A Funny Thing Happened...

while reading Alastair Reynolds' Chasm City. After about 200 or so pages of being pretty engrossed in the book and enjoying the two stories centered around the main character, I realized that there's very much a greek tragedy feel to it so far. But also, there's a moral theme playing out, with so many of the characters being immoral or having very ambiguous ethical systems, and yet noticing the "goodness" or lack thereof, in others. Makes me want to write an essay on the novel.

Small Batch #1/#14 A Hoppy Red Ale...

Not really sure on the name of this one yet, might have to taste it first...
I'm leaning toward calling it "American Red Ale for Blue States."

There were a lot of things not quite right about the process for this beer. Its my first half-batch/small-batch. In some ways, that makes it a test batch for halving recipes, using my new 3 gallon carboy, and brewing more/more efficiently.

I did a small mash of grains with 1lb of American 2-row barley, .25lb Victory, .25lb Aromatic, .25lb of Caramunich, 1lb of Red Wheat (which should help with a great foamy head), and .5lb of British Cara Malt. I mashed all of that at about 152, with a few temperature spikes (160) and drops (148) as I tried to keep things warm for about 90 minutes. The mash was a total of 3.25lbs of grains to 4.75 quarts of water. I washed the grains some with 150 degree water to get as much flavor out of them as possible, and this brought the volume I planned to boil up to about 3 gallons or so.

I added a 1/2 ounce of Columbus hops, 12.2 AA% and 3 lbs of John Bull Maris Otter liquid extract, which is basically a British pale ale extract. I also added 1 lb of Dry Malt Extract, which I had from one of the homebrewing supply websites. I thought I took better notes than I did, so it could have been 2lbs actually, but well, we'll find out the hard way.

Whatever I did, I hit the expected starting gravity of 1.056. However, there was one hiccup in the whole equation. I used a Wyeast Smack Pack of London ESB yeast. The way these things work is, you place it on the counter, locate the nutrient pack that is inside, smack the shit out of it, then the yeast have something to snack on, which wakes them up, gets them multiplying a little, and well, the still sealed outer pack starts to inflate from the gases emitted by the yeast. There was very little inflation, so I actually prepared a package of dry beer yeast, from a brand called Nottingham, that I've never used before, but have had around the house for awhile from previously purchased kits.

Fermentation went off without a hitch, I guess a little over 2 weeks ago. This week I'm going to rack the beer to the secondary carboy, bottle the Belgian Saison I made before this, and test the gravity of the Red Ale.

About Me...

I'll keep adding to this post with random shit about me. Yep, I'm that arrogant. Also, please feel free to point out spelling errors, grammatical errors, or nonfactual statements. I'll probably even correct them.

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11/11/2008:
So, a few things. One, here are things I am guaranteed to talk about: beer, homebrewing, scotch, politics, music, art, food, maybe philosophy, law, and did I say beer?

A New Blog is Born...

...probably every minute. But, here's another one. No mission statement yet, no plan, no agenda even. Just the thoughts of one guy named Seth R. Feldman...

Things to see in the future of this blog: lots of beer commentary, recipes, random political commentary, the occasional cute picture of a cat or two, philosophical ramblings, etc, etc.