New Logo = Changes Coming

I have a pretty nice apartment here in Edmonton.  Much nicer than anyplace I've had myself before.  That's good, in its way, but it does have an unfortunate tendency to show up all my actual stuff, so I'm having to make some changes.  For example, I now buy furniture instead of finding it by the side of the road.  It takes some getting used to.

Regular readers (that means you, Ma), will spot the new logo up above!  This piece of artwork is obviously not the work of my own cracked and crooked claws, I commissioned it.  The only trouble with it is that, like the apartment, it shows up everything else I've got, so now the blog is being redesigned (within the limits of my abilities).  The content will hopefully receive a corresponding upgrade (to actual content) someday as well.

That was fun, wasn't it?

Now that we've had some time to see what this blog is like when it's about writing, back to the beer for a little bit before I try that again.

We cracked open a bottle of the Bockenale at a barbecue on Saturday, just the one liter so everyone could have a little sample.  It's still technically green, since it had only gone into the fridge the night before and it really ought to sit a week after carbonation, but it was quite popular and people expressed interest in drinking it again.  Then they demolished a case of Lucky while we played bocce in the back yard, but you can't ask people to change overnight.

Bottling

Bockenale is bottled and carbonating now - I hope it's carbonating, anyway, time will tell.

The red colour has mellowed - you can really only see the red if you hold it up to the light, now - and the cidery acidity is gone, but it's still cloudy, and I think there's a hint of diacetyl.  That last is a little unexpected given the warm (for the yeast I used) fermentation temperatures and extra week in the secondary, but it's very subtle.  It could actually just be the vanilla.  You can't really taste the tarragon at all, I'd have to be doing a proper boil to make better use of it.  The end result is very smooth and pleasant, anyway (having a small uncarbonated glass before I wash up), and being more of an ale drinker I couldn't really give a toss about the clarity so I'm pretty pleased overall.  It is damn hard to make bad beer with one of these kits.

The more unexpected thing is that I seem to have gotten the gravity wrong in one of my earlier measurements, as it's now reading about 1.015 at 72F (before adding the priming sugar) which certainly doesn't correct to 1.01 at 60F.  Assuming my original gravity reading was correct, by no means a given, that brings the beer down to about 6.5% ABV, though if as I suspect my OG was also ~.005 low then the ABV is pretty much unchanged.

In other news, this is going to turn from a beer blog back into the writing blog I meant it to be over the next couple of weeks.  At least until carbonation is finished a week or so after that.

Bockenale

I love coming up with names - whenever I'm writing something, I've usually come up with a lot of the names, and certainly the title, in advance.  Sometimes they change as it goes along, but that's where I start.  It's not even that I find names particularly meaningful, inherently - I don't subscribe to the idea that the etymology of your name is important, studies about people named "Baker" becoming bakers aside - but I generally find that if I know a character's, place's, or story's name, I'm ready to use it, and if I'm still not sure, it's half-baked.

I also love stupid, stupid puns.

So naming beers is fun, because it combines those things.  It's also a little frustrating because all the good ones are already taken.  There are at least two Coal Porters, for example.  In trying to come up with a name for my latest brew I've been through a couple, and I finally settled on what I thought must be peculiar enough to be unique - Bock'N'Ale (a classic pun, if you'll forgive me, in reference to the combination of yeasts) - but sure enough, there's at least one out there already.  So I modified the spelling a little.  Alternately, I've been working on something to do with Winan's Steam Gun, playing on Steam Beer.

Unfortunately, the reason I'm working on that second one is, rather than that I genuinely need a unique name, the fact that our cold snap ended and it's been warm and lovely and entirely inappropriate for lager yeast, so my beer is probably going to turn out all fruity and cloudy after all.

Vanilla-Tarragon Bock

Only not really very much so, apart from the vanilla part.

After doing a couple of kits straight-up, I decided to do one beer with modifications but without so much care or attention, just to get a bit of it out of my system before settling down to rigorous experimentation with stout recipes.  I found some vanilla beans fairly cheap at the German grocery, and just racked my "bock" (really just a Brewhouse Munich Dark Lager with half the added water) to secondary onto that and about a cup of strong tarragon "tea" - I don't know how noticeable the tarragon is going to be in the finished product that way, but I couldn't really think of a better method on short notice.  The beer itself has a slightly cider-y, apple-like quality right now, not desirable for the style but actually quite pleasant, and a nice red colour.

It's really cloudy, though.  I wound up using two different yeasts (the dry packet in the kit and an Activator of Bavarian Lager yeast from Wyeast) because it was a last minute decision to use less water, and they're flocculating very strangely.  Bits floating on the surface, lots of it still in suspension, fairly thin yeast cake.  Strangely, though I didn't really pitch enough yeast for the OG, it's actually over-attenuating slightly, down to 1.01 from 1.065 (for reference, that's probably around 7.3% ABV).  I'm going to give it a good few weeks in the secondary, and hopefully it'll clear some.  We have had a cold snap so my closet is actually down to a decent lagering temperature, at least, so it should definitely improve if things don't warm up too much in the next week or so.

Nothing is ever finished.

I understand this now.  I don't know what to do with the information yet, though.

Oh, Alberta. What the hell is wrong with you?

Somebody told me this e-mail I sent out was a blog post, and as it's already written, here you go.

Since moving to Alberta, I've been weirded-out by different things.  People speaking English on the bus.  People yelling, "Get a haircut!" without intending it to be ironic.  Straight men wearing cowboy hats.  Some of these things I have mentioned here before.  You can get used to just about anything over time, of course, but every once in a while something still catches you off guard.


So I went out for a late-ish breakfast on Saturday, at Friends & Neighbors, and as is my wont on such occasions I brought along the big biography of Graham Greene I've been reading in bits and pieces since I moved here.  Very thick book, black and white photo of Greene on the cover.  Filled with stuff about Greene completing his first novel and working as a war correspondent and a spy before he was twenty, writing a set amount every day - basically I read it to make myself feel inadequate.

Anyway, as I was paying at the cash, I laid the book down on the counter next to me, and while I was entering the tip (not much, the new waiter got my order wrong at first), a fellow came up behind me and slurred, "That's a cheeky book."

Yeah, I didn't know what to think.

I glanced back at him, a fellow about my height, a little unsteadier than I think one ought to be at that hour of the morning, buzz-cut, red neck.  He continued: "That looks like a really intellect-yual book.  Can't you be an intellect-yual where you come from?"

"Where I come from?"

"Don't you practice...  I mean, you're a muslim?"

My first instinct was of course to call him an ignorant troglodyte and see if he knew what that meant, but we were in a crowded restaurant after all. Avoid confrontation.  Okay.

"No..."

"But didn't you used to be a muslim?"

"What?  No.  Why?"

"But you're from the Midder East, like."

"No, I'm not."

"But you're a muslim.  That's what it usually, a beard that shape usually
means."

A beard that shape?  My beard is beard-shaped, surely.  Fair enough, though, I guess facial hair can mean things, like how having a seventies mustache means you're a skeevy douche.

"It pretty much just grows like that."

"But you do, do you identify with the muslim faith?"

"No."

"But I mean, you identify with the Middle, the Ar...  Terrorists?"

"What?  No.  What are you talking about?"

This has to be the longest it has ever taken anyone to pay for breakfast. Move it along, I want to get out of here!

"You know this guy, Muh-Am-Ar-Uh-Muh-Ar...  You know we paid him ten million dollars, how do you feel about that?"

"I don't know anything about it."

"There are Native kids who got sod...  Who got...  Who got done in the butt, and we only gave them a few thousand, dollars, but this Muh...  Ar-Muh-Am... Uh-Am-Ari, he came and he played our intelligence agencies against each, I mean he played our intelligence against, our intelligence agents, intelligence agencies against the govern...  I mean, he turned our government against our intelligence, and made them give him fif, ten and a half million dollars and a mansion in (unintelligable)..."

I think he's talking about that guy who got sent to a secret prision and tortured.  Who wasn't actually a terrorist, or involved with terrorism, at all.  I really don't know much about it, but it seems like he pretty much deserves whatever he can get out of the government, really.  Anyway, my new friend continued...

"I think that's a problem, isn't it?  Like, it's a sign, our societ...  Our country is getting too liberal, when that happens, right?  Like when my father built this country, as a nucular physicist..."

I am not making any of this up.

"... He wouldn't...  I mean, don't you think, do you agree with that?"

"As I said, I really don't know anything about it."

I finally managed to retrieve my bank card and extricate myself from between him and the counter, but from the way his eyes followed me, I could tell I had failed his test.  I had not managed to convince him that I wasn't a terrorist.  Who could blame him for his suspicions though.  After all, not only did I have a beard, but I had been reading a book.  A thick book that didn't appear to be about wizards or farm equipment.  Speaking of which, as I threaded my way out, he had a parting shot.

"That's a real good book, eh?"

Yeah...  I didn't move here for the culture.