Lord of the Manor

Just got back from a wedding down in Charleston, SC - we had an awesome time.  Charleston is one of those cities with a lot of history, considering it's been settled since the colonial times.

The wedding site was pretty incredible.  After riding our bus through the private, gated road, cutting around giant trees draped with Spanish moss, we arrived at a huge plantation-looking home.  Right outside this home is where the reception was held.  There was a nice fountain, tables set up, and the place backed up to a lake.

After seeing the small sign that read "Caution:  Alligators" I spent a large portion of time looking for one of those things.  Turns out one came by to check out the action, but he just sat there with his head sticking out of the water.  I'm starting to think that unless you are dangling a piece of raw meat in front of them, alligators are pretty boring.

But that's not what this is about.

Jensen and I ventured in to check out the house later in the evening and it was pristine.  The place must have been several hundred years old, and smelled like clean, seasoned wood.  As if it were meant to be, I rounded the corner of one room and discovered the library.  Even though I was enjoying a beer, which along with any type of clear liquor is strictly prohibited for this sort of thing, I had plenty of scotch in my system from earlier to deliver a good Lord of the Manor face:

I dare someone to try to top this.  The stars were aligned.  Look at the perfect, aged hardwoods.  The bookshelves covering the entire walls, even the books were aged to perfection.  Most are of concepts and tales that the feeble minded would never understand.  Aside from the background environment, the keys to delivering on the Lord of the Manor are a proper lean, preferably away from the camera or other simple folk who may be in the room, proper attire, and the kind of smile that says "I'm only smiling to appease the peasants who are asking me to smile."  If done well, even your friends and those closest to you will temporarily want to jaw you when seeing you like this.  Mine would at least.  I don't mean to toot my own horn but I'll rate it A, and if I had been holding a scotch or bourbon, I would've scored the A+ all day long.

But on a more serious note, I had a blast in Charleston and met some great people.  I have a lot of fun at these weddings, especially when the bride and groom seem like honest genuine people - I may not know them as well as Jensen does, but they certainly seem to fit the bill.

Brew Day

If you like craft brew, you might find this interesting.  If not, grab you a high life and hit the back button.

I've been doing a lot of brewing over the last 2 weeks or so and have about 7 gallons of beer sitting in the closet, waiting to be bottled.  I think I've finally been able to hone in a few recipes that I've been working on--an American pale ale and a newer one, an oatmeal brown ale for the fall.

Even though there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes with hitting exact temperatures, and chemical reactions and what not, I wanted to outline the process as a whole.  I find it really interesting, as do a bunch of other dorks in this world, but then again I find pretty much everything interesting.  If there's something out there that I don't know much about, I want to know how it works, why it works that way, and how I can possibly do it.

Anyway I'll leave out the small details and explanations that make me want to "talk like thisch when deschribing thingsch" and just give the overview.  I'm no pro by any means, but I can say with confidence that within the next few batches of beer, if not the ones sitting in the fermenters right now, I'll regularly be making some damn fine brews.

I find it relaxing to do.  I fly solo on this.  Besides, even if I wanted help, I wouldn't get much.  One source of potential help was laying out:

          The other was laying in:  









So you start with some crushed grains, or malted barley.  There are countless different kinds, and you can pick any combination to give your brew different flavors and consistencies.  It's kinda like cooking with food.

You'll also need some hops---these rabbit turd looking things below are hops in pellet form - condensed so they don't take up too much space.  There are tons of varieties of hops; some create more bitterness than others, some are citrusy, others are earthy, some taste kinda like a pine tree, others like grapefruit, I'm sure some are downright terrible...just haven't found those yet.


Then you've got the yeast.  Like hops and grains, there are many varieties - all produce different beers and different styles.  Some are pretty neutral, while others produce disgusting, spicy Belgian beers.  There are also wild yeasts that mother nature sends flying around outside--you can even collect those and brew with them.  I hear a lot of them make terrible beer, but once in a while someone gets something good by keeping an open cup by a window sill.  That would be pretty awesome.

Anyway the point is that you can literally create your perfect beer around what you like and the cool part is that if you do things as seen below, it's the exact same process that craft breweries use, just with different equipment...I'm sure they aren't using gatorade style coolers picked up at Home Depot and outfitted with ball valves and  braided hoses.  But maybe they are.  Doubtful.

First things first, I heat up water to a specific temperature depending on what kind of beer I'm making.  Generally anywhere from 152-155 is where I want it to end up.  Then I pour the water into this Home Depot cooler that I converted into what's called a mash tun and mix it with the crushed barley.  Once mixed, this is called the Mash.  The hot water converts starches from the grains into ferment-able sugars that the yeast will eventually eat.



Once all of these are converted, after about an hour usually, I drain the mash tun, and flush more hot water through the grains, called the sparge.  This washes out all of the excess sugars.






After that, I bring it what's now called the wort, to a boil.  It's at this stage that you put in the hops.  Hopping earlier on in the hour-long boil creates up-front bitterness to the beer, while hopping later in the boil gives more hop flavor.  I'm kind of a fan of both.  I loves me a good hoppy pale or IPA.







When that nonsense is all said and done, I cool the whole pot down in an ice bath until the temp of the wort drops down to around 75, put it into a fermenter, and pitch the yeast.  The yeast, over a period of the next week or two, eat the sugars, and spit out alcohol and CO2.  It sits here for a few weeks before getting bottled.  Three to 4 weeks after that, you better be thirsty.

You can pretty much adjust any of the variables above, so there is obviously a lot more you could read about.

Welp, that's that.

Wedding season has officially begun.  Jensen has like a hundred thousand friends, and they're all getting married at the same time.  Off to Charleston, SC this weekend.