You are currently browsing the Uncategorized category.
I doubt that it’s even possible for anyone to be a regular visitor of this site and not have heard of the travel blog I’ve been pimping on Facebook, but here’s the address anyway: 2guys1trip.wordpress.com
Danny and I are making good on our promise to take the whole world on vacation with us, so make it worth our while and check it out.
A little more than a month ago I saw the Mr. Beer Premium Home Brew Kit on sale at Woot! for $20, about half what it typically sells for in stores when they pack the shelves with them around Christmas time. I’ve been curious for a while about home-brewing as a hobby so bought it on impulse without even really knowing what goes into beer making.
Mr. Beer makes brewing a fairly simple process by selling malt extracts chosen for their flavor profiles in the exact proportions you need to make beer in the 2 gallon fermenter that comes with the kit. There are plenty of flavors to choose from, lots of ways you can combine them, and you are free to add any other fermentable sugars or aromatics, or purchase different strains of yeast if you want to enhance the recipes. So it saves a lot of work, extracting sugars from gains, etc., but there is still plenty of room to be creative.
Anyway, I took the beer mix that came with the kit - the West Coast Pale Ale, and to make it interesting, I pureed three small jars of Strawberries and added it to the mix. If you add fruit, you are supposed to use pasteurized fruit from jars or cans to assure that you aren’t adding any foreign bacteria into the fermenter. It turns out that about 75% of the work that goes into making beer is sanitizing everything that comes into contact with your beer to prevent it from becoming a breeding ground for various non-tasty bacteria strains.
Sprinkle in the yeast that comes along with the mix, and stick the whole mess in a closet somewhere while the yeast colony converts the sugar into alcohol.
After about 10 days I gave it a taste - and it tasted like hot flat beer. That’s good, it means its done its initial fermentation. The next step is to carbonate the beer. This requires adding more sugar and sealing it into its final serving bottles to trap the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation. Here’s where it gets a little more complicated. I could have spooned table sugar into the 24oz plastic bottles that Mr. Beer came with…but the pros prefer corn sugar and beer drinkers in general prefer to have it served to them in a glass long neck.
So before my first beer, which I call Strawberry Alice, was ready for bottling, I made a trip to the homebrew store for some dextrose and some more bottling equipment, I picked up another Mr. Beer kit from a seller on Craigslist, and I ordered more beer ingredients from mrbeer.com. So my beer making operation has expanded somewhat and now looks something like this…
So after bottling Stawberry Alice (a process that involved collecting bottles from parties like a bag lady and the purchase of bottle-capper that cost as much as the entire Mr. Beer Kit), it sat in the closet for another two weeks. I took one out to cool it down and on the same day started my second brew.
This one has no fruit, but I did add brown sugar to the wort, and am adding hops (pictured below) to enhance the flavor.
So my second, as yet unnamed brew is bubbling in my bedroom closet, and Strawberry Alice is conditioning in the fridge. During the conditioning phase, the beer gains clarity and complexity as it ages in the refrigerator, but of course I took one out to try it as soon as it was cold.
And its good. It’s light and very drinkable with a gentle fruit flavor and most importantly - bubbles, which was the part I worried about most. The flavor ought to improve over the next few months so it ought to make a great summer beverage.
So you should come by for a cold one this summer because there isn’t going to be any shortage of beer in my fridge. I’m honestly more interested in making it than in drinking it in large quantities. Does anyone out there have an excess of meat? Maybe we should plan a barbecue.
Tonight is my last night working as an assistant editor on Bridezillas, and if I have learned one thing during my short stay it is that this show is produced and edited in the creepiest building to be alone in at night in the whole of Los Angeles. In the nine days I was here I heard multiple stories about how this building was once a hospital, how it once housed the screening room where Howard Hughes locked himself up and started peeing in milk jars, how there may or may not be a tunnel underneath of it built by bootleggers during prohibition, and how the woman who comes in at night to clean carries a bible to ward off mischievous spirits that would otherwise knock over her vacuum cleaner. I was here by myself between 2 and 4am a couple times and did not relish the experience.
So that’s probably the worst thing about my last two weeks. The BEST thing about where I’ve been working (aside from several very cool people, some of whom forced me to do karaoke, which is something I swore I would never do, and to a terrible song no less, but who were very supportive at least), the BEST thing, is this framed fucking cereal in the kitchen.
It displays 12 cereal pieces, their manufacturer, and the year they were introduced, and I would fight a dragon to have one of these in my kitchen, or oddly enough in my bathroom. Here’s a closer look.
Kix has been around since 1937. Who knew?
While I’m on the subject of cereal, I was breakfast shopping the other day and saw this incredibly dubious claim on a box of Lucky Charms.
I searched the box for some legalese that said something like “these marshmallows do not grant extrodinary access to the flow of time,” but didn’t find it.
I love time travel. LOVE IT. But have time travel stories become so mainstream that kids are thinking about it while they eat breakfast? Thanks, I suppose, is due to Heroes which features mostly entertaining but laughably inconsistent and nonsensical time travel story arcs and Lost which features time travel story arcs that are remarkably logical and consistent at the cost of staying true to the characters and draining the show of any dramatic tension. Someone needs to do righteous time travel fit for public consumption, or just let the nerds have it back.
Wow, I took it there didn’t I. Until next time.