Unlucky at cards

...lucky in beer?

Last night's debut of the F&H hospitality suite as a poker venue was a critical success, if not a financial one. Aside from the tragic unavailability of Geordie Ale due to pipelining issues, a good time was had by all. I for one lost my shirt by starting out with an ill-advised high dollar first hand, but Tommy (who was filling in for Greg thanks to Northwest Airlines) managed to squeeze out a little profit.

The big winner on the night was the 090601 Coldwater 420, which was the hit of the engagement. (I was drinking the Half Wit, which both described and explained my performance in the game.) The Half Wit has mellowed a little in the week since kegging and it's much smoother than it was over the Fourth.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from all this. First, as the wise man once said, if you can't figure out who the sucker is at the poker table, it's you. Second, and perhaps of more relevance to the subject of this blog, the beer gets better with time. I have to recognize that while the purpose of Fork and Hay is to provide something to drink, it needs to be something worth drinking, and if that means I need to leave it to age another week or two before tapping I need to plan that into the schedule and build up a buffer of WIP inventory to suit. It could mean that I need to move on up to ten gallon batches for some formulations.

RIP 090602 Geordie Ale

The worst sound in the world is the sound of CO2 ejecting foam from the tap instead of beer.

Looking to another brew day this weekend to replenish the Geordie pipeline. Now that I have two batches of this recipe under my belt, I think I will be better able to judge the results of managing the process more closely. The keyword this time is volume - I'm going to take special care to hit the volume targets for sparge and boil, and to keep the boil up until I am measurably near the 5 gallon mark. I want to see if there's a perceptible difference in the resulting gravity or beer quality.

Looking at the calendar, if I get this one brewed Saturday (the 11th), it will likely be in primary a long time due to upcoming travel. It could conceivably be in primary until the 25th. If so, I will probably keg it at that time without going to secondary. Depending on how tired I am when I get back on the 24th I might do some gelatin fining that night, but I'm not sure that it was required even with the last batch, which was pretty clear already when I moved it to the secondary.

On one hand, this violates the "only change one thing at a time" principle, but on the other hand, I should have been watching the water volume close already, so it's not like that in itself is a process change. The real change will be the 14 day primary only ferment and the omission of the gelatin. I have come to appreciate the one step force carb approach and the way it shaves a week off the schedule.

NFHR: Next year, one for the thumb

Amy won the Indian Springs Village dessert contest again today, for her fourth consecutive victory. She retired the Key Lime Torte this year in favor of a new cake, a piña colada flavored cake she dubbed the "Lotta Colada." She really expected Scotty to win with his Banana Pudding Cake (which I agree was really good, and which was in fact the first dessert eradicated by the good citizens of ISV), but somehow she was selected first place once again. My speculation is that she has attained "Robert Trent Jones" status, in that when her name goes on something it's an automatic contender regardless of quality. (No slight intended to Robert Trent Jones, of course.)

Kegerator, Revision 0

Yesterday I turned the ad-hoc arrangement in the keg chiller into the first step toward a real kegerator by installing the collar I have been building this week.

People build "collars" to extend the interior depth of a chest freezer and to provide a convenient place to mount taps and other hardware without drilling holes in the freezer body or lid. There are lots of examples of kegerator collar projects available. I drew inspiration from many of them, but I won't note any by name because I don't want to tarnish their reputations by associating them with this hack job.

The collar is made of 2x6's which I miter-cut at the corners. Needless to say I did this poorly, but I was mostly able to fill the resulting gaps with wood putty so it's less obvious. I used screws and glue at the corners and also installed some corner braces on the inside, so it's pretty rigid structurally. I painted it with two coats of Kilz primer (I like white, you know) and I applied some foam weatherstripping to the bottom to insulate the connection between the wood and the freezer.



I removed the lid from the freezer body and attached it to the collar. I removed the hinges from both the lid and the body, but I realized afterward that there was no reason to disconnect them from the lid, since they go right back on in the same place. Nota bene: one of those hinges has a spring. You should put a nail in the holes on either side of the joint to keep the spring from violently retracting when you undo the mounting screws. It hurts. Also, it's a bit of a challenge to get the hinge straightened out again to remount it.



I was concerned about how to attach the collar to the freezer body. As it turned out, I needn't have been. The thing weighs a lot and the friction it applies through the foam weatherstripping is more than enough to hold it in place, even when the lid springs open.



I drilled a hole in the back for the gas line to the primary regulator and the CO2 tank. I lacked the appropriately sized spade bit, of course, so I used the closest one I had and then iteratively widened the hole diameter with my Dremel until it was just big enough for the hose to get through. At least I don't have to worry about insulating it.

In the interior I mounted a cleat and attached to it the secondary regulator of recent blog notoriety. Note the unusual orientation of the Y adapter. This was what I was trying to avoid when I built the jinky manifold (also of recent blog notoriety). Oh well, this rig holds pressure and lets me have two kegs on one pressure and another on a different pressure if needed.




Having the regulator mounted cleaned up the interior a lot, but the serving equipment was still an issue. I plan to put in real Perlick beverage taps on the front of the collar eventually, but for now I'm stuck with the picnic taps. To get them up out of the mess, I just tacked some brackets to the front of the collar, only on one side, and used them as low-tech hangars for the taps.

090603 Half Wit - Kegged

I neglected to mention that I kegged the Half Wit batch last night after 14 days in primary only. The FG measured was a temperature-adjusted 1.011, which means that the ABV will be about 4.3%. I really need to get control over the water volume issue. I actually overflowed the keg while filling it because I had more beer than I anticipated, and I can't help but wonder if the low OG versus the prediction was due to over-sparging, leading to having too much wort even after the boil. Oh well, it still tasted pretty good so I'll try the force carbing process this evening.

Force at home

Yuri_Rage's force carbing technique worked like a charm on the 090602 Geordie Ale. I gassed it at 30 PSI, shook it for a couple of minutes, bled it and tasted it. It was flat, so I did it again. Second test was good, so I reduced the pressure to serving level and enjoyed a pint!

So far, so good

Looks like all the seals are intact. I need to remember my mantra ("buy don't build" - nothing related to Faxanadu). I'm going to order a manifold from MicroMatic or somewhere.