I wish you all a foamy and hoppy Halloween! Get the kids all sugared up early, let them crash and put them down to bed and open or pour your favorite fall beer and enjoy! Or do like me, put the kids down for a nap and pour an apple cider beer and write on a blog.

Actually, what is funny to me is that I grabbed the Hobgoblin glass that I bought last year and wrote about. Is that a dangling preposition?

Have a good night everyone, be safe and enjoy a good beer!

Cheers,
Tony

While I was racking my beer to keg yesterday I was looking at my five gallon secondary glass carboy and noticed a small crack in the neck below my carboy handle. Time to take that one out of circulation. I have never used the handle to carry a full carboy but often carry empty ones using it.

If you’re not familiar with the carboy handle, its just a metal loop that screws tight on the carboy neck. If I recall from the packaging there is the warning not to screw it on too tight, and not use it for full carboys. I am no physicist or engineer, but I imagine the neck would likely be the weakest part of the carboy. In the many years of reading Internet forums about brewing, I have come across several horror stories about broken carboys.

If one of mine were to break, I am not sure what I would mourn more, the loss of a brewing vessel, the loss of the beer inside or the huge mess that I have to clean up. All that mourning would come after finding out I am ok, of course. Here’s knocking on wood that I never have to find out first hand.

The whole point though is to remind all the brewers who read to check your carboys for cracks and replace them as needed. I have no idea what I am going to do with the cracked carboy though. It just seems wrong to throw it out or recycle it…

Cheers,
Tony

I’ve described before how to force carbonate a keg quickly, making it drinkable within an hour or two. Since I have a splitter off my regulator I am able to hook up two kegs and force carbonate both at the same time.

Typically, I don’t ever have two beers ready to keg and seldom is there room for two more beers in the kegerator. Especially considering the most recent kegerator only has room for two kegs. My brewing has been lacking lately and most recently I did a double batch of fruit beers. One pumpkin ale and one apple cider ale were brewed in the afternoon, many thanks to my father in law who said “Hey, lets do another one.”

To recapitulate rapid force carbing, I hook up a beer out quick disconnect to the gas tube and then crank up the CO2 and percolate the gas through the beer while rocking the keg back and forth. With practice, I have gotten to the point where I can have a reasonably carbonated beer ready to drink within a couple hours. After rocking it I have to put it in the fridge and leave it alone so it can settle down. Think what happens when you shake a two liter of pop and then open it right away.

The big warning, the important lesson that I re-learned today was to make sure the pressure in the gas hose is GREATER than the pressure in the KEG. Simple stupid pure physics that you don’t have to worry about when you hook the gas quick disconnect to the gas hose to the gas out, since there is never beer that high up! If the pressure in the hose is less, even by 0.5psi to the keg you WILL get beer in your gas hose.

That isn’t good.

Now what I like to do is vent the keg completely and leave the vent open when I attach the gas hose with the beer out quick disconnect to the keg. That way the keg is at normal pressure and there is no way to get a vacuum in the gas hose (short of trying to do it that is) so now no more beer in the gas hose! All it takes is a quick flick of the hand to close the vent and prevent the foam shooting out. (Yeah, I’ve done that too.)

Now I have to go and get new gas tubing. Figures…

Learn from my mistake! Thankfully my regulator has shut offs with back flow protection. Also thankful that it was only a slight pressure difference in my clear gas tube otherwise I’d have a wrecked regulator too. That would put me in a down right foul mood!

Cheers!
Tony

I’ve been shown this site by a friend and musician. The name of the site is Stereo Fame and it is a game and listening adventure rolled into a quest for points. Musicians submit their work, and people can sign up to listen and even download many of the tracks they like.

 http://www.stereofame.com/brewdad

If you are particularly ambitious, there is an option to create a label and start signing artists. By picking relatively new artists that you like, you can gain points as they gain recognition and move up the charts. There is even a “Points Store” where you can bid on items with the points you gain.

What does this have to do with beer? Not much, except it has taken the place of the radio when I do my writing. The radio ends up playing too many ads, particulalry political ads. When I’m trying to concentrate I don’t like being interrupted over and over about someone who did something or didn’t do something to someone and that makes them unsuitable for office.

Anyway, give the site a look, if you’re intrested sign up!

Cheers!
Tony

I’ve had this story sent to me by two other folks and just never got that round tuit to share it with the rest of my readers. A group of college students are working getting yeast to create an anticancer chemical as a side process to the fermentation.

College students often spend their free time thinking about beer, but a group of Rice University students are taking it to the next level. They’re using genetic engineering to create beer that contains resveratrol, a chemical in wine that’s been shown to reduce cancer and heart disease in lab animals.

Its a facinating field of study and I’m impressed with the students involved trying to tackle such a feat but I have to wonder what the reception to the end product would be. There are many beers on the market touting the “Organic” lable which rules out the GMO aspect all together.

Granted, in reading the full article, they freely admit the process is far from completion, much less production. It is an interesting exercise, though. I would imagine most people who care about their beer would take offense at beer using modified organisms, even if it is yeast.

Cheers!
Tony

There is an ongoing discussion at the board I frequent about what makes a micro brew a micro and how big does it have to be with respect to the macrobrewers. In my mind it is obvious where that line is but I have no numerical evidence to support my posistion.

The line is drawn right above Sam Adam’s production. I say Sam, or Boston Beer Co. is still a micro. A wonderfully flavorful, large micro brewer, but still a micro. I say Miller and A-B are macros. Their attempts at brewing micro styles are personally boycotted by me, but that is a topic for another post.

So, anyone have the numbers off hand?

Cheers!
Tony

We had a rare opportunity to get out with some friends this weekend without kids. We ended up at a bar talking around beer and nachos. After the usual topics of kids, beer, more beer, fishing, hunting and whatever the ladies were talking about, the topic of politics came up.

Our friends are a mixed marriage, red and blue. She had such a visceral gut hatred for Sarah Palin and it was very surprising. I tried asking her “why?” and didn’t get much out that we couldn’t hear on the evening news. My question to everyone is why is there such deep dark emotion directed at her? I don’t understand the depth of feeling invovled.

When Hillary was in the lead in the primaries I never witnessed the other side displaying such vehemence. Distaste sure, but not this primal hatred! Its strange.

We watched the candidates at the Alfred E. Smith roast as the ribbed each other. Everyone was laughing. Either they are really good actors or they didn’t take it personally. The rest of the nation and press should take note of that.

My apologies for bringing this up here. The board I moderate has a “no politics’ policy, so I thought I would toss it out here.

Cheers.
Tony

I wrote about Google’s beer goggles a while ago right? Well, I installed it because that is the best way to test it.

The darn thing works. It took me three tries to send a simple email tonight. Seriously! Unbelievable. I had to read over it a couple times to make sure I really wanted it to go out just to be sure.

Laugh all you want, it works. What is more, when the program is active, it doesn’t allow you to disengage it either. “Fine” I thought, “I’ll just turn the **** thing off”. No such luck, no chance, pal. Wait until it isn’t active.

What a hoot, well worth the second or two it takes to install it on Gmail. Yeah, I’ll go come back tomorrow and add links for what I’m writing about, but right now my computer is against me.

Cheers!
Tony (laughing, uproariously.)

My morning started out with my kids letting me sleep an extra hour and a half! I got up somewhere after 8am when I’m usually up at 6:30am. I went in the kids bedroom to get them up for breakfast and listened to my first scream of the day. That’s ok though, the three year old wanted mommy to wake her up, not me. Ok. Sure, I don’t mind.

Honest.

Then we went to Sever’s Corn Maze for mid day fun, the kids really liked the corn pit. Tons of corn kernels for them to play in, it looked like walking in thick snow for them. They didn’t really enjoy the corn maze itself, even though that is the best part.

On the way home we stopped at my absolute all time favorite beer store, the Four Firkins! Oh, how wonderful a hue that store puts on the day! A four pack of La Fin du Monde and a bottle of Sierra Nevada’s Harvest Ale came home with us.

The munchkins fell asleep at our exit, so once we got home, I sat in the passenger seat of our van drinking good beer and reading a good book, listening to Hannity’s radio show for almost an hour. The kids woke up happy. Dinner is on the stove and I’ll be lighting the fire outside in a bit.

It really can’t get better than this.

A dirty gin martini might end the evening, but after that, it can’t get better!

Cheers,
Tony

It seems that I usually slow down my brewing in the fall. After brewing up several batches last month I’ve not yet brewed again. Going in fits and starts doesn’t keep my kegs filled, that is for sure. I still have that IPA waiting to be fired up.

I also have a wine kit sitting in the crawl space that I should get going. Perhaps this weekend.

What does everyone else have in their carboys?

Cheers!
Tony