So for the Oktoberfest dinner the first course was a German “salad” and looked delicious. It was a large helping of lentils that were seasoned very nicely, some sort of bitter greens (thus the salad), and two different sausages all lightly drizzled in a sweetened course mustard sauce. The lentils, sausage, and mustard all went together well, I especially enjoyed the lighter colored sausage, I meant to ask what style it was but it slipped my mind. The greens for me were too a little too bitter, but Karen seemed to enjoy them a lot, yet IÂ discovered that if eaten with enough lentils they went down just fine. I believe the suggested pairing with this course was Iron Hill’s newest house beer the Vienna Lager. Good beer, I’ve had it several times, but they had their Pig Iron Porter aged with vanilla beans on cask condition, and well, I enjoyed that very much.
The second course arrived shortly after the first course and looked a little hurried. It was a large serving of home-made mashed potatoes, a bunch of purple cabbage, and a moist thick-cut piece of pork tenderloin all served with an amazing ginger-snap gravy. I’m sure no chef wants to be told the high-light of the dish was the gravy, but that gravy was ridiculous, I couldn’t get enough of it. The purple of the cabbage was a nice visual accent to the dish which was otherwise shades of brown, yellow, and white, but otherwise the cabbage (or maybe a light kraut) was just OK. The mashed potatoes had potential, the flavor was quite nice and buttery, but the consistency reminded me of when you mix potatoes too long and the starches get gummy. Then there was the pork tenderloin, which was the highlight of the dish for me. It was approximately four thick slices of pork tenderloin that appeared to be seasoned and pan seared, probably finished in the oven, which retained a lot of moisture. Plus the combination of the pork and the gravy was just right. I believe the suggested pairing with this course was the seasonal Oktoberfest beer. Karen got an Oktoberfest and it was quite malty and clean, I couldn’t resist and had another Cask Vanilla Porter.
For dessert we split a single serving of vanilla ice cream. It was from Hy-Point farms, and we found out the rest of their ice cream is from Woodside Creamery, my local favorite. Toward the end of the ice cream and the end of my beer I decided to combine the two and enjoy a delicious Double Vanilla Porter Ice Cream Float – yum! Overall it was another great night at Iron Hill Brewery.
So quite some time ago I brewed a beer I dubbed the Abbey Ale, it was actually the first beer I kegged for the kegerator, now it’s on tap.
This was kind of an off-the-cuff / tribute to Ommegang beer. I had brewed a Tripel and a Dubbel back to back so I was kind of in a Belgian mood, plus I had just worked through most of the beers from volunteering at Ommegang so I was in an Ommegang kind of mood too. This beer was suppose to be reddish in hue and closer to Ommegang’s Abbey Ale than anything else. Well, it turned out very much like Ommegang’s Abbey Ale and very much like a Dubbel, probably more so than my Dubbel did.
When I first tapped this Thursday night without all of the above explanations Robert said it reminded him of Ommegang’s Abbey Ale. So what do I have to do, run down stairs and grab one and do a side-by-side. My beer was colder, less carbonated, and a little sweeter. Their beer had been stored at cellar temperatures, was bottle-conditioned and fuzzy, and more dry than mine. But over all two great beers.
Scarily enough, this was the first beer I kegged for the kegerator and the last full keg I have being put on. Guess who seriously needs to brew some beer? Fortunately I do have three beers in carboys ready to go.
So today I worked on a small project that I have been putting off for quite some time, like over a year.
Back in October of 2006 Garrett and I brewed a 10 gallon batch of American Barleywine called the Gnarleywine. The brew day was long, the grain bill was large, and we used a ridiculous amount of hops. But between the high alcohol content and the extended time in secondary, this beer NEVER carbonated. I probably could have added some bottling yeast to achieve carbonation through bottle-conditioning, but I didn’t.
So, Garrett let me borrow a 3 gallon keg he has so that I could play with the Gnarleywine to see what I could do. Initially we had thought about reverse-counter-pressure filling in the sense of sending the beer from the bottles to the keg under pressure in a closed environment, carbonating it in the keg, and then filling the bottles with the counter-pressure filler. Seemed like a lot of work to me. So instead I basically cleaned and sanitized the keg then slowly poured the bottles down the side of the keg under a blanket of CO2. I’m sure I oxidized the piss out of the beer even though I was being very careful, but better to have a chance to drink it under better conditions than not at all. I also added a small amount of vodka infused with Madagascar vanilla bean and Wild Turkey bourbon that had been steeped on oak chips. Why not try and make a whole new beer out of it? I was contemplating putting some hop pellets in a bag in the keg, but with my luck with hops and kegs I decided to avoid it.
So right now the keg is carbonating. I haven’t decided if I am going to leave it in the keg and put it on tap or if I am going to use the Beer Gun and bottle it. It’ll partially depend on if Garrett needs the keg back (sorry I’ve had it so long). A weird thing about this keg was it had this weird little plastic dip tube on the gas side. I had never seen anything like this before. I’m sure it works fine, I’ve just never seen anything like it. It’s funny, I really like these small “half batch” size kegs, but they are expensive and rare. Usually most places don’t have them, and the ones that do they sell for around $100 used, ouch!
So this weekend (09.05/06.08) I got to go see Keller Williams at the Bottle & Cork in Dewey Beach and visit Dogfish Head Brewery in Milton Delaware.Todd and I went down to the Bottle & Cork to catch Keller for a 9PM show. We knew Tropical Storm Hanna was coming, but that only made it more interesting. We made it down with plenty of time to pick up our will call tickets and grab a bite to eat at a place called Gary’s Surf Shop (I think). We went it into the show about 8PM and Keller came out just after 9PM.
I have never been to the Bottle & Cork before and it is kind of a weird laid out venue. It is a typical open bar band kind of venue with little beer kiosks strewn throughout, but half of the venue was covered and half wasn’t. I’m not sure if this is a beach/temperature thing or if came about because of the smoking ban in Delaware a few years back and that way it was legal to smoke in there, dunno. Anyway, the place was way undersold, maybe 200 people in there, so there was more than enough room for everyone to be covered as the different belt of rain came through. Oh, as you probably would assume, the beer selection sucked – I was drinking $5 Coors Lights out of a can.
I poked around on line for a copy of the set list to post but couldn’t find anything. There was only one taper there and I didn’t talk to him so I probably won’t wind up with a copy of the show though I will still check http://www.archive.org/ to see if anyone posts it. It was a fun set in typical Keller fashion. He opened with “Come As You Are” by Nirvana and played “All Apologies” by them later. He also played a few older Keller tunes that I can’t think of off the top of my head, but I was impressed, pre-Breath stuff. Todd had never seen Keller before and totally had a good time and dug the KW-style, pretty cool. After the show, which was a little over 4 hours, we just hit the pike and went to the beach house.
On Saturday when we woke up we expected it to be a stormy hot mess, but instead it wasn’t even raining yet just very humid. We had 1PM DFH tour tickets, so we just kind of chilled out and ate some breakfast before then. Previous to this summer you did not need tickets (free) to the DFH tour, but they’ve switched up quite a few things. Now they have about five different tour times everyday with each tour being reserved for groups of 35 or less and requiring advanced sign-up via a free ticket system. I have taken the DFH tour maybe 10 times and every time it is different, which is great.
This time when we walked in the new “Tasting Room” was now set-up, which basically was the open bar area they used to have kind of walled-off and pimped-out with DFH gear. They also had a couple small seating areas so you could chill-out. Now they have it set-up so after you check-in you get four tasting “chips” to “cash-in” at the end of the tour for tastes. The tour itself lasted almost an hour which is probably one of the longest tours I’ve ever had there, and out tour guide, Luke, was very good, probably the best tour I’ve had. We got to see all the original equipment, the 100 barrel brew house, the new fermentation vessels including the humongous oak and palo santo wood casks, the largest in the country since pre-prohibition. They were working on the bottling line and the warehouse was basically empty so that was essentially the end of the tour.
After the tour they had Punkin Ale, Raison D’Etre , 60 Minute IPA, and Indian Brown Ale available to taste, and if you asked nicely you could also taste the 90 Minute IPA and the Palo Santo Marron. It was a good time to say the least. Todd picked up two shirts and we were on our way. Todd had never taken the DFH tour before either, but I know he’ll be back.
After the tour, around 2PM, we took the long way home now that the storm had hit so that we could kind of watch it roll in. We went up Route 9 along the Delaware Bay and stopped at a bunch of fishing spots Todd knew to watch the water and the storm. The best stop was probably where the road was basically washed out by crazy black vegetable matter infused water, pretty neat. Around 6PM we made it back to Newark and I drove home to Wilmington. It was a great music/beer/weather weekend.
This time it was 14 months in between tastings, but we still held the 6th Annual Fool Circle Beer Tasting last Saturday the 3oth of August over Labor Day weekend, and everyone could make it.
So, this years tasting was later than usual because of the saga of the kegerator. I had eight kegs worth of beer that would normally have been available for the tasting and I was trying to figure out all the logistics of how to do this. In the long run a few of the beers were drunk before the tasting and a few were filled with the Beer Gun. All in all we still had 20 beers (the most yet) to taste so I don’t think anyone was complaining.
This year we did the blind side by side tasting style again, which I think has become the new norm. I also declared right off the bat that I was not aloud to win, even if I got all of them right (which I didn’t), which was last years stipulation. This year we had four vintage brews from 2004-2006 plus the others from late 2007 and early 2008. Some stand-outs that I remember were the Saison, developed beautifully, the ABA, held up great for a great beer, the Vader, awesome, and the Honey Oatmeal Stout, still tasting fresh. A lot of the Ambers, Pale Ales, and Golds got muddled together for me with all of their hop presence being weakened with age.
In the long run the overall break-down went like this: Richard with a big 3 correct, Todd with 5 correct, Dave and Karen with 6, Robert with a huge 10, and Brian (me) with a non-counting 17 out of 20 correct. Richard did well at telling honey from apples from barley, Todd, Dave and Karen all did about the same, Robert did well with 50% correct mostly mixing up the browns with the browns and the pales with the pales, and I got 3 wrong, the Amarillo Amber, the Fool’s Gold, and the Pacific Gem Pale Ale. Robert walked with the big title though and was crowned the Grand Pooh-Bah until next year. He took the trophy base home to get engraved and hold onto, but left the Grand Pooh-Bah glass at my house to drink out of in front of me for the year, thanks sucka!
After the tasting I fired up the grill and got dinner started earlier than last year. This year I kept it simple with burgers, potato salad, baked beans, corn on the cob, and potato chips – simple summer BBQ style. Before and after dinner we played some Cornhole. Todd got full on food and drank too much and began “rubbing feet” a little early and dipped out around 9ish half asleep. Richard hung a little longer, but unfortunately had to work the next day so he couldn’t stay too long. Karen hung and played Cornhole and stuff until about midnight, but then she wised up and went to bed. But Robert, Dave, and I fool-asses stayed up to almost 3AM bull-shittin’, drinkin’, and getting ate up by mosquitoes. It was great.
If you’d like to check out last years post (2007) feel free to check it out, and that then will direct you to all the other Fool Circle Beer Tastings from the past. Plus if you’d like to see the rest of the pictures from this years tasting I have embedded a slide show below, but it can also take you to the full photo album. I also am going to include some of our more colorful quotes. No offense Dave, but even your good handwriting isn’t good.
“That’s fuckin’ with the Monkey”
“Don’t use your doctor handwriting”
“I got one right Fuck-Face!”
“Weigh my balls in it . . . That’s a stout”
“I wouldn’t even wait until I was starving to eat someone”
“Is there a part of the pig that isn’t delicious?”
“That smells whoopity”
“Hey, that’s our fucking cheese!”
“Gotta love the bottle ass”
“Fun-of-a-bitch!”
“I’m like Hazel and Gretal in the fucking woods”
“Richard pig noise”
“Take this cheese from me”
“10 is funky, like Bootsy Collins funky”
“He could have done it with his ass”
“Like it’s the first time I have tasted Richard’s vomit”
“You didn’t pick a 19 asshole!”
“I don’t want the mayonnaise jar back”
“We’re back to pig again…”
“I would have sex with this beer”
“Richard can tell the difference between apples and beer”
OK, so I’ve had the Blichman Beer Gun for almost two months now and I haven’t played with it yet, guess what, I just did!
Dude, the Beer Gun is way cool. The first time I tried to use it I hadn’t checked how much beer was left in the keg and basically kicked the keg trying to use the Beer Gun on the first bottle, no good. So this time I was feeling more confident and actually had two kegs lined up ready to go. I was going to bottle a six pack each of the Amber Ale and the Pacific Gem Pale Ale. I hadn’t even tapped the keg for the PGPA, and with the keg issues I have been having, that is almost being cocky.
Above you can see my basic set-up mostly hooked up. So essentially it worked like this. Turn the gas pressure down to half the serving pressure, so for me that is about 5 PSI. Then purge the gas from the head space on the keg and hook up the gas at the lower setting to the keg and let it equalize. With a second gas line (turned off) hook that up to the beer gun. Hook a ten foot section of beverage line up to the Beer Gun, then to the keg, then turn the gas on to the Beer Gun. Essentially your ready to go. I flushed the air out of the CO2 line, then pulled on the beer until no foamy beer was coming out, a couple ounces. I then got ready with the first bottle and held my breath.
Dude, no problems. Basically you insert the Beer Gun into the bottle, pull on the gas button for a couple seconds to flush the bottle with CO2 then pull on the beer lever for maybe 20 seconds and you have a full bottle of beer. I let the foam rise up and over the opening of the top of the bottle, then pulled out the beer gun which left the perfect amount of head space and then hit the head space again with CO2 to blanket the beer. Then I quickly grabbed a cap and capped the beer. It seemed almost too easy. Pretty fast, not to messy or too wasteful, and I knew the carbonation was controlled – shaweet! So I went through six bottles of the Amber then six bottles of the Pacific Gem in this manner with no issue. I then filled a growler of the Pacific Gem too since the Amber is on tap, I can then enjoy the Pacific Gem now too.
I was thinking of messing with the three tap tower I have and hooking that up, but honestly lately I have been thinking of contacting the company I bought it from and possibly doing an exchange for a two tap tower. Sure it’s cooler to have three taps and more variety, but I don’t know, two just seems like it may work really well. We’ll see.
So as anyone who reads this knows I have been having some issues with my kegs becoming clogged which appears to be from hop debris getting stuck in the liquid out post of the keg.
So, I have determined that my racking technique is poor and could use some attention. The obvious way is to be more careful and more discriminant in my racking. This I can work on. But, I was also interested in possibly adding some sort of course filtration system to my racking system to double insure that I will rack only clear beer. My initial idea was for an in-line filtration system. I imagined some sort of filter on the out-going hose between the carboy and the keg. I also thought about the same idea but instead located at the input location of the racking cane or at the output location of the hose from the racking cane.
While on lunch one day I daydreamed a sketch for the inline version of the hop filter. It seemed to make sense, my biggest questions were what to use as the filtration material and how long should it be. I decided on using a stainless-steel braid butchered from a water line. I have heard of people using these for straining out a grain bed in a mash tun with great success. Then I decided to make it about six inches long just to help avoid any weight issues since the contraption was made out of stainless steel, rubber, and brass.
The parts were easy enough to find, though I would have rathered everything was stainless steel, but the brass was NSF rated and it was really just a proto-type at this point. I bought all the parts and threw it together in about 30 minutes. Next I added 1.5oz of pellet hops to a glass carboy with 5 gallons of water. I had to let the hops “dissolve” so that they were no longer pellets and were more of a particulate. I was amazed how much hop debris was in the water, it was literally green. I can only imagine what it looked like when I brewed my Pliny the Elder clone and it had about 6oz of dry hops in it. I also realize that under normal circumstances the hops would have settled for a week plus, but I really wanted to test the filter under a worse case scenario type of atmosphere. So after all the hops had “dissolved” the experiments began.
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First (Experiment #1) I tried the in-line filter. This is really the one I wanted to work because I like the way it worked and it was the most expensive and time consuming to work on (though it wasn’t really expensive nor time consuming). So I hooked the filter up basically right off of the racking cane. At first, because of the size of the tubing used on the filter (1 inch inner diameter), the chamber would not fill with beer, thus the suction for the racking would not occur. Not that I would want to do this with beer, but I “pumped” the Auto-siphon a few times and things got moving. I figured I was initially testing its filtration capabilities and the efficiency of the rest of the design could be questioned later. So the racking cane pulled much hops and the filter appeared to catch 90%+ of the hops, I was definitely impressed. But you could almost watch the filter clog. The hops were so dense and the filter material so tight it actually caked all of the holes closed on the filter. First it slowed, then it stopped, at about 2.5 gallons. Experiment #1 = Failure. I would say that it slightly worked, but not with this design. It makes me wonder if the filter was longer how much better (or worse, that’s a big chamber to fill) it would do, say at twelve inches or eighteen inches long.
Second (Experiment #2) I tried the filter at the end of the racking hose. The idea here was similar to the little lint filter you would put from your washing machine before the utility sink. My expectations though were that it would work the same, that is it would clog internally and eventually lead to the beer “squirting” out through whatever opening were available. So I set the experiment up the same and began racking. This time things began to run fine, but after a short while it was obvious that more hop debris was getting through than the inline. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough that a small circle of hop debris formed in the middle, maybe the size of a quarter, but quite possibly still enough to clog a keg. Eventually the flow began to slow and then all but stopped, again at about 2.5 gallons. Experiment #2 = Failure. This again lead me to question how much of a difference the length of the filter would make.
Third (Experiment #3) I tried the filter at the beginning of the racking cane. The idea here was similar to a fish tank filter where it draws the water from the tank up through a course filter and then through a fine filter, though I would not be including a fine filter. Also, just because I could and it kind of made sense, I used an extra piece of stainless steel filter material that was about twice as long to see if that helped. So I set the experiment up the same and began racking. No problems getting the flow going again this time. Almost instantly it was obvious that with this technique the most about of hop debris got through. Again, not really a lot, but maybe twice the amount then Experiment #2. The flow did slow and it took about ten minutes or so to rack the entire 5 gallons of hop-water, but it did rack and filter the entire 5 gallons. Experiment #3 = Partial Success. It was a partial success for it did filter out hop material, but it did not filter out all of the hop material. It did make me wonder how much of a difference the longer piece of filtering material made.
By this point I had been playing with the Hop Filter Experiment for a couple hours and was kind of burning out on it. So for now, I think it is pretty open-ended and inconclusive. I do wonder about lengthening the inline filter which was the one that filtered the best. I also wonder about possibly adding a filter at both the beginning and end point of the racking cane and hose, a double filter? What it really all boils down to is I just need to unlearn bad habits and relearn how to rack properly, because to me it must be my problem since no one else uses these kinds of products or else they would be commercially available. I also think if I dry hopped with whole hops I would have fewer issues, and if used with one of these filters could possibly have even fewer. Until the next experiment occurs.
Our 1998 VW Golf K2 sold today (09.01.08)! We have owned this car since it was new and we have taken very good care of it. If there is anyone you know in the market for a new used car available in Delaware feel free to forward a link to this post to them. Thanks for your help.
FOR SALE! – 1998 VW GOLF K2
This car is a real deal; perfect for a new driver, college student, commuter, or anyone in between.
This car includes the following features:
– Approximately 25-30 MPG
– ONLY 131,500 Miles
– Priced Below Kelley Blue Book Value
– CarFax Certified and Vehicle History Report Available
– One Owner
– Accident Free History – Clean Title
– Cold Air Conditioning
– THULE Roof Rack System with Ski Rack Flat Top
– Plus 1 Pair Womens K2 Skis
– Yakima MegaJoe 3 Rear Bike Rack (New, in Box)
– 4 Cylinder, 2.0 Liter Engine
– 5-Speed Manuel Transmission
– Power Windows/Doors/Locks
– Alarm System
– Moon Roof
– Alloy Aluminum Wheels
– K2 Edition
– Front Seat Heaters
– 40/60 Fold-down Back Seat
ONLY $2500 – FIRM
Please contact Brian at 1998VWGolf@gmail.com and leave a detailed message with contact information.
There are more pictures available and I can answer any questions. Thanks.
This ad has now been removed from Craigslist too in case anyone is interested. Also, in case anyone does read this, we sold the car through Craigslist.
So this weekend it happened again, and it happened in a big way.
Click on the above image for a larger view of the Top 64 from the Tournament 512.
We got together for the big one on Saturday (08.16.08), The 512 Greatest of All Time, Randomly Drawn, Non-Seeded Tournament. Yes I said five hundred twelve, ri-dic-u-lous, seriously. So we have been talking about this for the better part of a year, and honestly I think there is a part of me that has been putting this off on purpose for the better part of a year. I was a little intimidated going into this, more for the time commitment and possible rivalry flair-ups, but it appears to have been unwarranted. No major arguments, sheesh honestly I don’t think there were any arguments, and we seriously busted this thing out in like 9 or 10 hours. I know that sounds like a lot of time, but I really thought it was going to take like twice as long.
So Erik, Robert, and I had to figure out the logistics of this thing, I mean really, you don’t want to get 8 hours into this thing and run into a problem from miss-counting. So forward-thinking uses saved all of the previous names from the first four tournaments, so really all we had to do was verify that there were 128 names four times. All the names were there, so we were ready to move on to the next phase, figuring out the logistics of the brackets. Again, forward-thinking, I had asked someone I knew about the possibility of printing the bracket on a plotter. The advantage of the plotter was that we could do the tournament on a single piece of paper 36 inches by however long we needed. Well that turned out to be 36 inches by 96 inches – 3 feet by 8 feet, crazy! The original layout was almost 6 feet by 16 feet, but we remedied that quickly.
This time the tournament was mostly the same idea, but completely different at the same time. The aspects that were the same were that we were doing a completely pointless, random, non-seeded tournament with characteristics from the previous four tournaments (Front-men, Villains, Heroes, and Hot Chicks). A couple of the things that were different were the No-Nah rule, the Top Eight DQ rule, and the No Criteria rule (I just made all those names up).
Previously we would have our “nah” system in place where we were given a certain amount of over-turn authority in which no one opinion could easily out weigh the game, versus this time we played the entire game with no “nahs” and it never seemed to get out of line. Next we decided that all of the top eight from the previous four tournaments needed some weight in the first round (256 battles). So we decided that if any two of the top eights went up against each other in the first round they would be thrown back into the pot and redrawn, essentially an automatic “nah”, I think this only happened twice. And finally there was the unspoken (remarkable) no criteria that was involved. Somehow the discussion never happened and it made things that much better, that is, the discussion of by what criteria are we judging these battles? Because, really, how do you determine who is better in a battle like Jessica Simpson vs. The Purple Pie Man? Sometimes the thought pattern was along the lines of: Is “X” a better villain then “Y” is a better Frontman? And other times it was more like a Mortal Combat video game with the two players openly fighting each other. And sometimes ‘boobs’ just win. And yes, all of these were going on in my head the whole day.
To say it was a fun crazy day isn’t to say enough. Though this was our “last” tournament I honestly only see this as the beginning.
So after the RYPA kicked the Naked Wheat got to come on down and be the next contestant.
So this may not be the oldest keg (first-in-first-out mentality) that needs to go on tap, but it is a freshy summertime beer that needs to be on tap. So this was the first pint pulled from the kegerator, notice – no excessive foaming and the pour was much more the speed it was supposed to be, I was pleased. I agree (I can already hear you thinking it) there is very little head, in particularly surprising for a wheat beer, but as of right now I am not concerned. I also chose this beer to test the dry-hopping technique theory since this beer was not dry-hopped. So far so good. This beer is very easy to drink, nice and crisp and refreshing, like Summer in a glass. But I bet it won’t last the weekend; I heard Batman is supposed to come over this weekend, and if you know what that means, then you know it is always trouble.
