Continuing the Brewing Process

Learning to brew beer is an interesting enterprise. There is always new information to absorb and put into the process of perfecting your latest concoction. Also, for me personally, I enjoy designing the bottle labels.

This is the second beer brewed. It's a Belgian ale I name the Wayward Redhead because it was supposed to be a blonde ale and turn out to be red.

This is the best ale so far. It's my version of a California Common recipe. I call it Oklahoma Steam.

Then along came a version of a Kentucky Common.

2nd Batch - Home Brew

I was up this morning before 6am sanitizing bottles  in preparation for filling them with my latest batch of brew. By 10am Dorothy and I had 8 twenty ounce bottles and 33 twelve ounce bottles capped and ready to condition.

This is the color of the final product.

The beer gets siphoned from the large bottle into

the stainless steel bottling kettle where it is mixed

with a sugar and water solution. This solution feeds

the residual yeast in the beer producing carbon dioxide

which carbonates the beer. 

As Dorothy filled the bottles I capped them.

In two weeks these will be ready to drink.

Listen........

I have come to the conclusion that the polarization that exist between the American people is not so much Republican vs Democrat, conservative against liberal, nationalists vs globalist. The actual schism is between rational, critical thinkers and true believers (as defined by Eric Hoffer).

Home Brew

For my birthday I received all the equipment and ingredients to make home made beer. Well, the whole process of making beer appeals to my inner geek what with all the measuring, calculations, and planning. It's intricate and demands acute attention to detail. Here is the result of my first brewing attempt:

Steeping the grain. Similar to making tea.

After adding malt extract and hops and cooked for

an hour the mix must be rapidly cooled in an ice water

bath.

The beer wort is poured into a 5 gal.

container, yeast is added and the batch 

ferments for at least 2 weeks.

Listen.....

     A rather vicious cycle has been at work for years. Reduced taxes on the rich leave them with more money to influence politicians and politics.  Their influence wins them further tax reductions, which gives them still more money to put to political use.  When the loss of tax revenue from the rich worsens already strained government budgets, the rich press politicians to cut public services and government jobs and not even debate a return to the higher taxes the rich used to pay.

---Richard Wolff

Gracen's Painting

Gracen, our 7 year old artist in residence, painted this picture of a snowman after drinking hot cocoa.

Stages of Rad

We got up one morning this week to find our neighbor's bull loitering in our garden. I went out and shooed him back down the lane to his owner's place. When Gracen came home from school and heard about it she was impressed and pronounced me a "rad" grandpa. I'm sure, in her imagination, she saw me in a much more adventurous light than what actually happened. But she reminded me that I was only at stage 1 of radness. Stage 2 would require that I talk cool. Stage 3, of course, would be attained if I dressed cool. Acting cool was a requirement for stage 4. And to achieve stage 5 of radness I would have to show some pretty cool dance moves. I think I'm content to remain in stage 1.