Well, I put on a good front, but the only true metric of effort is accountability. I made a number of vows for the new year, and I intend to follow through with them. So here’s a straight and merciless look at what I set.
You all knew it was coming: another beer post. This is really where my motivation comes from–as my friend Sparrow was saying to me earlier this week, alchemy is irresistible. I tried to hold off, but the stuff I put out in between was just senseless emo rambling, so we’re back for another update on that delicious ambrosia that is the result of letting organic machines do the work for us. 
Unfortunately, no pictures today. I will get that webcam working soon!
Grad school is taking its toll. Most of my days are spent putting off grad work or doing grad work. And by putting it off I’m usually thinking about it but not writing. So, video games, which I know I must swear off at some point, or television, which I also know I must swear off. I’m learning the hard way to say ‘no’ to just about every social activity imaginable, because it’s time I need to be spending working on grad school. I backed out of the tutoring gig for similar reasons–without medication, I have much more of a time burden than I really want. And so it becomes unrealistic to think that I can just pop off to a party and also expect to finish any given task the next day.
Which means I’ve had to embargo thoughts, put a stop to the free-wheeling bubble machine that it my brain. And that’s no good, because they’re still here. I still dream of the worlds in my head, I still dream of the things that might be. Not getting them out on papaer is driving me crazy. Focus on any one subject feels nigh impossible, and yet that’s what I’m supposed to do. So I have a black market of ideas. I write little scenes in my notebook while the professor is lecturing in my class. I think about the necessities of history when I’m staring at my online class Web site, and every time I read about a new exoplanet I get a little thrill from the denizens of the one in my head. I need to get it out, and I don’t know how I’ll find the time. I thought I would have more time when I left the clinic to write and do other efforts of the mind, but it seems that is a delusion.
Still not giving up.
One of the larger themes about my new year’s resolutions is the act of communication. I’m terrible at it. Really, what I’m terrible about is maintaining it. I have a pile of people I want to be in touch with, some going months back, and it’s all I can do just to hang on to these lists and not lose them. Never mind actually keeping up a steady flow of dialogue–I let myself get bogged down in the mundanities of life, and before I know it, it’s 10pm and my school work isn’t even done, so how am I going to find time to write a letter to each of these people (email or otherwise)? On the other hand, minor successes in that front. I have gotten several letters out to friends, and even received replies!
Renewing the commitment here and now. I’m not giving up–I’m staying on fire. Pass the kerosene, please. This bonfire ain’t over till I croak. If you get a wild hair and feel like sending me a letter (and are not already waiting on a reply), do so. I shall respond. Hell, even if you’re waiting on a reply. One thing I don’t get is silence. I try to at least reach out to people, and sometimes all I get back is crickets. What’s the limit? How many times do you reach out to silence before giving up? I have lost contact with some of my dearest friends simply because I never hear back from them. And that tears the shit out of me, because I have no way of knowing if I’ve done something wrong or if life is just eating them up or what.
It’s funny–part of this is self-inflicted. I have purposefully left facebook, for instance. The light’s on, but I don’t log in unless someone prompts me to. I don’t read it. I don’t use it. And the reason for that is partly because it ended up being me just watching other people, and posting meaningless things that got ignored. That, or the format constrained any attempt at serious discussion to sound-byte levels despite its attempt at threaded topics. At least on Twitter there are the virtues of concision and direct address, and the built-in glibness of the whole thing means that if you want serious discussion you must take it to a better forum anyway. I am finding fewer and fewer reasons to use facebook. It’s now one of my many address books.
My family has a communication problem in general. Mother won’t talk to father, sister won’t talk to mother, brother only talks to me and mother…it’s ridiculous. But I suppose my communication difficulties should, then, come as no surprise.
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
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!
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 ]
