Honestly John, it's like, every other week with you.


Matt on 06.02.10 @ 11:48 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Water: Filtered San Diego tap
Grain:

• 10.5lb British Pale
• 1lb Victory
• 0.5lb Special Roast
• 0.5lb Crystal 40
• 0.25lb British Chocolate

Yeast: WLP013 - London Ale
Hops:

• 38g rather old Fuggles (probably 4.4% AA?)@ 60 min
• 15g (I think) rather old Fuggles @ 5 min

Mashed at 152 for 60 minutes. Boiled 70 minutes.
Topped off with 2 gallons filtered tap water.

OG: 1.053ish

And then there was that time that I didn't post for 6 months. I mean the other time. I mean... HEY SHUT UP. So this weekend was the NHC first round competition, which, as always, I did data entry for. Which was pretty exhausting. But since I was already giving up most of my weekend to beer I decided to go ahead and make it a beer weekend. Which proved to be even more exhausting but that's neither here nor there.

I've been needing to brew since October when I won an entire pound of Fuggles at the Oktoberfest Picnic. And there they've sat, in the freezer, in a styrofoam container since then (don't hit me!). (I've also got a couple ounces of whole Cascades in there, but they're vacuum sealed so they should be ok for a while yet, no?) So it had to be something British, and since the recipe I have for brown porter calls for the rather unavailable brown malt, and since Lynnea hates ESBs, I decided to bring back Nut Brown Jenkins. (This is actually pretty much a totally different recipe than the original Nut Brown Jenkins but who cares, I like the name).

Brewing went pretty slowly, especially the sparge - I've got to get a new hose braid/manifold thingy. I also must have vastly underestimated my mash efficiency and messed up on my wort volume because at the end I came out with about 4 gallons of 1.080 wort, instead of the 5 gallons of 1.050-something I expected. At that point in the day every surface in the kitchen was covered in dirty brewing equipment so I just soaked my filter in sanitizer for a couple minutes and ran it directly into the carboy. Even though I'm told there's nothing in San Diego tap water that should cause a problem I still really really hate having to do that.

But enough of this beer stuff, next weekend it's back to sweet, sweet video games.

Matt on 04.19.10 @ 12:20 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Well, we've been back a week now. Work was as mind-numbing as usual. Since I haven't exactly seen any clamoring for a post about Whitby (or, "dear old Whitby" as Lynnea and I now like to call it) I shall, I think, put it off further. It's Sunday and I'm lazy and I just don't think I have a full post in me today.

Meanwhile, some things I learned from the trip (in no particular order):

1. I hate cobblestones.
2. French speakers are rather more intimidating to me than I might have expected.
3. Kippers are delicious
4. The middle ages was not a good time to live in Scotland.
5. Everything in Europe is very old, including the new stuff.
6. I really, really hate cobblestones.
7. British food is actually pretty good, but eating it for every meal is taxing.
8. As far as I can tell, you can't get bad food in Belgium.
9. Red Leicester is delicious
10. Cask ales are grand and all, but it rapidly gets difficult to tell them apart.
11. Cobblestones are made of evil.
12. The North Sea is rather windy.
13. I highly enjoy rail travel.
14. Haggis is made of love.

Matt on 10.11.09 @ 12:29 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Well, we're back home. Blogging sort of fell apart at the end of the trip there... of course, what with no wifi in Whitby, no wifi in London, and an extra special kind of no wifi back in Brussels (the hotel booklet thing said that net access was 20 euro a day, but that there was wifi in the lobby. It turns out the wifi in the lobby was also 20 euro a day... what the heck?) it was a little hard to come up with a good way to update. I guess I could have written the posts out and posted them when I came by some internet, but after traveling that long, our enthusiasm was sort of falling off. (Oh, by the way, Lynnea was posting the trip as well, see her blog for more).

Anyway, the last bit of the trip just involved going back to Brussels for a day then back home. The second round of Brussels was a little bit easier than the first since we pretty much knew what to expect. We finally managed to make it to the Museums of Ancient and Modern Art. Saw a bunch of Rubens, some various Brueghels, a Bosch, and for you TMBG fans, several James Ensors. Among various other things. Of course, at that point in the trip we were a little overloaded with having seen stuff, so it was cool, but not awesome.

After that we wandered about the Grand Place area for awhile, ate some moules et frites for dinner (we of course had frites for lunch and frites the night before as well - one must eat all the frites one can in Belgium) then had a horrifically long flight back home the next day. Got in here at around 6:30 last night (3:30am Belgium time), managed to stay awake until about 9:30, and crashed.

I should mention the second hotel we stayed at in Brussels. Now, the first one we stayed at was the Four Points, which was a rather nice hotel room. The second one, on the other hand... I have never, ever, stayed any place that posh. It was the Mariott Renaissance directly next to the EU Parliament - apparently the rooms usually go for a standard rate of 500eu a night. 500 EURO A NIGHT. We got it for $105 a night through Priceline. How, I do not know. But damn that place was crazy nice. It was also bigger than our apartment.

Anyway, we're currently recuperating/unpacking/catching up on the world. I've still got a couple posts about the trip (especially about Whitby) in me, I should get them up in the next couple days. With pictures even. Honest!

Matt on 10.04.09 @ 03:39 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Back in London for the night. There wasn't really any easily accessible wifi in Whitby (there's less open wifi in the world than one might think) but man what a fantastic town. We really didn't want to leave. In fact, I just wrote out half a blog post about it but I realized that I wasn't even coming close to doing it justice, and not all of my pictures are off the camera, so I think I'll have to devote a longer post to it when I have the time.

But: Dracula, ghosts, kippers, fossils, ancient ruins, fish n' chips, telescopes, and more...

Didn't get to do much in London today, just popped in to Harrod's, then had a really good curry. Back to Brussels tomorrow. Then one more day there and finally back home. Home doesn't sound too shabby just now.

Matt on 09.30.09 @ 03:36 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

Hmm, notice how these posts are getting shorter and shorter, and also less frequent? I'm pretty sure that's fatigue setting in. So once again, York is cool, not enough time here, etc. Today we walked around the entire (ok, well we actually missed a small section) city walls, did a bit of shopping (Lynnea found multiple cutie shops, as we call them), and went to the York Brewery. We were going to do a ghost walk tonight but the one we picked already had a crowd of 200 people or something like that (I guess it is saturday night after all) so we skipped it. That's just way too big a crowd for a proper ghost walk.

The York Brewery is awesome by the way. They're really friendly folks and the beer there is past tasty. Got a bit of swag from there, including a cool little jug/pitcher thing that I really hope makes it home. We really weren't sure we wanted to do a brewery tour (let's face it, if you know how to make beer, most brewery tours are not entirely fascinating) but it ended up seriously being the high point of the day.

Anyway, assuming we can find the right bus, we're off to Whitby in the morning. Don't know if we'll manage to find wifi there, it's a rather small town (13k or so), but you never know.

Now is time for the sleep.

Matt on 09.26.09 @ 03:12 PM PST [link]  [1 Comment]

No time for a full post... or at least no time for pictures. Once again we didn't have internet in Edinburgh (well, actually we found out as we were leaving that our B&B had internet down in the lobby and we didn't know it). Edinburgh was fantastic. We went on a few tours of the supposedly haunted vaults (didn't see any ghosts, but it was still creepy), saw the castle, the camera obscura, ate a ton of haggis.

By the way, haggis is absolutely delicious. I've got to try to find it in the states.

Anyway, mostly we just did tourist stuff, but it was a kick. The only disappointment is the scotch. It's pretty much twice as expensive in Edinburgh as it is in the states. So I didn't buy any and didn't even really drink any. Sad sad sad, but what can you do.

Anyway, we're on the train to York right now, hopefully I'll get a chance to post again later today.


Matt on 09.25.09 @ 03:15 AM PST [link]  [2 Comments]