HIGH KRAUSEN: Sarcastic Doorman

"High Krausen" is not, contrary to popular belief, the time when yeasts
hold tiny shoot-outs in your beer.  That actually occurs only during lagering.

Unsurprisingly, given that I massively over-pitched my yeast (that is to say, 100 billion yeast cells is a bit excessive for four liters of wort), fermentation is proceeding pretty rapidly and the beer is krausening like crazy.  The krausen is the foam which develops on top of the fermenting wort early in primary fermentation.  This is caused, I believe, by the CO2 produced by the yeast when it is metabolizing sugars pushing certain compounds out of the wort, and in some places (notably Germany), this foam is skimmed either to harvest yeast or simply to remove the compounds in it so that they are not reabsorbed into the beer; the foam can contain some of the harsher compounds found in hops, and removing it is supposed to yield beer with a smoother bitterness.  Modern "noble" hops, of course, contain far less of those compounds than would have been found at the time this tradition was started, and in some styles they are desirable anyway, so skimming the krausen is not often recommended for the homebrewer.

For some kind of perspective, I've got as much krausen on these four liters as I get on the average 23 liter batch, but it seems much denser.  I'll probably be moving this brew to the secondary almost as soon as the krausen falls, no later than Wednesday I think.

BREW DAY: Sarcastic Doorman

Today was the day to brew my new experimental small-batch recipe, Sarcastic Doorman rye porter (see the post bellow this one for an early sketch of the label).  As I brew here in my one-room apartment upstairs from my landlord and it's damn cold here in the winter, a one-gallon batch is about as much as I can make without using a kit.

It was a lovely morning for it.

Painting the Cave

Perhaps you recall the original version of the logo at the top of this blog.  It was one of the better examples of my own particular artistic style, "painstaking doodle," which consists of fairly crude, sketchy drawings which never-the-less take me ages to do.

Sometimes when work is very slow, or I manage to have a quiet lunch hour for once, I'll do a little doodling at work and post it on one of the walls of my area to brighten up the otherwise squalid surroundings.  And considering these things brighten the place up, you can imagine how squalid it is...

I really did just give up on finishing
this one.  So many teeth...

I was listening to Bauhaus on the
way in to work.

The beer can was originally "LUCKY",
but I realized only "KY" showed up in
the actual picture...

This was supposed to be something else
but I'm not good at drawing people.

This was inspired by a Language Log
post.  "Balas" can mean either "bullets"
or "candy" in Brazilian Portuguese.

This is just how I felt that day.  Yes,
it is in the correct orientation.

I was reading something that mentioned
Edison's film version of Frankenstein.

Playing around with a label idea for a
beer I'll be brewing soon.

There is a story behind this.  I will not
tell you what it is.

The images are presented here in no particular order; Spy in the Cab was the first one I drew, but after that I'm not sure.  Click for much larger versions.  All pictures taken with my new digital camera, and then very clumsily cropped and rotated as necessary.

Chicken and Eggs, Maybe Some Green Onion

Am I in a better mood when I cook, or do I tend to cook when I'm in a good mood?  I can't tell.

It's Here!

The video is finally done, the pilot for our new and highly irregular series: Don't Cook This at Home.

It's up on Youtube in two parts:





Also, Blogger has been telling me I have unmoderated comments, but it won't actually show them to me - are they yours? You could try commenting to tell me, but I probably won't be able to see it!

A Phone To Save Us From Ourselves

Is it just me, or is the entire premise of the "Windows Phone" ad campaign that you're such a complete jackass that you need a phone that allows you to be a jackass more efficiently so you can get it over with? Who's checking somebody's "status" or whatever the hell you kids have these days in the middle of a baseball game, or on the dance floor?

Star Anise, Star Bright, First Beer I Drink Tonight...

I added two... Cloves? Stars? Flowers? Two units, approximately, of star anise, to the new minikeg of homebrew I carbonated a couple of days ago, and pulled the first glass tonight. I know they say two is enough for a whole batch (five gallons, versus the roughly one and a quarter gallons in the keg), but I like to go a little overboard.

Whoa boy did I overdo it this time, though. After fourty-eight hours it already tastes like there's a shot of Jagermeister in it, by the time the keg is done it'll be overwhelming.

I'm working on my next brew now (punny name to be revealed in time), even though I have an untapped keg of this one left in addition to the one in the fridge. I'm going to try to get into smaller batches for a while so that I can experiment more.

In other news the video is, possibly, done. I just need a final okay from my collaborator and then it's ready to upload.