Monthly Archive for December, 2007

Comments

Published
by
DT
on December 31, 2007
in Life
. 0 Comments

Time to answer some comments -

fat bob | cyclenut.blogspot.com

Yo fool, good to see you posting again. Nice crib, I’m gonna have to bring the wife up there in the fall so she can see how nice the NE is in the fall, we should hook up for a ride.

Anytime Bob! I’ll treat you to the grand tour of trails and homebrew on tap, ha. Only thing is you gotta share the guest bedroom with Buster…

CL

DT, what do you think of the Weyerbacher Double Simcoe IPA? I really dig the Simcoe hops.

Dogfish just opened a brewpub in Falls Church. JK and I tried it. Nothing special really, i think it will just be convenient for growler fills.

The Double Simcoe IPA is a great one, super hop aroma. Simcoe tends to be really floral and citrusy, a lot like Amarillo. Add in Centennial and you’ve got my three favorite hops. The Dogfish brewpub - I’ve heard mixed reviews. I bet it was nice when they opened it and had a ton of their vintage beers for sale. Like you said though, nothing super special about the place except you can get really good beer now in a location that was pretty lacking before. Not to mention it’s pretty much across the street from Derek’s homebrew shop (next to the Sears), makes for a good way to kill a couple of hours.

Rob L | rahlrob.blogspot.com

Yo! DT good to see you back and posting. Your new place looks pretty sweet but you forgot the most important foto’s, that of your bike area and beer brewing area in your basement. Hhahahaha!

Damn, I need to get out and try snowboarding again. I had a semi-bad fall last year out in South tahoe and I was sore for a couple of weeks. Ugh. Gotta find somewhere nice and easy. Any suggestions for down here??

Cheers on the brewing notes, I think my wife is finally getting me a kit for the holiday of commercialism. :)
Cheers and have a good one!
rob

Don’t let us fool you Rob, brewing is disgusting…disgustingly awesome! It’s a dangerous path, much like mountain biking, that once you start going down, there’s no coming back. Hope that kit treats you well.

Snowboarding isn’t that hard, it’s just kind of freaky to not be able to move your feet like you can on a skateboard or skis. My first season of boarding I had a few rough runs. Once I knocked myself out so hard that my head bounced off the snow/ice and bent all the way forward hard enough to severely bruise shoulder/chest. The kind of bruise that starts off black and ends up green/yellow. That was a hard one to come back from. Then there was my first time trying a table top ramp. Up the one side, got way more air than I thought I would, rotate backwards and fall 8 feet out of the air onto my back…breathing was a little hard that day. All that said, I’m still boarding, still pretty rubbish at it, and it’s still fun. Down in your area you’re probably looking at either Massanutten (down near Harrisonburg, VA) or Seven Springs in PA. Both are probably within 2 hours from you.

I’ll see if I can get some photos up of the basement area, particularly the brewing and bike area. I need to get some updated photos of the whole house anyway. Might take a few days to get the basement back to a state where photos are possible, ha.

I. Conoclasst | wrenchinthegears.blogspot.com

Fatty Dee, please come home, all is forgiven! I need my ridin’ buddy!

Hey man, get something up on this rusty cog of a blog, will ya? I’m askin’ nicely… ;)

The rusty cog has been cleaned…and it’s your turn to come up here mofo!

Fermentation Station

Published
by
DT
on December 31, 2007
in Brewing and Life
. 1 Comment

Holidays are almost over. We had a nice whirlwind trip, Boston to Killadelphia, where my brother and his wife took us to Monk’s Cafe. Our first time there and it was definitely impressive. The moules and frites were just as they should be and the Belgian beer selection was spectacular. It was a good night for sour beers! Next day we stopped off to visit with Kristin’s family, since they were all holed up in Philly this year. Then it was off to Ocean City, MD for the next few days. We got back late Wednesday night and took the next couple of days to get the house in order. We needed to caulk the bathroom and fix the fan so it actually pulled air, not to mention we needed to get out on the roof and break up the ice dams that had formed on the edges. All in vain though, as it’s snowing again right now and we’ve got another storm on the horizon.

Anyway, we took a break on Saturday from all the house stuff and set in for a full day of brewing action. Friday night I finished up making a second mash tun out of an old rectangular Igloo cooler, a ball valve kit, and an 18″ stainless steel washer hose with the vinyl tubing removed. A little caulk on the outside and it was water tight. So Mike came over on Saturday and we did two different batches. He wanted to do another Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter and I was feeling the Belgian Dark Strong. We made a couple of changes to his recipe since the shop was out of certain grains and hops. I also dropped the amount of base malt in mine to make a beer at the lower end of the Belgian Dark Strong category, instead of the very top of the category like I did last year. Last year’s recipe went on to the second round of the National Homebrew Competition and received a few comments of having a lot of alcohol, um yea, it’s supposed to! Brewing session went well, no major hitches. We ended up with some extra wort from both batches, so we put about 3 gallons of blended imperial porter and Belgian dark strong into a bucket and dropped a packet of T-58 yeast in it. Started bubbling about 2 minutes later and hasn’t stopped yet. Mike filled his carboy up to the tip top and as expected got enough blow off to put the air lock on the floor, check it:

At least everything stayed on the towels. Next we put our two batches of single hopped IPAs down in the basement to hopefully cool down and drop some crap out of suspension. We’ll probably keg/bottle them tomorrow. Finally, we took a sour starter I had been working on, a mixture of Roeselare and the dregs from a bottle of Orval, decanted and pitched into a carboy of double IPA.
Funny story about the double IPA. It’s a recipe I came up with more than a year ago for Mike. He brewed it, but ended up having too much unfermentable sugars (I think it finished at over 1030) and the bottled beers just never carbonated. So flash to a year later (he bottled this on 10/1/2006) and he still has an entire case of Hop Dog that is cloyingly sweet and fairly undrinkable. So we proceed to open all the bottles and pour them into a carboy. Out of the entire case, one bottle had carbonated and was at the perfect level. We split that one with dinner and damn was it a fine IPA! Glad at least one bottle turned out great, but it’s sad to know what the entire case could have tasted like. Instead we poured the sour starter into the carboy and we wait to see if the brettanomyces will take hold and chomp through the remaining sugars, yielding us a sour IPA…fingers crossed. Now we also wait to see if everything I brew from this point on ends up infected, ha.

Palisades IPA

Published
by
DT
on December 20, 2007
in Brewing and Recipes
. 2 Comments
Palisade IPA
Recipe Palisade IPA Style American IPA
Brewer DT & MM Batch 6.00 gal
All Grain

Recipe Characteristics

Recipe Gravity 1.061 OG Estimated FG 1.015 FG
Recipe Bitterness 69 IBU Alcohol by Volume 5.9%
Recipe Color 12° SRM Alcohol by Weight 4.6%

Ingredients

Quantity Grain Type Use
0.19 lb British crystal 50-60L Grain Mashed
0.50 lb Canadian honey malt Grain Mashed
0.25 lb Crystal 120L Grain Mashed
12.00 lb Maris Otter Malt Grain Mashed
Quantity Hop Type Time
2.00 oz Palisades Pellet 45 minutes
1.00 oz Palisades Pellet 15 minutes
1.00 oz Palisades Pellet 0 minutes
Quantity Misc Notes
1.00 unit American Ale US-05 Yeast Dry

Recipe Notes

Grains were actually doubled and mashed at the same time in order to pull off enough wort for two 6 gallon batches. The idea being we would have the same wort and only change the type of hop for a single hop batch.

Batch Notes

Brewed Saturday, December 15, 2007. Drill died while milling grains, had to go it by hand. Mashed in basement. Started with 8 gallons of 168 degree water, poured grains into mash tun, losing a pound or two on the ground. Mash temperature was 155 degrees. Mashed for 60 minutes, then ran off a little over 5 gallons of wort. Batch sparged with an additional 8 gallons of 180 degree water. Stirred up mash and pulled off remaining wort, so each boiling pot had a total of 7 gallons of wort.

Brought wort to a boil (45 minute boil), added 45 minute hop addition, 2 ounces of Palisades at 9.7% AA. Boiled for 30 minutes and then added 15 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Palisade. Boiled for 15 more minutes, cut the flame, and added final zero minute aroma hop addition, 1 ounce of Palisade.

Cooled wort in about 15 minutes. Poured into bucket through a mesh bowl. Pitched 1 packet of US-05 American ale dry yeast and stirred with spoon to distribute yeast and oxygenate. Placed bucket on towel on first floor, which is usually kept at 60 degrees at 8:00 PM. Fermentation had begun by 8:00 AM.

Summit IPA

Published
by
DT
on December 20, 2007
in Brewing and Recipes
. 0 Comments
Summit IPA
Recipe Summit IPA Style American IPA
Brewer DT & MM Batch 6.00 gal
All Grain

Recipe Characteristics

Recipe Gravity 1.061 OG Estimated FG 1.015 FG
Recipe Bitterness 73 IBU Alcohol by Volume 5.9%
Recipe Color 12° SRM Alcohol by Weight 4.6%

Ingredients

Quantity Grain Type Use
0.19 lb British crystal 50-60L Grain Mashed
0.50 lb Canadian honey malt Grain Mashed
0.25 lb Crystal 120L Grain Mashed
12.00 lb Maris Otter Malt Grain Mashed
Quantity Hop Type Time
1.00 oz Summit Pellet 45 minutes
1.00 oz Summit Pellet 15 minutes
1.00 oz Summit Pellet 0 minutes
Quantity Misc Notes
1.00 unit American Ale US-05 Yeast Dry

Recipe Notes

Grains were actually doubled and mashed at the same time in order to pull off enough wort for two 6 gallon batches. The idea being we would have the same wort and only change the type of hop for a single hop batch.

Batch Notes

Brewed Saturday, December 15, 2007. Drill died while milling grains, had to go it by hand. Mashed in basement. Started with 8 gallons of 168 degree water, poured grains into mash tun, losing a pound or two on the ground. Mash temperature was 155 degrees. Mashed for 60 minutes, then ran off a little over 5 gallons of wort. Batch sparged with an additional 8 gallons of 180 degree water. Stirred up mash and pulled off remaining wort, so each boiling pot had a total of 7 gallons of wort.

Brought wort to a boil (45 minute boil), added 45 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Summit at 18.1% AA. Boiled for 30 minutes and then added 15 minute hop addition, 1 ounce of Summit. Boiled for 15 more minutes, cut the flame, and added final zero minute aroma hop addition, 1 ounce of Summit.

Cooled wort in about 15 minutes. Poured into carboy using a funnel and filter. Pitched 1 packet of US-05 American ale dry yeast and used a wine degasser to distribute yeast and oxygenate. Placed carboy on towel on first floor, which is usually kept at 60 degrees at 8:00 PM. Fermentation had begun by 8:00 AM.

Take That Snow

Published
by
DT
on December 20, 2007
in Snowboarding
. 2 Comments

Yesterday I drove out west to Mike’s place. Back in April when I first found out I was probably moving, I purchased a season pass to the local mountain, Wachusett. Well last night I finally went and picked up my pass and hit the slopes. Somehow I managed to leave my boots at home, doh!, but they rent just boots for idiots like me. My board has gone unused for a couple of years now, showing a rusty edge. Oh well, no time like the present. A few runs in and no more rusty edge, ha.

The slopes remind me of Massanutten from back in my college days. Nothing too steep, nice wide turns for carving, some side off shoot trails through the woods to make things interesting, and each run has it’s ice spot. But having just received so much snow in the last week, this was an ideal time to get out and ride on a fine layer of powder. The Conifer Connection trail turned out to be my favorite.

Wachusett Trail Map

Weather was just about perfect. Temps sitting right around freezing and no real wind to speak of, with a little Captain to keep you warm. Definitely a good night, 3 hours and at the end of our last run, the ice started to come down. Managed to get home before the real heavy snow started to fall again. Couple of things I knew, but last night reinforced…my board is too long for me at 163, my bindings are XL and the straps still barely make it around my boots, and I’m a big wuss when it comes to going super fast on my board.

Anyway, gotta finish up some work so I can jet out of here. It started snowing last night at 10:00 PM and it hasn’t stopped yet. It was pretty slushy riding in this morning, but the 700×32 inverted tread tires seem to be handling it all pretty well. But it looks like I’ll be riding home in this (as shot out my office window):

Area Trails

Published
by
DT
on December 18, 2007
in Bikes and Dirt
. 3 Comments

Quite simply, the bike trails around here rock. I actually haven’t made it to a lot of the hot spots, but when you’ve got 60+ miles of trail outside the door, it gets a lot easier to not even think about jumping in the car to drive to a mountain biking hot spot. Add to that I was on injured reserve with a cracked collar bone for close to 2 months, which has cut into my riding time for sure, and you have a lack of total spots ridden…not that I’m complaining.

Two blocks from my house is an old reservoir and the area is known as the Valente trails (aka Shawsheen Cemetery trails), which has a nice little main loop around the reservoir and a few little side trails that lead to alternative loops and out to the neighboring streets. After working the Valente trails, you can jump on the street for a couple of blocks and then cut into the Private Reserve (aka PR, Land Locked Quadrant, LLQ, Paint Mine, etc.). This small piece of land is owned by the town of Burlington, but Burlington access to the land was cut off by having a six lane road (Route 3) along one side, with the other sides of the land being bordered by the towns of Lexington and Bedford. At some point people built trails and they did a good job of it as there’s probably 12 miles of trail. It’s a little like Wakefield, except you can’t see the power lines as much and there is probably 1/100th the traffic…hmm, guess it’s more like Lake Accotink if you will, with some of the more technical variety you find at Wakefield. Anyway, it’s a blast riding the PR day or night. I haven’t taken any pictures while riding there, but I found some shots posted on the NEMBA forum here (not sure if you have to register at the NEMBA forums to see those shots).

So those trails are off to one side of the house, but if you go the opposite direction you run into the Minuteman Bikeway, which is basically a shorter version of the W&OD and goes from Boston out to Bedford. I’ve mentioned the Bikeway and the dirt trail continuation of the Bikeway, called the Bay Circuit Trail (BCT) in previous posts…even put up a few photos. The BCT is your average railroad bed trail. It sees more traffic and it’s not super exciting with very little terrain or altitude change, but it’s nice to still be under the cover of trees. As a bonus there are side pockets of trails, usually looped so you can end up back on the BCT and add a couple of miles worth of trail. If you keep going out on the BCT, you finally get to more of the good stuff when you hit Concord. Not that the BCT isn’t good, but at this point it’s more of a way to get from point A (my house) to point B (the tight twisty singletrack). After the BCT, there are a couple of different sets of trails you can ride and the best thing is you can loop them together. I’m not familiar with a lot of the Concord/Acton trails, but hopefully when theres a little less snow, I’ll get a good tour of out there.

Anyway, from the end of the BCT you can loop around right and head over to Estabrook Woods (let me just say, all these names could be completely wrong, I’m new here, remember!). After that you need to jump back on the road for a little bit and then you can hit the Carlisle Town trails, which will get you to Great Brook Farm Park. There are a bunch of looped trails in Great Brook Farm Park. If I remember correctly, I’ve done Acorn loop, Stone Row, Heartbreak Ridge, and Llama trail, which puts us back in Estabrook Woods, which is the path to getting home. If you’re good or you have a guide (check, thanks Hog!), you can make it over to Punkatasset Hill, which is where I cracked my collarbone. I smooth like that.

Anyway, where was I going with this, oh yea, this is all readily available out my door. So you can see why it’s taken me so long to mount up and drive in to the Fells or over to Lynn Woods. Sometimes the hardest part is packing up the car and making the drive to the park, which for the most part I have avoided. Now the toughest part is getting out the door, as the snow is keeping me on the streets for now. I’m going to try and keep biking through the winter, at least keep up the bike commuting even if I can’t get on the trails, but I need to start looking at snowshoeing and xc skiing to see what they are all about. If you’ve got tips on stuff to look for on craigslist, drop me a comment. Also, if you grunted through this entire post, you’re a rock star…

Double up the IPA

Published
by
DT
on December 17, 2007
in Brewing
. 0 Comments

Last Saturday was a good brewing day. Mike came over after lunch and we decided to mash enough grain so we could end up with two 6 gallon batches. This would give both batches the same wort as a starting point for doing two single hopped beers. Mike would be using Palisade hops and I was going with Summit. For the most part, the recipes were exactly the same, with the exception that the Palisade hops were only 9.7% AA and the Summit were 18.1% AA. So Mike used two ounces instead of one at 45 minutes for bittering to get an IBU count closer to the Summit hopped beer.

We hit a speed bump as soon as we got underway. My drill is only 7.2V’s and it just doesn’t have the juice to power through and mill all the grain. About a third of the grain was milled before the drill just gave up the ghost, then we had to go in and do the rest by hand. Check done, 25 pounds of grain milled.

Then we proceeded to max out my 10 gallon mash tun. We spilled a little bit of grain on the floor, so instead of being 25 pounds, it probably ended up something like 24 pounds. It was filled to the brim and we had to simply lay the lid on top and hope for the best. While the grains mashed in, we headed back upstairs for some furniture installation…fun stuff, but at least our new giant cabinet in the dining room won’t be falling over anytime soon.

Back down to the mash, we drained, then batch sparged until we had 14 gallons of wort. 7 gallons went in Mike’s brew pot and 7 gallons went into mine. Brought the batches to a boil, added our 45 minute bittering hops, boiled, added out 15 minute flavor hops, boiled, cut the flame and added our zero minute aroma hops. Cooled the batches down and dumped them into the fermentation containers and added our yeast. Mike used a bucket and I used a big carboy. The batches are fermenting away as we speak and it took less than 12 hours to get underway. We’ll let these go for a few more days, then drop in the dry hops.

Here’s Mike telling us how it is after a good long brew session:

I use a pretty basic program for creating my recipes, QBrew. I like it for a few reasons, mainly because it’s free, they’ve built it for all your major platforms (win, mac, nix), and you can super easily edit the ingredient database. On top of all that, they have export functions and they actually update it, unlike ProMash. Check it out if you come up with your own recipes or you need a way to keep notes on batches. I’ll post up the two IPA recipes here in a bit.

Microphone Check

Published
by
DT
on December 17, 2007
in Life
. 2 Comments

Time to clear out the cobwebs and brush the dust off this old thing. It may have been 5 months since I last posted, but it doesn’t mean there hasn’t been anything going on, quite the opposite. Most notably, Kristin and I bought our first house. The amount of crap one accumulates year in and year out really adds up, it’s just amazing. We’ve got the process down…pick a box, unpack box, decide what gets tossed and then find a spot for what remains, breakdown box for recycling…then repeat over and over again. We moved in and started unpacking in September, yea, and now it’s December. Theres only five boxes left, one box of Simpsons Christmas Village and four boxes of crap to be sorted. The house actually looks like a house now. We can actually find things again, not to mention I’ve got my first basement since I lived in Arlington about 6 years ago. Plenty of space to hang the bikes AND hold all the brewing equipment. Kristin even has her own glass fusing area. So we moved into a new house, I’ve been learning the local bike trails, and I’ve finally started brewing again. Life is good.

Then came Winter, that’s right, with the W in caps baby. We have had a couple of flurries, nothing more than a few inches, that was until this past Thursday. The storm came on fast just after lunch and started dumping 2-3 inches an hour. When it was all said and done, we had around 10 inches of fresh powder. No worries, just gotta shovel a few times during the storm. Streets and sidewalks were plowed and clear before Friday morning rush hour. Then comes Sunday. Sunday blew through and dumped another 8-10 inches, only this time it wasn’t all powder. There was a lot of wintery mix, also known as ice, which makes the snow you gotta shovel much heavier. By the end of the weekend, there was a total of something like 18 inches of snow outside. I’m digging it, but you know it’s rough when even your dog has a tough time getting around. Check out the wall of snow, click on the pic to see Kristin’s gallery oh photos she took:

DT shovels as Buster watches

That’s not our house in the background, but theres a couple of shots of our new house in the gallery or you can check out the house gallery here with photos that were taken before we moved into it.

Saturday before the storm, M&M came over for a big brew session. No big beers were brewed, but we filled my 10 gallon mash tun with 25 pounds of grain and pulled off enough wort for two 6 gallon batches of IPA. More info on those brews in another post, but like I said, I’m brewing again and loving it.

I’m back to commuting again too. Put back together the Bianchi Pista a few days ago and rode that into work this morning. I would have ridden the Tricross fixie, but I need to press in some new bearings I just got with a new updated axle for my LeVeL hub. The Pista did it’s job, although I obviously didn’t tighten the track nuts down enough as my wheel slipped forward in the drops. Not a huge deal, just a little rubbing. Hopefully I can find a wrench around work to tighten it up before I leave. The best part was some ass in his SUV. Hate to stereotype, but damnit, there are generalizations for a reason. This overweight guy was driving his Jeep Cherokee, he was in the left lane of a two lane road and I was riding in the right most left hand turn lane. So looking down the street he came up on my right. He leaned out his window and gave the obligatory tough guy threat “Get off the road!” to which I responded with a cheerful wave “Hope that made you feel better!”. I’m in the left turn lane, so the stoplight is obviously close. About 20 feet further down the road, he no doubt was paying more attention to my cheerful waving and smiling as he blew through the red light only to come to a skidding stop in the middle of the intersection, literally 2 inches away from the crossing cars…yea he almost hit two cars. I gave him a “Nice!” and a round of applause, which he responded by cutting off the rest of traffic to peel out and continue on his fat pathetic way. Damn if that didn’t make my morning! I mean if he had hit those cars, it would have been the cherry on top. The funny part is this was actually my first real road rage encounter in New England. For the most part, people are extra careful to give you room when they pass, it’s actually quite pleasant.

Anyway, living up north is going well. Looking forward to posting some more recent updates on a couple of bike rides and the recent brewing experiments. Steve…you happy now…you lucky cab dodging bastard…