Child's Play

1/31/2011

I don't know about most brewer's children and how the children view brewing but mine are not interested. I don't blame them at all. Science can bore even the scientists. I know being a Network Engineer there are things dealing with computers that can put me to sleep. Now, how do you make yeast interesting? You make it funny. And that is actually very easy when you put your mind to it.

I told my children that yeast eat sugar. At this point they pee alcohol and poop CO2. Yes this was probably over simplified and may not even be accurate but who doesn't like a good poop joke. Biological needs have always been the butt of a LOT of jokes. You get a few boys together and have one pass gas and see who doesn't laugh. Everyone will. Educational? Probably not. Getting their attention? Totally worked. I even broke out my fake Irish accent and would say. "lil yeasties are a peein in me mead." Even my brother that is about 38 or 39 thought this was a gut breaker. Yes he laughed his butt off on this one. Now my sister didn't think it was all that funny. She is a teacher in Alaska. And this is what she had to say about my comment.

"Only you could make something so natural seem.... unseemly"

Now did I really? Yes on the surface I sure as hell did and it was not the first time and will NOT be the last time. I have a very colorful sense of humor. But when you see that I actually got my children interested in what was going on and now they come in and watch the little yeast farts bubble up in the glass jug I think what I did was very educational. Funny but educational. Maybe that is the missing denominator. We have stopped making learning fun. It is a chore that most children do not look forward to. Now you take the making of alcohol from yeasty and make the CO2 farts and you will have the attention of every child, and a few adults, right then and there. You will also get giggles. You will get questions that some will really make you think even if you know exactly what is going on. THAT IS GOOD! Most of the time we learn from the people who we are teaching. If you don't you are teaching wrong. In my opinion. And on this blog my opinion is everything. :)

So, in closing do you have to make brewing dull and dusty like old ancient texts left in the tombs of Egypt? No! You should not. It is up to us to grab the imagination of the generation destine to take our place and make it think and make it wonder. When you think and wonder about something long enough you experiment and when you experiment you learn. When you learn you truly live. So by following this I breathed life into my children and in turn they gave me the only medicine that can heal everything. Humor. Go and joke with your kids about thing so complex that they could not possible understand in a way that makes them interested. This will sow the seeds that will reap the next generation of brewers.

Chuck

Mead It In!

1/28/2011

Ok, I could not wait for the Tax money to come in to start making yeast pee alcohol and poop carbon dioxide. Yeah, it sounds nasty but we have been drinking it for thousands of years. Anyway, I went to the local brew supply shop and picked up a gallon jug, fermentation lock, rubber bung, cap to shake the contents without spilling it and some Red Star Premier Cuvee yeast. That was a whopping $8.68 total. Yeah, it broke the bank.

I came home and sanitized everything completely. I used bleach mixed with water. I rinsed everything over and over again to make sure no bleach was left. I had 5 pounds of honey and I just added it all to the carboy and topped it off with water. The must is about 3 inches from the rubber bung right now. After adding the water I shook the gallon jug for 10 min. If you have never shaken a gallon of liquid for 10 min I suggest you do this. It will work your arms and hands. Mine are wore out. While I was shaking the must I had the yeast getting started. After the shaking was over I pitched the yeast into the must and shook it for another min. Added the fermentation lock and called it good. It is setting on my desk behind me.

I picked the Premier Cuvee because it has a high alcohol tolerance. That may sound really crazy but when you understand that alcohol kills yeast you can see why we need it to live as long as possible so we get as much alcohol as possible. Yeah, I am shooting for jet fuel on the first batch. Within the next 24 hours the little yeasties will start doing their stuff and we will see bubbles really humming through the fermentation lock.

Why did I decide to do a gallon of mead for the first roll through? That is easy, I had the honey to do it. I am concerned about how much honey I used since it usually calls for about 4lbs. of honey for one gallon, but I keep seeing people add more and more at the end to get their specific gravity up. I really didn't have the money for the hydrometer so I am working blind on the first try. I really don't have issue with too much honey. It will just mean that at the end of the fermentation I will have a little bit sweeter mead. That is if this yeast doesn't do its job and eat all that sugar and pee me some alcohol! :)

More updates later!
Chuck

AFTER NOTE: I was really concerned that I didn't get all the cleaning agent out of the jug before I added the must. I am glad to say that I have bubbles coming out. If I had not gotten it all out all of the yeast would have died and I would not be seeing bubbles now.

When Can I Have A Drink?

1/28/2011

I was sitting here thinking about what does alcohol go with. I think what I should have been asking myself is what does it not go with. Quite frankly I can't find anything in my mind that it does not go with. Let's take a small look at a few things or times that it goes with almost like biscuits and gravy. Yes, you can tell I am from the southern states in the US with that statement. :)

Lunch: You know we have been trained not to have that beer at lunch sine so many people decided they would just get drunk and go back to work. HOWEVER, when I was younger I worked for Mayflower moving company. For lunch we would go to a place called Soap N Suds. It was a place so close to the main office we could just walk there. You could do your laundry in the front, thus the soap. You could get beer and something to eat in the back, thus the suds. We would go there and get lunch and have a beer. I was not a big beer person back then and to this day prefer wine over beer. However, after working my ass off all morning moving things around in the warehouse that one beer was like the nectar if the gods. Yes, I was tempted every day to have more than one but I knew if I got drunk it would ruin this little trip that let me unwind from the hard labor of the morning. That ice cold beer was not just beer but something the actually refreshed me and made the first half of the day worth the pain and sweat I put into it. To this day when I am working hard and have a beer around mid day it makes me think of back then and the stress, sweat and pain just flow away. Amazing how one beer could do that when we have been trained to think it is a horrible thing to do to have a drink early like that.

Dinner: Please! We all love a excellent cut steak and a nice glass of wine or a cold beer. They go together like breathing and life. So I will not waste your time going further on this.

Social Events: I don't know about you but my favorite birthday was a couple years ago when we had quite a few people over and I had several bottles of wine and of course beer. That night I spent on the back porch with a hand full of the people who were there and my wife made sure my glass was never empty. It was cool enough that we needed jackets so my wine stayed cool and so did I. The conversation was great and the people even better. Yes, I drank in excess but it was not a frat party. You don't have frat parties when you are 41. You have a social event. And that is what it was. No I didn't drink so much that I regretted it the next day. I had just enough that everything will stay in my memory as the best birthday I have ever had.

New Births: Every child that has been born to me, and I have four with a fifth on the way, has been celebrated by myself with either a cold beer or a great glass of wine. Every one deserved that short time where I was able to enjoy something that took from months to years to create to appreciate what I had and what I had helped bring into this world. No it is not a great time to get hammered but it is a great time to have a few moments to enjoy what I have and think about what I will have. As a note on this one all my children are from the same woman, my life long companion and wife Leslie. Don't want you thinking that I am a total jerk. :)

I think a lot of reasons that we don't enjoy alcohol like our ancestors did is because of social dynamics. We have been taught that if you drink too early, too late, at this event or that event and even if we drink alone we are alcoholics. Or at least border line alcoholics. I think this is pure crap! You are an alcoholic when all you think about is where or when you are going to get your next drink. We have been taught that it is wrong to drink in front of your children and I really think this is total crap. When you drink responsibly in front of your children you let them learn what is responsible drinking. A beer after work does not mess up your children. Beating them does. Not being in their life does.

I think if you are working a garden you deserve a drink. I think if you have put up with the total crap that society brings and leaves on your door you deserve a drink to wash it off your door step. I think that society may have it wrong and that is a very sad thing. People are losing their past and sometimes it really can be found in the bottom of a bottle. As long as you are responsible about getting to the bottom of that bottle and you don't become one of the people who ruins it for the rest of us that actually see this as a sacred thing that should not be abused. Much. :)

Just my honest opinion.
Chuck

No Preservatives Needed?

1/27/2011

The more I look in my basement the more items I find with no preservatives. Last night I found some Clove Honey. Just pure clove honey, nothing added and all the crap taken out. We got this at Sam's Club. That's right! You could walk into Wal-Mart and walk away with the prime ingredient to make a very height grade and high quality mead. Wal-Mart of all places!

Tonight while we were making dinner our two year old, I call her Oogie, went into the basement and came up with a can of peaches. Just wanting to know what she was about to eat I looked at the ingredients. What did I find? Peaches, water, corn syrup and sugar. NO PRESERVATIVES. Nothing that could possible stop fermentation. Nothing that would inhibit the creation of a peach wine. I also found that the myth of being able to eat healthy is expensive is just a myth. We purchased these peaches at a store called Save A Lot. It is a discount grocery store.

I know what is going to happen now. When Leslie and I go shopping I will be looking at cans of anything that I could turn to wine to see what has preservatives and what does not. I think when the dust settles on this I will see that for years I have been eating healthy and I really didn't have to buy "Organic" crap for three times the price of what is on the general shelf. You know, maybe the whole Organic movement is just bull shit so people can grow 1/2 the crops and actually charge three times the amount. hummm.... I wonder who else has looked at food in this light before.

I guess the full and the short of this is take a good look into your local grocery and you just may find things that you never thought of turning into an adult beverage on the shelf begging for you to take it and make the Bio-Chemical processes take shape and make something that was never meant to be anything more, oh so much more.

Chuck

And So It Starts

01/26/2011

Well, I am waiting for my tax return to purchase all the equipment I will need to get started with my Home Brewing Project. Funny how I will be using tax money to keep from paying consumption taxes. Kind of means that I will be paying around $2.00/bottle of wine instead of $20.00. Makes me wonder exactly how much I pay in taxes on a given bottle of wine. I will also have complete control of everything that is in what I drink along with how strong it is. I am sure that many of you who do not brew will have no idea what is really in what you are drinking. Is your blackberry wine made from real blackberries or is it made from flavoring?

Over the years I have researched brewing wine. I have read things from people who are die hard naturalists to people who think chemicals make everything. I think they are both wrong. I think there is a happy medium of diehard naturalist and chemist. That is where I will be trying to tread. I guess you could call me a natural chemist. When I can use something from nature I will. When I can't get my hands on it I will turn to chemicals. However the bulk of what I brew will be natural.

Here lately I have really been sinking into my research of brewing wine and mead. I think the people who do this are mis-catagorized. Many people see them as rednecks, country bumpkins, or just plain cheap bastards. Yes, some of them might fit the descriptions above but I don't think the vast majority fit into this mold. I know I don't. Looking into this I have found that the people who keep track of what they do and how they do it are borderline Micro-Biological Chemists. They deal with yeast and basic chemicals to get a chemical reaction for not only alcohol but also taste, texture, smell and color. Just a little yeast, sugar and anything they can dream of. That really doesn't sound like a country bumpkin to me. They have to know how to calculate specific gravity of liquid to not only know how much alcohol to expect but to also know when it is time to move from one stage to another. They have to keep specific records so they can reproduce what they have found works and what doesn't. They do think just like a scientist. Almost identical to what a modern chemist does. And here is the kicker. They end up using more chemicals then a modern chemist does. Not the redneck listed above. As I follow this hobby I hope I can iron out misconceptions, myths and outright lies. I guess this is in a small way a quest for what the truth is.

My father brewed a little. So did my grandfather. They are both gone and I never paid any attention to what they were doing to pull information from that. All this is entirely my research and my hard work. Sure I will meet people along the way that will explain this or that but in the end it will be research and hard work that will make what will be my brew project. Oh poor me. All the work and so much wine to have to drink. Now that I think of it you may even get a few drunk blogs on this subject. hehehehe

Chuck