Ramble

[degringolade]

Fishing in Central Oregon

05/02/20

To balance yesterday’s excessive drive, today is a stay at home day, gonna bake some bread, gonna brew some beer, going to spend more time thinking.

Today’s beer is the first of several batches to work out the long-term methodology for brewing in the post-Rona world. So first thing that you do is take your trusty 4-gallon, purchased from WalMart pot and add approximately three pounds of liquid malt extract and approx. two pounds of dextrose. Fill up the teapot and bring the water to a boil (approximately three-quarters of a gallon) and use the boiling water to bring all the dextrose and the liquid malt extract into solution. Now stick the pot under the faucet and fill to around three-quarters full. Put it on the burner on medium low and begin the temperature ramp.

This batch is starting out with a specific gravity of around 1.072

I tossed in about a third pound of dark crystal malt for the non-fermentable sugars and the yummy mouthfeel and head. These went in early. I will fish them out around 155 F.

Let’s talk about the temperature ramp. I use an old electric range to brew with. It came with the apartment. I tend to not be in a hurry when I brew. It is a baking/cooking/cleaning/choring thing. One of the things that I think will be going away for good is the idea of the weekend being only for recreation because your life sucks. So brew and bake and clean and do chores on one of the weekend days. You will get stuff done and your place will be a place worth staying in. If you think of it as a burden, it will be. If you think about it as a part of a good life, you will be surprised how content it will make you.

Back to the temperature ramp. I go slow at medium-low because that way the bottom of the pot doesn’t burn and give your beer a nasty taste. I also use the slow ramp to steep the grains and kinda cook them a bit so that the remainder can be used in cookies for fiber and texture.

When the mix hits 160 F, I full out the bag of grains and let them drain. Today they are going into a peanut butter-coconut-chocolate chip concoction. I would give you the recipe, but I just made it up and there you go. They taste good.

30 grams of AA=5.7 Cascade hops go into the boil for 50 minutes. 15 grams of the same goes in at 50 minutes and boil for another 10 minutes with the initial. Turn the heat off, pull the hop bags and wait for tomorrow morning to transfer to fermenter.

05/03/20

Woke up this AM and got the laundry into the washing machines. Then spent time searching around for something that will give me a clue as which way to jump. Alas, there is nothing. So I sat down quietly at the kitchen table and started writing while the eldest slept. When he shows signs of life, I will be doing the transfer of yesterday’s wert to the fermenter. I will also work through the process for baking bread in light of yesterday’s debacle.

The debacle yesterday consisted of not being careful about the heat of the proofing area. Since I was baking cookies, I forget that the area around the stove gets warmer than is good for the process. Well, after a four hour initial rise and a four hour final rise, the crust of the bread stuck to the towel in the proofing bowl. Ripped the crust right off the loaf. So the gasses that would normally rise escaped instead and I have a flattish cracker, more reminiscent of a Norwegian rye cracker that the rye bread that I was attempting. Sigh. But truth be told, I learned something, and next time will be closer to the mark.

Screed

Mostly this whole piece today is a ramble. Sorry about that, but life is like that sometime. I mostly wanted to say that we are in a holding pattern until we figure out what is actually going on.

The Rona is still an unknown. There are any number of petty Cassandras out there who are trying to foist their view of the future off as the undiluted truth. But no one knows. I am and have been a heretic, I walked away from the world of scientific truth a long while ago because the “experts” that everyone is looking to for solutions are really not that correct that often when it comes to a problem that lies outside of their narrow field of research. Virologists see things one way, epidemiologists see things another way, primary practice docs see things another way, ER doc’s see things yet another.

That doesn’t even take in the political and economic views of the problem. How did Sweden really do? Is Italy’s lockdown really that effective? The data is very subjective and what is read about things usually have a heavy dose of spin.

I am coming more and more to the conclusion that the is thing is fractal in nature. Looking at it at a high level gives you a different picture than looking at its lower levels. The lower levels give a lot of information, but no idea of the interconnections. The higher levels give you a big picture but don’t really allow you to change that much with fixes.

We have a while before we understand what is happening. What we are seeing now is a super-big discussion concerning risk management. What risks are acceptable and to who. Mostly is seems that the Proles are being sacrificed for Bougie safety. Should be nothing but fun while this thing works its way through the process.