FOOLCiRCLE

First, I’ll say that I have been neglecting this website for a while, so I promise for 2007 to have more updates. Second, in order to have more updates that means I’ll need to brew more than in 2006. So my modest goal for this year is to finish upgrading my equipment (for now) and to brew at least once a month for the year. Third, to fill-in-the-gaps between brews I may start posting other random things; beer reviews, happenings, and other ideas, so hopefully all will enjoy.

On Sunday January 14th I brewed the first beer for 2007, *plus* it was the first beer at Calhoun, *plus* it was a beer brewed with all homegrown hops. This beer is an English Mild-esque beer. The reason I say it like that is that it is brewed bigger than an English Mild, with all American hops grown exclusively in Delaware, and uses a strain of yeast from Canada.

This beer used some new malts for me, specifically Pale Chocolate Malt and Flaked Barley. Pale Chocolate Malt is half as dark as regular chocolate malt, but should still add all that lovely color and vanilla and caramel notes, only more discreetly. Flaked Barley is an unmalted barley which should add a graininess (in a good way) to the beer plus help with head retention. There was a total of five different malts in this beer, hopefully all will add to the end result.

Also, as mentioned before, I used all Delaware grown homegrown hops in this beer. For bittering I used Nugget hops grown by my friend Garrett and for flavor and aroma I used Cascade hops grown by myself. Nugget hops are generally a good bittering hop with high alpha acid, but since these are homegrown there is no true way to test there alpha acid level, so it is used with an educated shot in the dark. Cascade are know widely for there grapefruit citrusy aroma and flavor, this is the signature hop for almost all west coast Pale Ales. Also since these are homegrown their pungent smell will most likely be lacking, but other variants may stand out more.

The brew day itself was mostly uneventful but still interesting. This was the first beer brewed at Calhoun, so I had to get used to where to situate all of my equipment. Also, most of my stuff still hadn’t even been fully unpacked yet, so that made everything more fun. I figured out a pretty good scenario for a set up was to work out of my basement through the door leading to out back. In this way my kettle, hot liquid and gas are all outside with plenty of ventilation, and myself and the remaining equipment are nearby and undercover inside without having to go up any stairs. Craig came over about half way through the brew day and we enjoyed a few good beers, Trader Joe’s Dark Belgian Ale, DFH Zwaanend’ale and DFH Chateau Jiahu.

In combination of beers clouding my thought process, being overly optimistic and forgetting to do anything about it – I wound up running into a stuck run-off after my wort had cooled. This is a bad time to have issues for the wort is at a very delicate stage very susceptible to picking up an infection during this period. The obvious reason for the problem was being unprepared for using whole leaf hops (5.5oz for that matter too), and having them clog the exit spigot on the kettle. The solution I came up with on the fly, dump the whole kettle full of wort into the mash-tun which has a false bottom and basically strain the sweet liquid from the hop material. Yes I took the time to sanitize everything. I poured from kettle to mash-tun, then ran-off from the mash-tun to the carboy. From what I can tell it worked like a charm! Recovered just over five gallons at approximately 1.044 OG. “Approximately”, why do I say that? Well, ‘Kid Genius’ over here forgot to take an original gravity reading, so that number is a guess based on the gravity reading of the wort prior to boil.

What’s next? I’m open for suggestions.

I FINALLY bottled the Fool Circle Linvilla Orchards Hard Apple Cider. This beverage was originally made on October 22, 2005. Today it was bottled, and in approximately 2 weeks it will be ready to drink (October 26th). This is my first hard cider and if this goes well at tasting time you know I’ll be back up at Linvilla to buy some more cider.

Why such a long wait from start to finish? Well I was “told” by different sources to not even bother tasting it for 6 months and it would only get better after a year. Plus I was told to bulk age it as that makes a difference. One problem I was having was the cider would not fall clear. I finally found a product called Super Kleer KC Finings that cleared the cider like crystal in less than 24 hours – way faster than 12 months. Unfortunetly this picture does no justice for the clarification. The clarification was suspended because I added more yeast at the time of bottling while adding my priming sugar. I do not know, but assume, that there were no longer any viable yeast left to make carbondioxide to carbonate the beer, so added some nice fresh healthy guys.

But, the reason for the picture is to show my final gravity which is 0.098 – below 1! I have never had a beverage fall below 1.000, so this is big. Basically water has specific gravity of 1.000 and ethanol (alcohol) has a specific gravity like .800 or something close, so alcohol is “thinner” than water. When you brew or make a fermentable beverage like this cider there are sugars in the solution which the yeast feed from. These sugars raise the specific gravity for a solution with sugar is “thicker” than that of water. For my hard cider the orginal gravity was 1.050. So, with an original gravity of such and a final gravity of what we had, we have an expected alcohol level of 6.8% for this hard cider. I know blah, blah, blah – but the (bad) picture shows sort of what I am kind of trying to elude to . . . whatever.

The 9th Annual Kennett Brewfest was Saturday October 7th. This year it was held at a new location, which I think I actually preferred better. There seemed to be more room to move around in, but there also seemed to be more people to wait in line with. All-in-all I would say the brewfest was a success. Biggest complaint – lines, beer lines and port-a-potty lines, but I suppose there is only so much you can do about it. Favorite beers: hands down favorite beer for me was Stone’s 10th Anniversary ale. This is a super-dooper hopped IPA, as described by the guy pouring it, “Who likes hops? This is like drinking a bag of weed!” All righty then . . . Other favorites included, Mojo IPA from Boulder Beer, Bourbon Aged Barleywine from Steart’s, and Old Foghorn from Anchor. Lots of beer, not enough time.

After the brewfest we went to the Half Moon Restaurant as we have now for the past 5 years. Every year they are very busy and you expect a certain amount of waiting, this year they took it too far. I don’t believe we’ll ever be going back to this restaurant after the brewfest. It’s a shame for them, for we had a party of 10, and now that’s 10 people that will be spreading bad news about them, oh well – tuff-titties. Anyway, we arrived around 6:15 and ordered. We didn’t receive appatizers for an hour and half with no inclination that our food was coing anytime soon. We asked for our check of what had already arrived and asked to speak with the manager. It took 15 minutes for us to get the check and the managar (owner!) couldn’t have given two shits that we were unhappy. So after being there for 2 hours, we all left, not fed and pissed off – it was a lovely time. We got home and ordered pizza which was at the door in less than 20 minutes. Guess what – that pizza guy got a good tip =).

So, brewfest was good, Half Moon was horrible. I’m choosing to look on the bright side of this one and take it as a lesson learned. Until next year . . .

YIKES! What did we brew? Why of course it’s the GNARLEYWINE! When you brew a monster barleywine that takes 9 hours, looks this “pretty” and has an original gravity of 1.111, what else could it be called. This will be one strong mama bittered and aromafied with all glorious American C-hops, with no Cascade (thank you very much!).

Garrett and I pumped out this puppy in his garage on Sunday while anticipating rain that never really came until the very end. It was a great day, we sampled the 3 beers he had on tap: an Oktoberfest, a super-charged Amarillo Pale Ale, and a Robust Stout and also tried 6 American Barleywines to help us have pretty little hop dreams. We tried: Fred from the Wood, Bigfoot, Blithering Idiot, Old Horizontal, Old School Barleywine and … one dipped in wax that I forget it’s name. Regardless, all delicious all different interpretations upon a style. Next year we’ve discussed brewing an English Barleywine.

We also had enough sugar left in the grain to pull off 5 gallons of 1.035 wort to can as starter wort. After the long brew day Garrett volunteered to can it all by himself while watching the kids the next day. I got an email at almost 1AM saying he had finished, doesn’t sound like fun – thanks for going the distance.

All in all I can’t wait to try this one, though it may not be for many months!

(Me. Since I’m never in my own pictures.)

Here is a picture of the Palino Pimps vs. Punk in Drublic. This picture was taken at the fabulous 2nd Annual (Invitational?) Dogfish Head Intergalactic Bocce Tournament. This was a 16 team bracket double-elimination tournament. It took place over two 10 hour days.

Unfortunetly, since I was occupied, I could not attend last year. And because of that, I missed out on this years play. The teams from last year were invited back first. Anyway, Robert and I decided to see if we could “stop by” on the second day and maybe hang-out for a bit. Surprised, we felt as though we were totally welcomed. All of the players were very nice and hilarious, the employees that were that were being very cool towards us, and even the owner of the company personally came over to us and told us to make ourselves at home – awesome. So a couple of hours of “stopping by” turned into all day hanging out. We then left the brewery to head to the brew pub to try the brew pub exclusive Fed Extra Mild. This beer was really anything but mild at over 6% and really nicely hopped. While we were standing at the bar, one of the employees asked us to come upstairs to the private bocce party, where we thouroughly enjoyed ourselves.

Because people don’t always think, we forget to remember that we had previously signed up to run in the 1st Dogfish Dash 10K the following day. Let’s just say morning came fast and hard. But, we were determined to run the race. We had two objectives that we easily accomplished: 1) We are not allowed to be last & 2) We have to finish. The race was rough, but I’m glad we did it, already looking forward to next year – both bocce and the 10K

So next year at the bocce tournament look out because if you have a problem – if no one else can help – and if you can find them – maybe you can play bocce with : The B-Team.

Today I went over to my buddy Garrett’s house and we brewed a 10 gallon batch of a Pale Ale together. Not that this beer won’t be good, but essentially we brewed this beer as a giant starter for a 10 gallon batch of Barleywine we plan on brewing in like 3 weeks or so. The brew day actually went pretty smoothly, only real troubles we ran into were the mash briefly got stuck and there was a lot of break material in the kettle. I also got to try some new beers Garrett had available including a Mango Witbier (Mango Mama), a Robust Stout (Choking Sun Stout) and a DIPA (Hopacalypse), an English Bitter (Horizon Bitter) and the newest rendition of an Oaked Aged Vanilla Porter. Please feel free to correct me if I got any of the names wrong or left out any of the goodies. Regardless, I am already looking forward to brewing the Barleywine.

Brewed a second batch of the Angler Amber Ale today. Things went pretty good for the equipment I was using and for with the break since my last batch. Actually, things went much smoother than I had anticipated with only 2 problems, one more major and one more minor. Problem number one was I missed my target gravity by about 0.010. This may not sound like a lot but it is really enough to make a difference. Don’t know why the efficency was so low, but I’ll get it straighten out. Problem number two was my yeast. I tried to make a yeast started with a White Labs vial of California Ale Yeast 001 and the sucker was dead for lack of a better term. After 36 hours in the started there was still no visible action. I was pissed about the yeast not working partially because I was so excited about not having to make a starter from scratch since Garrett had canned off a few quarts – DAMN! Anyway, I was fortunet enough to have some US-56 on hand which basically saved the day. Next brew day in less than a week. I will be teaming up with Garrett to brew a 10 gallon batch of a Pale Ale, can’t wait.

This week (August 21st-24th) I got the opportunity to volunteer at Fordham Brewing Company in Dover, DE. I had been in contact with the Head Brewer, Walter Trifari, several times via e-mail inquiring mostly about opportunities with helping him brew and additionaly about just general help around the brewery. He was quick to reply and basically said that they bottle beer every other week usually on Monday’s or Wednesday’s and would I be available. At the time I was not, but I told him during July and August I could come down every Wednesday if he needed help. He never e-mailed me asking for help, so I assumed he didn’t need it. Last week I decided to give hime one last shot since August was almost up and asked if he needed help. Because of the timing of several different things at the brewery he was very much in need of help. So, kind of unbeknownst to me, I just signed up for four days of bottling.

Fordham’s bottling line is semi-automated. The reason I say this is because there has to be people at certain spots to make certain things happen, but generally the machines do most of the work. Here is a brief (and probably) incomplete run down of how the bottling line works. First, someone takes either loose empty beer bottles and puts them onto a conveyor belt or someone takes a case of empty beer bottles and puts them on onto a conveyor belt. If it is a case, there is a machine that extracts the bottles from the case, so the bottle go in one direction while the cardboard box goes in another. Next, the bottles are funneled down a conveyor belt to the true bottling aspect of the machine (actually multiple machines, but whatever). Anyway, the bottles are rinsed and sanitized, then flushed of air and filled with CO2, then filled with beer, then fobbed (basically another way of trying to make sure all the air is out of the bottle), then capped, then rinsed, then onto another conveyor belt. It probablt takes each bottle about five seconds to go through all of that part. The bottles are then shuffled down the conveyor belt to a dryer, then a labeler, and then seperated to be filled into cases. A person then pushes a button to raised the case and lower the bottles so they meet again. The same person then folds up the lid of the case and sends it through a taping machine. After that someone is standing at the end to lift the case off and stack it into pallets. Once the machine is fully running I would guess it takes a bottle about 30 seconds to travel from start to finish.

My job for the week was one of three: bottle loader, button pusher, or pallet stacker. None are glamorous, all are important. The trully difficult job is the person who has to maintain / watch the filler and labeler to make sure things are running smoothly. I kind of viewed the bottle loader position as feeding the mouth on the great bottling beast, and the pallet stacker as sort of the ass extractor, or something. The button pusher (man I make these sound exciting) was maybe the intestine or the colon . . . dunno, whatever. Anyway, it was a long physical week and I’m glad I had the experience and the opportunity to help. Next time though, I think one or two days would be much better. Between driving, tolls, and the repetative physical nature of the job (oh yeah, it was really loud too), I would not want to do that everyday by any means.

Hopefully I have created a relationship with a big brewery in the area and will have more and better opportunities around the bend. To say nothing else, it was an eye-opening experience. Also, they were generous enough to give me about a case of beer a day too, so right now I have some of their Lager, Copperhead and two seasonals, the Maibock and Oktoberfest – lucky me!

This isn’t my typical style of update, but I’m hoping it’ll get the ball rolling again since I havn’t posted in a while. Anyway, my brother at zogworld just hit me up to do a book meme. What the hell that is I’m not really sure, but he’s got links and stuff on his website, so you can check it all out there. Anyway, looks like there are 9 questions and 1 request to be covered, so here we go:

1. One book that changed your life
   
2. One book you have read more than once
   
3. One book you would want on a desert island
   
4. One book that made you laugh
   
5. One book you wish had been written
   
6. One book you wish had never had been written
   
7. One book that made you cry
   
8. One book you are currently reading
   
9. One book you have been meaning to read
   
10. Now tag five people

So, one theme I consistently see here is “one”, so I am going to try and limit each answer to one book though for several of the questions several answers come to mind.

1. One book that changed your life: Well, that is a large cup o tea right there, that is. Anyway, … I’d probably have to go with Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit by Daniel Quinn. The reason I say this, was it was at a very influential time in my life. First, I had just quit my job and would not work again for a year. Second, I was very disappointed with the direction in which my life was heading and was trying to “self educate” to help give my life new direction. Third, I was preparing for my Outward Bound trip, which is an experience that totally rearranged a lot of stuff for me for a while, mostly positively. And fourth, this was the book that made me realize that I liked reading. Throughout my life I had always been “forced” to read books. I was told what to read, and when it had to be done by, and then I’d either be tested on it or have to write a paper on it. I read very little books for pleasure until after I was 21. Not all will agree, but I also liked Daniel Quinn’s writing style and since then have purchased and read all of his other works, including some hard to find ones.
   
2. One book you have read more than once: Easy, The Bones on Black Spruce Mountain by David Budbill. I have seriously read this book 10+ times. I would say this book falls into a ‘favorites’ category for me easily. It is a book written for young readers, I probably read it for the first time in about 5th grade. It most likely took me quite a while to read at that age, not really being into reading, but now when I read it, it takes me an afternoon. This is just one of those books, I bet you have one too.
   
3. One book you would want on a desert island: No idea. Maybe, Survive on a Desert Island by Claire Llewellyn. Really the only thing that would make sense would be a survival book or something along those lines. I mean, I would probably use the book to start a fire with before I would allow myself to get all wrapped up wondering about the wonders of life. Water, shelter, food, and rest all come before books. Oh, well.
   
4. One book that made you laugh: Book that made me laugh? I’ll go with Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein. I probably started reading this book about whenever I started to read and have always read it. The poems are smart and funny the pictures are the same. I have recited many a poem from this book for school, and still have some memorized today. Listening to Shel read it on audio book is classic too.
   
5. One book you wish had been written: What an awkward question (< what an awkward word to spell). The “book” that is actually being written now, the “book” of my life. But, if it had been written, I could read it and skip ahead sometimes when I got confused and see what the outcome would be.
   
6. One book you wish had never had been written: I can not think of any book which I would wish it not to be written. But how about this, can you imagine the impact (or lack there of) if a certain book had never been written: The Bible. Now that would be something.
   
7. One book that made you cry: Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson by Mitch Albom. I don’t remember why, besides the story obviously, but this book tore me up. Tears running down my face tore me up. Could get out of bed and be productive tore me up. I think I literally stayed under the covers in bed one day while house sitting a friends house and read this book and cried. It was bizarre, it was release, it was a good book.
   
8. One book you are currently reading: Designing Great Beers: The Ultimate Guide to Brewing Classic Beer Styles by Ray Daniels. This book was recomended to me by another brewer friend. So far it reads like a lot of books about brewing, technical and repetative, but always informative. To actually really retain the information, you have to read it in chunks. then once all the chuncks have been read, this will be a great reference book for trying to brew to a particular style and how to adjust things properly.
   
9. One book you have been meaning to read: Diary: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk. I actually just ordered a signed 1st edition, 1st printing, now out of print hard cover of this book yesterday. Can’t wait to carefully read it. I really like Chuck’s writings, if you haven’t read any of his stuff you totally should, he’s more than just Fight Club.
   
10. Now tag five people: 1 – Erik Mitchell, 2 – B.T., 3 – Richand and/or Ann, 4 – Garrett, and 5 – Jack Curtain (hey, why not!)

I picked the first crop of my hops today. This year hasn’t seemed to be as good for the hops as last year for example. I think it may be the extreme heat, dunno. But it’s already August and this is my first crop. Anyway, it was over 4oz. dry which is good. Not sure on the true weight since my scale bottoms out at 4oz. and it was beyond that. Yeah I could have weighed it as two smaller sets, but I was feeling lazy. I know I’ll weigh them proper before I use them so it’s cool. More hops I say!