The Covert Family Website

Ok.  I’ve always been a bit of a science fiction fan.  Ever since I saw the holodeck, Data, and the replicator of Star Trek, TNG, I’ve been a closet advocate of good sci-fi tv shows.  They fuel the imagination and let us dream out of our implementational design constraints.

About a year ago I ran across one of the best sci-fi shows ever: Firefly.  The show is built along the well tested (star wars) theme of space cowboys, but surprisingly, isn’t corny, and is well made.

But, like all good television programming, it couldn’t last.  It only made it for 13 shows.  You can, and I highly recommend you do so, pick it up on netflix.  Time well spent letting your left brain take a nap, while you and your right brain go adventuring.

Don’t forget to bring your moleskine with you for any anti-matter injectors your might dream up.

Not sure if anyone out there is much of a Widespread Panic fan or not, but I recently found one of their greatest live albums on iTunes.  It’s called Light Fuse, Get Away, and it’s 2.4 hours of pure jam, southern rock bliss.  At $17, it’s a bit more than your average $9.90 iTunes album, but did I mention it’s a live 2.4 hours?

Anyways, go head on over and have a listen.  It’s not their absolute best album (that would be Everyday), but the improvisational riffs are awfully hard to beat.

About 2 months ago, I was garage sale’ing with the family and came across a “Mr. Beer” kit for $5.  I’d been contemplating brewing my own beer for a few years, but had always been a little intimidated at the expected complexity.  Well, for $5, you really can’t go wrong.

So, I diligently followed the instructions.  Seemed easy enough.  Bring about 1.5 gals of water to boil, add in the “Booster” pack, then the small can of pre-hopped liquid malt-extract.  Stir off heat.  Add to the cheesy, small plastic keg-looking container.  Fill the rest with water to the 3 gal. mark.  Sprinkle in potentially ancient dry yeast packet and stir.  Surprisingly, it worked.  After about 1 day, my wort (unfermented beer, pronounced “wert”) started to bubble and ferment.  But after bottling and conditioning for about 3 weeks, I was a little disappointed at the cidery taste and bland flavor. I wasn’t TRYING to make cider.

Luckily, I have a friend at work, Joe Bodnar, who stared doing the homebrew thing a few years ahead of me.  After fessing up to the Mr. Beer shenanigans (insert disdainful “hurumph!” here), I started getting some good pointers on what probably went wrong.

Turns out that using mostly sugar (which the “booster” pack mostly is, along with some malto-dextrin) does not a good beer, make.  Sugar should only be used for priming (adding a bit to the bottles before bottling to add carbonation), and not to add to the primary fermentation stage.  Guess most of the good beer flavor and complexity comes from the direct fermentation of the natural sugars present in the malted barley.

So I ended up buying a real starter beer kit ($99) at the local home-brew store.  It included:

• two large 6 gal. plastic buckets - with one lid
• a spigot - for the second, priming bucket
• siphon - to get the beer to the priming bucket undisturbed
• some tubing - see above
• 48 brown glass beer bottles
• bottle capper and caps
• Complete “Brewer’s Best” beer starter kit - Irish Stout variety
• White Lab’s Irish Ale liquid yeast bottle - strict instructions here to keep refrigerated

So last Friday, I invited my friend Matt over and we set to work.  Starting about 9:30, we finished putting the seal on the primary fermenter at 1:30 in the morning.

The Brewer’s Best Irish Stout kit included:

• 2 3.3 lb Cans of unhopped Malt Extract
• 3 different packs of steeping grains
• 2 different packs of hops - one big one to add at the start of the boil, and another ‘finishing’ hops to added 5 minutes before it’s done
• 1 dry little foil pack of yeast - didn’t use, as my starter kit came with the White Lab’s liquid Irish Ale yeast
• Malto Dextrin - Non-fermentable, but adds body and contributes to a good head on the beer
• 2 muslin grain bags

Instructions that came with the kit included here.

It’s wasn’t that hard, and truth-be-told, wasn’t all the different from the Mr. Beer kit.  There was an added step at the beginning where I had to steep the grains (in two little sock bags) for 20 minutes at 160 F.  Removed grain bags, added malt extract (liquid), first bag of hops, and the malto-dextrin.  Boiled (roiling) for 60 minutes.  5 minutes before the 60 minute boil was over, I then added last little bag of hops.  These are called ‘finishing’ hops; more useful for aromatics.  The ones I added at the beginning are referred to as ‘bittering’ hops.

One interesting step here, was the instruction to cool down the wort rapidly.  Rapid, huh?  Okaaayyy….  I put the big stock pot I bought at K-Mart in the sink with about 2 bags of ice and waited.  And waited.  This took almost a whole hour in and of itself.

When it got down to about 80 F., I dumped it into my big 6 gallon primary fermentation pail.  It was about 1.7 gal of thick black syrupy (sp?) liquid at this point.  Filled the rest of the pail with plain tap water up to the 5 gallon mark.

Measured to “original gravity” [1.53], sealed the lid and stuck in the little airlock.

Now it’s happily bubbling away in my basement.  Should turn out a lot better than the first two batches.

On a side note, I found a great little Mac OS X program to help me track all of the details (ingredients, temperatures, boiling durations, etc): BeerAlchemy.  Designed quite well, and stores all the possible information I’d need.  For me it makes more sense than keeping a brewing log book.  Should be easy enough to track my progress.

2 weeks now until I get to prime and bottle.  I’ll try and take some pictures along the way.  Click the “read more” for some good links.

Over at the Bacchanal, I have created a new webpage for my on-going fight against hunger in America. It is here.  You can help by making a donation to this cause. I have set up a Paypal donations site to accept payments. I am suggesting a donation of $25 dollars but please give whatever you feel can. All donations will go to the Maryland Food Bank. If you would like to donate to the food bank in your area, please do so. I won’t be offended.  LOL!

Remember, every $1 donation buys 7 meals.  That means your $25 donation will provide 175 meals for those who need it.  Thank you so much. 

I’ve been thinking of trying to get my hands on a bottle of Absinthe.  I’d read about it before it sounded interesting.  Here are a few articles possibly worth reading.

http://www.absintheonline.com/acatalog/news.html

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.11/absinthe.html

http://www.bestofneworleans.com/dispatch/2002-12-17/cover_story.html

I subscribed to a neat email mailing list a bit ago called ”A Phrase A Week”.  As it sounds, each week this website sends you the historical story behind some common phrase.  Just the kinds of etymological anecdotes I love.  Well this week’s phrase was “Riot Act”.  Here’s a snippet from the email.  If you dig this kind of thing, be sure to sign up.

Since the early 19th century we have used ‘read the riot act’ as a figurative phrase to describe attempts to calm groups of rowdies - along the same lines as ‘you noisy louts, don’t you know there are people in here trying to sleep?’. It wasn’t always so. Had we been ‘reading the riot act’ in 1715 we would have noticed capital letters. At that date there was a real Riot Act and it was frequently read in public.

While writing this short blurb, I also ran across what’s probably another good reference: The Online Etymology Dictionary.  Isn’t the internet great sometimes.

         - Jake

Please support your local food banks.

Here’s a neat little Sunday afternoon project for ya.  Build your own paper pin-hole camera.

Dirkon - The Paper Camera [pinhole.cz]