The beast is brewing

Dogfish Head 120

Have you heard of it?  It's a very unique beer in not only do they put it through a 120 minute continually hopped boil, but it also contains a whopping 18% abv.  The first time I have ever had the beer was a few years ago and I would have to say it didn't exactly strike my palate as something that I would be enjoying all that much.  Since then my tastes have changed and the more beers I tried I found myself longing for the 120 again.  When I try the beer today - it's one of the greatest beers I have ever encountered.

This brings me to where I am now - over 2 weeks into the fermentation of a Dogfish 120 clone.  Paul was so kind to introduce me to a clone recipe that he ran into.  Of course after knowing that somebody has given this a try, I couldn't deny giving it a try myself.  Of course, the more and more I read about the process of brewing this beer, the more I was apprehensive on actually getting it done.

With the help of Tim (my sister's BF) I was able to acquire all of the ingredients to brew a 5 gallon batch of this monstrosity.  All that it took now was a day to say, "Hey let's do this shit and get the show on the road."  Once that day was set, we were on our way to brewing.

I got some brewday help from Paul, Chris and Ed.  They were a tremendous help in getting a lot of the brew started - from cleaning up the various utensils and pots, to helping with the triple decoction mash that the recipe called for.  Unfortunately, they had to take off right before the actual boil started, so I was faced with feeding the boil for 2 hours every 3 minutes adding hops.  Of course, after that, I had to chill it then transfer to the 6.5 gallon carboy for the primary fermentation.

After letting it go through it's traditional fermentation for 2 days, I started adding additional sugar to the batch.  The recipe was from a guy who had a conical fermenter, which allowed him to pull an amount of brew from the vessel, add sugars and re-introduce that to the brew.  I don't have a setup like this - so instead of trying to figure out how to pull beer 2x a day adding sugars and adding it back, I decided to just take some water - my measured amount of sugar, boil and dissolve.  After cooking this sugary substance to a more reasonable temperature for adding back to the beer, I dumped it in with a small amount of dry hops.

This process continued for almost 2 weeks, resulting in the addition of 8 plus pounds of sugar.  Oh, did I mention that I had to do a second yeast start which would be used to feed all of this sugar?  This was my first beer that I used a yeast starter for since I built my own stir-plate to aerate the yeast for me to make sure it was good for pitching.  Simple process, but makes for a pretty much guaranteed strong fermentation to take your beer to the promised land.

I'm currently waiting for the primary fermentation to stop so I can transfer to the secondary for racking. I'm hoping that it will happen within the next few days so I can start thinking about the homebrew that I am going to be doing for Thanksmas.  Things have been going pretty well with this beer - so hopefully it is a winner when it's time to crack open that first bottle of delicious elixer.

Taking another step in the world of brewing

Is it bad that I have already finished the Cornelius keg of beer that I brewed?  Well, it was my first ever keg of beer, so it shouldn't be too much of a surprise.  :)

This step into kegging has brought me to the next step in my home brewing.  I started with extract brewing, in which you steep some grains for a bit, add some malt extract, boil, add hops and then you are on to your fermentation.  I did this for a number of brews, all using pre-made kits from the home brewing store.

From there, I stepped in to all grain brewing.  This is a bit more labor intensive where instead of using malt extracts, you take the grains and and you mash them yourself before you start the boil, adding the hops and then starting the fermentation.  I did a couple of brews using this method and then Tammy got me the kegerator.

I was so excited to give the kegerator a try, I took a step back and did a simple extract brew to fill that kegerator up.  :)  The flavor of this first kegged brew has got me thinking of moving towards my own recipes.  Instead of starting from scratch with a recipe, I am using my very first brew (San Diego IPA) as a baseline.  Doing some research of different IPA recipes, I have come to a conclusion of what hops and hop schedule I was going to follow for this brew.

I didn't stop there.  I figured I wasn't taking this to the next level appropriately, so I am also using BrewSmith2 to enter my ingredients and get a good estimation of the IBU's and expected gravity readings.  Plus, using this program I am able to save my recipes and tweak them as I see fit depending on how the brew comes out.  I'm looking forward to finding my ideal brew recipes.  Of course, I'm starting with the IPA, then I will be branching out, narrowing down my recipes to my liking.  Covert these steps to an all grain and I'm well on my way to getting Mellow Octopus on the map of the best craft brews in the industry :)

Hanging up the indoor shoes...

I've been a big fan of volleyball for quite a while.  Not only watching, but playing.  I started playing back in Santa Clara on the sand courts they have at the Intel campus out there.  I always stuck to beach volleyball until I moved out to Arizona.  Here, I picked up the indoor game.  Much faster pace and even though there are so many more people on the court, with the right teammates and communication everything moves like a complex dance.

That is not the point of this post though.  Over the last season of indoor volleyball, my knees (or more specifically my left knee) started bothering me more than usual.  During a season, I play for 2 teams.  One for the City of Gilbert, the other for the City of Chandler.  We play in some semi-competitive leagues so there is quite a bit of activity going on.  During one of the final games of the season I started feeling quite a sharp pain in my knee.  It hurt to the point that I couldn't jump.  Not exactly a great feeling to have.  But, spending some time off of it proved to be good and it is feeling pretty good.

After that episode, I decided it was time to stop playing indoor.  I don't have problems playing on the sand with my knee because of the less impact it has.  Maybe I will pick up the game again in the future, but for now I am going to stick with sand and just sub for indoor when the team needs me...

sad panda.

R-C Camping

 

R-C (ar-bar-see) camping...  You know, I just spent the last few minutes typing up this blog post only to find out all of the text was lost in the upload.  What a pain!  So, I'm going to try and type this thing up again - hopefully capturing the same feel as I did the first time.

Josh and I spent 4 days up just east of Payson with his fellow Cub Scouts at the beginning of summer.  This was our first non-family overnight camp trip that we have attended, with the past years being day camp trips to the Pueblo camp in Phoenix.  Let me just say that the weather difference was STUPENDOUS and made the camping trip that much more enjoyable.  We took off in the morning on a Thursday, met up with the other scouts and dads in Payson - then headed out to the campsite.  After registering and unloading, we were able to settle in and get the festivities started.

Here is a snapper of our tent.  They had a number of tents setup for the campers there already, so we didn't have to setup our own tent like expected.  A number of the other campers went ahead and setup their own tent, but this one was comfortable enough (and tall enough) to warrant keeping our tent in its bag.  Probably the only thing I would change in regards to the accommodations is to have cots instead of air mattresses to sleep on.  Being able to sit on a cot and not crouch and ultimately sink to the ground on an air mattress isn't exactly ideal in my eyes :)

We were able to participate in all sorts of activities while camping.  All organized and run by boy scouts.  They had Archery, Horseback riding, Camping Skills, Crafts, Compass/Orienteering, Fishing, Dodgeball and assigned free time.  But probably the highlight of the trip was the Crawfish catching.  During free time, we would head out to the creek and catch as many crawfish as we could.  The camp has a competition every session to see which den could catch the most crawfish (in weight) over the course of the camp.  We used hotdogs wrapped in nylons to lure the little buggers in, then swooped them up with a net.  Or den caught (if I recall correctly) 194 ounces of crawfish.  The camp session as a total caught over 100lbs!

One of the things I wasn't expecting during this trip was to see Box Canyon.  R-C borders this beautiful area, and we were able to take a quick hike to the location and enjoy the views.  I would have to say, I didn't know what to expect from this camping trip, as it was our first one - but it was a great time and I'm glad I got to experience it with Josh.  We are looking forward to next year!

Whoohoo! Disneyland!

Sometimes you just have to put all of your avoidances aside and just do it.  I'm not a big fan of the theme park scene, but I would have to say that doing this Disneyland trip was well worth it.

We decided to surprise the kids with a trip to Disneyland over the start of Briana's spring break.  Instead of the regular process of booking the time share, and scheduling things 'just right' for the trip, Tammy and I booked a Disney vacation without the kids knowing.  We stayed at the newly remodeled Disneyland Hotel and it was probably the best Disney experience we (at least I) have enjoyed.

The Thursday before Briana's spring break, Tammy and I showed a little instructional video and wanted the kids to critique the performance before we posted it online.  The video was about packing efficiently for a weekend getaway.  The trooper that Tammy is, she did the entire performance in one take.  Showing the perfect amount of cheese, she pulled it off flawlessly.  The video was edited and and we splashed a 'Pack your Bags, we are going to Disneyland' at the end of the video.  The kids were ecstatic!  Of course, we told the kids we needed to video tape them watching the video so we could catalog their reactions so we knew what adjustments we needed to make before publishing the video.  I'll get to that video.... eventually.

 

We traveled out Friday morning after Briana finished up a Math test.  Driving isn't the most fun thing to do, but knowing your final destination didn't make the trip too bad.  Of course, with the way my body reacts to the initial hour of driving - I wasn't behind the wheel all that much.

We arrived in the late afternoon, checked into the Adventure tower (7th floor) enjoyed the room a bit then headed out to Downtown Disney for some grub.  We wanted to take it easy the first night before hitting the park the next day, so just a little walking around the shops and we were done for the night.

Magic Morning the next morning was just about perfect.  Get up nice and early so we can get into the park 1 hour before the regular patrons.  Staying at the hotel does have it's perks!  We were able to hit Star Tours, Space Mountain, Astro Blasters and the Nemo sub without any waiting.  Once the park opened, we headed over to get some Mickey Mouse pancakes and enjoy the rest of the day!

My mom was able to drive out from Helendale to visit us, which was also a nice thing during the trip.  She didn't go into the parks with us, but we were able to have some meals and spends some good time with her visiting during some park down time :)

Sunday we spent at California Adventure.  They are remodeling 12 acres of the park for 'Cars World' which will open in the summer, so much of the park we couldn't see.  We were able to enjoy the World of Color water show which was excellent and partake in the night elecTRONica dance party that goes on at night.  Good times.

Once the park closed, we still had a few hours left so we hit up Disneyland once again and did Space Mountain.  Spent some time shopping then calling it a night - a bit of sadness in the eyes knowing it was the last day in Disney.

We finished our trip by have a leisure day at Downtown Disney before driving back home.  The quick trip was well worth it, and I think being spoiled with the 'inclusive' experience will have us really thinking future trips and how we will spend them at Disney.