This…… is a zucchini.
I didn’t believe it either. And the funny thing is that this variety is supposed to look like that. This is a Round Zucchini, Cucurbita pepo. I didn’t know such a thing existed until I saw it.
Strange garden. I half expect to see two-headed bunnies hopping out of there next.
The zucchini was yummy.
I have an Admiral FitzRoy Storm Glass. What is that? It is a glass tube that is filled with “stuff” that crystallizes in curious ways to predict the weather. They have been around for eons, but were made famous by Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who took one with Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle. You can read about the glass online. Here’s one link.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_glass
The weather prediction is done by looking at the way the crystals are formed in the glass. According to Admiral FitzRoy’s “research” here are the rules:
My glass has been nothing but clear since I put it up last Winter, which doesn’t bode well for its reputation for accuracy given the weather we have been having lately. I was beginning to think that it was a dud. But then, suddenly on Thursday night, last…. it did this.
Frost? Interesting. Especially since the really bad storms had gone past by Friday, and Saturday was gorgeous…. and it’s July. But the crystals are cute anyway. Here’s a closeup.
The glass works…. it’s just a little slow on the uptake. Or perhaps it’s predicting next Winter’s weather. Work with me.
Today I tasted the beer again after letting it rest in the carboy for a couple of weeks.
Not a good outcome. It tasted nastier than ever. So…….
I dumped it.
I poured all 5 gallons down the drain in the appropriately named “slop sink”.
And away go troubles down the drain.
Sigh.
We have a little Feverfew plant that has taken up residence in our stone wall out back. I was struck by this image with the little white flowers poking out, so I photographed it.
Very bucolic.
Last week I tasted the beer that I had put up to ferment a couple of weeks before that. Here is the result:
Yeah. That bad.
Stinkzoid.
The beer tasted so bad that I just put the cap back on it and left it. I did not bottle it. What a disappointment. I decided to leave it in the carboy for a week and then taste it again to see if it was still horrid.
Basically, I procrastinated on throwing it out.
So Friday evening I tasted it again. Still horrid. Acidy. Bitter. Nasty. Dang.
I was going to throw it out on Saturday, but on a whim I put some of it in a bottle and took it to the store where I buy my ingredients to ask the experts what they thought about the taste…. before I threw it out.
One of them smelled it and said, “Hmmm. Smells delicious”.
Then he tasted it and made a face and said, “Eww”.
That’s a quote…”Eww”.
We all pondered it for a while. The beer guys said that it tasted bad, but it did not smell bad, so it is probably not a bacterial infection. The flavors they came up with were “soap” and “green apple” and “sour”….. (tempted yet?). They thought that it was some “off flavors” in the beer, not really sour beer. Off flavors? More like “way off” flavors. “Off the chart” flavors.
Then they suggested that I rack if off of the sediment into another container and let it sit for a couple of weeks. Sometimes off flavors like that will straighten themselves out over time. If it is still nasty in a few weeks, then I can throw it out.
So that is what I did today. I racked (siphoned) the beer into my brew bucket (not to be confused with Dad’s Beer Bucket), scrubbed the carboy clean, sanitized the carboy, and then racked it back into the carboy.
Here is a photo of the siphon working to move the beer from the brew bucket back into the carboy.
Notice the soap suds in the carboy?
That is foam from the new sanitizer that they sold me called “Star San”. It foams up like that. Here is a better photo of the suds.
The Star San instructions say that it will foam up, just ignore the foam and don’t rinse it.
OK fine then. That is what I did. Now I have soap suds in my beer.
Hey! Want to come over to try some of my home brewed beer?
Didn’t think so.
It is a new carboy for fermenting my beer in. That is actually the name of it. “Better Bottle”. Really. That is the name of the company.
It’s pretty good marketing, don’t you think?. Picture this…. Someone goes into the beer store and the proprietor says, “What do you want?” and the customer says, “I want a better bottle”, and wham bam a sale is made. I need to start a company with a product called “Lunch”.
The Better Bottle is actually a carboy made entirely of plastic. I has been designed for fermenting wine and beer, so it won’t spoil the brew. If you try this trick using a regular plastic water carboy, the beer will be spoiled because that plastic is permeable by air, and the oxygen in the air will ruin the beer. The Better Bottle was designed so that the air cannot get in. It also has no BPA in it, which the water bottles apparently have.
And…. it isn’t glass.
But….. why a plastic bottle after all these years? Well the glass carboy I have used for 50 batches weighs 60 pounds when it is full of beer. This new plastic carboy weighs 45 pounds when it is full. The bottle itself only weighs about an ounce. Here I am lifting the empty bottle with my pinky.
OK. Sure. I have strong pinkies from playing my banjos, but still…..
“Big deal”, you say, “So what?… can’t you lift 60 pounds?”
Sure, I can lift 60 pounds. But lifting 60 pounds with my arms straight out, while placing the glass carboy onto the quartz counter….. ever so gently to avoid breakage…. was becoming difficult.
Quartz is three times harder than granite. Glass is not.
I bumped the counter last time, and my heart stopped beating for a second. “Heart stopped beating” is not a good thing at my age.
OK here’s the math. A gallon is 231 cubic inches. So, five gallons is 1,155 cubic inches. If you spread 1,155 cubic inches of sticky goo onto the floor 1/8″ thick….. um…. using my fingers…. that would be 9,240 square inches of goo on the floor… which is a space that is approximately….. wait a second… taking a square root….. 96.1249187256 inches on each side… dividing by 12 inches per foot…. 8.0104098938 feet on each side…. of sticky sugar water…. in my kitchen. That pretty much covers the whole kitchen.
Cleaning up 5 gallons of sticky beer wort and glass shards from my kitchen floor does not sound like a pleasant afternoon, especially after the trip to the Emergency Room for the stitches. So I have switched to plastic.
Here is the plastic bottle with the water in it, sitting happily, stress-free on the quartz counter top…. no worries about breakage.
The garter is to help lift the bottle and move it. The black tape stuck to the sides measures gallons in the bottle. I put the black tape on the bottle as I filled it the first time so I can just fill to the level I want and not worry about measuring. Pretty classy, huh?
So today I retired my glass carboy, and I have started batch number 51 in plastic. I am making a dark Honey Porter again, so I have two types of specialty grains, English 2-row Crystal and Chocolate malt.
There are three bags because I put no more than 1/2 pound of grains in a bag, and there is a pound of crystal in there and a half pound of chocolate malt (don’t make me go through the math).
Same process as last time. Steep the grains; boil the malt, honey and hops; cool the wort; sparge into the carboy; pitch the yeast; yada yada…. blah blah blah… and ta-daaaaa
Another batch is ready to bubble us to sleep at night.
Today I bottled my 50th batch of beer. Oddly enough, I got 50 bottles of beer out of the batch. Pretty interesting, huh?
Coincidence? I think not.
Actually, I always get 50 bottles of beer out of a batch, so that is a bit phony.
Well.. to tell the truth, I really got 53 bottles of beer out of it, so it wasn’t all that interesting after all… except that 53 is a prime number. That’s pretty interesting.
Work with me.
OK enough of that. In order to bottle beer ya gotta have bottles.
And ya gotta have a beer bucket.
That is the same bucket that I put the hose into while the beer is fermenting. I use Dad’s Beer Bucket for sanitizing some of my tools. I also have a larger bucket that I use to sanitize the bottles in. Here are some of the bottles sanitizing in the larger bucket.
I boiled the bottle caps and the priming sugar to sanitize those.
Before I got too far along, I pulled out half a cup of beer to measure the specific gravity (0.010) and to see if it was sour. It wasn’t sour. It looks pretty good. Nice, amber color, and pretty clear too. It tastes OK. Raw beer is always a little nasty, but it is OK. I wasn’t drinking any, I was just tasting it. Honest.
The next step was to rinse the bottles out. I sanitized them with the “One-Step”, “No-Rinse” sanitizer that I got at the beer store, and that has Percarbonates in it. Ya. It does. Percarbonates. Scary word, “Percarbonates“. Like…. that stuff is used in laundry detergent! I’m not going to rinse that stuff out? I don’t think so.
I used to use laundry bleach to sanitize the bottles, but face it, even “Percarbonates” sounds better than “Laundry Bleach“. Yuk.
I use my bottle washer to rinse the bottles. It goes on the faucet like this.
When we were designing our new kitchen, I picked out that faucet at the snooty faucet showroom store by going around with my 89 cent aerator to see if the bottle washer would fit their fancy faucets. LOL. They thought I was nuts, but it worked. I can hook my bottle washer to it.
I turn the water on and leave it, then I can simply push the bottle down on the washer like this to rinse it.
After rinsing the bottles, I siphoned the beer out of the carboy into the large brewing bucket (not to be confused with Dad’s Beer Bucket).
That leaves behind most of the muck and slime in the carboy. Here is the beer flowing into the bucket.
I ran out of hands while I was doing the bottling, so I did not get any photos of me siphoning the beer into the bottles. There were some, uh, “issues” with the second siphon, and I ended up getting beer on my shirt….. and on the floor… and on the top of my head…. but I didn’t get any on the ceiling. I won’t go into that any further.
Anyway, here they are…. all 50…. um… 53 bottles of beer on the wall.
I guess this is a longer post than usual. It would appear that I have violated my own 15 second rule ( “If you can’t read a blog in 15 seconds, it is too long”). But for today I have changed the rule to the 15 pictures rule (“If it has more than 15 pictures in it, it is too long”), and I am in compliance with that one.
So there.
You can see a more detailed photo of the pen and ink at my web site, Rockland Harbor Light Pen and Ink.
OK. Here’s the bubbling bucket as promised.
Now back to sleep.
That is the number of the current batch of beer I am making. I made my first batch in 1996, and now I am on batch number 50. Time flies like an arrow (fruit flies like a banana).
In honor of this batch I treated myself to a new, stainless steel brew pot. Here it is.
That is a Big Pot! What a beauty! It is a Tramontina. 18/10 stainless steel laminated-base induction-ready 22 quart stock pot!
I also treated myself to a new thermometer to hang in the wort while I steep the specialty grains for 30 minutes. Here they are, steeping away.
My new recipe calls for steeping the crystal malt for 30 minutes at a temperature between 160 and 170 degrees F.
Nailed it! This new pot has a laminated bottom with a stainless/aluminum/stainless sandwich, so the heat transfer is really even. After I steep the crystal malt for 30 minutes, I put in the honey, hops, and extract and take it to a full boil. I stir it really really fast.
After a while, I get that “Creature From the Black Lagoon”, heaving, rolling, foaming living, breathing effect.
It’s Alive! Bwaa haa haaa!
OK. Enough of that. Here is why I need a huge, 22 quart pot.
At this stage, my wort foams up to fill that entire pot. The original 6 quarts of beer wort has grown into 22 quarts. In my old 16 quart pot, that would be a boil over, and we all know what that means….( well OK… I know what that means…. a sticky mess to clean up).
After a few minutes, the wort settles down and goes to a simmer.
It got pretty boring after that, so I didn’t take any more photos. Maybe later I will post another photo of the bubbling bucket like I did a few months ago. Right now, I am in violation of my 15 second rule (“If it takes longer than 15 seconds to read a blog, it is too long”), so I am signing off.
