Atomic Nerds

Ah, the weekend. That glorious time when after five long days doing pointless drudgery for a company openly hostile to you, you get to take a breath, relax, and enjoy your own thing.

And then, that two second period is over and your ass better get back to work because you only have 48 short hours to cram in about 100 hours of work on the house and projects there in.

The fence is reasonably patched (and I’m looking into some electric fun and those Hurriquake nails, thanks to commenter tips), the house is at least a vague approximation of clean, but the important thing is the beer is now in bottles.

Random Protip: About a cup of ammonia in a sink full of water will dissolve the glue on just about any beer bottle label you have around. Some (Sierra Nevada, for instance) just fell right off after 10 minutes. Others (Sam Adams) took a little scrubbing to get residue off. The odd part is the label from Santa Fe Brewery sat in that bath for the better part of an hour and barely even acted wet. Go figure.

Anyway, this batch of IPA represented my first go-round with dry hopping. For those not familiar, that’s the process of adding more hops to the already-fermenting beer for an extra aroma boost (and some more hop flavor, but mostly aroma) so the fragrant oils never come in contact with boiling water/wort that could break ‘em up. I tell you, an ounce and a half does not sound like a large quantity of hops, but they formed a cap about an inch and a half thick over the top of the beer in the secondary fermenter. Light product means high volume, and now it looks like a horse threw up in my trash can, because damn if I’m stopping up the plumbing by trusting the garbage disposal to chop that much leaf up fine enough. The process seems to have worked though, because the un-carbonated beer tasted pretty damn respectable already. Not as complex as some of the bigger name IPAs, but as the first attempt at an IPA after getting a little bit of a clue about what I’m doing, I think it’ll turn out pretty well once it has some time in the bottles and a cooler than ambient serving status.

Tomorrow: Chainsaws, paintbrushes, wrenches, insulation, fish tapes, and wondering why the hell it’s getting dark so early, I’ve only been out here for an hour or so it can’t be… oh. Oh damn. When did it get to be 9?

Posted Booze and Fine Hooch, homestead |