done with another beer book

i just finished reading Brewing (2nd Edition). it was a pretty dry book that covered both the scientific and technical aspects of brewing. it's mainly targeted at very large scale brewers. so aside from some tweaks to my minimashing process i don't think there will be much take away for my home brewing from this one. (although it was interesting to see what the big brewers are doing and they did explain how those widgets in the cans of guinness work.)

aside from that i did laundry today at the usual place (the brain wash) and while folding up my sixth helio sequence shirt i realizing that i forgot about the helio sequence show yesterday. damn it! they are probably the second greatest band on the face of the earth. ( the supersuckers still claim to be the first and i respect their opinion because they do kick a whole lot of ass.)

a morose weekend

and it's not just the weather, since it was actually nice outside today. ronda's grandfather passed away yesterday evening so the mood has been a little morose. she's been talking to family a lot and making plans to travel out for the funeral this week.

aside from death, the weekend has been pretty uneventful. yesterday i read the first issue of my new economist subscription. i also searched online for more places to take welding classes. (this past week i also signed up for spanish classes so i'm gonna be really busy for the next few months.) today i transfered my brain IPA into a secondary fermenter and it tastes pretty good so far. i'm still planning to dry hop with 2 oz of mt hood hops when i keg it so we'll see how it turns out. this evening we went to meet chuck and marco at the zeitgeist where we had a burgers, bloody marys, and beer.

brain IPA is born

i didn't do much this weekend. yesterday i watched a couple movies, Crimson Gold and The Decameron. i also came up with a new IPA recipie that i brewed today, it's been christened Brain IPA. (since my previous IPA experiment was called Pinky IPA.)

here's a couple pictures of my prepared beer brewing workspace.

beer tapping bonanza

so i finally tapped the two kegs of home brewed beer i had aging. they were the speckled speckled hen and the belgian style dubble.

unfortunatly the speckled speckled hen didn't taste as good as when i last tried it (on 12/18). i probably should have tapped it earlier. (it's drinkable, but not quite the taste that i wanted... course i should have probably expected that since it's only the second time i've made up a recipie.) so last night i tweaked with it a bit by adding some more lactose and vanillia to the keg.

i think the belgian style dubble turned out really well and at almost 9% it's going to make for some deadly drinking.

well, with almost 10 gallons on tap i think it's time to start drinking.

new years in big bear

so i spend new years in big bear with my family and parts the polish posse. i had missed the last two years of new year festivities in big bear so it was good to be there. i saw many familiar faces from costa rica and many not so familiar faces (people that i had never met or hadn't seen is so long that i didn't recognize them.) new years eve itself was filled with lots talking (my voice was hoarse the next day), drinking, and dancing late into the night. (i got to bed around 3am.)

that said, not everything was perfect. the tchaikovsky family wasn't there because their grandfather was in the hospital after a hear attack. also after calling her family to with them a happy new year, ronda found out that her grandfather was also in the hospital after a heart attack. obviously this was not a good new years to be a grandfather.

here's some pictures from the evening.

xmas with the family

well, another xmas eve has passed. i spent it in la with ronda, my family, and oliver. we had the traditional wigilia dinner, but unusually, the fish in aspic was missing (not that i missed it) and i wasn't asked to play christmas carols on the piano (the first time this has happened in probably 25 years.) here's some pics.

flying to the wrong airport

for the first time ever, me and ronda decided not to drive to la for xmas but instead we decided to fly down. unfortunatly, due to heavy fog at john wayne airport the redirected our flight to ontaria. (and i thought this only happened to people on the east coast.) so while we should have gotten to my folks house at around 8pm, we ended up arriving at 11:30pm. had we driven we would have made it there by midnight. the lesson has been learned.