Chaos is.. over? A few beers otherwise...

This is me and Tim P. s a while back.. can't remember exactly when. Invited down for a pint or two of brew, and did up a couple commercial treat a while I was there. Tim is a collector of beers, it seems.. has a closet full of gold, and breaks one out occasionally for a special guest. That would be *me*. In this case, it looks like Sam Adams Longshot winner Mike McDole's IPA was on the list, which was a clone of Pliny the Elder, as I understand it. Amazingly hoppy, this beer was like spooning a mouthful of hop pellets into your face and chewing on them. It was a veritable MEAL of hops. Just sick! Next on the list was Sam's Imperial Pilsner.. which wasn't quite the hop bomb I remember it being the last time around.. but still pretty potent. I remember being nearly killed by the hops in this beer the first year I tried it.. so maybe they scaled it back a bit to keep everyone else alive who wasn't quite used to a thing like this? Hmm.. Last on the list, another hop monster, the Sierra Nevada "Torpedo". Also, not quite as powerful as the Longshot winner, but damned close. This is a really sweet brew. Props to Tim for the introduction. Too many of these will really kill a fellows taste buds though.. and they're pretty high alc. too. Careful kids! :)















Oh no! The Chaos Pale ale I brewed with Pete a while back, when I totally forgot I had no yeast and had to fall back on, and used the wild yeast cultured form a bottle of Oro de Calabaza is killed! Here's it's dog tag for proof.















This beer will be missed. A little strange tasting out of the chute, it really mellowed out into a beauty in it's end days.

Fortunately, this keg was replaced by the Oro de Maggie, my tribute beer to my sadly deceased dog, Maggs... A review will be forthcoming, upon it's carbonation. I just tossed it in the fridge today, so stand by for that one.

And finally, here we have the first shoots of my 2009 hop crop coming up. Hacked down last year to make way for the new deck, this year should produce something. They're in the ground, making their way towards the deck rails where I hope to shoot 'em straight up a trellis of some sort.. both to get 'em up in the air, and to shade the unshaded portion of the deck. We'll see what happens. Stand by for more pics as the year goes on...



















Now, go click my money ads, you cheapskates. I know you haven't been lately!

Bagels.. and some coop updates. But no chicks!

So, like so many other things in my life I get involved in for the most minuscule of reasons, I took up baking today. What?!? How, you ask? Well, I like the bagels at Stop and Shop. I like Dunkin' Doughnuts bagels too. But the darn things only last for about 2-3 days before they turn to solid rock, so you really can't buy a good supply of them, and I just *need* a bagel for a bagel, egg and cheese sandwich in the morning. I live for those things. So, I get to thinking.. "what's it take to make a bagel?" and then it's all downhill from there. From someone who thinks it's a challenge to get more than one food group on a plate at the same time for a meal, this is really an undertaking.

As it turns out, they're not that difficult to make, really. And hell, it involves yeast, so I'm halfway through the battle.. my beer making skillz make yeast ranching a breeze for me! A bit of flour, some salt, yeast, water, mixing and.. wait, boiling? Damn, that works for beer making too. See? Bagels are a natural progression for a home brewer after all. Then, a short trip to the oven to seal the deal and you're done. I even poppy seeded, Kosher salted, and sesame seed the things to give 'em that "everything bagel" sort of theme. I should have taken some pics, but I failed. Next time! These didn't turn out perfect, so they're really not pic worthy, but the next ones, after a short tweak to the recipe, I think might be. Then, I'll post more on the process. Can't wait till morning to try these babies out!

In other news, this is a pic of the chicken coop door thingy for the chicken ingress and egress to the outside of the cage world.















This one is a pic of the caged in portion framework that's getting framed out now.. we're getting really close now. Got one of my boyz hooking me up with some vinyl flooring for the coop floor and then we'll bolt on the roof. Still no chickens, though. I was hoping this week, but it looks like it might be next week now.. rats.

Coop Pics.. the big build, 2009!

So here are some pics of the big build so far... not complete, but we're getting close now.

This is a nest box I built from leftover scraps..















Ah! The basic frame. Started off with 5-6 chickens in mind, so I wanted like 4-5 square feet of lawn for them to have access to. So, with a max of 6 chickes, they've got a hair over 5 sq each. Perfect for an 8x4 footprint for a coop. It's like throwing down a piece of plywood on your lawn.. that's the size of 'er.















Here's the basic frame, with a floor and the pitch of the roofline I was working out at the time. It's a 6" slope from the front to the back.



















Here's the thing with three walls up, as seen from the back side. The whole box is like, 4 foot by 3.5 foot square on the floor, and 3 to 3.5 inches tall, depending on the slope of the roof. I think.



















And here's all four walls! You can just see the hinges for the side access door on the right hand side of the box here..















This is the big side access/clean out door that's on one side of the box. Only purpose is to allow me total access into the box for cleaning and whatnot that makes it necessary for me to get my whole self inside there. A small access door right behind where the nest box will be situated (yet to be determined..) will be cut in later on..



















..this is a shot of the fancy sliding coop door thingy I build, with hopes of one day also installing an automatic door opener for this box. I've seen plans for a powered window blind motor contraption hooked up to a day timer that would work..

And now this!

And back, by popular demand, this blog!

Couple things to touch on this time.. mostly, the reason for the lack of posting (Ahem!) is the continued struggle with the chicken coop build. Not so much a struggle, really.. it's going along rather well, just a bit slower than I had expected.. I'm really trying to think 13 steps ahead of these chickens, see? You know, what they're gonna need, and how building this thing in certain way, and how adding some features here and there now will make my life easier down the road.

Here's a pic of the thing so far:















So, you can see it's like a big plywood box on skids, sorta. The idea is to be able to drag it around from spot to spot on your lawn so the chickens don't tear up one spot only till it's bare.. you let 'em goof around in one spot for a few days, then when it's mostly still intact, you drag the sled/chicken tractor to another spot so they have some new bugs to chew on. While they're in the coop, of course.. if I let them out to free range forage, then they go where they want. And get eaten by whatever can catch them, unfortunately. Don't worry.. I have a sniper nest set up in the upstairs bathroom already, for just such predators. ;-)

I'll post the rest of the build in different blog posts, cause the pics are gonna be too crazy to get all in the right order right here in this one. The editor for this Blogger site isn't the best really..

The other things I wanted to mention is about double edge "safety razors", like this one here:















I have two weeks worth of shaving review for this thing now, since that's how long I've been using it. I'll mention that I started out with a regular two blade standard razor like everyone else.. then moved to an electric when I went into the Academy.. for ease of use, time savings, etc., and then got all adventurous and grabbed a straight razor and worked with that for a long time. I liked the straight razor, and still do, but it requires a lot of equipment (some expensive..) to keep cutting well.. i.e. a good leather and cloth strop, and a couple of very fine grit (read: expensive) water stones and a boatload of skill to learn, to keep them sharp. The shave is nice enough with a straight razor, but it takes practice and, unfortunately, time. More time than I want to spend when I'm in a hurry to get to work, really. You could hurt yourself if you're not careful.. It really makes you feel like a hero, though, when you can say you know how to shave with a straight razor! The thing is killer with the cool-factor. I ended up switching back to my two edge Atra after a while, and keeping some of my roots with the old school by still using a badger hair shaving brush, cake soap, and a legit shaving mug with the funny knob handle thingy to keep stuff in check.

Getting back to the double edge thing, I read about these somewhere along the line and, while buying replacement blades for my Atra in CVS, noticed how much cheaper the double edge blades were, and that got me thinking about economy and shaving and coolness again.. so, I started the hunt for a double edge handle, and thins is what I ended up with. Found in a junk shop in Morris, this is an American made (yes!) Gillette standard gold plated model. Now, having used it for a time now, I can honestly say that this device is the cats' ass. I have never been so impressed, except for maybe the vacuum pot or the Aeropress for coffee making, in a product, ever. Period. It's seriously the best shave I've ever had. You know how you use a multi-blade thing like, and the little beard hairs all just seem to get jammed up in the works and the shave suffer as a result? A straight edge doesn't ever have that problem, cause there's nowhere for the hairs to jam up. Apparently, there's also nowhere for them to jam up on a double edge, either.. you can shave your whole face, then someone else's face, and maybe someone else's after that, and you'd never have a problem with it. Except for some sort of interpersonal cross-contamination or something.. anyway, I've been using just one side of the blade so far, and there's just no degradation in the shave. No pulling, no irritation, no nothing. In fact, I thought I had the blade screwed in there wrong or the wrong blades or something, because I ran it over my face and I felt *nothing* at all.. figured I just missed the blade or whatever.. but it had shaved, and I just didn't feel a thing. And I'm using some shitty CVS brand blades right now! They're a couple bucks cheaper than the Gillette two blade units I normal get for a ten pack for my old multi-blade razor.. and there's a lot less packaging involved. I think they were $5 and change for ten, with no shopping around. I am totally a convert right now. My straight will get little use and my old Atra will get NONE. This thing is awesome. Oh, and it cost me $5 at that junk shop. :) Not bad for a thing manufactured in the USA back in 1934.

Roggen is down!

..and we're gonna give Timmay the win for that one. He was over last night and pretty much dealt the death blow on the Roggen. 5 pints at the very end of it's life and she was clear as a bell and tasting the finest. Really nice there, and then [poof!] gone. Replaced last night by the Rambler v1.2 I did up with Will S. Tried to pull a pint last night (cause I'd already primed it in the keg with a couple ounces of corn sugar..) cause I knew it was carbed, but it came out like muddy chocolate milk, all full of yeast particles. I grabbed another one this afternoon and tossed that as well, as it was like regular milk at this stage, so yeasty.. better compacted, I suspect, from the cold sit overnight, but not really drinkable.. and the third one, here:















..is still really cloudy, but I don't see any real huge particles in it. I wonder if it's gonna clear up, or stay this orangy-ish color. I've had a bit of what looks like a haze in some o my rye beers in the past, and, although this only has a single pound of rye in it, I wonder how that'll affect things. In a positive note, it's got carbonation the lies of which usually take WEEKS to settle in. So tight carb-bubble wise, it's crazy. Still tastes yeasty, but I've got a pretty good bitterness in the background, and a touch of flavor from the hops too. There's a big malt hit in the middle, and the rye, again, at just one pound, is coming through like a train. Rye is some crazy stuff.. big, big flavor impact from that grain.

In other news, here's a shot of the framework (or, some of it..) of the chicken coop I'm building here.. I spent hours on this yesterday, and some more hours today too already, and this is where I'm at so far:















Well, I'm off to put in the floor of the thing now. Went out and actually bought my first power tool today! Jigsaw. Yep. Power tool. Yay me.

Just wanted to share...

This shot was the bomb. 50/50 mix of a week old dark roasted Panama Peaberry, and a the other half of the same bean, light roasted from just a couple days ago roasting.. 15.5 grams in the basket and a whole lot of mad, phat skillz! Came together like the drink this was meant to be and 10 seconds later, it was gone. But it was really *good*. Just look at the redness in the crema on this thing.. you know that was tasty!

The Boss brought home a cardboard box about 2.5x2.5 feet square that I'm going to use for my chicken brooder when the babies get here in a couple weeks. I'd show you a picture of it, but, well.. it's just a cardboard box, and it's not that exciting. Maybe when I get the heat lamp hooked up and the wood chips and waterers in there I'll take a shot, but if you're gonna get excited about a pic of a cardboard box right now, you need to get out more often. I can tell you I need to get out more often, 'cause yeah, I was excited when I got the cardboard box yesterday and decided it was *perfect*. So, there's your litmus test.. me!

That's all men. Carry on..

Packaged up the 'Flaming Craftsman' Amber...

In a hostile beer combat zone such as this one, at Second Shift Brewery, it's really no surprise that we have so many casualties.. but we still feel each and every one, deeply. Late last night, this little guy (the Stove Top Pale Ale) kicked the bucket after putting up a pretty good effort at drinkability. For only ~2-ish gallons, it made it just over a month in battle after being suited up in a keg and put on draft line #2. She'll be missed..

Oh yeah, the '1903 Wheat' crafted on Second Shift's first ever driveway style Big Brew went up on tap line #2 in the above-mentioned dearly departed beer's place... I'll give 'er a week to carb up and report back on the thing.

I'll also say right up front here, just so you're prepared for the tough news when it comes, that the Roggenbier really can't have all that much left in 'er either.. she's marked down as 42 pints from the log keg she's in now, so there can't be much hope for surviving the weekend, I'm afraid.

Speaking of dead kegs, there's a shot of the main suspect now (seen below). Cause with 'er guard down perusing the battle hymn song list, no less. Also in this photo, a shot of the fellow with whom the Rambler v1.2/Flaming Craftsman Amber Ale was created with. As you can see by the strained look on his face, and the death grip he has on that karaoke microphone, the Stove Top pale ale at least put up a good fight and did some damage to one of his assailants before going down for the count!



In a follow up to the brew day, Will came back for a beer packaging extravaganza. His half of the bounty was packaged up into 54 brown bottles and sent off for a weeks sleep before coming out to play. Things went off without a hitch during the bottling process and I think he's gonna be good to go with those little guys. There was a fair amount of some sort of hazy/yeast in suspension that irritated me a bit, but hopefully a few days in the fridge after bottle conditioning will flocculate those guys out.

Also of note, last night me and Will opened up a small bottle of a Cantillion Kriek he brought over.. and I'll say, it's damn near as powerfully sour as the regular non-cherry version. It hurt on the first sip, and then evolved quickly into the beer I love so much. Will, on the other hand, made a hell of a strange face, and pulled the rip-cord sooner than later. Something about "churning in my guts" or whatnot. Sorta resembled Jody's intro to big time sour, if memory serves, 'cept Jody claimed he tasted burned rubber instead..

That's all for now. Go click the money links on the right side there, you cheapskates!