Stout's in the secondary, and...

...  more importantly, all these beer-related posts might actually be writing related.

The history of booze is the history of the world.

Carbonation complete

Hooray!  My beer is carbonated and cold again.  I don't think it carbonated quite as much as it would have if I hadn't mucked it up, but it's still really very good.  If you're thinking about brewing beer, I highly recommend The Brewhouse kits; despite my inability to properly follow directions the Munich Dark Lager turned out excellent.

Not a lot else going on.  Writing seems to have stalled out again, I'm rubbish at trying to arrange it around full-time work.

Beer is not success(ful)... Yet.

I messed up the carbonation phase, but I think I've got it working now, so hopefully I'll have proper beer in another week or so.  Managing the temperature range is tricky, but if I'm lucky I've got away with my mistakes up to now.

No danger of this turning into a writing blog before the end of the year, at this point.

Beer is Success

It's a week early, but I tried some of my beer tonight - and it's actually pretty great.  I was expecting the first batch to be merely okay, preparing myself not to give up right away, but if this is where I'm starting from, great things are possible.  My next batch, I'm already planning well ahead, will be an unmodified Stout kit, and then after that the experiments begin.  I've got a lot of things I want to try.

I recently decided to start making myself write every day.  I haven't set myself a word count, as some writers do - though I may do that eventually - but I am trying to be somewhat disciplined about doing at least some work every day, even if it's more editing than writing.  It does seem to be working.  Progress is still slow, since I just started I haven't built up a tremendous amount of momentum yet, but I have already solved some important problems.  If I can keep it up, this might even turn into a writing blog.

All bottled up.

The beer is in bottles and carbonating now.

Racking to Secondary

Today I transfered my beer-to-be from the sealed bucket to the carboy; in brewing talk, this is racking from the primary to secondary fermenter.  The primary fermenter was seriously threatening to explode, so it's a good thing I got to it.

I measured the specific gravity before siphoning; down to 1.020 from 1.050, right on target.  I also tried a little sip - it actually tastes pretty good already, very promising.  Given that I'm going to end up with twenty-three liters of the stuff, I really want it to be alright...

I'm slowly accumulating more equipment - I've got a hose that connects to my sink, now, to help with the cleaning (washing stuff in the shower wasn't super convenient), a little ladle to take the samples for testing, and a few other things.  Two kinds of sterilizer, sanitation is very important.  I feel like by the end of this batch I'll have a pretty good handle on things; what I need next, probably, is a platform so I don't have to move the fermenter to transfer out of it stirring up the sediment.  I'll have to see what I can come up with.

Brewing Commences

I started my first batch of homebrew today. It's going to be a learning experience, for sure... Things I have learned already:

1. I need to make better arrangements for cleaning and sanitizing my equipment - what I went through today was ridiculous.

2. Those headaches probably were related to the TSP fumes.

3. Wort smells awesome. I wish my apartment always smelled like that.

4. My handwriting deteriorates very rapidly under stress.

5. Italics can be overused.

But now the primary fermenter is merrily fermenting away, or so I hope, in its dark corner, and I have a few days respite before I have to mess with it much again. A few days in which to figure out how to use the siphon without covering myself and my apartment in beer.