Strange Brew

A couple of months ago Groupon had a deal for a starter home brewing kit.  As I have learned more and more about beers, the process of creating my own beers has intrigued me.  A couple of the guys from Beer Club brew and some of their beers are really good. So I bought the kit and selected the Irish Stout as my first beer.

As with any brewery, the first thing to do is select a name. After sitting in my favorite pub with Laura one night, we came up with the name Fartlek Brewing. It combines two things I like, beer and running.  You can follow it on Twitter or Untappd. A couple of names that were rejected. Brains, Beer and Boobs and Sizzletits.

Thanks to my friend's daughter who is a good artist, I also have a logo. I may do some tweeking on the text/name part but it looks pretty good.

Last week, I finally got around to actually doing the brewing.

The directions provided in the kit were a bit vague at times. I found I needed a few things that were not provided. The big one being a thermometer. Hitting specific temperatures at points is critical.

The raw ingredients

Next I took some warm water and mixed in the dry yeast. It had to sit for awhile to starting working.

The yeast

Next you crush the grains and put them in a muslin bag and steep them in almost boiling water for about 30 minutes. This is where having a thermometer would have been handy. You were to keep the temp about 155*

Steeping the wort

Next you add the malt extract to the wort. This is really thick, like molasses. You have to stir it constantly until the malt is dissolved or it can burn.

Malt has been added to the wort

After that you bring it to a low boil for about an hour. You need to add the first batch of hops at this time. The hops I used looked like little rabbit food pellets. They dissolve in the water. You have to stir it a lot at this point as well to keep the wort from boiling over when adding the hops.

Wort with hops added

Once the boiling is almost done, I added the second set of hops. Lots of stirring again.

Then comes the cooling of the wort. You need to bring the temperature from boiling to about 80* as quickly as possible to avoid contamination of the wort. I used an ice bath. Another home brewer puts the ice cubes right in the wort. I may invest in a wort chiller if I decide to keep brewing. The chiller hooks up to the sink and you run cold water thru copper tubing that is placed inside the boil pot.

Chilling the wort

After that you put the wort in the primary fermentation. Basically a 6.5 gallon bucket. You fill it with water to the 5 gallon mark and stir the crap out of it to get lots of air into the wort. Oxygen is what the yeast needs to do its job. I got a good arm workout in. Here is where I may upgrade again and get an aquarium pump and use that to add oxygen.

Fermentation bucket

I then put the lid on it, put the airlock in the hole and put it downstairs.

A couple days later a guy asked how it was going. Was I seeing lots of action? I went downstairs and looked. Nothing. Crap! What is going on? After a pow wow with several tweeps, it was decided that the basement was too cold and it need to be warmer for the yeast to work. Thanks Tom for all your help and advice! I stopped at the home brew store to pick up a packet of yeast in case it was needed. Once I moved it into the spare bedroom, I gave it a few minutes of good swirling and waited.

By the next day when I came home, it had warmed up enough to get the yeast working again and I had bubbles!! The fermentation process was working!

I now have to wait for the bubbles to stop and take some gravity readings. One the reading are the same for three days in a row, I can move it into the secondary fermentation bucket where it will hang out for about another week or so.  Once again this is where the directions were a bit vague.No real time frames were provided.

After that I bottle it up and it conditions and carbonates in the bottles for about a month.
I will be posting more pics and updates as the process moves forward.

Garbage Day

Today is garbage day in the neighborhood. I am fascinated by the amount of garbage my neighbors generate.

Most weeks I have about five newspaper baggies of dog poo and a Pick N Save bag of garbage in my cart. Maybe if it was a big week, I will have another bag. Throw in the monthly furnace filter and that is about it. Some people will two or three carts of stuff. What do people buy and use that they generate that much stuff? I rarely eat fast or take out food so that is alot of waste I don't generate. I recycle everything I can.

Puzzling, I tell you....

Martin Luther King Jr Day

 Today is Martin Luther King Jr.Day. I thought I would share a couple of photos I took when I was in Washington DC in October. It was right after the memorial was dedicated. At night is was really a moving and beautiful memorial.

New Challenges

I am still here. I survived Vegas, thanks goodness. I still need to put a recap of that together but am lazy.

Welcome to 2012.

As I look back on 2011, I had lots of great experiences and new adventures. I traveled across the country from Florida to California. Philly and Washington DC to Vegas. I met some amazing new people that I'm proud to call friends.

I started a run streak on Thanksgiving. My goal was to run at least one mile every day from Thanksgiving thru the end of the year. I accomplished this goal. I was a bit nervous about how I would do after running a half marathon in Vegas but I think getting up early the next morning and running with Annie helped my legs recover quicker. I probably would have kept going but the weather turned crappy and running outside was miserable. I have a gym membership but hate, hate, hate running on treadmills. I feel like if I run at the Pettit, I need to get in more miles and some days, I just don't have time to block out an hour or more for running.

This year I am once again looking for new challenges.

So I decided to sign up for Ragnar. What is Ragnar, you ask? You can see all the fun details here.  But it is a 200 mile relay run between Madison, WI and Chicago, IL in early June.There are 12 runners in a group and we rotate running legs. We run day into night and back into day again. Some Team Challenge friends did it last year and talked about how crazy fun it was, so I was talking with someone and we both said "What the Hell, Let's go for it" So I mailed off my race entry fee to the team captain and proceeded to freak out.

I am also trying to keep running and staying active so I have been signing up for other races as well. I am doing the Samson Stomp at the Milwaukee County Zoo in a little over a week. The following weekend I'm part of a marathon relay at the Pettit Ice Center. This is a team of four people who have to run a total of 96 laps around the track. We still have no strategy (or maybe that is our strategy).

After that, I have no idea. I would like to run at least a race each month. 5k and 10k are preferred but am thinking about heading back to Napa with Team Challenge again for another half marathon.

So what new challenges should I embark on for 2012?

Viva Las Vegas

Only a few more days till I leave for Vegas. I'm really looking forward to running in Vegas half marathon with Team Challenge again. This year it will be at night under all the lights of the Vegas strip. 

I can't believe how fast this season has gone by. 14 weeks ago, I was just meeting my new group of mentees, assuring them that they  A.) won't die and B.) can raise a ton of money for Team  Challenge and the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation. I am so proud of them and how they have done such a good job with their training and fundraising.

I am a bit worried about how to prepare for the race. With it starting at 5:30 pm, it is much different than I'm used to. Trying to figure out when and how to eat and drink. I don't want to have to stop and pee or be not hydrated enough.  I was planning the run out a bit and was happy to see that there were 8 water/GU stops along the course. That means I won't have to carry any water with me.  Yeah!!!

I was a bit disappointed to see that Steel Panther won't be playing at the House of Blues or GVR this year.  It was a blast seeing them last year. I just may make the trip to Chicago to go see them at the end of the month. I still have three vacation days to schedule.

Also looking forward to a few places for beers. It is nice that the Burger Bar is in our hotel. I can stumble back to the room.  I'm hoping that we can hit up another place or two after the race on Sunday.

Stay tuned for race updates next week!

Cranky

For the past couple of weeks it seems like I have been more cranky than usual.  I have less tolerance for people. It seems like everything is just irritating me. Neighbors who insist on parking on top of the pile of leaves in front of my house and then the city doesn't pick them up. Co-workers who change things mid stream or give us crap data and then when we do what they gave us are not happy because it is crap. People in stores who stop in the middle of an aisle and give you a dirty look when you say "Excuse me" when trying to get around them.

I'm blaming it on the lack of sunlight.  I'm leaving work and it is dark outside and by time I get home it is dark outside. And the cold. I hate cold weather. Give me 90's any day over the 30's.

I'm walking the dogs in the dark at the park. I'm not overly fond of this because of the deer and coyotes that roam the area. More so the coyotes.

By time I get back from walking the dogs I don't feel like working out so I put my lounge pants on, eat dinner and snuggle with the puppies on the couch. Some nights I feel like I could go to bed by 7 pm. 

I'm hoping my trip to Vegas will help cure this grumpyness a bit. If not, it will be a long winter.

I've also been looking at some vacation options for Jan/Feb. I would like to go back to Mexico. The weather and scenery were beautiful. The resort was fantastic.

So who's up for a tropical vacation?

One of Those Days

Today at work was just one of those days where I wonder how anything ever gets done there.

I have been working on a small project of documenting several processes that our group performs.  The one I started yesterday involved going to a vendor website, downloading some updated files, unzipping the files and repackaging the files that are needed by our system. We then move these smaller file packages to various servers depending on the package type.  Because of how we do our development work, this mean putting the files out in four different environments.  Development, IT Testing (we test how good our development is), UAT (where we let our users do testing) and production. I figured this would take me a day to perform the action and write up the processes.

That came to a screeching halt.  Because this is a fairly new process that was implemented about eight months ago there have only been two updates to this area.

It turns out that each of our four environments are set up differently.  Not good.  They should all be the same.  How else can you expect something that you developed to work properly if, as you migrate it up the chain to production, everything is different? You can't.

So at 2:30 this afternoon, I pull together two of the people who worked on this previously.  No one knew why everything was different.  The guy who did most of this work went to another area shortly after this was implemented.

Now it is my mess to clean up.  We have to get each of the environments look identical.  That means trying to figure out what they did in production and working backward to replicate it.  This means making server changes, database changes code changes and who knows what other changes.

This may now consume the rest of the month if not longer for me.  I don't mind it, as I am learning lots of new stuff but I hate going back and cleaning up other people's messes that they were too lazy or incompetent to do right the first time.

It also meant that I didn't get out of work until almost five and hit some crappy traffic on the way home.  It took me an hour to get home and I had to walk the dogs in the dark.  That made no one happy.