snakeplissken

This time of year there's always some sort of show on about something spooky. Ghosts and goblins and all sorts of boogins. I find that I enjoy a lot of the ghost-hunting shows, but more for the history of the structures, atmosphere, and things of that nature. As for the whole "paranormal" aspects I tend to take them with a grain of salt. The shows...
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My foot hurts for the third day in a row. I'm really not sure what's wrong, but I suspect it's a nerve irritation. I didn't do anything to it, so I know it's not that. No bruising, no swelling, but damn it hurts. It's on the outer edge of my right foot, in front of the arch towards the toes. Stupid thing can't even bear...
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Things are hopping at the Plissken home brewery. First I drew a sample from my robust porter I brewed three weeks ago last Friday. It measured out at around 1.014 points gravity down from an original gravity of 1.056. That makes for an alcohol by volume of around 5.6% and an attenuation of around 75%. Good numbers all around. This is my first truly all...
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My nut brown ale is sputtering away in the kitchen as we speak. The Sam Smith yeast is an aggressive little bugger. It cleared 90% of the airlock water by sheer force alone. Not bad. If it had been a smaller fermenter it probably would have blown out, but I'm using 8 gallon ones now which are much fatter than the traditional 5 gallon. I...
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I'm making beer. Fucking shocker, huh? I should do my physics homework, but I can't drink physics.

Oh look, I'm going to talk about beer again.

I went to the brewshop here for a little look-see at the yeast selection in terms of limited releases for the fall. Lo and behold I found a vial of Yorkshire Square Ale Yeast. If you're a geek you know this is the strain used by Samuel Smith over the pond. Oh goodie. I get to...
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Today I was glum and it was rainy, so I made booze.

A gallon of fine Oregon wildflower honey diluted and sanitized to six and a half gallons. Probably around 8% abv when it's done. In secondary conditioning I'll be adding a couple of vanilla beans and a few pounds of lactose sugar. The milk sugar is unfermentable, so it will remain to sweeten the...
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The Polish Festival was fun today. It was warm and sunny and I felt generally pretty good overall. A couple of good polish beers, some fine grub, and my bestest buddies made things better. So did all the fine euroboobies and women eating sausage everywhere.

We also did a good job of making the strangers at our table uncomfortable through general discussion of our typical...
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I'm thinking of brewing a Robust Porter.. A nice dark beer for the coming cold weather. I'll be doing a full grain mash this time instead of adding any extract. Due to my low boil capacity I'll be using an old English method known as a reiterating mash. A larger than average grain bill is created, then split into two separate mashes. The first...
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Quite a good weekend. I went and visited with EnergyChannel and BabyBlue Saturday evening and had quite a good time as usual. We always seem to talk about food for hours on end. I figure that's ok since we're all fans of food and whatnot. It keeps us from dying and wasting away like a Lohan. We went to a new (to me) place that...
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I'm back to Oregon, where the necks are flesh colored. Thank god. It was a goodish time. I bought new clothes at a fat guy store, my first new shoes in many, many years, and ate too much. The flight back I upgraded to Economy Plus and had to sit next to this Triathlon douchebag who gave me the "oh great a fat guy" look....
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