You Can't Rush These Things

I kept a few bottles of my current batch of stout apart from the rest during carbonation, and instead of the cool corner where I usually let them sit a couple of weeks, I let them in a box next to a heating vent - basically the warmest place in the apartment.  In theory, the yeast will work faster in this warmer environment (although possibly producing some off flavours), so they might have carbonated faster than the bottles in the closet.

In reality, not so much.  They're quite drinkable despite my refrigerating them before the other bottles, but they're not really fully carbonated.  A bit of fizz, but not much in terms of head.  Acceptable but hardly ideal.

This blog is pretty ugly, not green-on-yellow ugly but certainly not pleasing to the eye, which is one of the reasons I don't use it much - it's not someplace I want to spend a lot of time.  I'm in the process of trying to make it less ugly, but it's going to take a while.

Originality is Overrated.

Or so I choose to believe after discovering that a project I've been working on much more closely mirrors history than I had previously been aware.  This isn't the first time such a thing has happened, in fact.  I'm still trying to figure out if it could be helpful in this case, or if it's a distraction I ought to put aside.

On the other hand, I discovered a good third of a bottle of forgotten ginger wine in the back of the fridge tonight and am going to sleep very soundly indeed.

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.