I have a new art blog (lesleyatlansky.com/blog) to go along with my new art website (lesleyatlansky.com) !!
I’m very excited to have a space to talk about my art, upcoming shows, inspirations, or whatever strikes my fancy. Bonus fun: click on the little squares near the upper right corner. Too cool!
(My Assistant)
We made our yearly trek to the Oregon Brewers Festival this past weekend, going early on Friday to beat the heat. Unfortunately the 2009 OBF was marred by crabby kids, obnoxious people and ever-changing OBF rules. All right, let me peel apart the pages of my programs (I spilled my last beer all over them) and get things going.
We staked out a lovely spot under a big tree near the water. Fortunately outside food is allowed, so we munched on sandwiches, crackers, and grapes. The kids enjoyed many a free root beer from the kid’s tent, and later went in there to color some frisbees. Fun!
This year OBF didn’t just sell mugs and tokens individually, everything had to be purchased as a package (though once you had a mug you could go and buy more tokens for $1 a piece). The packages had weird amounts of tokens with the mug purchases so we had to do some configuring and with the three leftover tokens we found at home from previous years we were ready to go. Packages came with a program as well, which were extra in previous years. We didn’t need three programs for four adults. I wish you could just straight up buy a mug and how ever many tokens you want (or bring your own old OBF mug, but more on that later), it just seems better to let people get what they want.
It was pretty hopping for a Friday, I think more people are coming on the days before the weekend then I remember. We started out with some light beers before moving on to the palate busting hop bombs.
Highlights include 3 separate people taking pictures of D’s Lagunitas shirt (which he has worn before - the “IPfukinA” one - but for some reason it got a lot of notice) and the fireboat going by.
Lowlights include a lady asking D if he would move because he was smoking a cigar and she decided to sit right next to him to eat her lunch. Come one. There are at least 100 tables there, we’d been there for about two hours already in that same spot, cigars are sold at OBF so it isn’t an anomaly, and finally, if you don’t like cigar smoke go sit at one of the other 99 tables strewn around several open air acres of the festival’s location in Waterfront Park. Criminy.
We found out Saturday via Twitter that OBF expected to run out of cups by Sunday, so they were allowing people to bring their own that day. First of all, if you don’t follow them on Twitter, how would you know? Would you hoof it down there in 95 degree weather only to find you had no way to enjoy your beer? they have signs up saying that beer can only go in the current years mug. Last year they hadn’t even run out of the 2008 mugs and we were given a 2007 mug anyway. I firmly believe that they (heck, all the beer fests) should allow you to bring a mug from a previous year. This is Portland! Re-use! Do you know how many plastic mugs we have? Ridiculous. Probably some stupid OLCC rule.
Anyway, enough bitching. It was more stressful and less chill fest than in the past, namely because the kids who were excited to go stopped having fun about the time we first sat down. We’ll see how they do next year.
We did have a sighting of a dude in a “Steve McKenna’d” shirt, which was cool (if you watch Three Sheets you’ll know what I’m talking about, if you don’t, you should!).
And here is me doing a poor Zane Lamprey impression…
Spurred on by Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince mania (all right, well maybe not so much mania as brief discussions by the adults about who gets to go see it when, and sadness on O’s part because he doesn’t get to go at all), we’ve dedicate the past week to The Book of Wizard Craft. We checked this book out from the library about a year ago and liked it so much we ran out and bought it.
Unfortunately I had about two of the fifty items needed for most crafts, so we didn’t do much at first. I slowly collected things we needed and we started a few projects. Bottles were collected for potions, a high speed chase broom was aquired, trimmed and painted, the dowel for the wizard staff waited patiently for the anabus head to top it off.
I decided this week that we really needed to get our wizard bums in gear and get these projects completed. And behold, we were mostly successful!
The quickest project to finish was the broom, which just needed the flames added as a finishing touch.
The wizard staff was painted red and wrapped with cord before we carved the anabus head out of florist foam and wrapped it with glue and newspaper. The kids put on some gold paint and I drew on black eyes. Turned out pretty cool!
We got some silver and gold Sculpey and made a variety of unique wizard coins. I bought some canvas bags when we placed our order of the new game Tales of the Arabian Nights, and the kids can eventually paint them with fabric paint and use them to store their coins.
We also used the Sculpey to make magical amulets. The book came with a design for a scarab, but they kids wanted something different so they looked through the book for inspiration. O chose a capricorn image and symbol (his sign), and XM chose the symbols for Leo (not her sign, but more appealing than an archer to a four year old). Unfortunately O’s broke (I rolled it too thin and D leaned on it with his elbow), so I’ll have to find a way to fix it. I did do most of the work on these, but it was pretty fun and gave me something to do while they worked on their coins.
We haven’t gotten around to filling the bottles with potions ingredients yet. I think it would be fun to go to SCRAP to see what treasures they have that we can conjure up into cool ingredients. Or maybe I can just crush up some charcoal for Peruvian Instant Darkness Powder…
I can’t believe when we got Sophie she was such a wee little thing. When she played, she scampered playfully about with little mice or small stuffed animals. Her favorite spot to sleep was this tray behind the couch:
Isn’t she sweet? Well now she is a year and a half old. O affectionately calls her ‘the devil’. Her scampering now sounds more like the thunder of a hundred cats rampaging around the house (Thundercats, Ho!). She shreds homework, destroys boxes, and steals socks. She claws at the bedroom door at 1:00 am, sneaks out when she isn’t supposed to, and leaves giant tufts of fur flying in her wake. She also insists that she still fits in her little tray…
Welcome to the final installment of How I Brew. If you missed the previous installments, feel free to read this and this before continuing. Take your time…I’ll wait.
Now that the wort has been put into the fermenter and yeast has been added, it is time for fermentation. Fermenation is the process of the yeast converting the sugars that were previously extracted from the grain into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
The first thing to do is to create the right environment for the yeast. The ideal temperature will vary by type of yeast being used, but it is usually within the mid-60s F for an ale yeast.
Keeping a consistent temperature is very important for a clean tasting beer. Changes in temperatures (such as having it in the main part of your house where it is 70F during the day and 60F at night) can cause off-flavors. To combat this, I ferment my beer in the basement, which is pretty steady in the low 60s F. In addition, I use the combination of:
The Fermwrap heater is a thin, flexible heater that wraps around the carboy. It plugs into the digital temperature controller which can turn the heater on and off to maintain the configured temperature. The thermowell is a homemade, water-tight stainless steel tube that goes into the beer and is held in place by a cap on top of the carboy. The temperature probe on the digital temperature controller is lowered into the thermowell. This allows extremely accurate temperature readings without ruining the temperature probe (which can’t get wet). So, when the temperature of the beer drops a couple of degrees, the temperature controller will sense that and turn on the Fermwrap heater. When the desired temperature is reached once again, the temperature controller turns off the heater.
I use the “carboy parka” for two reasons — to maintain the temperatures without losing as much heat from the carboy, and for safety. 6.5 gallons of liquid in a glass container is very heavy — if dropped, it could be extremely dangerous and there have been many accidents among homebrewers. The parka has handles to make it easier to carry and, if it does break, most of the broken glass will be contained within the parka and not in my flesh.
The fermentation process takes about a week. During this time, a large layer of foam, krausen (pronounced “kroyzin”), is produced on top of the beer. Particularly vigorous fermentations require what’s called a “blowoff tube” in order to carry the excess krausen out of the fermenter. It’s pretty amazing watching the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced by the yeast at this stage. If you’ve ever toured a microbrewery, you may have seen a blowoff in action on a large scale — this is pretty impressive.
Some people transfer their beer into a “secondary” fermenter after primary fermentation has ended. The reason for this is to get the beer off of the yeast and trub (pronounced “troob” — stuff that has settled out of the solution and sunk to the bottom). It is/was thought that leaving it on the yeast and trub can cause off flavors. I used to do this, but recent trends are indicating that this is not necessary. So, I usually leave it in the primary fermenter for an extra week to clean up a bit.
One thing I failed to mention in the previous post is the measuring of “specific gravity”. Specific gravity a measure of the density of the liquid at a particular temperature. By taking a gravity reading after the boil (called original gravity) and after fermentation (called final gravity) the amount of alcohol in the beer can be calculated. Most people use a hydrometer to take these measurements. The process of using one is to take out some of the liquid, put it into a cylinder, and float the glass hydrometer in the liquid. The gravity is read by looking at the number on the hydrometer that is just at the level of the liquid.
My lovely wife, however, purchased me a refractometer for my birthday. This is a fancy instrument that can take a gravity reading with only a few drops of the liquid. Benefits of this device are:
That’s about it for fermentation. Just set it and forget it.
Once fermentation is complete, the beer is ready for packaging. Long ago, I used to bottle beer. Bottling beer is a pain in the ass. It means scrubbing off labels, trying to get them completely clean and sanitized, making a sugar/water concoction that the leftover yeast can use to carbonate the beer, and individually filling approximately 40 bottles from a 5 gallon batch. Kegging is much easier. Plus, nothing is better than pouring your own beer from a tap.
Moving from the fermenter to the keg is pretty simple — just siphon the liquid into a clean and sanitized keg. To carbonate the beer, hook up a carbon dioxide tank to the keg, turn it on to about 10psi (depending on beer style), and wait a week. Alternatively, you can set the CO2 to something like 40psi and it will be carbonated in a couple of days. Alternatively to the alternative, turn on the CO2 and shake the keg to quickly dissolve it into the beer. I’ve never tried this, but it is supposed to give you carbonated beer in a matter of minutes.
I’ve got a kegerator that I built that allows me to have a nice looking draft tower from which to dispense my beer. Since I have pretty much everything I want for my brewing, I think my next brewing expense will be to upgrade my kegerator to allow two or three kegs on tap at once instead of just one.
Well, that’s about it. Pretend I’ve written something clever here summing up the entire process. I’m tired and need a beer.
