Epic fail? Habaneros are stubborn..

I am seeing a total ammount of nothing from the Habanero seeds I put into the propagator back on the 14th of February.. I know these can take some time, and of the six I put in of the first batch, I got only one.. but really, I put like eighteen seeds in this prop, and I got nothing showing right now. That's sorta sad. On the bright side, I have half of the Hot Cherries sprouting now in a cup with a damp paper towel under the lights, so I figured I'd toss the rest of my Habanero seeds into the same situation because it's looking pretty bleak otherwise. Nothing going on in the newly seeded props, but those are really brand new so far, so I'm not stressed about those yet.. check a pic of the germination cups right now though:

Hot Cherry Pepper seedlings

The fluffy stuff is rootlets, I believe..

In other news, I just took my digital thermo outside and put it on the edge of the hoop house, on the outside of the house. Here's a pic of that and the temp outside right now:

And a few hours later, I took a pick of the same thermo, that I had put inside the hoop house propped up on a cup to keep it up off the snow. Check it out:

And there it is, 55 degrees. Considerably warmer in the house than it is outside.. I'm surprised the snow isn't melting faster, for sure, though.

Oh, also found out.. the Jalapeno's I have are the Early variety, supposedly ready to roll in like 75-85 days. I've already took a chunk of that up already.. two months they've been in here!

Otherwise.. everything else is status quo. Stand by for further info..

The Brutal Truth: Savvas's Northern English Brown

This is the competitor:

Hard to tell from the photo alone, but that's a Northern English Brown, so says Savvas.. let's see about that.  ;)

Appearance: Initial appearance shows a dark brown liquid that canot be seen through at normal room lighting conditions. When jacklighted with my trusty maglight, it shows a crystal clear mahogany color thats awesome to see. Style guide wants to see dark amber to red/brown, so I'll give him that. Dinged only for no real head appearance on this beer. 2/3

Aroma: I'm getting an initial sweet caramel thing here, but in the background a high pitched sorta hoppy thing comes through. It's fleeting and get's squashed by the sweetness pretty quick, but its there. That's pretty much the definition of the NEB, so.. hey, good for you. On second glance, I'm sensing almost a microscopic roast note in here, too.. appealing. However, for style, I think it's a little heavy on the caramel and esters are readily apparent, where for style they are allowed, but should be restrained. But still, it's darned tasty..  8/12

Flavor: says hops. Mild, but apparent. A bit of a tangy flavor in here.. from the hops, nothing bad. Beer is a bit too cold right now, gotta rest this a bit and let it warm up.. I'll come back in a sec. After a sec: ah, yes! Quite fine. Nice beer. Seems to hit a lot of the right notes for this style.. I'm liking it. 16/20

Mouthfeel: I'll go medium body for this beer. It's pretty smack in the middle of 'just right'. I'm thinking it's a bit on the light side of carbonation, but I was warned about that ahead of time. Still, nothing wrong with where it's at.. could just stand a pinch more is all. Maybe that's just the high carbed American in me talking, though.. and holy crap, but am I sensing diacetyl here, or is that just me?? 3/5

Overall Impression: They say 'nutty' is the characteristic you're looking for in this beer.. I still get a more deep sweet, caramel thing here than nutty. It's still quite fine, but the nutty party is missing.. which is saying a lot, considering how nutty the brewer is. Oh snap! Still, I'll go so far as to give an 7/10 here.

That's only a 36 out of a possible 50 points, but man.. the whole seems greater than the sum of the components. I really wanna go back and re-figure the numbers to push this a bit higher, but I'm not sure that's the right thing to do. I wanna see this beer a bit less caramel-ly and a scosche more nutty, whatever that means. For a brown ale, I'm thinking it should have a bit more brown in it, rather than Red beer, you know what I'm sayin'? But I'm not an Englishman, and I guess my score will hve to stand, although I feel it should be more of a 38 than a 36. What a bastard!

Put some stuff in the props for *real*, yo..

Got some peppers in the propagators now for real.. no fooling around this time! My original test subject Jalapenos are geting way too big to fit under the lights now, along with the rest of the tiny baby plants. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with those buggers.. except my sole habanero.. that's still growing, but very slowly. Here's a pic of the setup now:

Today, I put in some extra Hot Cherry peppers, because I have so many of them and the ones on te paper towel experiment haven't done anything yet.. I also put in the *real* Jalapenos that I'll be putting out this year, the flat of Habaneros haven't popped yet, but I remember the other ones I tested on took almost 20 days to sprout, and so far isn't only been like 13 days for these ones.. and, most exciting, I put in the Fatalii seeds (well, six..) that I got with Jody at the Garden show in Hartford the other day.

I think I failed to mention that.. me and Commando Jody hit up the Hartford Gaden and Flower show the other day at the big civic center place.. it was mostly garbage and flea market crap, but there were some cool things. I forgot to bring my camera, but had I remembered, I would have taken some pics of this totally awesome self temperature regulating greenhouse thing that was on sale there. $4,200 if I remember right.. so, not cheap, but damn, it was cool. Otherwise, the only thing we walked out with was a single pack of 25 Fatalii pepper seeds that we split up between us. Fatalii's are supposed to be slightly less hot than Habaneros, but not by much. They're supposed to also have a fairly nice fruity, citrus flavor to them too, just before they knock your teeth out with heat.

Otherwise, I got nothing else. So get out of here..

Hoop house back in action..

Just a quick pic of the hoop house that I recovered today... figured I'd throw some plastic on it and set 'er back out on the bed and see what kind of heating action I could get out of the thing. I'd like to see some snow melt-age out there and start to dry up the soil a bit so I can get some early plants into the ground.. but gotta get through that 2 feet of snow stuck to the things.. bummer. Here's a shot of it:

Far..

Close

I tried something new this time and used a standard technique that a normal greenhouse assembler would have used, unlike my attempts last year.. in that I used furring strips around the edge to hold the plastic down, and hopefully this time it won't all tear up and get stupid on me. But heck, this time I'm using real MAN SIZED plastic, nto flimsy painters plastic.. this is good, think material. There's also two layers of it, cause I couldn't *quite* get one piece to entirely cover the whole house, so the plastic overlaps about 4/5ths of the other piece of plastic. That piece of red tape is where the upper-most piece of plastic ends, and I just taped it up to keep it from flapping around in the breeze. We'll see.

The whole unit was just buried under some snow and ice, and it took quite an effort to get it unstuck. I'll have to see if next year I have the foresight to not leave the damn thing out there all winter.. that was like work.

Additionally, I scored a pack of Neseed branded Hot Cherry Peppers this morning while getting some dog food.. nice! I am trying something different with these guys.. instead of just putting these straight into the propagator, I'm putting these little guys into a small plastic tupperware container on top of a damp piece of paper towel.. and whatever decides to germinate will get popped into a propagator tray afterwards. I think it's going to be more work this way than it would have been otherwise, but I wanna try this method out, as I think it will be more useful with iffy seeds that I'll plant in the future.. you know, to check viability of things and all without wondering what's going on under the dirt that you can't see.

Seedling test update..

 Just a couple pics to document progress.. not sure what I'm doing with these guys still, but still just nursing them along as space under the lights in and in the propagator allows.  The only seeds in there really truly destined for the big garden are the un-sprouted Habaneros in the propagator up front. And, probably that Hab in the clay pot there. That's become a pet now..

The whole shebang right now.. 

Had to pinch the top off of one of the basil this morning, as it was getting much taller than the other five plants. Trying to keep these going until it's warm enough to put 'em outside.

Basil

This tomato that got ejected from the game is clearly unhappy at being out of the lights and up on a tiny windowsill, but I'll be darned.. it's still alive and kicking. We'll nurse it along as best we can up there, but I really didn't have the room to keep it going under the lights. It was just way bigger than everybody else that was growing..

Roma, so sad.

Here's that tiny Habanero.. the only one of the bunch I initially planted so long ago that popped up. Goofy bugger..

Habanero

And these guys.. I might keep these after all, if they don't too big too fast before I can get them outside. It almost looks like they're staring to put out flower buds, which I don't believe it s a good sign this early in the game. Usually means they're stressed out and trying to get some seeds into the world before they croak out, but we'll keep an eye on 'em and watch what happens. 

Jalapeno's

A couple of geeky brewing graphs..

So, Jody came up the other day and we brewed up a Porter in the garage. Inspired by James Spencer and the current science experiment he's got going on over on Basic Brewing Radio (podcast..) we decided to measure a few things while doing up our brew. First, we measured the specific gravity in Brix at several points during the mash, to see how the O.G. went up, down or stayed the same. Of course we figured it would go up, sure. but I was sorta surprised by how much this went up. Here's the graph:

So, again, measurements for the mash sugars were measured in Brix for sake of simplicity, repeatability and not having to screw with the extra layer of temperature correction, since we measured on my ATC refractometer. If you do the math (ok, I'll do it for you.. ) you can see we started off at something around 23.6 Brix when we finally got the temp stabilized at the 153 degrees F we wanted. We used the pump to recirculate the mash fully before each reading, and then we just ran off some wort into a pyrex jar and took our sample from there. Then we measured at various points along the way until an hours time had passed.. and strangely, the curve still hadn't flattened, meaning that either it was just going to keep going for a bit more or maybe just take a steep nose dive in it's climb and flatten out. Who knows? An hours mash time is plenty for this kid any day of the week. The difference in the original reading and the end of the house reading is 0.014 Original Gravity points, for those of you not into the Brix/Plato thing. That's not insignificant. It loks like from the moment of mash in, to about the half hour mark, you get the most bang for the buck (time) spent.. but if you need another point or point and a quarter, spend the extra half hour in the mashtun and then start running off. It looks like only about a point and change was gained after the 30 minute mark, which translates to 0.004 O.G. points or so.. it's something to consider, I guess.

An interesting thing happened here during this brew. Now, normally, I calculate for 82% brewhouse efficiency here at Second Shift Brewing.. but I normally only do a half hour long mash, then start my sparge. The results I get are good, and I base this half hour mash time off the new info that's getting kicked around which seems to indicate the vast majority of the starches are converted by around the 20 minute mark. So, I round that off to half an hour and call it OK. The interesting thing was that we had calculated this thing for a 1.058 O.G. beer.. but in the end, we came out with 1.063 O.G. I was puzzled at first by this, because I rarely miss my mark by that much.. but apparently, this hour long mash increased my brewhouse efficiency so much, it skewed the numbers right up and off the chart for this beer. So, Jody.. that's gotta be the reason why that happened. This occurred to me in the car ride this morning after I dropped off the kids. :)

Here's another chart for you:

This one is the readings we took on the wort that was draining from the mashtun into the boil kettle. We took readings on the wort as the kettle filled up, so the Galons of Water Sparged on the left side is the amount of wort that was in the kettle when we pulled a sample from the hose as it was flowing into the kettle, and the bottom line there is the poins in Brix (labeled incorrectly as Plato.. rats!). As you can see, the tun was originally running out at nearly 25 Brix at first, but as the sparge continued, we measured about 4.8 Brix at the 10 gallon filled level.. and we finished out at 2.5 Brix when we actually had our entire pre boil volume of 13.6 gallons. This info would be useful to know if, say, you wanted to do two beers from one batch of grain.. and you could gather the first 3.0 gallons or so of super high gravity wort, add a bit of plain water for evaporation losses, and boil and add hops to that on the stove top, while grabbing the rest of the wort of lower gravity stuff and doing up a regular strength beer from that in a normal sized boil kettle. I'd do this and fill my mini keg up with barley wine for the winter and be happy with that, since I could ferment it in a standard 5 gallon glass fermenter and probably not have any overflow issues. FYI, this was a 24lb grain bill that this came from.

Wow, I'm spent! Too much long head stuff there.. good job Jody, couldn't have gathered this data without you! Speaking of Jody (the head brewer over at Blue Label Brewing) I believe he said they were offering a free beer sampler over there with your purchase of enough gas to get to his tasting room, and no more strings attached. Drop in and tell him I said hello!

NYC, sneak attack & fryathon..

So, me and the Boss headed off to NYC for a concert. Went out to see Chromeo at Terminal 5. Heck of a show, and had a great time there. This is the only decent pic I got of them, as the light show was driving the camera nuts, making it had to get a shot.. most came out black.

We also visited the USS Intrepid while there, and saw a few neat things.

This is gonna be the new controller for my automated brewery..

And this is the new kettle setup for the 40 gallon brewery.

We also hit up Grumpy's coffee and some blah place called Starbucks while walking around the next morning (we stayed the overnight at Ink48 again.. nice place!). Right after we left this Brooklyn Industries store is when we found the parking ticket on our window. Drats.. 

After we got home, we decided to celebrate with a massive fried food extravaganza with my new deep frier.. we had all sorts of things, like this bunch of onion rings, fried Hot Cherry Popper poppers and some fried dough. The poppers made me pay for everything I took from them them the next morning.

And lastly, Barbie the dog was brutally attacked and beaten up by this baby over the weekend as well. I was rooting for the baby..

Monday rolled around soon enough and Geoff and Mike came over to brew. We worked up a sweet pale ale (shocking!) after a few hours and we hope to have that on top here in the next few weeks or so. Stay tuned for that..