First Beer attempt

A friend of mine, John, and I took a road trip all the way north to Red Hook, NY a few weeks ago. We are interested in brewing our own beer and this place, Party Creations, came highly recommended. To make that story short, we ended up spending about 2 hours there and I came home with all the equipment and a beer kit for brewing an Irish Red.

On Sunday, the 22nd, we got together and started the brew by mixing and boiling this and that. At the final stage you're suppose to being the temperature of the brew down to about 65 to 75 degrees. Well, this is where we made our first mistake. It said to take the brew pot filled with the wort, which had just been boiling about 2.5 gallons of stuff and put into a cold bath. This should have cooled it down in a few hours, by replacing the cold water bath occasionally. Well, we actually added the other 2.5 gallons of stuff and then started to cool it. It took over night to cool it down, which I was just told is about right for the mistake that we had made.

Anyway, it got placed into a 5 gallon bucket with an airlock on top. This allows the CO2 to escape without anything else getting in there. about 48 hours later the bubbles started happening.

The second mistake made was that we really should not have started this, because I'm going out of town for a few days. So, do I bottle it before leaving or do I just let it sit until I get back. Fortunately the people at Party Creations are very helpful with this stuff. I called and was told exactly what I should do prior to bottling it before we leave. YIKE, time will tell.

Fortunately, I had planned this batch to be an experiment so if it does fail, not all that much will be lost except maybe some undrinkable beer..

I'll let you know as time goes on...

Sous Vide

I have hacked a crock pot with a temperature controller. We tried this last night. Great cooking method..

Try it..

When the night shift gets bored!!

Very good Message!!

Don't litter!

This might be a little extreme, but it certainly gets the point across!! You go girl!!

Stupid email WOW!

Can we make life be easier??

The Amish know how to build (or raise) a barn

New phrase

A friend up north in Canada, that being Ray, emailed me a bit ago and gave me such a new truth that I feel that I really needed to share it. Hope you don't mind Ray.

There's "no key to a closed mind".

Now is that the truth and a very profound saying or what...

High Tech IKEA commercial

Ya, gotta love the genius of it....

Is MSG bad for you?

Only you can decide that for sure. But, here's a little information on the subject.

Benjamin Franklin

I'm reading a book on my Kindle called Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography & Experiments and Observations on Electricity. I'm finding the reading, let me say, interesting. The language obviously is in his own voice at the time. The English language has certainly changed since then, so understanding some of it is difficult at times.

I do have an electric/electronic background and I am finding it difficult as well to capture and understand the concepts that he speaks of. I scanned a page and it's shown below. Unfortunately the figures are not contained in this version so I have to try and visualize what is actually being done. See for yourself..