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Heck YES I’m making beer! What, you thought I was playing? Boo, I don’t play when it comes to Germany’s greatest invention. (Was beer invented in Germany? I should look that up. ::wikipediates:: Looks like it was invented in Mesopotamia. How about that.)

Anyway, I’d been wanting to give it a try for a while, so last Friday I headed over to How Do You Brew?, the nearest supplier of hardware and whatnot for making beer and wine. The gentleman in the shop, Joe Gallo, was EXTREMELY helpful, and I ended up staying about an hour, talking about the process and various tools. I bought the various tubs, tubes, and attachments, along with a kit containing the malt extracts and various hops and sugars. I wanted to make sure I had something super simple, that I couldn’t screw up.

Well of COURSE I screwed it up. C’mon, now.

The process starts with boiling a lot of water; various recipes call for various amounts in the initial boil. Almost all home recipes are designed to make 5 gallons of beer, but some call for you to boil all 5 gallons, some call for as little as 1 gallon of boil, and you just add the rest of the water later. This recipe called for a 2 gallon boil, and I happened to have a 2 gallon jug of spring water available, so I poured it in and gave a righteous boiling. While I did this, I filled a 7-gallon fermenter bucket with water and mixed in some sanitizer powder, and stuffed in all the various equipment that would touch the beer during the fermenting process.

When the water boiled, I poured in the two massive cans of malt extract (the kit supplies this so you don’t have to grind and steep your own grains, a complexity I may be ready for at a later date) and brought the mix back to a boil.

Here’s where I made my first mistake: the recipe was very clear about watching the pot to make sure it didn’t boil over. I took this to mean that as the boiling went on, various starches and things would make a foam on the surface that I would want to make sure didn’t spill out. So, thinking nothing of it, I dumped in the first package of hops.

Apparently hops and water and malt react violently, because roughly 2 pints of water exploded out all over my kitchen.

After the boil calmed down, I moved the pot over to another burner, because I was going to have to completely disassemble the left side of my stovetop to clean all the beer out of it. This kept me busy for about 15 minutes, and then I poured myself a large glass of gin.

The boil continued, and as boiling liquids are wont to do, much of the water steamed out into the air. I watched bemusedly, and wondered how, if I boiled this thing for an hour, I was going to end up with 5 gallons of liquid, since I appeared to be losing about a cup of water every 15 minutes (ignoring, for the moment, the quart I’d lost when the brew exploded). I pored over the directions to see if I was supposed to keep the pot covered, and could find no useful information. So I left it uncovered. Whatever. Towards the end of the boil, I threw in the last little bit of hops (very, very carefully) and began to ready the fermenter.

Unfortunately, I had made another sizeable mistake: the recipe called for me to use 5 gallons of spring water (tap water, being chlorinated, would kill the yeast), which I didn’t have. It also called for me to rapidly cool the mixture before adding the yeast, by sitting the fermenter full of liquid in a tub of ice until it got down to about 70 degrees; I did have plenty of ice, due to buying roughly 12 bags of it for a party and saving 4 7-pounders in my freezer. I remembered in the Good Eats episode on beermaking, Alton used an amount of spring water PLUS an amount of ice IN THE FERMENTER and that way immediately cooled the mixture to a temperature that wouldn’t kill the yeast. Brilliant!

My mistake was made in misjudging the ratio of ice to water. I was SURE that Alton had put all the water in the initial boil, and used about 3 bags of ice plus a few additional pint bottles of water. So I put two bags of ice in the fermenter and poured the hot wort in; it rapidly cooled to about 40 degrees and didn’t come close to melting all the ice. Dang; now I had overcooled liquid that was still a gallon short of the amount of water! I managed to stuff the rest of the ice in, and poured in some pints of heated spring water, but it still wouldn’t completely melt. Dang; I feared if I added the yeast to this mixture, the cold would screw it up somehow. Oh well; let’s put the cover on and sit it aside, and after rehearsal I’ll come back and it’ll be a nice toasty 70 degrees and I can pitch the yeast.

So I left, and came back. The ice still hadn’t melted. Hells bells, as my father would say. Oh well. I went ahead and bloomed the yeast anyway, poured it in, and put the top on. I had some problems getting the bubbler (a little device that allows CO2 to escape the bucket, but doesn’t let air in) working, and in the end I think it was allowing air into the bucket for the better part of a day, so hopefully the beer doesn’t taste like a monkey crapped in it. I measured the specific gravity of the beer on Saturday, and it was about 1.040, about where it was supposed to be; as of today, it’s at 1.010. The recipe says it should get down to 1.007 or so, so I’ll keep an eye on it and hopefully get it into bottles this weekend, after which it needs to “age” for about 3 weeks. Yay beer!

I’ve been getting swept up in a lot of “Disaster Recovery Tests” here at work, which basically means I end up driving out to some hotsite for a few days and working my tail off. The basic idea is that we have to assume that our data center was destroyed by a comet or overrun by Commie Nazis or something, and we have to rebuild everything. I actually enjoy them, because while it’s hard work and long hours, it’s almost completely technical problems, which is the part of my job I don’t despise with every fiber of my soul. Unfortunately, many of the technical problems appear to be with stuff I don’t control (invariably the backup systems get all screwed up and take 3 times as long to get running as we had anticipated; so far this has happened EVERY SINGLE TIME, and yet we invariably allocate like 3 minutes to get that stuff built), so I spend a lot of time sitting there watching OTHER people panic.

Anyway, we did one starting Friday morning in Carlstadt, New Jersey, which is like one good camel spit from Manhattan. My part in the test wrapped up at about 2am Saturday morning, so I went back to the hotel, got some sleep, packed up, checked out, and drove through Manhattan to Brooklyn to meet my boy Josh for some Wild Fun, which at this stage in my life consists mostly of eating everything I can find.

We grabbed brunch at a nice place called Rosewater (very reasonable; I think we paid about $36 for our grub, which was pretty nice by NYC standards), and then headed into the city to misbehave. We wandered all over Greenwich Village and its environs, ate at Joe’s Pizza (really good), got ice cream at Cones (bloody outstanding), and then a few hot dogs at a street vendor (tasted like a tobacconist’s carpet), along with going into a few fun shops selling things like raccoon penis bones (really).

We went back to Brooklyn to chillax for a while (my left knee has developed the annoying habit of developing AGONIZING PAIN if I walk more than a few miles, so I needed to rest it up), met up with Josh’s girlfriend Cassie, and spent a few hours jamming on our Guitars (we, sadly, did not play Freebird). After Cassie’s nap, the three of us went out and got delicious BBQ (I don’t remember where). Mmmmm…brisket. Then we went back into Manhattan to go to a party, at which I met a large number of Josh and Cassie’s friends and drank too much vodka.

I may or may not have said horribly racist things in the cab on the way back to Brooklyn. I honestly remember nothing of the ride (I fell asleep for most of it), but woke up the next morning with a feeling in my stomach that indicated either I had cast aspersions on the heritage of various persons, or had simply poisoned myself with alcohol, or both. So, to all who were in the car with me (Cassie, Josh, and some poor Middle Eastern driver), I apologize for any and all things I may have said about anything. (This is a pretty standard boilerplate statement that I issue whenever I drink more than 3 cocktails in one sitting.)

Sunday we all slept in until about noon, and then Cassie had to go meet friends for brunch, so Joshums and I went to the Miracle Grill, a satellite location of the official one in Manhattan that’s mostly known for being Bobby Flay’s first big restaurant, before he got famous and turned into a dick. I had an omelet with herbed goat cheese in it, which was ridiculously good.

Then we hung out at Josh’s apartment playing Burnout until I got back in the car and drove home, where I collapsed and entertained myself by tickling Charles to make him giggle, which is HILARIOUS.

Walking through my local Acme on Monday, I discovered that, of all things, they were selling Ducklings. 5 pounders. On sale for $1.99 a pound. I was like, whaaaaaaa?
I have a more or less permanent craving for duck, and have always wanted to make it myself, but never found a place that sold it (I guess I could check a local butcher, but there’s not one that’s at all convenient). I consider it rather a gourmet item, so finding it Acme seemed incongruous; I half expected to find, I dunno, bricks of foie gras or something nearby.

Anyway, I grabbed me one and brought it home. Sarah was out with Charles, having dinner with friends, so I had plenty of time; I made a nice brine, pulled all the giblets out of the bird, and threw that puppy in there for a good soak. Mmmm…sugar salt water. While that sat outside in the snow to keep things from getting too bacteria-y, I worked in the garage building a custom-sized baby gate for our main staircase, which is only 5 steps high but 48″ wide, and all the pre-made gates that fit that size and were hinged were going to run us $60 and I said HA HA to that. HA.

After a couple hours, I covered the bird in salt and pepper, sliced up the skin a bit to promote rendering and tasty browning, and threw it into a 400 degree oven to try and get me a nice crispy skin. After about 20 minutes, the skin was sort of bubbling, but not yet brown; I lowered the temperature a bit and put my probe thermometer in the thigh.

After an hour or so, it started beeping. I was like, wait what? I thought this thing would take 2, maybe three hours. Nay nay, apparently. The skin was still kinda squishy, but I’m not terribly picky, so I cut in, and was nearly bathed in dark red liquid. Ummm…yeah, done my fat pink booty. Back into the oven it went, and I upped the temperature to 500 to try and crispify things.

5 minutes later….beep beep beep! What the hell. I got out my instant-read thermometer, though, and everything said 165, which admittedly is lower than the 180 demanded by the government, but if I did everything the government said I’d have a lot fewer hobo bodies under my floorboards. There was still red liquid, but I said to myself, hey, this is duck. Not nasty salmonella-y chicken. I’m gonna eat it.

And I did. And I’m still alive! It was delicious, although the skin needed way more crispitude. Next time: I’m just gonna let that bastard broil.