Pursuing Calefaction

The semester has already been going well. The structure alone has been beneficial. Unlike last semester, where half of my classes had nebulously-constructed assignments with only a few due dates, my classes have specific assignments due at specific times throughout the semester, and the instructors were very clear about how they were to be formatted and turned in. This feels like a much better “first semester,” I think.

But the big news is that in one of my classes, a fellow student indicated that she had need of some assistance filling a tutoring position. So I contacted the place, and a phone interview seemed to go very well. I am now waiting on references and transcripts to finish arriving.

However, some things just don’t change. I have been sitting here at the computer all day, trying to make myself do this three-part assignment for my class tonight, and it is as though I’m frozen. I’m making the barest of headway. Two hours to go until it becomes irrelevant. Yay, ADD.

I’ve been slacking this week, the first week of my second semester. I allowed the funeral of my great uncle Bud (who died at the ripe old age of 102) to eat up my workday on Thursday, and then failed to compensate for it by doing extra work this weekend. Back to the old habits quickly. But I promised myself that I would pursue graduate school with a laser-like focus, and I mean to keep to that. That means dropping the video games, and less distraction by thinking about beer recipes. They’re not going anywhere. Now that I’ve laid out my goals for the year, I need to find a way to structure my time so I can achieve them!

Concerning the beer, I have enough time now that I’ve brewed up my first two batches. I’ve already thrown together my plan and recipe for the next batch, an American IPA, so I should put further beer thoughts to rest until after the IPA is actually in fermenter. I am a tad behind on my reading, and that is directly attributable to the allure of XCOM: UFO Defense. It’s an old game, but wow, does it hold up well. I have established some letter-writing, but there are so many people I want to reach out to that it bottlenecks in my head whom to start with first.

I am using my wiki, though, and that will serve for now. Whiteboards are such a pain in the tail in practice, and what’s the point of my wiki if I don’t use it? My tasks this semester culminate in writing a “teaching recipe” and writing a lesson plan. I will get this done.

Fortitude!

I have a few friends with gluten issues, and it’s a fantastic challenge to be a good host when they come by. I’ve sought out roast recipes, and tried my hand at baking cookies. But I had never tried to brew beer before without some sort of glutenous malt. Fortunately, this is an active topic in the homebrewer scene, to the point that people are starting to malt their own grains (buckwheat and quinoa seem the most popular). The chief among these, and the most available on the market for homebrewers, is white sorghum. So when I saw the jars of sorghum liquid malt extract at the FLHS last fall, I knew to pick a couple up. And now with the fullness of time, I am finally making good use of it!

Getting dressed for the debutante's ball

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I am always surprised when I rack the correct amount of beer into the bottling bucket, even though I use brewing software that accounts for liquid losses when transferring from the brew kettle to the fermenter. When bottling last night, I had the presence of mind to take some pictures, so I’ll share with you the process as I describe the beer.

29 bottles of beer on the wall, 29 bottles of beer...

This brew has been pretty much all upsides and no downsides. Before pitching with Windsor, I read up on it some more and saw that it was not very attenuative. (Which just means it will ferment less of the sugar in the long run. It’s not greedy.) Fortunately, I thought to add some corn sugar–a very easy-to-metabolize sugar–to the fermentables. So the yeast did its job and then some. All in all I was expecting a 4% ABV beer, but with the slightly higher Original Gravity and  the slightly lower Final Gravity, I got a beer that is 4.3% ABV Best of all, the Sidhe’s comment on tasting it was that I should enter this into a homebrew competition!

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I realized after I got home from a whirlwind tour of Maryland to see my family over the holidays (yes, multiple holidays) that I hadn’t posted since way before I got on the road. So, here’s my magical New Year’s post for you. Which is just to say, I’m already hard at work on the resolutions I laid out earlier. Once this week is through I’ll have a much better sense of the sort of pace I can keep. I’ll tell you all about my venture northward sometime, but for now I’m content to just get back in the habit of posting.

Happy 2012, everybody!

My first stovetop brew was a special bitter. It’s a fun style. Not too strong, so you can do it on the cheap, and nice for playing around with adjuncts and showcasing hops. It’s a happy middle between a fully alcoholic beer and table beer, tasty enough so you can toss a few back without getting sauced. Because of the low-gravity yield of my rig, it’s a style that lends itself to sitting in my fermenter.

Today I brewed my second take on it. I upped the bitterness a bit, and changed the yeast to something more characterful and fruity. But I didn’t make it more bitter by adding more hops. Instead, I changed the hop schedule around a little bit to bring out more flavor from those delicious Kent Goldings. I also employed a technique I have been reading about on various homebrewing Web sites for extract brewing. I only added about a third of the malt extract to the water at the beginning of the boil–the rest went in about 15 minutes from the end. Apparently this increases hop utilization, and also eliminates what has been referred to as “extract twang.” I had assumed that the wierd taste I had been getting in my beers was because of the molasses. So we’ll see in about 4 weeks just how attributable it is.

I also got around to making my volumetric displacement stick, or as I like to call it, my Rod of Displacement +1. So for this batch I was able to precisely determine how much distilled water I needed to hit my gravity. I also remembered to tuck the distilled water in the fridge the night before, so it brought my wort down to well within pitching temperature range. 64F, to be exact! I wanted to make a video of the brew session, but this netbook is not up to the task, and I don’t have a better laptop available for use. But I’ll get my shiny new YouTube channel up and going before the new year, I hope.

One of the best reasons I love my stovetop setup is this ability to brew the same recipe with only minor tweaks. When Clinton and I brew on the big rig, there’s a pressure to do something awesome that we haven’t done before. (Especially since we did a LOT of repeat brewing for Rob’s wedding!) But I can be as boring as I like at home.

[Update 12/15: Whoosh, the yeast (Danstar Windsor) are off like a rocket this morning! The airlock is bubbling away. Definitely a change from the first yeast I used (Wyeast London Ale), whose activity was much more tepid even at the beginning. This bodes well ]

I used to look at new year goals as a quick fix to my broken self. “These goals enumerated here,” I would say to myself, “will make me a better person, and I am going to do them right now.” Well, that’s obviously unrealistic, but that’s what young people do, I guess. I have a different outlook on such things now, and it’s not the road of pessimism. Giving up on the notion of a setting goals is foolish, and in any event, I yearn for ritual. The better question to ask than what sort of person I want to be is, what sort of person am I becoming? Because it’s one thing to want to change to some ideal, but another to try to change without taking into account the distance that you need to cover. I suspect that this is the reason so many of my new year resolutions stuttered and stopped–I was trying to lift more than my carrying capacity.

But I have done a number of things in the last couple years that I didn’t think I was capable of. I wrote one novel and most of a second. I brewed beer for my friend’s wedding. I got into grad school. These all tell me that I am heading in the direction I want to be going. I am becoming someone dedicated to education, to science, to writing, to craftsmanship. And there are areas I want to make strides into–I want to document more of my life in pictures, and to be timely about doing so. I have taken scads of them over the last year, but I never seem to make the time to publish them. There are easy avenues to do so, such as facebook, but that has ethical baggage that I’m not willing to take on. Facebook deserves the bare minimum of my personal life. I feel the need to be a self-published person. That’s the whole point behind this blog, my wiki, and my eventual self-hosted status.net site. As Rob Carlson said to me: “Guard your inputs, maximize your output.”

The other side of that, the inputs, is harder. I’m a terrible news junkie. It’s easy to say what you will do, but it’s much more difficult to say what you won’t do. Breaking habits is….non-trivial. (It took me nearly 20 years to kick my nail-biting.) But I think the secret to kicking habits is to supplant them with healthier ones. I changed nail-biting into nail-trimming by carrying around a nail clipper on my person, and every time I started to put my fingers in my mouth I would try to remember to use the nail clipper. So it must go with my Internet habit. I need to supplant the Web site hopping with something more productive. That is what I’ll be chewing on for the next week or so.

So without further ado, here are my discrete goals for the coming year:

• write, edit, and submit one novel OR three short stories
• read 25 new books (that’s two books a month–slow pace, but one must crawl before walking)
• brew 12 distinct styles of beer on my stove
• find paying work in the teaching/tutoring field
• volunteer 50 hours in the local community
• write 50 letters (actual, printed and/or hand-written correspondence)

These are all things I can do and have done severally, but I have never tried to do them as a whole or in such quantity. But I feel I am at the tipping point, and so I must push myself to reach them. It’s not going to be easy, but I have a wiki to keep track of them

What are you thinking about for the coming year?

This food writing thing is starting to look like a pattern. It occurred to me today that by not writing frequently, I’m engaging in a pattern of thought-hoarding, which fits in with my tendency to ’save’ other things (computer hardware and paperwork are the most pernicious of these). So I guess I’ll try to ride the food wave into more regular writing. Being vegetarian (with a vegan partner) means needing a fair amount of creativity in the kitchen, or at least a breadth of good recipes so you can fake it. Most frequently I rely on Vegan Dad (linked to in the blogroll) or Isa Chandra’s lineup of books and online recipes. But I have one recipe that I have been crafting over the last decade that is mostly my own, and nets high marks consistently even from the most steadfast omnivores. That is, my vegan stroganoff.

It’s pretty straightforward, really; it just requires a small amount of preparation. Just before you start veg prep, soak a little less than 3/4c TVP in 3/4c vegetable stock (or a water/soy sauce mix, but homemade veggie stock is cheap and easy to make). Then take a brick of silken tofu (I prefer the Mori-Nu aseptic packs) and mix in a food processor with about a tablespoon of olive oil, 1/4t salt, and about half a lemon’s worth of lemon juice. This is the “sour cream.”

Once that’s out of the way, you just start throwing it all together. Basically you saute over medium heat a nicely-chopped onion and a stupid, ungodly amount of thinly-sliced mushrooms (though you might call it a godly amount if you’re a fungus-worshiper like myself). Add to that minced garlic (or granulated if you don’t feel like mincing garlic), and then some herbs (parsley and thyme are nice), salt, and pepper to taste. Once most of the moisture is gone, add the TVP, which should have mostly soaked up the stock by now. It’ll add a little bit of moisture to the pan to deglaze any scorching. Cook the TVP for about 5 minutes, maybe 10 if you cut the heat down, and then add the sour cream. Let the heat get through it, stirring thoroughly, and when you start to see it bubbling again it’s chow time! I like to serve this over rice or short noodles. Egg noodles are traditional, of course, but if it’s got starch it’ll probably be ok.

This recipe changes just about every time I make it. Sometimes I play with the consistency of the sour cream; other times I change up the herbs or veg base. Celery is not unheard of, nor is eggplant. But I have laid out the basics, and it’s out there for you to play with now. Bon appetit!

Not everything I do is about beer, though it has become somewhat an obsession of mine. But I suspect it is an extension of a much broader field of interest: cooking. I have been learning how to cook since I was 18, out of the house and in my own place (well, with roommates). I remember my first real lesson, too; I was awkwardly trying to get the skin off some garlic cloves and one of my friends’ friends showed me the knife blade trick. But one thing I have done very well for as long as I have been cooking is bread.

The Sidhe taught me the basics. She had her standard recipe, as handed down to her by her grandmother, and I followed that for a few months. (I mostly still do.) But the thing about crafting is that if you have the knack for it, you’ll notice things. Specific details about the material you’re working with, how they behave together, and the subtleties of the changes they undergo as they become a unified whole. And this is true as much with bread as with beer, pottery, metalwork, writing, and even (albeit more abstractly) programming. It is the border between reason and reality–the territory that the ancient Greeks called techne. It’s art. And there’s something maddeningly irrational about it. You can describe the process to someone who has never done it before, but until your friend undertakes the process in turn, nothing whatsoever is communicated. Art lends itself to mentorships, either of the autodidactic variety or the more traditional master/apprentice. But it is the sort of activity that is best done with your whole self thrown into it.

Now, I’ll admit that I used to get a great deal of meditative joy out of hand-kneading dough. But our stand mixer now takes care of that part of the work while I can do other things. The important part to remember, though, is that I’m not just letting the mixer go unsupervised. You can do that, but the important part of the kneading process is the assessment and re-assessment of the dough’s texture. Bread machines are handy for those who don’t delight in the details. But bread is way too much fun to watch at every step to use something like that. The smooth texture of a freshly-kneaded doughball, the smell of yeast doing their part during the rising, and the hollow “pop-pop” sound a well-crusted loaf sounds like when it’s out of the oven all contribute to the satisfaction I derive from baking bread.

And then, of course, comes the eating. Mmmmm, bread. It’s like a lattice of deliciousness. The yeast create pockets of air within a gluten-bound matrix, and this matrix solidifies during baking to create the perfect union of five simple ingredients. Fresh bread is incomparable to any other food. It’s pretty great that after all these thousands of years we’ve been around, the art of making bread has really changed very little. We understand the science much better–but the recipe is not the loaf.

My main brewing efforts have been with my friend, the Unknown Lamer, since last October. We use a mega-burner (basically a turkey fryer), and since January it’s been an all-grain setup with the construction of a 5-gallon mash tun. Since June I’ve been doing this little stovetop side project, in part because I don’t always manage to link up with Clinton in terms of timing. He’s a little closer now that he has moved to Raleigh, but it’s still on the other side of the city. And if you have any sense of cities in the South, that means spraaaawwwwl. So, it takes about 20 minutes to get there instead of 25. Wew.

With my stovetop setup, all I need to do is throw some malt in the pot and get cooking. And that’s the point. I want to continue exploring beer, but a home setup is a little more manageable. OK, I don’t brew as much in terms of quantity–the electric range limits my kettle size to about 3 gallons, realistically. But that puts useful constraints on my process, giving me that much more incentive to figure out how to make decent beer with just what I have. So here’s my breakdown in terms of what I intend to do with this new habit:

• Brew good table beer. First and foremost, my goal is to make reliably yummy alcoholic beverages using malt & adjuncts, hops, yeast, and water. I want to be able to pull this stuff out of the fridge and relish the various flavors and aromas without getting drunk.
• Make beer for an ingredient cost of less than $1 per bottle. Obviously this is not a hobby that will pay for itself, but since I enjoy drinking beer anyway, I might as well at least try to save some money while I’m doing so. Since I’m using mostly household items, I can just write off the small hardware layout I’ve done; the equipment, handled with care, should last me for the foreseeable future.
• Explore the BJCP Style Guide. Beer has a fun and complex history, and the styles that we have come to know and love offer a nice completionist’s prize–”I did these!” And the challenge of attempting the different styles on such a low-budget setup will be all the more fun.
• Improve my all-grain brewing. Having a small side workshop means that I can bring a better understanding of unique ingredients to the table. I can try out different hops and malts in more rapid succession, so I will have greater ability to make impactful aesthetic judgement calls in my Serious Beer.

The small size of my kettle means I can’t reach those high-gravity altitudes, but I have a few plans to take it up a step from the 3.5-4% range I’ve been exploring thus far. And this brings me to the point of this post: I’ll be documenting my efforts with a Youtube channel! Starting in the next couple of weeks, I’ll be posting videos to share with you about brewing, beer, and the like. I hope you’ll join me.