Wicked HLT graphs!

Did something funny today and jury-rigged up my HLT.. no switch, no safety covers, just plugged it straight into the wall and let it rip. Talk about yer' reckless!

Did this with a mostly typical strike water sized volume of water.. 10 gallons. Actually, most strike water volumes for the beers I brew are more like 8.0 to 9.5 gallons for the initial batch of strike water.. and somewhere generally in that same ballpark for the sparge water after the mash. But I figured, let's go large, right? So, I filled it up with cold water from the outdoor faucet which leveled out at 10 gallons of 58 degree water. Then, I plugged in the element and started writing down numbers and times.. I started out doing 2 minute intervals, but I got bored of that pretty quick, and moved to three minutes.. then I missed one along the way and moved to four minutes. It seemed to be doing a pretty straight temp rise anyway, based on the rough numbers in my head that I was seeing, so, whatever.. I then whipped out a handy online graphing program and plotted the 21 data points I gathered and.. lo and behold! This is what I got:

Damn straight, that's a pretty straight line. What the chart is failing to show, for some reason, is the last two points on either end. It ended up boiling at the 74 minute mark, and that's off the chart up there. The main thing to look at, however, is that I never heat stone cold water. I always heat water from the hot water tap that comes out at like, 160 degrees or so.. by the time I get it into the cold HLT and all filled up, it settles in at around the 140 F range, and we heat from there. I can't recall ever measuring exactly how long it takes propane to heat water from 140 to a typical strike water temp like 162 or so, but I'd guess somewhere in the 25-40 minute range. We're usually milling grain and shooting the bull and drinking coffee at this stage of the game anyway, so it doesn't matter much.. but according to this chart, this element will heat from about 140 to around 162 in roughly 10-12 minutes. It's about a 10 degree rise in temp every 4 minutes or so, give or take.

Oh, snap! That's fast. And this is with a 3500w element. You can imagine how quick Jeremiah's is with a 5500w element. That thing is a monster. I think 3500 is enough for me, though. :)

Brewery mods for electricity..

Just got back from the welder shop where I picked up my newly modified kettle that now has the big stainless steel nut welded into the side for the electric element to attach on to. Check the pics for some detail.

Interior view of the element coming into the keg..

Nice welding job, done by Accurate Welding of Barkhamsted. 

The next step is to gather up the appropriate parts to make the connections from the 220v wall outlet to the element, which includes the switch, the box to hold all the parts, the wire holder thingy, and the plug itself. I've already got 16 feet or so of 14 gauge three strand wire, so it's just the little pieces I've got to gather up now. I think a trip down to Lowes should pretty much do the trick. I've been talking to my electrician friend Dave E. and my other ingenious pal Jeremiah to work out the details of all these connections and how to make it safe and workable, and I think I have a plan in mind. Stay tuned for that..

Amaryllis and Spinach..

Hmm.. a bit of a slow time recently. Got some SPinach growing slow but sure out in the hoop house. Check it:

Spinach

This was taken a couple days ago, so it's a bit bigger than this now, but still small. The Arugula is almost near the zone where I'd consider almost calling it 'Baby Arugula" and eating every last leaf of it in a baby Arugula salad.. but it would literally be entirely gone if I did that.

Did some bagels up yesterday. I've had better end results, but the process this time was really nice. Here's a step by step timeline..

A large dough round

Split up into smaller rounds..

shaped and risen..

Boiling the bagels..

The best of the bunch. 

Other than that, here's a snapshot of the Amaryllis I'm grown. Again, thanks Dad. This one is a trip!

She's geting' pretty big now, and you can see where the flower is gonna form eventually. Neat stuff..

The IPA I've got downstairs that I made with Timmay is just about done doing it's thing. Should be able to keg that in a day or two and get it ready to go online.. but I'm still really looking forward to the Dubbel I made with Jeremiah that's right ahead of it in the que. Speaking of brewing, I failed to get pictures of this, but last night I went out into the shop and bored a huge hole in the side of my HLT at about the 3 gallon mark. Then, today, I brought that kettle down to the welder guy next door with instructions for where to weld in the SS nut that I got from McMAster Carr to fit in the electric element. I'm still hashing out some details with my electrician friend Dave E. from down south CT, but we'll get it figured out sooner or later. It may or may not be ready for the next brew session I do here, but the next beer I do up will most certainly be the one on Nov. 6th with the Commandos at Don's Dad's place in T-Town. Stay tunes for a million pics of that event.

A bit of a frost..

So there was a bit of a frost last night. Took some pics of the bed with the hoops on it to show, and also an update on the Garlic planting that I did the other day. Check the garlic first:

Gonna be planted in the upper bed, in the four squares right next to the end-most ones..

Holes dug for garlic bulbs, and garlic jammed in..

Those three at the top are actually Organic Elephant Garlic from the store.. just for fun

And some mesh over the top to keep the damned dog out.

Otherwise, here's some pics of the interior of the hoop house I mentioned above after the frost last night. Clearly, the basil didn't like this frost idea at all, and it's totally expired now. But everything else looks OK. Check it out..

See? Everything else is OK.. 

So, the experiment continues, minus the basil. That basil was a bit more fragile that I had anticipated. I thought for sure that, under the hoops, it would get past a minor frost like this one.. I think we only just barely touched 32-ish.. not a deep freeze by any means. Live and learn. Maybe if I'd had some thicker plastic it would have done better, but too late to find out now. ;) Next year..

'Quebec' Citra single hop brew and garlic bed prep..

Me and Timmay whipped up a single hop IPA the other day (code named 'Quebec'!) all IBU'd up with just 12.3% AA Citra hops for the duration. Here's a couple of pics of the operation in action, including a mash paddle solo by Tim, the throttling of the growler of yeast to give up the goods and the finished product in the bottle, pre-ferment. Check it:

Mash paddle solo..

Yeast wrangler, or yeast strangler?

That's 5.5 gallons of good times waiting to happen right there!

In other news, I did some work prepping the upper bed for the overwinter/garlic planting. Here's the upper bed, all llama manured up with two 10 gallon buckets worth of manure spread over the top. I spread the manure for the obvious reasons.. good, well processed organic material, with a small amount of all the right vitamins and minerals. But I also added a couple other things, including Greensand and Bone Meal. The greensand is a sandstone, which is mainly used as a soil conditioner. It helps soils with too much clay loosen up and, conversely, helps soils with too much sand stick together a bit better, so as not to be totally limp-wristed when you go to work in it. It also has trace amounts of some minerals, mostly potassium. Since the upper bed I planted used a lot of topsoil, instead of the soil-less mix I used in the lower bed, this stuff I hope will come in handy to make this stuff a little bit nicer to work with. It got a touch compacted this past year. I also added the Bone Meal as well, for the phosphorus it contains. I get most of the Nitrogen in the beds from direct application of fish emulsion, so I didn't add anything with nitrogen to the beds. Hopefully, next year wil be fantastic in comparison this this time around, with all this prep work I'm doing now. Supposedly, the overwintering of the beds with the manure and supplements is one of the best things you can do to the joint.. if you try this in the spring, the stuff hasn't broken down and added what it's could have added in that short amount of time. The compost will probably overwinter in the composter and be added in the spring as a top dressing, I'm thinking. We'll cross that bridge later.

Here's some pics of what it looks like now..

Yeah, I'm inadvertently organic.

In other news, the hoop house is still intact and functioning well. I lost a piece of tape on one of the ends,  so far, but still working well just the same. On an average 50's -ish temp day, if you stick your hand under the plastic, you can easily feel that it's 10-15 degrees warmer, and more moist inside than it is outside. I've also re-evaluated my plan with this thing and now I'm just looking to see how long I can get the plants that are in it to live into the cold months, through various degrees of frosts. The reason being, if next year I plant a bunch of lettuce and broccoli and spinach and I know the cold frame will extend the harvest up until the middle or end of November, or maybe into December, then I know I pretty much need to eat up everything inside it by that time. So, I've got a few lettuce and other things still around in there that I would really like to eat now, but I think in the name of science, I'll leave them be until I see how long they'll last inside the hoops. They sure look delicious right now, though.. hmm..

Stay tuned for the garlic bulb planting episode coming up..

Mickey's garlic and some updates...

My horseradish is *still* getting murdered by these damn cabbage worms.. *sigh*.

It's even sadder now, since this photo was taken a few days ago. Those things are ferocious out there..

The hops are also keeled over now, but that's just the normal course of business for them for this time of year. Check 'em out:

Everything else is doing much better. Stuff in the hoop house is still growing.. I've got several true leaves on all the lettuces and the arugula's now.. the radishes are up with a vengeance. The mint is also doing quite well, since I thought that plant was on it's way out for some reason. But, it's back and happier than ever now..

Also, me and the kids went on a field trip to Mickey's garlic place in New Hartford. Here's a couple shots of his greenhouses and stuff:

Kinda rustic in spots but, apparently, this guy is sort of a big thing around these parts. He's the only person I've heard of that grows big amounts of garlic around here that you can use for seed garlic, because it hasn't been treated with anything weird or chemically. I'll still probably plant some organic garlic of a different variety from the store in a plot out back, but I don't have as much hope for that as I do with this stuff from Mickey's place. I know his garlic will work just fine, because it's already acclimatized to our area and be pretty much ready to go. Speaking which, I got a hand full of these guys from him, German hard-neck White bulbs:

I got about 30 or so cloves of these guys to let loose in the beds. I'll plant 'em up next week or so, when the rain let's up a bit.. stay tuned!

Amaryllis..

I think that's how you spell it, anyway. It's a huge bulb my dad gave me the other day, and he told me to plant it in this teeny tiny little weird looking pot. But the pot is so cool, I had to take a couple shots of it to show.. check it out:

It's got a completely glazed lower section, and a half glazed upper section, so the inner pot sits inside the outer pot, which you fill with water, and then the water seeps through the wall of the inner pot and slowly waters the plant over time. Neat. Bizarre, too.. but neat.

They sure don't give much room in here for this big monster though.. damn near thought I was gonna have to chop this thing into quarters to get it in there!

That's all I got right now..