reasonable temperatures for once.

As far as the brew session itself goes, this was basically far too easy. It was probably one of the most hassle-free brew sessions I can remember. Which is not to say it wasn't exhausting, but brewing is always exhausting (I can't believe some people brew for "fun"... I just do it cause I'm cheap and I like beer). The only thing that went wrong was that I once again completely overshot my gravity. I ended up at 1.070 when I was supposed to be around 1.050. I don't really like diluting (for sanitation reasons) but when you're that far over, it about all you can do. I'm not sure why I keep ending up so high, I must just be way overcorrecting for my slightly low mash efficiency. Or I may have overboiled as well. I did three small pots in addition to the big one. Speaking of which:



Yeah, that took awhile to clean up. Anyway, as for the name... School Rumble fans will get the joke. Or at least some of them might (I had to remind Lynnea). It may be one of the nerdiest beer names I've ever come up with, and you're talking to the man that invented Nut Brown Jenkins.



Matt on 02.11.09 @ 09:22 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

So around 12:30 last night, right after Lynnea fell asleep we were rather abruptly awakened by an incredibly loud bang. My first thought, as the adrenaline started flooding my system, was "Is someone taking a battering ram to our front door, perhaps to come in and kill us for some reason?" followed about a quarter of a second later by "Oh, wait, that came from the cooler."

Yep. I gots me a cooler full of bottle bombs. If you've ever hung around homebrewers very much you may have heard the term bottle bomb thrown around. It's when, for some reason or other, the pressure in a bottle of beer gets way too high, and the bottle actually explodes. They used to be way more common, back in the dark ages of homebrewing, before people knew about things like sanitizing and before there were books and things written on the subject.

Now, I had assumed that "exploding bottles" was perhaps a bit of hyperbole, that really the cap blew off and beer went everywhere, not that the bottle itself actually exploded into tiny bits with enough force to actually embed small pieces of glass in the sides of the cooler. But explode it does. And it's a hideous mess to clean up. I can only imagine if it hadn't been in the cooler.

As to why I now have bombs instead of beer, the truth is... I uh... bottled it 1.020. *cough*. But it tasted very dry and I just thought all the insoluble starches from the pumpkin were raising the gravity reading. So, yeah. Don't bottle before the beer is done fermenting. That is all I have to say on the subject.

So then, what to do with the remain 260oz (7x12oz bottles and 8x22oz) of potentially incredibly dangerous beer? Dump it? The problem is that is the Pumpkininny! (I guess I shouldn't have added that exclamation point to the name) is good. Really quite good. I would call myself a fan. So I have opted for the alternative solution. Keep it cold (prevents explosion) and drink it as fast as humanly possible. And don't hold the bottles anywhere near anyone's face.


Matt on 11.29.08 @ 11:07 AM PST [link]  [1 Comment]