re-turn

Achievement Unlocked: Climbing

2012-01-28T15:23:00.001-05:00

Oh dear.

The British Bitter...

2012-01-21T21:30:00.001-05:00

...just keeps pouring better and better!

Austen's First Skiing Adventure

2012-01-21T09:20:00.001-05:00

Austen did a little skiing with us in the back yard last weekend. We were mostly hampered by the fact that they don't make snow boots small enough for his feet! Austen didn't seem annoyed at all to have these long slippery things underneath him:

The Indignity of Commuting by Bicycle: Goin' Down

2012-01-19T18:30:00.000-05:00

Winter bicycle season is truly upon us. It hasn't been a very consistent winter for snow. As the northern and southern systems continue to fight it out for primacy in Vermont the roller coaster of temperatures has resulted in "variable" snow conditions. Wet snow from last week frozen hard, then melted and rained on and frozen hard again this morning means that where the roads and paths are not clear, they are covered in a glaze of sun-pitted ice. The single-digit temperatures this morning didn't offer a lot of reassurance that the roads would get any better any time soon.

At the bottom of the first big downhill of my commute, there is a roundabout/cul-de-sac thing with a path exiting from it. You have to enter the roundabout on a right turn, transition to a left turn to follow it, then make a right turn to exit onto the path. I often overcook that turn as I carry speed from my downhill, ending up on the far left margin of the path as I get the bike back under me and straighten out to continue on my way.

I overcooked it just a wee bit this morning, in fact. It wouldn't have been a big deal except that there was some ice on the path. The bike slid off the path and down the grade next to it, with me in tow (and toe-clipped in, I might add). I felt my elbow hit first, and heard the loud smack as my helmet made contact. The aforementioned sun-pitted ice was like a big cheese grater underneath me.

I got up right away and got on the bike, cursing. I could feel a bruise ripening on my butt and a scrape on my knee as well as the pulse of pain on my elbow. At least my head felt OK. I had been riding "like a bag of wrenches" already, that sort of muddy, cruddy feeling you get that is the opposite of cruising down the road in full fitness with a tailwind. Now I was muddy and cruddy and in pain and nervous about falling again. If there is a way to tiptoe on a bike, I did it all the way to the office. In a quiet moment on the road, I noticed the tell tale ting-ting-ting sound of a derailer touching spokes on the rear wheel. Looking down, a yellow flag of fabric, the lining of my winter tights exposed by a big three-corner tear was evident as well.

Surprisingly, the indexing was still working just fine- but I must have bent something down there. A post-ride inspection showed a crack in the road crud and underlying paint on the derailer hanger, confirming my suspicions. I'll have to see if I can bend it back. The tights can be sewed back together. I'm bruised and scraped, but functional.

Still, an experience like this continues to lead me, Mr. Bike Commuter himself, to wonder aloud about the hopes and aspirations of bicycle advocacy here in Vermont. We want to get people on bikes, we want to get people out of their cars. People want to get to and from work, safely, consistently, efficiently. I live six miles from my office, living in and working in two of the most developed cities and towns in the state. And yet, the barriers to consistently getting to and from work car-free are considerable. If I can't bike, I default to the car. There's a bus, but its schedule gets me to work late and would force me to wait about 45 minutes after work to get a ride home. The objective is for Kate and I to continue to live "car-light," the dream would be to live "car-free." But in the depths of winter, I just don't see it, and I sometimes yearn for a car of my own.

I think about taking the average adult in my position, who maybe hasn't ridden a bike since they were 13 and hasn't ridden on the road ever. Winter clothes? the ability to diagnose and fix a bent derailer hanger? The ability to put together a bike suitable for riding in the winter? What about overcoming a lifetime of being taught that "bikes belong on the sidewalk?" What about not wanting to be that weird person at the office who rides their bike to work? What about picking up the kids on the way home? What about getting yelled at by drivers?

I'm prepared to soldier on, and I have the goal of commuting by bike as consistently as I can through the winter. So far, of 12 working days in 2012, I have commuted 10.5 times. That's a pretty good record. For all the pain and inconvenience of this morning, it felt pretty good to be on the bike when I saw one of my fellow cyclists headed the other way and we gave each other a hearty, knowing wave.

Brewing journal: Batch 13: Greenbelt DIPA

2012-01-17T22:30:00.000-05:00

1/16/2012
Brewed batch #13 Greenbelt Double IPA. First time with the big kettle and the chiller. I started with 6 gallons of spring water in the pot and it took well over an hour on the stove to reach anything even approximating a boil. 2.5 pounds of various steeping grains at 155 for 25 minutes, then the “boil-” 11 pounds of light malt syrup. bittering hops, flavor hops at 15 minutes. I messed up and missed a half ounce that were supposed to go in for aroma at 5 minutes, too excited about the chiller. I’ll put them in for the dry hop at the end. The chiller worked very well, through in my excitement I forgot to turn off the burner for the first few minutes of chilling. I had the wort down to a temperature of 75 degrees in 15 minutes. I was able to move the chiller around and get a whirlpool going, which made siphoning easier without getting too much hop gunk. Nevertheless, moving chunky wort through the siphon was not ideal and it makes me nervous about infection issues.

I ended up with a little over 5.5 gallons in the fermeter, which is what the kit instructions said I should have. Gravity was 1.075, close to the target of 1.077 called out by the kit. It smelled wonderful. I made a one-quart starter with a 1.040 wort and a smack pack of Wyeast “Greenbelt” and pitched that starter after 30 hours, not really high krausen but with about a half inch of yeast sediment in the starter. I observed some signs of fermentation within an hour and moderate fermentation within 18 hours.

I’ll put a hole in the kettle soon enough to do a spigot. I may also get a big tea ball so I can dry hop right in the keg. I’m planning on a 5-6 week primary for this beer with no secondary and two weeks in the keg for natural carbonation before the first taste. Realistically I won’t plan on drinking much of it until the beginning of April.

The first outing with the big kettle and full boil was an overall success, but I can tell I need to get this operation outside. The shopping list now includes a weldless bulkhead kit to make draining the kettle easier, an outdoor propane burner with a tank of gas to make the boil faster and more vigorous (and to get things out of the kitchen!) a big tea ball to dry-hop this beer in the keg, and a new piece of tubing for my autosiphon so I won’t stay up nights worrying about infections.

Here Comes Beer

2012-01-16T11:54:00.001-05:00

-A nice big Double IPA, in fact:

Thank You Mr. Erlenmeyer, Wherever You Are

2012-01-15T12:27:00.001-05:00

It's a yeast starter for a batch of IPA I have planned:

Uncle Ben

2012-01-01T18:46:00.001-05:00

Apricity

2011-12-30T10:23:00.000-05:00

One of my favorite blogs to follow is Futility Closet. One of their features is "In a Word." Yesterday's word was "apricity," which FC says means "the warmth of the sun in winter." What a lovely word for such a fleeting and unique sensation. May our new year and especially the next three months be filled with this apricity.

I always get to the end of the year feeling like I'm about to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel. The holidays, beginning with Halloween and continuing through New Year's Eve, provide a distraction to the dropping temperatures and lengthening nights. But there is no mistaking that there are three long months of winter ahead now. I used to be a big skier. Last winter, not at all, this winter, probably not so much. Downhill skiing is expensive and time consuming, but all of that sun and motion and sensation sure is a good antidote for the winter blues. Without a regular weekend commitment to speed and snow, quieter pursuits take over, like pulling my son in his sled along our quiet streets, maybe a little snowshoeing at his grandparents' house in the country. Maybe some writing. Certainly, if I keep it up, the toughest three months of bike commuting. There are no more real holidays, the tree needs to go to the dump, the lights need to be coiled and stored.

At home and in my office, I do my best to de-clutter. I think about what I want to accomplish in the new year and I'm too often filled with regret about what I didn't do in the old.

2011 has been different in that regard. The first full year with my son. The year I dumped Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr from my digital life in an effort to de-clutter there. The year I lost almost 50 pounds. The year I rode 100 miles on my bike for the first time (albeit in the basement!). The year I emptied half of my closet. I'm coming into 2012 and those dark months ahead with some good momentum and I feel more hopeful than usual.

"Maybe a little writing." I look at that phrase in the paragraph up there. The writing has always been a challenge. There was a moment, back at the end of my college career in 1999, when I wrote in a final essay for a class that I was finally ready to accept the title "poet." I'm not so sure if I should still have that title. I struggle with the fear that maybe I just wanted to be a writer, but not to actually write. I struggle with the way inspiration and time and a clean desk all seem to pass one another so fleetingly, like that winter sun. I struggle with the glaring vividness of the dreams I have in the morning, so many of them seeming to allude to a greater thing out there that I am supposed to be doing, and the first step is to write it down.

Apricity. Little accomplishments in the new year, born in the cold and the dark. Maybe a poem whose first line enters my head while I'm shoveling out the car. Maybe an idea for a novel that comes as I grind my way up the hill to my office, rear wheel slipping in the sludge and frozen breath clouding my lenses. Maybe the first day in March when there's a bare rock in the woods big enough to sit on, melting the snow at its margins with the retained heat of brief winter sun.

Exploring the Beach

2011-12-27T17:37:00.001-05:00

Bray Farm Again

2011-12-27T09:02:00.001-05:00

Getting Hit By a Car

2011-12-15T12:58:00.000-05:00

So, last week I was involved in a minor collision with a car while I was on my bike. Although my body hitting the car's side made a pretty healthy thump, there was no damage to the vehicle or myself, and we both continued on without skipping a beat. I'll be lucky if it's the worst bike-car collision I'm ever a part of in my life.

It was a classic "right hook."

Goofus turns in front of the bicycle, Gallant waits until the bicycle has cleared the intersection to make the turn.

The woman in the black ford Focus (North Carolina plates, a rental perhaps?) came up behind me to my left. By the time I noticed her, she was in front of me, partially turned to the right, and slamming on her brakes. I didn't have time to stop, and I didn't have room to swing out around her. I didn't have space or time to maneuver to my right into the curb. I had time to realize I was going to hit her, and I leaned in to take the brunt of the impact with my shoulder, judging that that position would give me the best chance of staying upright and not ending up on the ground or under her wheels.

Then the thump.

I didn't come to a stop with that thump, though. My shoulder and upper body kind of smeared along the passenger side of the car, and I came to a stop even with the front window. I looked into the car. The middle aged woman, blond, with glasses, gave a meek smile and said "I was stopping so you could go by." I'm sure that's what she thought she was doing. What she was really doing, of course, was she was beginning to engage in a "right hook" maneuver, realizing that what she was doing was bad, then reacting by slamming on the brakes. In fact, if she had simply completed her turn instead of slamming on her brakes, I might have been able to get around her to the left. We'll never know. I smiled and rode on.

Interestingly enough, right after the incident I read that the same sort of "right hook with brake slam" has recently been happening to the author of 327 Words. Hmm.

Brewing Journal: Batch 11 Kegged, Batch 12 Tasted

2011-12-15T08:00:00.000-05:00

Kegged Batch #11 Hard Cider and tasted Batch #12 British Bitter.

British Bitter is nice and mild, more of a caramel aftertaste than I would like, no hop aroma, just gentle bitterness and carbonation on the tongue at the end. I did try for natural carbonation in the keg with a generous half-cup of sugar, but even after two full weeks followed by extensive chilling, there were not enough bubbles to my taste. Perhaps the basement is too cool for vigorous fermentation at this point. Anyway, that’s what C02 and a kegging setup is for. A few weeks at 36 degrees on 12 pounds of pressure carobonated the beer to 2.67 volumes- high for the style but balancing whatever un-fermented malt is in there. Very easy drinking and a good pair with roasted meats and other winter fare.

The cider was an adventure. I boiled 2 pounds of lactose in 32 ounces of water and tried to add it to the fermenter to ensure good mixing before putting it all in the keg. The cider in the fermenter immediately foamed up and I lost a pint or three as I worked to get it under control. I put the rest of the lactose solution into the keg and topped it with the cider- so I have a full keg with more lactose than last year but it may not be the full two pounds. I have chilled the keg and put it on 20 pounds of pressure at 36 degrees. I’ll bottle some of it from the keg.

A Celebration of Crud Weather

2011-12-14T10:31:00.002-05:00

The weather has been cruddy of late. Near freezing, dim, foggy, grey, a little wet, etc. etc. Who cares? I've been on my bike to and from work every single day since we changed the clocks. This time last year, (OK, the end of November 2010) I was lamenting that I had already been off the bike for some time. Grey weather isn't a problem at all. A little snow on the road just makes it interesting.

I have my morning routine down. Kid in the high chair, cereal in the tray, bike clothes off the peg and on, work clothes in the bag. Coffee. Kiss the wife, wave goodbye to the kid through the dining room window. He waves back, I turn to go. One time another cyclist came down the street after I left and he got all excited thinking it was me, then disappointed when it wasn't. Cute, in a bittersweet sort of way.

So the weather. Just above freezing with no wind most mornings, wet on the roads. Insulated tights, a base layer, balaclava and shell seem to do it. Light shoe covers and full-fingered summer gloves inside the bar mitts (review pending, but so far I love 'em). I alternate between my bike helmet and an older ski helmet equipped with clear-lensed goggles. There's a little bit of snow on the wooden bridge I cross in the morning. At 7:40, mine are the fifth set of tracks across. Good to know I'm not alone. I'm too sweaty if anything by the time I get to the office. VPR on the radio, hot shower, awake and at my desk by 8:00. Every morning.

Back in June, I wrote about it being the best time to get started bike commuting. I'd say that right about now might be the worst, at least if darkness is what you dislike the most. If what you you hate the most is cold and snow, we've got a whole other three months coming up for that. But darkness? The sun will set on Friday this week at 4:13 PM, and at 4:14PM the next night. The days will continue to shorten until the 21st, but the afternoons will get a little longer. In a month from now, if I'm still riding (and I plan to be!), I'll be riding home in the daylight.

I know that what's coming will be harder. Cold and snow. Cold, I can dress for. Snow? I can leave a little earlier in the morning and ride snowy road shoulders, but I can't make the drivers around me any less reckless (or just plain freaked out by a cyclist on the road in front of them in the snow). I really want to make it through the whole winter on my bike. It's going to be a challenge. The snow rig is holding up well so far, though the rear wheel needs to be trued and I don't really have a good place to clean the thing as it gets crusted over with winter grime and liberal applications of WD-40. Connoisseur bike lubricants are for the nice road bikes, the winter rig gets whatever's cheap.

But mark my words: if I make it though this winter, I am seriously going to consider buying a snow bike for next winter. The Salsa Mukluk is at the top of my list right now, for reasons that I may go into in a later post.

Sweet inspiration.

In the Chair

2011-12-12T21:24:00.001-05:00

Traveling Light

2011-12-12T15:56:00.000-05:00

I have eliminated my Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and Diaspora accounts. I have been wasting too much time on the first three, and the last one never really got off the ground. I'm still on Google+.

Spinning on the Beach

2011-11-28T09:52:00.001-05:00

Aside from family, friends and four days of the most amazing food I'll eat all year, Thanksgiving was wonderful for an amazing sunset walk we all took on Nauset Beach this weekend. The tide was approaching dead low, there was no wind, and it was about 50 degrees out. The entire sky was pink and the yellow grass on the tops of the dunes was gold as the last rays of sun lit it up. There were numerous birds and seals out on the water, a few surfers, and lots of people like us out for an evening stroll to work off their meals. People say "hi" to each other, and share a knowing look: this is the place.

If my description seems clunky or inadequate, it is because it is. This place on the edge of the earth is different every time I come to it. If you have never been, you need to go there. If you can find a calm sunset on a low tide, all the better.

The Benefits of Commuting by Bicycle: More Road Find

2011-11-23T20:09:00.001-05:00

Anybody who says they have enough clamps is a liar. Found this one on the road yesterday:

The Winter Bike in Pictures

2011-11-21T14:56:00.001-05:00

The complete winter rig. It's my old mountain bike from college, with extensive modifications for winter riding. This thing weighs well over 40 pounds and is a total pig compared to the usual bikes I ride. It makes winter riding tolerable and even a little bit enjoyable, though. Details in the following shots:

Bar Mitts. These things are horrible in a crosswind, but they mean warm hands in light gloves on sub-freezing days. Hope you like riding up on the hoods, because the drops are useless. Note, I have medium hands and bought medium mitts. I'd probably go for large if I had it to do again.

Cockpit. Shimano bar-end shifters, all cables under the tape, El Cheapo LED flashlights, and a view into the warm caverns of the Bar Mitts. Local Motion "Pedal Harder" stickers as finishing tape for motivation.

In addition to the normal front and rear lights, I have a strand each of white and red battery powered Christmas lights on the milk crate cargo box. Red only in the back, white only on the front, and a mix on the sides. Say you didn't see me there in the dark, just try and say it. You can't. Also zip ties.

A little hacksaw time rendered these cable guides full-housing-run compatible. Yes, that's another zip-tie.

I am the zip-tie king, I can do anything. That's a 9-speed 11-34 back there. Full cable run all the way from the shifter to the rear derailer.

Studded Rubber. These Innovas are about the junkiest studded tires you can buy, but they are fairly cheap. Just plain steel, no carbide, half of the studs are gone after a couple of seasons. Surly steel fork replaces the bombed-out Rockshox that originally came on the bike.

The super-high straddle cable means lots of modulation but not a whole lot of braking power. At least it clears the fender. See also the plastic clamp holding one side of the rack stay because the bolt on the frame was frozen in and I gave up even trying to drill it out.

I inexplicably had these really nice Salsa rings in my parts bin(s) amongst all the usual garbage I hold on to. A 36-46 double up front is just fine for what I need. That's the original crank and front derailer for the bike on there.

Brewing Journal: Batches 11 and 12

2011-11-17T08:59:00.001-05:00

Racked Batch #11 Hard Cider to a 5-gallon secondary vessel with an airlock. Did not take a gravity reading but did taste a sample. Very similar to last year’s batch so far, a little stronger on the apple esters and maybe a touch more sulphurous. Clarity should be improved by secondary, I may also cold-crash the secondary before racking into the keg to avoid more sediment. I’m still thinking about two pounds of lactose (milk sugar) for this batch instead of one, like last year, for more body and a little more sweetness.

Racked Batch #12 British Bitter to a keg with 1/2 cup cane sugar for natural carbonation. It smelled great but I did not take a gravity reading or taste a sample.

My schedule on these brews is a little slower than planned, so I doubt we’ll be drinking Bitter in a week for Thanksgiving. Oh well, time always seems to help rather than hurt.

Further Machinations

2011-11-08T09:10:00.000-05:00

It was supposed to be a pretty simple project: Build up an old mountain bike frame with a wide range of gears, studded tires, fenders, and a rack.

It's never that simple. A bike with that much "stuff" on it gets pretty cramped. Derailers run into fenders. Chainrings want to hit the frame. Brake straddle cables hit fenders. Then you get the whole thing together and the riding position, (with the saddle at the "right" height) ends up resulting in a 15 centimeter drop to the handlebars, which is, shall we say, a wee bit aggressive for a bike that is meant to be mashed through a season of Vermont roadside snow.

Anyway.

I got most of the thing together. Ran out of electric tape to finish the bars off. The front brake is wonky. The shifting on the chainrings sort of works.

Here's an in-progress picture:

Final pictures to come.

Meanwhile, in minivelo-land, I wrote a long post recently about all of the changes I made to it (mostly cosmetic, changing cable housings and bar tape from black to white to match the saddle). But I didn't get a picture of it until this weekend:

Sadly, though it isn't visible in the picture, the rear tire is flat. Again. Even though I put a rim protection strip in it. I'll have to take a look at it. The little bit of riding I did with the bike this weekend was a joy though, and the new gearing (with the big 56-tooth ring up front) is excellent. Too bad nasty weather season is about to be upon us.

In other news, I'm back up on the rollers indoors and the nice weather has held such that I can stay on the 460 fixie for another week or so before the winter rig truly needs to be put to use. Even though we did have a little crankbolt incident the other day that resulted in a hasty office-supply repair to get me home:

Yeah, that's a zip-tie.

It's all better now.

If course, the basement is a total wreck now, with bike parts and bits of cable slung every which way. I'm looking forward to getting the shop all cleaned up, and I hope to build an actual workbench over the winter.

Wrenching and Meditation

2011-10-21T11:11:00.001-04:00

It had been a long day in a string of long days. With Austen to bed and Kate on her way out the door to do some grocery shopping, I headed into the basement to see if I could get a little time on the rollers. After the summer ended, I had finally set things up again: Rollers on the carpet, centered under our low basement ceiling's floor joists, tires pumped, old laptop on a stepladder ready to boot into Netflix, headphones with long cable threaded above, through the skis and tent poles stored in the ceiling.

I looked around the rest of the basement. Five gallons of British Bitter and another five of hard cider bubbled merrily away in fermenters. A drop leaf table I refinished years ago dropped one of its leaves too far when a hinge broke and I had moved it into the work area. Then some bike parts I ordered showed up, and the table became a workbench, as horizontal surfaces in the basement are wont to do. The minivelo was in the workstand. I had already rearranged the crankset and installed the new cassette. The bike had come with stock gearing for a normal-size road rig, but the 20-inch wheels threw it off, made the gearing too low. I had replaced the 52-tooth big ring with a 56-tooth one, and the new cassette has an 11-tooth small cog and a 32-tooth large one. Big range.

The next task to undertake on the minivelo was born of functional need and vanity in equal parts. I needed to adjust the shift cables and move the front derailer to make the new gears shift smoothly. I also wanted to replace the stock black cable housing with white housing, to match the white saddle and white handlebar tape I plan to put on the bike. I pulled the cables, cutting each one cleanly with a satisfying crunchy snip. My Park Tool cable cutters are sharp and are reserved only for these two tasks. Cut cables. Cut housing. I removed the old housing and retrieved a bag of ferrules from the drawer I have for such small bike parts and uncoiled the new white housing. I made the new pieces shorter, for a more elegant "no reverse curves" layout that should make the shifting smoother and more precise. Even with the nice cuts made by the tool, some of the wires that stiffen the housing come out a little uneven. I ran each piece over a file a few times until all of the cut ends were perfectly flat, ensuring that the bare cable end would nest into the ferrule as tightly as possible.

I returned to the toolbox again. In the top drawer, there are a few tools that came from my grandfather's basement after he died. Calipers my grandmother used every day in her job at the Clarostat factory. Old wrenches, smelling of engine oil and the basement dirt of my grandfather's cellar. An ice pick labeled "Dover Ice Company." Think about that. A tool used to chip manageable pieces of ice that were delivered to the house from some other place, packed in sawdust after being cut from some winter pond. I use the ice pick to neaten and widen the holes in the cable housing, to pick bearings out of the unreachable places they sometimes end up in, to clean gunk. This time, I used the sharpened tip to pen up the housing, again ensuring a smooth interface.

All of these little things. All of these little things combined to do such a little thing. Someone else on the street is doing the same thing in their basement, slow, methodical, Doing it Right. Maybe fixing a lawnmower, maybe sanding a bookshelf, remembering to wipe the new wood with a tack cloth after, remembering a time when they didn't know to do that. Wisdom in the feel of the right tool, findable and maintained, the hand planes on my bench, each wrapped in an old section of inner tube, keeping the cutting edges keen. The right kind of oil stored just for this purpose of loosening one nut someday, waiting in the cabinet.

The ferrules and cable housing slide over the cable with a little resistance, then effortlessly once they are fully on. I put everything back together. I go back to the toolbox. Top tray: Tools of Measurement. First Drawer: Tools that Cut or Abrade. Second Drawer: Tools that Push, Pull, or Drive. Bottom Drawer: Attachments, Tape, Solder. I take my "third hand" tool from the second drawer. I use it to put just the right amount of tension on the derailer cables before I tighten the fixing bolts. I adjust the shifting a bit here, a bit there. I plug the soldering iron in and let it heat. I don't have any new crimp-on cable ends. I heat the freshly-cut cables with the iron. The solder is a solid, then it isn't as it melts and flows into the fiber of the cable with a sputter and a puff of smoke.

It all clicks, the new cable housing is bright, different. The tools all go back in the box, the bags of small parts are closed and returned to their proper places. The bike stays on the workstand. Next time I'll do the brake cables and bar wrap. I can hear the car in the driveway as I head back upstairs to wash my hands. I never made it to the rollers, but I felt deeply satisfied, and my mind was clear.

Brewing Journal: Batches 11 and 12, Entry #1

2011-10-18T11:43:00.002-04:00

Batch #11. Purchased 5.5 gallons of unpasteurized apple cider from Boyer’s Orchard. Allowed it to warm to room temperature overnight and pitched a pack of the Wyeast 4767 the next morning. Last year’s cider had an original gravity of 1.051, I’d guess that this years’ was close to that or a little sweeter, but it is whatever it is and I’m not too hung up on worrying about the alcohol content on this anyway. Looking over my notes from last year when I made cider, I can’t believe that I only let it go two weeks in primary and then kegged it, and that I was liking the taste of it two weeks after that! That is way, way too quick for good cider. The best of the cider from last year was the bit I drank in April before the keg finally blew. This year’s plan is more conservative. I’ll give it two or three weeks in primary, then rack it to a secondary for further clarification. I got too much sediment last year going right from the primary to the keg. I also think the cider could have benefited from a little more sweetness and body, so I am going to double the lactose addition from one to two pounds. Same sugar and maple syrup additions for natural carbonation in the keg, more sugar if I decide to go ahead and put this in Belgian bottles.

Batch #12. British bitter. I brought 2 gallons of my boil water to 170 degrees with my steeping grains in the pot and allowed it to sit for a few minutes, then to the boil with the DME and LME included in the kit, 1 ounce of Kent Goldings hop pellets at 60 minutes and another ounce with a minute left to go in the boil. Chilled the wort to 100 degrees in about 10 minutes in a water bath in the kitchen sink and added it to the fermenter with the rest of the water to make just a hair over 5 gallons. Didn’t bother with a gravity reading, it is supposed to be around 1.035. (Not like I’m really doing a mash here, so as long as the right amount of water is in the fermenter and I put all of the malt in, which I did.) I pitched the yeast when the wort had cooled to 78 degrees and observed slight signs of fermentation 12 hours later. 24 hours in there was a fluffy krausen about an inch thick and my blowoff tube was bubbling away. This is supposed to need a two-week primary and two weeks of bottle conditioning (fast, low-gravity, low alcohol brew) so I should be able to rack it to a keg for natural carbonation on 10/31 and be ready to consume by 11/14 (at least taste). looks like we’ll be pulling drafts of cellar-temp British Bitter for Thanksgiving if all goes well!

The Cold

2011-10-13T09:30:00.002-04:00

We all have the cold. Austen snuffles all night and wakes periodically to protest the way a stuffed-up nose interferes with the use of his pacifier. Kate has had it for a day or two now. It started for me last night, a grating feeling down one side of my throat and now a pressure behind my right eyeball that makes me want to check the mirror to see that it is staying in. An all-day regimen of tea (to soothe my gravel throat) means waking up all night, every two hours, to pee. Like an old man. Last night at some unnamed hour we all awoke and hauled the little humidifier out of the basement for Austen. I don't remember when that was. Its little ultrasonic element that vibrates the water into vapor was dried out or clogged or something, so there we were, the three of us in Austen's room, Kate rocking him in the chair and me stabbing at buttons, the electrical outlet, stabbing at the little ultrasonic thing with a Q-tip trying to coax it back to life. It's making the noise but no vapor.You wouldn't know Kate had the cold if she didn't tell you. Austen, though tired and off his normal appetite, smiles and laughs the same, giggling through his perpetually running nose. I'm the real baby. I can't stand it, the reduced lung capacity, the fatigue. Kate recommends a decongestant, a vitamin."I hate pills." I say. What I mean is that I hate that the pills are not a miracle cure, their efficacy more imagined than measurable. I get the vapor going in the humidifier. At 5:30 Austen is up again, and I have the sensation that I have been wakened from a more peaceful sleep than the rest of the night brought. He's back to bed, we all sleep. Fifteen minutes before I need to be on my way to work he wakes again. I feed him, make the coffee, try to eat something myself. I get my bike stuff on and roll out the door, knowing Kate has had a frantic shower and is half together herself. I'm leaving her with more work than she should have to do. I have the fenders on, the lights, the shoe covers. The raindrops hit my thighs just the same. Wet wool. The first hill comes and I feel like my lungs stop an inch below my neck. Short breaths, try not to upset the delicate balance in my throat. There's a gremlin tugging back on my wheel, resistance like a flat tire but I can see there isn't one. Later, spinning, trying to find a rhythm, the cough comes, the sharp sandpaper throat follows, the grimace. At the top of the hill is the Poplar that drops leaves and sticks into the road. On a rainy day like this, I slow and go around. The leaves wouldn't crunch today anyway.

Surveying the Harbor

2011-10-09T13:05:00.001-04:00

It may be Fall, but it is basically beach weather down here.