I Definitely Should Not Parent

One of my coworkers brought his grandson, I'd guess eight or nine years old, to work the other day.  He does this periodically when the little monster doesn't have school, gets him to do little jobs in the back that I will then have to clean up later.  SO helpful.

Anyway, I guess there wasn't enough to keep him occupied this time, because he kept coming around and bothering me.  I'm not a jerk, so I listened to him complain about school and answered his questions about what I was doing, and generally tolerated his mucking about as long as I didn't think he was going to hurt himself or break anything his grandpa couldn't replace.  At some point he was fooling around tying various bits of scrap wire together with wire nuts, and while I was writing up an order and calculating in my head how long it would take to untangle the knot he was creating, he commented that he was really enjoying playing with our electricity, and his parents never let him play with electricity at home.

It took a second for me to put together that he didn't know the difference between electricity and wiring.  My first thought then was to wonder whether explaining it to him would make him more or less likely to accidentally fry himself.  In the end we established that he knew enough only to play with "electricity" that wasn't connected to anything, which struck me as a pretty poor safety standard, so I tried to reinforce his parents admonitions with some stories about my own electrically-induced injuries when I realized two things:

1. This kid has been hounding me all day about what I'm doing, what my tools are, etc.  The last thing that will keep him from electrocuting himself is hearing that I'd done it.
2. I wouldn't be the person I am now, or have the job he was bugging me at, if anyone had ever succeeded at preventing me from "playing with electricity" when I was younger.

So I felt sort of conflicted and just kind of trailed off.  I don't think the kid learned much from that.

Note to Self

New beers are delivered to Wunderbar on Thursday nights, which means they need to clear out the fridge.  This is a task with which I am very much willing to help.  (I had a couple of Trois Pistoles on the way home from work tonight.  If I did that every night...  I'd be an alcoholic.)

CITY OF SIGNS: "What the Hell?" Edition

I've obscured the phone number on the theory that it belongs to someone
who doesn't really want untalented girls calling them.  Hm...  Maybe I
should put up some posters...

Snapped this picture tonight on the way home from work.  It's on one of those big poles that get put up exclusively for the purpose of having posters all over them.

My theory is that someone got dropped from a band to make room for new members, and those members were perhaps female.  Possibly the remaining original member wanted to sleep with one of them.  Terms like, "betrayal," "sell out," "that's my amp," etc, may have been thrown around.

I do like to imagine, though, that somewhere, somebody's living room is full of more-or-less identical bleach-blonde twenty-somethings, each with a guitar their parents just bought for them, sitting around making awkward small-talk while they wait for their turn to audition.  The Sonic Youth song they're being asked to lip sync to filters in from the garage.

Also fun: The coffin-shaped "FATALITY" signs the city apparently puts up at the sites of deadly car accidents.  I understand the premise, but when they genuinely look exactly like the coffin a cartoon vampire would come out of, it sort of undermines it.

Feedback on Sarcastic Doorman

I took some of my homebrew, the last of the Sarcastic Doorman, to the Homebrewers' Guild meeting last night, and passed it around.  Feedback was actually very positive!  Some of the more experienced hands advised that I should be toning down the rye a bit - I can see what they mean.  After getting quite a bit of advice I'm going to try a batch with half the rye to give myself another reference point, and go from there.

I'm also going to recreate the recipe with light extract rather than dark.  The trouble with dark extract, of course, is that you have no control over the grain bill - it's made from whatever combination of grains the maltster thought was desirable and even if it's the colour you want it may not give you the properties you're looking for.  By going with a very pale extract, you know better what you're getting (pale base malt), and that way all the specialty grains are your own.

I've got a lot on my to-do list after last night, actually, but one thing at a time.

The label got VERY good reviews, though.

BOTTLING: Buckwheat Cuivrée

My fellow brewer, Mr. Smashton, dropped by on Wednesday evening and we bottled this batch in real glass! I've only got around to posting about it now, though.

My first challenge was collecting enough bottles. Here in Alberta you have to take your empties to a designated Bottle Depot, rather than just anyplace that sells beer, so I have plenty of bottles around the apartment, but I didn't want to try screw-tops my first time out. After a thorough search I put together a motley selection of fifteen bottles that were appropriate.

I had to soak them overnight to remove (most) of the labels (the label on the bottle of Japanese Imperial Smoked Porter proved too tenacious for the chemicals I have at my disposal). I sanitized them all, as well as my caps, Mr. Smashton's capper, the siphon, bucket, and all other equipment with iodophor.

Next, we weighed out the priming sugar which will feed the remaining yeast so they can produce CO2 and carbonate the bottled beer. I used approximately fifty grams of corn sugar, which given the amount and temperature of the beer should yield slightly higher than normal carbonation, around three volumes of CO2 (a typical American beer is two to two and a half). We dissolved the sugar in a little boiling water, cooled it, and the gently racked the beer from the secondary into the bottling bucket so as to mix it with the sugar thoroughly without introducing too much oxygen. We took a small sample during racking to recheck the gravity, which is unchanged since last time at 1.020.

~ 50 grams of corn sugar

Sadly it was no longer that shade
of orange soda when we finished.

We siphoned everything into the bottles one at a time.  Even though having Mr. Smashton there to help made this much, much easier, it's still kind of a messy, involved pain (which is why there are no pictures of this part), especially to get started.  I have a ball valve spliced into my siphon line so I can start and stop it, and this is very handy, but I'm going to have to put together a better bottling system, especially as I won't always have Mr. Smashton to help me.  I lost at least a full bottle to siphon mishaps this time, in addition to the usual amounts left behind when racking and so on.

In any event, once we got through that, it was time to cap the bottles!

A bowl of sanitized crown caps and a wing capper,
provided by Mr. Smashton.

The procedure was pretty simple.  First, place crown caps loosely on all the bottles, then, work your way down the line with the wing capper crimping each cap on.  The trick, as it turned out, was removing the bottles from the capper - once again, having two people was essential.

The loose cap.

Crimping the cap takes little force.

I'm using my other hand to take the
picture.  I needed both to actually
get the capper off the bottle.

The end result!

Finally, we lined all the bottles up in a cardboard box lined with a trash bag and some newspaper (I understand that so-called "bottle bombs" are actually very rare, but to read a homebrewing newsgroup you'd think they were the leading cause of death), and stowed them away to carbonate. Probably one to two weeks and a bit in the fridge, and they'll be ready to drink. And drink them I shall, if only to get rid of the things... We tried a little that didn't make it into bottles (you'll notice there aren't actually fifteen bellow), and it's... Well, the hops didn't make it much more exciting.