Author: Tom Kern

The one with alot of words…

No I haven’t been watching friends… there is no gratitous nudity in that show. And I’m on a Led Zepplin kick so it’s kind of hard to use a line from one of their songs.

Why?

Because there are 3 other posts in the last 4 years with some sort of Led Zepplin refrence. Ok here’s a game for you, find two of the three titles with lines from Led Zepplin songs and you will win dinner on me… and when I say on me I will meet you at like a Chilli’s in a strip mall some placy buy you a beer and dinner. I’m not really going to let you eat dinner on me unless you 20 something cute and female in which case goto town.

Now your probally asking yourself why only 4 years for this game Tom? Well that’s easy that is about how long I’ve been on blogger you don’t honestly expect me to expect you to search all 8 years of this shit do you?

Wait 7 years? Oh good lord it has been 7 years… December 1, 2000. I started blogging in the 20th century! There has to be some sort of award for that. “And now to present Tom with the award for the most pristine and occasionally amusing pile of shit on the intertubes is Kate Beckensile” (and if Kate Beckensile isn’t around snag Cylon Model Eight aka Boomer aka Athena to present the award) This pile of crap is older then some of my friends kids and is defitnaly older then all of their marriages.

I wonder if it’s time to graduate from blogger to a honest to goodness domain name and some sort of open source web2.0 social networking esque website with a content managment system that would allow me to blog in real time as I thought of something, post pictures when ever I saw something that was amusing to me!

Or I can have another beer and go get some books packaged together for more friends having their first peanut.

I think I’m going to do that, personal jesus would be proud.

Ok lets talk about cleaning….

So if you’ve done any reading at all on the whole home brew process you have surely run across more then a chapter or fifty about how important it is to clean and sanitize your equipment.

The good news, it’s easy to do and doesn’t require alot of heavy elbow work, the bad news. You have the most ungainly group of items ever devised by man to clean. Did I mention the nooks and crannies? No? Oh you have nooks and crannies too.

Case in point #1 the Keg… because bottling is so much worse then kegging. Now for those of you keeping score at home this is the same keg that I kept batch #1 in and the keg I planned on putting batch #2 in.

The stuff in the bottom? The normal sediment you get with home brewing since your not filitering your beer like the micro/macro brews you get this lovely sludge in the bottom. The good news it’s mostly beer (barely) and fine particulate matter so it’s easy to rinse out. The bad news… remember the bit about the nooks and crannies? Now look down on the bottom of the picture… see the tube thats where the beer comes out of the keg… You need to clean that too.

I can already hear you crying with joy now.

It’s not as bad as you think… the thing actually screws out first off and then you can get a special brush to clean the inside. If you goto morebeer.com it’s called a line brush if you talk to the guys at homebrewdepot here in Mesa it’s a “dip tube brush”. So cleaning the keg isn’t that bad at all and once you’ve got it disassembled it’s really easy to clean. I think I may get a toliet brush (a new one you sicko) to clean the keg after the next batch clears out. Since all I really did this time was rinse it with water and gave the keg a once over with my carboy brush.

I am probably going to look for a deep socket set since the connectors on the top of the keg are hexagonal in shape and a socket wrench will fit around them. Lets just say it’s a little unnerving pressurizing your tank to 25psi after hand tightening everything.

Of course if things had gone south on me I would have the start of a very nice sky light in my kitchen.

Batch #2 and other thoughts….

I kegged Batch #2 this evening… I don’t know how the fermentation took… there was about .25 of a inch of yeast on the bottom of the carboy…. I don’t know if this is because of the yeast I used or the beer. The last batch had almost 2 inches of yeast.

I also planned on posting more photos and cleaning guide.. I think that is going to wait until tommrow night.

With his mind he says…. “NO MORE”

Hmmm I guess I should explain my title this evening. I’m listening to music as I often do when I write. And in the case of this evening I happen to be listening to a playlist I call “Seattle Sounds” which if you can’t figure out from the title contains mainly music from Seattle like Pearl Jam.

So when I start writing I write the line that is playing when I open the page… and in this case it happens to be what amounts to a Pearl Jam protest song, against President Bush.

Why do I feel the need to explain this? I have alot of knuckle dragging republican family members that read this drivel… And I mean knuckle dragging in the most positive sense of the word possible 🙂

Ok now that I’ve offended 2.8 of my readers lets get on with it already.

So a loooooonnnnnnngggggg while back I was having a beer with a coworker and her husband who had just started his own I.T. consulting business. As we sat their drinking our Fat Tires in the late Arizona summer the subject turned to blogs and other thing web 2.0. At which point Rich (the coworkers husbands name) tells me about his blog Securosis. A couple of weeks later coworker and I are talking and I mention I’ve been reading Rich’s blog and mention what I like and don’t like… Ok I mainly like everything I’m an encouraging person like that.

A week or so later coworker comes back and says something to the effect that Rich liked the feedback and if there is anything I want to ask him I can and he will publish it on his blog. Several weeks pass and I can’t come up with any thing good, finally I come up with this little gem

Yeah it’s not much but I think it’s cool and Rich is respected in the I.T. security blogger circuit. At least I didn’t ask him about the best ways to find new and intersting p0rn… I’m pretty sure I have that one covered.

Don’t you trip like I do?

You know I really need to do something about all of this crap on my floors and all of the tripping that then follows the crap around. It’s bad enough I’m tripping lord forbid the roomba trip over itself…

Oh yeah I got what could only be called two of the most throughly awesome xmas gifts one being a 30 pack of Coors light (individually wrapped (thanks Scott)) and a Roomba (Thanks Grandpa, people are going to have to work hard to top that gift) The roomba is a awesome little piece of technology while it does not replace traditional cleaning it makes the time between cleanings a little less dirty. I’ve actually been very surprised at how well it works, and it has a 5 pin serial port so we all know what that means… roombas with chain guns and rockets.

I may have to put a lift kit and beer cooler on the thing to just to complete the redneck motif.

Oh and I need to find a Tony Stewart bumper sticker for the roomba too!

Hopefully everyone had a quiet and pregnant new year where no streaking or feats of mass quantities of alcohol were consumed… Hell I was just happy that I didn’t spend this year curled up in a ball sick like I have 3 of the last 4 years. I did break with one tradition this year and watch Dick Clark on ABC… uh yeah… he’s going on the top of my death pool this year or at the very least most likely to end up cryogenically frozen in Scottsdale.

What does 2008 hold in store? Who knows thats why linear time is so cool! My only hope is that 2008 holds more quality strippers then 2007 did (for the record the # of quality strippers in 2007 was 8 one night in April)

And world peace… but honestly I would just be happy with more strippers.

Batch #2 – A fine Scotch Ale

OK so I wandered down to the homebrew store down the street and picked up another kit… this time it’s a scotch ale. This should be intersting since the closesest thing I’ve ever had to a scotch ale is a irish ale.

And in a very uncharacteristic turn I am almost totally ignoring the instructions that came with said kit and doing the entire thing as I’ve been taught… it’s either going to be a mess or it’s going to be ok.

And I just realized that I’m supposed to let the water get to 180 before I put the grains in… Oh well