Last night, I had a bit of a mishap with the peanut butter porter (now dubbed Satan's Peanut Butter Porter). Everything was going beautifully: the mash portion went off without a hitch; the first and second parts of the preliminary boil went well; I extracted all but one bag of grain without incident; then all of a sudden:
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Today was a brew day (and tomorrow is too, woot)!
I just recently finished a beer I have dubbed the Liberal Elephant Pale Ale. It's a simple American Pale Ale recipe that I threw together right before I left work on Friday since I wanted to have a couple of beers to put into kegs together. You can check out its recipe here.
Tomorrow is the much anticipated Peanut Butter Porter's brew day. I need to figure out exactly how much dried peanut butter I need to use during the boil as to make the beer not too peanut-buttery or not peanut-buttery enough. You can check out the preliminary recipe for the beer here, but after tomorrow, I'm going to modify it to match what I actually did.
Currently in secondaries are my second brewing of the Kalevala Red Ale (made famous by the Red, Wit, and Blueberry Fourth of July party last year) and Mojo's first solo beer, a Rye IPA. They'll both be going to kegs on Tuesday/Wednesday evening.
That's all I have for now. You can check up on The No. 16 Brewing Calendar by clicking on "Home Brewing" at the top of this page and you can find our brew blog at http://www.scatteredthoughts.org/brew.
Time to go crack open another beer and figure out how much peanut butter I need to use!
I'm behind on blog posts, but I'm not concerned. I should have made at least nine posts to both this and my Photoblog since the new year. I've been struggling for inspiration as to what to write, but I think I now have a pretty good idea. In the next couple of days, I'll be doing some work on the information structure of the site to see how things go. Can you really resurrect a blog that's been dead/dying for a while? We're about to see.
My plan is this: I'm going to write about what's going on in my life. I'm going to be adding a few categories, writing about my brewing, gaming, reading, climbing, and scouting stuff. I think I can turn this space into something that I can actually relate to and something that fits with me and my own Ruminating Thoughts.
That's all for now.
tm
A new year, new beginnings, new experiences, new challenges, new everything!
I geek out on apocalyptical theories and this week is making me like a kid in a candy store — it's Armageddon Week on the History Channel! Every night, there's a new show about the end times, focused on the Winter Solstice, December 21, 2012.
Well, I've done it again, it's been far too long since I've updated. Lately, I've been busy with work stuff, not wanting to write when I get home, and have generally had nothing too interesting to write about (too interesting to me, anyway). If you've been following me @tlmasonaea or on Facebook you've been staying up-to-date with my life. If you're not following me, why not?
So, why the strange title to the post? I'm going to be talking about beer, specifically my beer. Even more specifically, my Red, White and Blue ales. If you're not a beer geek, the number 1.060 means nothing to you. It's a measurement of what's called Starting Gravity or Original Gravity for a beer. OG is a measurement of how much more dense than water a specific beer is, water being 1.000. I (along with other brewers) typically don't use the dot in the notation, but whatever.
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