Nose Caught in Kung Flu Grippe

I have fantastic news to report! This morning, I smelled coffee! And that’s no metaphor.

Earlier this week, I came down with what I thought was covid. It wasn’t severe. Mild aches. A mild headache. A mild fever. A very runny, stuffy nose. Fatigue in the afternoon. Not that bad.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that things didn’t taste normal. A sandwich tasted funny. The beer I had made was kind of gross.

As of yesterday, I couldn’t smell much of anything. I put Vaporub right up against my nose, and while I wasn’t sure, I thought I could smell a very faint menthol aroma.

Sure looks like covid. Other things can mess with your sense of smell and taste, but covid is the worst offender among common diseases, and my symptoms don’t match other illnesses well.

The web says I could have sinusitis, but I don’t think that’s true. We’re in a pandemic, for one thing, and it’s not a sinusitis pandemic. Also, I’ve had all sorts of upper respiratory bugs during my life, including bugs that affected my sinuses, and I have never lost my sense of smell to the degree I lost it this week. Not even close.

The weird thing is that some things taste almost normal. People like to tell us most of taste is really smell, but that appears to be an exaggeration. Out of self-pity, I’ve been eating breakfast cereal instead of healthy food when I get up, and Grape Nuts taste completely normal. I made beer cheese spread which I eat with Ritz crackers, and those things taste fine.

I always lose weight when I have a cold or anything like a cold, and it doesn’t matter what I eat, so I am indulging myself. I got an Entenmann’s raspberry coffee cake. It tastes just fine. Today I decided to have some coffee with it.

For some reason, I really like instant decaf. I made myself a big mug a short time ago, with sugar and real cream. When I opened the coffee jar, I decided to see if I could smell it. I inhaled deeply, and I was shocked by a strong wave of coffee aroma.

It was exciting. I inhaled more than once, just for the joy of smelling anything.

The sad thing is that I have two homebrews on tap, a third about to go into the keg, and three more waiting to be made, not to mention three factory beers I bought because I thought I was going to have a homebrew shortage. Drinking this stuff is like drinking thickened club soda with an extremely high level of hop bitterness. A waste.

I bought Boddington’s Pub Ale, Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, and Old Rasputin Imperial Stout. Boddington’s is a beer made with profit, not quality, in mind, but I still like it. Old Rasputin is extremely heavy and dark. It’s full of crazy smells and flavors. When you lower your nose into the glass, the aromas surround you and pummel you like an evangelist at an Antifa riot. Boddington’s is very mild.

Last night, Boddies and Old Rasputin didn’t taste much different at all.

The coffee I’m drinking tastes a lot like coffee, so at least I have that.

I ordered myself two new fermenters, which means I bought buckets. They’re a like Home Depot buckets, but they hold almost 7 gallons. I make 5-gallon batches, and beer makes foam when it ferments, so it’s not wise to use 5-gallon buckets. You need extra space.

I can’t find bigger buckets locally, so I gladly paid about $20 each for buckets with lids, spigots, and airlocks. With tax and shipping, I was up around $55. Insane, I know, but there was no cheaper way to do it. Ebay had nothing. I could drive to Orlando, but then I would only save the shipping fee, and the tolls and gas would cost more.

I discovered Hearts Home Brew in Orlando, and it’s now my go-to supply store. For big orders, it’s worth driving or paying for shipping. Their prices are low, and they’re fast. I ordered buckets yesterday, and they will be here today.

This week will be Brewapalooza, AKA Brewing Man. Today I’ll make an ale that ferments at room temperature. Tomorrow, I’ll make a lager. At some point during this time, I’ll put a stout in the keezer. Before the week is out, the ale should ferment fast enough to let me make another ale; something wheaty but based on a tripel.

I think I need to face reality and get one more freezer so I can do lagers properly.

The word “lager” means “to store.” I guess this is why prison camps were called stalags. I don’t know. When you make a lager, you ferment it, and then you let it sit for a long time at a low temperature. This is the lagering process. It supposedly kills off-flavors.

These days, there are new ways of doing things. By fermenting under pressure, many people are making lagers at higher temperatures and in shorter times. They say it works. There are also new yeasts that work better at high temperatures. I’m not sure what to do. I would like to get a lager in the box, so maybe I should take a chance. I have a pressure fermenter. On the other hand, because I’m still working out the kinks in my techniques, it would be safer to use the old methods for my first post-comeback lager.

I can’t lager anything in my keezer because the temperature is wrong. If I use my fermenting fridge, I won’t have any place to ferment things while the lagering is going on.

It looks like a lot of the changes in brewing have been driven by Australians. They started Kegland, a leading manufacturer of brewing gadgets. They made my pressure fermenter.

Australians drink way too much. Many have a bad attitude toward drunkenness, like high school boys who never grow up, and their alcoholism rate is very high. It is claimed they drink more, and get drunk more, than all the other nationalities in the world. Think about that. The world includes places like England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Finland, and the Czech Republic. When you’re drunker than the British, you need an intervention.

I guess it’s not good that homebrewing has taken off in Australia. It should be about making quality beer, not getting ripped with your pals and passing out face-down while singing “Waltzing Matilda.”

Homebrewing should never be about drunkenness, any more than French cooking should be about eating contests.

If you’re determined to be a drunk, you should probably drink wine or screwdrivers all day. Cheap alcohol buffered with a lot of liquid and maybe some nutrients. Pretending you’re a brewer just adds expense and effort, and beer makes you fat.

When my senses come back, I may make a Boddies clone with Amarillo hops and a little bit nicer grain bill. Amarillo hops have a strong lemon flavor, and that’s just what Boddies needs. The problem, though, is that Boddies goes well with beer gas.

I have a 4-body secondary regulator so I can dispense beer with CO2 at 4 different temperatures. I also have a beer gas tank with one disconnect, so it will only serve one keg. I plan to have stout in the keezer, on beer gas, all the time. If I start fooling with an ale that needs beer gas, I’ll have to fix things up so I can run another keg off the same bottle.

That would mean getting another secondary regulator. I think it’s fair to assume I’ll never have more than two beer gas beers in my keezer at once, so two bodies ought to get it done.

If trying to keep 5 kegs going sounds extreme, think about the guy I talked to the other day. He has 27 active.

Whatever this illness is, it’s progressing fast. Every day I feel much better than the previous day. My nose doesn’t run now, the stuffiness is nearly gone, and I rarely cough. I didn’t hit the energy wall until around 8 p.m. yesterday, so I’m getting two more hours than I did earlier in the week. No fever, either.

Maybe now Budweiser Will Taste Good

Well, this is interesting. I think I had covid last night.

A few days back I stayed up until three in the morning. Little tasks kept popping up, and I just went with it, even though what I really like is to be in bed by 9:30. The next day, I felt bad, and I thought it was because I needed sleep. I continued to feel off for the next couple of days, though, so something wasn’t right.

Last night, something hit me. My bones started to ache. I got a headache. I stopped sweating; my skin got very dry, so I knew I had a fever.

I went to bed, wrapped myself in an electric blanket, put it on the highest setting, and lay there. All night. Unable to sleep.

Of course, I took ivermectin, vitamin D, and vitamin C first.

I wasn’t very sick. Last night I had a runny nose for about 10 minutes. I sneezed a couple of times. I coughed a few times. My throat wasn’t quite right, but I can’t say it was scratchy.

In some ways, the experience was pleasant. I couldn’t sweat, so I lay there all night wrapped up comfortably in hot, dry bedding. It was like a long, padded sauna. If the aches aren’t too bad, a fever can have its enjoyable side.

I got up today and prayed with my wife. I put oil on myself, and she prayed for me. The dryness left my skin. Now I feel just about completely normal. My only problem is that there may be something going on with my sense of taste.

My understanding was that Omicron was not allowed to mess with your sense of taste. That’s supposed to be a Delta thing. I ate a slice of pizza and a ham sandwich this morning, because that’s the kind of junk I eat when I’ve been sick. The pizza was okay, but the sandwich seemed to taste a little metallic.

Here I am with three batches of beer on hand, a batch of grain in the spare fridge, and two more batches of grain on the way. What if I can’t tell if the beer is any good?

Yesterday I had a small serving of wheat beer early in the day, and then I had some more later. The first serving was a lot better. Was coronavirus messing with my perception? The second batch tasted odd.

The web says that if coronavirus changes your sense of smell or taste, it can take weeks to get over it. I would hate to have to wait that long to get back to work.

Whenever I start to feel sick, and I’m not very sick at all, I hope it’s coronavirus. If coronavirus can’t make me very sick, then presumably my immunity is good, and every episode ought to improve it. I’ve had three or four mild cold-like illnesses since the start of 2020, and all were very, very mild. I always test negative, but on the other hand, the symptoms always fit coronavirus better than a cold, and the tests are not very accurate.

A little part of me always wonders: “What if this is the first time I’ve had coronavirus? What if it gets really bad?” I must have had coronavirus by now, though. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been to restaurants. I’ve gone to stores. I’ve been on crowded trains.

I’ve listened too much to leftists who are pushing lies about coronavirus for political reasons. They want us to think everyone faces a high risk of serious problems, and that’s complete garbage. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you are extremely unlikely to die and very unlikely to be really ill. I’m getting old, but I’m not in the age group coronavirus hits hardest. I’m not sick, and I’m not all that fat.

Young, thin, healthy people who have real problems with coronavirus are outliers. They’re like nonsmokers who get lung cancer. Leftists like to point to a few here and there, as though one robin made a summer. They did the same thing with AIDs. They tried to tell us it was going to be a big problem for heterosexuals, so we would clamor for research funding and so we wouldn’t rightly point the finger at the depraved homosexual lifestyle that spreads disease, but widespread heterosexual transmission never happened. Just about all the people who got AIDs from normal sex were women who slept with men who were closet homosexuals. It’s nearly impossible for a man to get AIDs from a woman.

People think Magic Johnson got AIDs from a woman. If that’s true, why didn’t it happen to the thousands of other sports figures and entertainment figures who have had sex with dozens or hundreds of women per year? Why just one?

I just saw an article with the title, “COVID-19 isn’t discriminating by age — younger people are dying, too.” That’s a lie, straight out. A tiny percentage of the dead died young, but coronavirus definitely discriminates by age. The CDC says about 19000 people in their twenties have died, but the number for people over 85 is nearly 300,000. What it doesn’t tell you is that there aren’t many people over 85. There are around 3 times as many people in their twenties. So Americans over 85 aren’t 15 times more likely to die. They’re around 45 times more likely.

A 45-fold difference doesn’t represent discrimination by age? Sorry. That’s a lie.

I still only know one young person who got really sick, and frankly, he’s obese. He has to be 80 pounds overweight.

My beer recipes are already fixed, so coronavirus can’t do any real harm while I’m brewing. It’s not like I’ll be tasting the beer and making changes. But I could be delayed in evaluating it.

Stout on the Way

I had a busy day today. In addition to taking care of some nagging tasks, I made a pizza and a keg of Irish-style stout, and I worked on problems with my first post-hiatus wheat beer, which I kegged yesterday.

The pizza was nothing remarkable. An 8″ Sicilian with Boar’s Head pepperoni. I can crank those out all day. The beers were more interesting.

I drew my first wheat beer today. Sour with lots of head. The sourness concerned me a little. Wheat is supposed to produce tart beers, but you can overdo it, and I used about 75% wheat in this beer. A lot of so-called wheat beers are down around 30%, and back during the Bush II years, when I drew up my recipe, people thought I was nuts to go to 75%. Nonetheless, this beer is working.

You can’t judge a beer by the first few samples if you are drawing beer off the bottom of the keg. Yeast and hops flakes will make it bitter and sour. I threw out a little bit of beer, and after that, it seemed the balance between crystal malt sweetness on one hand and wheat acidity and hops bitterness on the other was way better.

Beer starts out as a sugar solution, and sugar is heavier than water. Alcohol is less dense, so as yeast does its work turning sugar into alcohol and CO2, beer gets lighter, and the alcohol content increases. This beer went from a specific gravity of 1.053 or so to about 1.0115, and this suggests it should have a light character and around 5.8% alcohol, which is not a lot. It’s very easy to drink, and cold temperatures don’t detract a lot from the experience. This means it’s a lawnmower beer, even though it’s a quality homebrew and not big-beer industry swill.

“Lawnmower beer” is a term homebrewers use to describe beer which goes down easily and isn’t very heavy. It’s a hot day, you’re mowing the lawn, and for some reason, you think it’s a good idea to quench your thirst with an alcoholic beverage while riding a 20-horsepower machine that can cut a person’s feet off. You want a lawnmower beer. It means you’re probably an alcoholic, but nonetheless, the term itself is useful.

Most people who think it’s intelligent to operate dangerous machinery while drinking will favor gross corn-and-rice-based beer substitutes like Bud and Coors, but any beer that goes down well on a hot day is a lawnmower beer, and it is possible for a truly good beer to fit into this category.

I have another lawnmower beer recipe. A long time ago, I tried to convince a Bud addict he should like real beer. I made a light lager that was partly corn-based, and I used a yeast similar to the one Bud uses. It turned out to be great, but I got nowhere with the conversion because my friend was an alcoholic and drug addict who was not interested at all in the quality of what he drank. He just wanted to stay high and drunk so he didn’t have to face himself and admit he treated people badly. I didn’t understand that at the time.

When I think of alcoholics, I think of vodka, not beer. When I was a kid, an older Irish lady lived next door to me, and she was a good example of a vodka alcoholic. My mother saw her turn up tumblers of pure vodka, and she said that as she drank it down, her Adam’s apple moved up and down like a jackhammer. One tumbler like that would make me very drunk and might even stop my heart, but she was used to it.

Addicts like vodka because they have the mistaken belief other people can’t smell it on them, it’s less likely to cause headaches than brown liquors, and there are a lot of cheap vodkas. But there are beer and wine alcoholics, too.

Anyway, what I drew from my keg today was full of yeast and hop sediment for various reasons too boring to go into. It will clear up as the beer at the bottom of the keg is consumed. The yeast and hops gave the beer sharp acidic and basic flavors, and the live yeast may produce astounding CO2 flatulence, but as I go through the lower layers of beer, the hops and yeast will be removed, and the beer will be outstanding.

What I have now could be called a beer lemonade. I used Amarillo hops, and they produce a strong lemony flavor. They belong to a family of hops, and believe it or not, related hops like Centennial and Cascade produce orange and grapefruit flavors. That’s how crazy hops are. I don’t know of any lime-flavored hops, though.

So I have a light, lemony beer that tastes great on its own, but what about adding things to it?

Ordinarily, I think adding things to beer is an indication that someone is misguided. Generally, really good beers don’t need any help. Wheat beers, however, seem to lend themselves to flavorings. Adding fruit syrups to wheat beers is a pretty old practice even in Germany, where people are so uptight about beer they take all the fun out of it.

I am thinking I may try adding grenadine, which is really cherry syrup. I may try to find raspberry and strawberry syrups. People add these things to German wheat beers from really stuffy companies, so I would not be committing heresy.

Today I brewed an Irish-style stout, sort of like Guiness and Murphy’s. It’s one of my old recipes. At the time, I wrote this:

It’s a bit like Guinness or Murphy’s, but it has tons of body and a silky feel to it. The chocolate malt gives it a wonderful chocolate smell and flavor. I used Munich malt and Maris Otter to make it rich, but it’s not TOO rich. The bitterness is high, at 47-something, but it’s still very smooth. I think it might be better if I dropped it slightly.

It’s in the fermenting freezer now. I have high hopes for it, but I don’t know if it will pan out. As you drink better and better beers, you lose your enthusiasm for old favorites because you grow up. I had a pub draught Guinness yesterday, and I found it thin, too dry, and lacking in complexity. I hope I won’t find these same flaws in my own stout, which I created during a time when I thought Guinness was pretty good. I liked Murphy’s better, however, and it had a friendlier taste, with less of an edge. I hope my feelings for Murphy’s pushed the recipe toward the sweeter, more complex end of the stout spectrum.

Incidentally, stout is dark because it’s made with barley that has been roasted until it turns dark brown. Now you know.

Next up is my orange lager. I am not all that excited about lagers because they are boring compared to ales, but this one can hold its own against an ale. It’s about the color of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and that means it has a lot of malt flavor. It has crystal malt to prevent it from being abusively dry. It’s smooth and full of interesting aromas and tastes. It’s like a lager that wishes it were an ale. Very, very good.

The big problem with lagers is that they have to be lagered. Lagering is storage at low temperatures. Lagers need it to refine them and dissipate off flavors. I’ll have to leave the keg in cold storage for several weeks.

I’ll just blurt it out: in my mind, lagers are generally inferior to other beers. They are the vodka of beer. If you want something extremely polished and inoffensive, there are a lot of lagers that will make you happy, and there are subtle pleasures in lagers. Those pleasures are real and not to be contemned. Still, if you want to get lost in a beer, it’s easier to do it with ales. That’s my opinion, but there are way more beers now than there were when I formed my ideas about beer, so I may be wrong.

I do appreciate a good lager. I love Spaten and Gosser. But I’ve had a lot of very good lagers that were like BMW’s. Well-behaved. Faultless. Relentlessly similar.

I don’t like dark lagers at all. They taste like light lagers flavored with burned sugar. A good dark ale is another matter. It’s a forest of unexpected flavors and aromas.

In a week or less, I should have stout ready to serve. It would probably be best to wait a couple of weeks after that to serve it, but I don’t plan to do that. I need to get a beer inventory going so I don’t empty kegs prematurely, and besides, the fact that a beer gets better with time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start on the keg before it hits its prime. You can enjoy it for what it is as soon as it’s ready, and then you can enjoy the way it changes later.

I have this idea that God, or “Tod,” as I call him when I hit the wrong keys, would like me to be able to talk to ordinary people leading ordinary lives. That means not surrounding myself with Jesus buffs who only associate with each other. Beer, strange as it seems, could help me bridge the gap. I think self-righteous teetotaling Christians repel a lot of people. They make them feel dirty and ashamed. Maybe if I can have a couple of beers with people who have tattoos and spit cups on their dashboards, they will understand that Jesus, not I, is the one I want them to admire and love.

Invest $2000 in Equipment and Get all the Cheap Beer You Can Drink

I feel like writing about the beer business.

I can give new people some advice.

1. Don’t bottle your beer. It’s a miserable job, your beer will get infections, you won’t be able to adjust the carbonation, and there is nothing like the convenience of draft. If you’re excited about taking your beer on the road, use small kegs. You don’t need bottles.

2. Build a keezer (freezer converted to hold kegs) instead of buying a kegerator (refrigerator made for kegs). It will hold more kegs. It will look better because you can put all the tanks and junk inside it. You can build it so all the beer stuff lifts off and onto a new freezer if the old freezer dies. Virtually all fridges and freezers are Chinese now, so they are poorly made. Finally, appliance repair people often refuse to work on kegerators, and manufacturer support is negligible. It’s better to spend $250-$400 on a new freezer than it is to spend hundreds more on a new kegerator.

3. Use dry yeast whenever possible. Wet yeast requires making a starter, which is a batch of fermented liquid that increases the number of yeast cells. It’s a pain. It also requires adding oxygen to the wort before you add (“pitch”) the yeast. It has a short shelf life, it has to be kept refrigerated, and it’s more expensive. With dry yeast, you just open the fermenter and pour it in.

4. If you can afford an electric brewing machine, or all-in-one (AIO), get it, because it will cut the work in half. But realize you may have to brew smaller batches when you want to make heavy beers. AIO’s only hold so much grain.

5. Use Star-San to sanitize. Forget iodophor. Star-San is colorless, and you can use whatever you spray it on right after you spray it. No rinsing.

6. Get yourself some push-fit fittings and EVAbarrier tubing. Forget barbs and hose clamps. This stuff makes things much easier. If you find you have a place where you have to have a hose clamp, use a stepped or Oetiker clamp instead of the worm clamps they sell at the hardware store.

7. Buy brewing software. It will keep track of your recipes and your progress. It will do a lot of the math for you. Be careful, though, because it has been said that some calculations done by beer programs are better done by hand.

8. Keep very detailed notes, like a scientist. Every time you brew a batch, create a text document and write down everything that happens. Date every entry. This will help you repeat your successes but not your failures.

9. Figure out how to serve your beer correctly. You want a system that carbonates it enough while not blasting beer out of the faucet so hard you get a ton of head. Look into things like flow control faucets, beer line length, and flow control disconnects. You should also skip gas manifolds and go right to a multiple-body gas regulator so you can give every beer the right pressure.

I am still not positive I have my serving setup optimized, but then 23 days ago, I didn’t even have beer to serve. All I had was a bucket of unfermented beer.

It’s possible to have a situation where your beer has too much carbonation in the keg, too much head, and no gas in the glass. You can have a lot of head and flat beer. It’s important to get things right.

My second beer, a wheat ale, is done fermenting. I have a way of kegging it, but it’s not ideal, so I won’t be able to drink it until Saturday at the earliest.

When I started getting equipment, I decided to get a Fermzilla All Rounder fermenter. This is a round plastic jug with a bunch of valves and whatnot attached to it. The advantages are 1) you can see what’s happening through the plastic, 2) it’s easy to clean because it’s short with a big mouth, 3) it can be used for fermenting under pressure, which can be helpful with some beers, and 4) you can serve beer from it because it’s made for pressure.

I now think this thing was not a great investment. I can ferment under pressure in a dedicated keg, and a keg is easy to handle. I can put my wort in a keg and put the keg in the pool to cool. The stainless steel will conduct heat well and cool the wort quickly. I can’t drain hot wort into an All Rounder because it can’t stand anything higher than 130°. Finally, Kegland, the company that makes the All Rounder, stamps an expiration date on them because they get weak with time. No problem if you’re not pressure-fermenting or kegging, but what if you are?

I kept it anyway. But I don’t plan to use it to keg the wheat beer. It’s fat, so it will prevent me from putting a total of 4 kegs in the bottom of the keezer. I can’t have that.

I should probably send it back.

I found a salvage guy online selling used Cornelius kegs. Not really Cornelius kegs, but kegs made for dispensing soft drinks. Cornelius was a company that made kegs for Pepsi, and people tend to call all pop kegs Cornelius kegs, but a number of companies have made them. Homebrewers use them.

This guy said he had ball lock kegs, and he would sell them for $75 per pair plus shipping. “Ball lock” refers to the orifices that let CO2 in and beverages out. Most homebrewers like ball lock kegs.

He sent me 4 kegs, and they turned out to be pin lock kegs. Pepsi used ball locks, and Coke used pin locks. The hardware used to connect to them is different.

I complained, and he told me to keep the kegs. He refunded everything except about $37. Under Ebay’s terms, he was supposed to refund everything, and I was supposed to send the kegs back at his expense. I let it go, because I found a way to turn pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs. I bought some parts. For around $55 plus $37, I should end up with 4 good kegs, and that’s a great price.

In case a homebrewer is reading, turning Cornelius-brand pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs is very simple. Just order new gas and beverage posts for Cornelius kegs. Cornelius used the same thread on pin lock kegs and ball lock kegs. The story is not so simple for other brands like Firestone and Alloy Products. You’ll need to buy conversion kits. Right now, they run about $15 per keg. Different companies used different threads, so be informed before you buy.

Back to my problems. In the meantime, I had ordered more used kegs–ball lock–from another company. So when the smoke clears, I should have 8 ball lock kegs. Do I need 8? No. Let’s see. I can use 4 in the keezer and one in the fermenting fridge. That means I need 5 kegs. But it’s conceivable I may want to do a other things in the future, and Corny kegs, as they are called, never do anything but appreciate.

Ball lock kegs are thinner than pin lock kegs, so they will make my keezer less crowded. For that reason, I plan to make as much use of ball lock kegs as I can.

I hate to say this, because it’s just like me, but I could see getting a second keezer. Not a real keezer with taps. Just a small freezer for the garage to hold kegs of finished beer until the ones in the house run dry. As things are now, I will be able to store one new keg, but it will have to go in the fermenting fridge, so I won’t be able to brew anything else while it’s in storage unless I want to ferment at room temperature.

A second freezer would also let me store beers that benefit from aging. I make a stout that tastes too fruity for a few weeks, and I made a tripel-style ale that became transcendent after sitting in a freezer for months.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have developed a new appreciation for beer, and that’s saying a lot.

The only beer I’ve kegged so far continues to amaze me. The head is like the head on a Kirin, except that it has some color and tastes good. Kirin is like Budweiser made by Japanese brewers; an extremely well-made version of something no one needs. My beer is a little darker than a typical lager but not quite orange. When you smell it, multiple aromas come at you. They seem to pulsate. First you smell one, and then then another, and so on.

There are odors of spice, iced tea, caramel, and other things I can’t name. It’s hard to believe I didn’t throw a handful of spices into it.

Every glass seems to taste a little different. Some seem sweeter. Some more bitter. It’s like looking at a gem in different lights.

I have realized something interesting about beer. It differs from wine in that you don’t want to swish it around in your mouth. Not all beers are this way, but most of the time, swishing a beer around detracts from the experience. You smell it carefully. You taste certain things as you put it in your mouth. Then you taste and smell other things as you swallow it. If you hold it in your mouth, it feels uncomfortable.

Wine is not like that. If you don’t hold wine in your mouth for a little bit, you miss out on half the experience.

I am no connoisseur, but I can tell bad wine from good wine. I can tell Macallan 15 from Macallan 18, which isn’t as good. Maybe I’m not fit to judge, but I think beer is just as rewarding and interesting as wine. We think of beer as unsophisticated because we are used to bad beer, not because beer can’t be complex or refined.

Beer is a lot harder to make than wine. To make wine, you press grapes, ferment the juice, and put it in bottles. Done. Beer requires you to choose different malts, a yeast, one or more hops, a mash schedule, a fermentation temperature, a carbonation level, a serving temperature, and possibly other things like flavoring additives.

I am thinking of making mead because it’s so simple. It’s wine made from honey. Dissolve honey in water, add yeast, wait, and you have mead. So easy.

We are living in a golden age of beer. The big boys are still dominating the market with swill, but we now have more breweries than we did before Prohibition. It is now impossible for anyone to say he has tried everything. You can no longer be familiar with every beer sold in America. Even competition judges only get to try some of it.

There are 4 breweries in my rural Southern county, not including homebrewers. I don’t know if all are legitimate. There are probably people in America cashing in on the craft beer wave by offering crummy Bud-like beer in settings that resemble real breweries. It’s still impressive, and one place near me has won a statewide competition, so I would guess it’s the real thing.

In 2000, people here were probably suspicious of anyone strange enough to drink Heineken. Look where we are now.

Can’t Wait to Meet the FBI

Today I had one of the stranger experiences of my life.

Back in December, I became convinced God wanted me to brew beer again. Within less than two weeks, I had a beer finished. During the time while I was getting the whole business back on its feet, I looked for sources of things like grain and tools, and I found a really excellent homebrew supply place in Orlando, over an hour away. I bought my first grain batches there. I went in person, and I was impressed by the service and prices.

As part of this process, I needed to look after my gas bottles. I needed CO2 and beer gas for draft beer. I always to go Airgas near me, but they said they could not deal with 5-pound bottles. I checked measurements to see if I could use a 20-pounder in my keezer, and I learned it would cost me a keg, so I gave the idea up. I emailed the supply place to see if they knew anything, and they recommended a gas supplier right around the corner from them.

Over the last week or two, I’ve had what I thought was dermatitis on my hands. My skin was cracking, and when hot water hit my hands, it stung. I thought maybe I had been in contact with some harsh chemical or other. I also wondered if it was just age. Maybe old people’s hands don’t deal well with all the cleaning involved with homebrewing. I thought about going to a dermatologist, but then I thought maybe I should just try lotion.

Before Rhodah and I went to Singapore, I applied for Global Entry, which is a government service that allows citizens returning to the US to bypass a lot of the DHS/Customs torment and waiting. You have to fill out an online application, pay a fee, and then make an appointment to be interviewed in person.

Because this is the government we’re talking about, appointments are scheduled far in advance, and you have to drive a long way to be interviewed unless you live near one of a small number of facilities. I applied in November, and the best I could do was January 6, which I somehow missed.

When I looked for a new appointment on the government’s site, I saw very depressing news. They wanted me to wait months. Then I learned about a private company that scans appointment schedules continuously and tells people when spots open up. The government doesn’t tell anyone when it decides to add appointments, and it does not inform people of cancellations, so a private company does it for $29 per month.

You have to love the government.

When an appointment pops up, you have to jump on it fast, no matter what time it is, because other people are also using the service.

I paid the fee, and I started seeing appointments popping up in my text messages. The closest places were Orlando, Sanford and Tampa.

I saw an appointment I liked. I took it. I saw a better one. I rescheduled. New appointments kept coming up, and I kept running to the PC to reschedule.I found myself in February. Then yesterday, I got a shock. I saw an appointment for today, in Sanford.

I grabbed it. I was thrilled. The wait would be over, and I had to go to Orlando anyway to run beer errands. This saved me a second set of tolls plus gas. Sanford is near Orlando.

As I got ready to leave today, I thought maybe I should plan a stop to get some lotion, but I decided to wait.

I went to the gas place first. They could not have been nicer. They gave me shiny new tanks, took my old ones that needed testing, and sent me on my way. I went to the brew store. Everything went well there, too. Then I drove to the Sanford airport, where they do interviews.

I was not happy about dealing with the government. It belongs to Satan, and I do not see the government as my friend. I don’t want to deal with law enforcement, ever, if I can avoid it. Homeland Security is close to the top of agencies I want nothing to do with. Who knew what questions they would ask? What if Bidenistas ran the place, knew I was a far-right Christian, and wanted to make trouble?

I resented having to go through this, but I really did not want to wait in any more long customs lines.

I went into the airport and sat down. The agent came out, asked who was next, and ushered me in, early. He held the door.

They ask you where you’ve gone in recent months. I was wearing a Singapore shirt and an Ephesus hat. He asked me how Ephesus was. I told him my wife and I had really enjoyed it. I said we were Christians, so it had significance to us. There is no other reason to go to Ephesus, so I thought I needed to explain.

He said he was a Christian, too. He said, “God bless you.”

I was more than a little freaked out.

I started telling him about Ephesus and the pizza-shaped ichthus signs the underground church left there. He told me he had worked in Israel for 6 months. He said, “I worked on a kibbutz.”

Most people would say, “What’s a kibbutz?” I got excited. I asked which one.

He worked at Nir-David, near Beit She’an. I didn’t know Nir-David, but I knew Beit She’an. It was just down the road when I lived on Geva. He also worked on a kibbutz near Jericho where they grew bananas. He said one of the places where he worked grew pummelos. Geva was in the process of replacing grapefruit with pummelos when I worked there!

We got into all sorts of things. We had been to the same temples in Egypt. We had both cruised the Nile, although he did it as a kid on a little rented sailboat, and I did it on a nice cruise ship. We had been the the pyramids. He had seen more of them than I had. He had been to Saqqara. We couldn’t go to Saqqara because Rhodah felt an attack of evil spirits inside the Great Pyramid, and we had to go back to the hotel so she could recover. I told him that.

He had been all over the Sinai Peninisula with a backpack. I told him I had turned down a trip. I said a Finnish girl on the Kibbutz had offered to pay my way so I could protect her from Middle Eastern men. Then we started talking about Israeli men and their abnormally high sex drive, and that got us to the subject of Israeli women and how unexpectedly attractive they were.

He had been to the Banias. He started to explain it to me, but I knew about it already. It’s one of my favorite topics. He knew how the pagans had thrown sacrifices into the spring there and how it was believed to be the site of Caesarea Phillipi, where Jesus called Peter “Satan,” told him to get behind him, and said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. It is said that, “gates of hell” referred to the area of the Banias, because it was a center of demon worship. The Banias itself looks like a gate of hell. It’s a big hole in the side of the base of Mount Hermon.

Mount Hermon is significant to me because it’s believed to be the place where fallen angels came down and made a pact to have sex with women and then stick together when they had to account for themselves to God.

He said I was the first person he had interviewed who had known about kibbutzes. I think. Maybe he said I was the first one who knew about the Banias. He was amazed.

We talked much too long, and then he had me put my hands on the fingerprint machine, which didn’t see my fingerprints. He said I should try applying some hand sanitizer, but it didn’t help. He excused himself, went out, and got a bottle of lotion, which I put on my hands. The machine then worked.

I shook his hand when we parted, and he said, “God bless you,” again.

I thought I was going to have a creepy, scary government interview, but instead, I met a brother. I must have made 5 appointments while I was looking for a convenient time, and look who I ended up with. I picked his location and a time when he was working, and I had no idea who he was or even that he existed.

I got to my car and made a short video call to Rhodah and told her. She was amazed. I prayed after we hung up. Then I started the car and turned on Waze to find the best way home. I set home as my destination, and my phone said, “Have a blessed drive.”

I’m not kidding. Waze told me to have a blessed drive. I’ve been using it for at least 5 years. It has never said anything like that to me. I was actually scared for a minute.

The interview shocked me so much, I started asking myself if the government had had people look at my blog and investigate my past so they could have a plant pretend to be a Christian with amazingly similar experiences. It was hard for me to believe God had brought us together, so my mind looked for other explanations.

Of course, the government is far too stupid to do a thing like that. The government is only smart in movies and in the minds of socialists and other authoritarians.

As I was writing this, my approval came through, and when I got home, I realized my hands were better. The lotion did the trick, so now I know what to do about the cracks.

I wonder what’s on tap for tomorrow.

It’s all About the Data

The whole brewing enterprise is going very well.

Day before yesterday, I was finally able to get my first ale into a glass, and yesterday, I started drawing beer that was carbonated more correctly and had less suspended yeast in it. Yeast is bitter, and not in a way that improves beer.

I’ll post a photo.

The beer is still cloudy. It may stay that way. This is what I wanted. I can’t explain why, but this is a beer that should be a little chewy. If it turns clear as I take more out of the keg, it will still be great, but this photo shows what I was trying to do.

I bought 4 of those glasses. They’re called Brimley nucleated glasses. “Nucleated” means they stuck a laser or something in each glass and made tiny dents in the bottom. This creates what are known as nucleation points, and it means bubbles form on them and stream up into the beer.

I was not really interested, or even aware of the existence of, nucleation points when I started looking for glasses, but they don’t seem to hurt anything, and I was willing to compromise because it was so hard to find sturdy glasses with a good shape and a low price.

Brimley himself must be a Chinese guy, like Mr. Bauer from Harbor Freight.

Wing Wa Brimley, son of Mei Ling and Wo Fat Brimley.

I am controlling my food and beverage intake these days, but Saturdays…come on. I’m going to have a pizza or a Coke occasionally. Yesterday, I must have had a quart and a half of beer. It’s delightful. The complex aroma and flavor. The fine-textured Kirin-y head. And the satisfaction of finally getting it in my hand. These all drove me to go overboard.

Also, this stuff is just plain good. I have a problem when I create recipes: sometimes the results are so good, it’s very, very hard to stop eating. Beer is made from recipes, so the same problem applies when I get it right.

I will not say I make a great beer or a beer that should win prizes. It’s all subjective. I will say I really, really like the beers I designed. Really. A lot. Seriously.

I always say I don’t drink to get a buzz, but I will not lie. I want to be honest and correct myself. While I’ve been researching new beers and…wow, “researching” sounds so legitimate! Like saying, “I EXPERIMENTED with marijuana before being put in charge of document security in the Clinton White House.” Anyway, during my research, I have had several strong beers, and there is no way to drink twelve ounces of a 10%-alcohol beer without feeling something, especially if you have my Gary-Coleman-like moderation-induced tolerance. I have felt some pleasant sensations, and several times, I drank a little more to extend them.

I have been a little concerned. I don’t ever want to be drunk again, and my feeling has been that it’s a bad idea to see beer as anything other than a delicious drink. I’m not going to worry, though. I’m in the initial-enthusiasm phase of my return to brewing, so naturally, I will drink a little more now than I will in the future.

The Bible says God gave us wine to make man’s heart glad, so I suppose it can’t be true that it’s evil to feel a little sensation from beer. I don’t want to be a self-medicater, but being a Sadducee–a legalist–is worse.

I still want to make a couple of strong beers, but I have realized they’re not for every day. If I drink a bottle of imperial stout in the evening, I feel a little different when I get up the next day. The general rule is that I feel energetic and enthusiastic when I wake up, so I don’t want to face mornings with a vague sensation that reminds me I drank the night before.

I keep thinking about the relationship between Christmas and the rapture. I feel that beer is suitable for celebrations, as we see in Deuteronomy 14, and this is why I’m supposed to make it. I think I’m celebrating the rapture–the second Christmas–in advance. I’m ahead of most people. Last night, I lifted a glass and told God I was celebrating. I kept thanking him for coming for us the first time.

As for my views on how we see Christmas and gifts, I believe God told me this yesterday: Christmas IS the present. That’s really true. I told this to Rhodah, and she quoted John 3:16. God “gave” his son so believers would not perish but have eternal life. Jesus is a gift. The best possible gift. But we have Jesus-free Christmases during which we get excited about puny gifts like jewelry and gift cards.

Giving is essential to a blessed life. If you want to receive, give to others on God’s command. Not preachers in Lamborghinis. Actual human beings with hearts and needs. The things we give are seeds, and we receive harvests. God gives to receive a harvest, and so should we. He gave his son so he could have us. Jesus, who is God, even received a harvest when he gave away fish and bread.

If you don’t have a lot of money to give, you can give prayer, labor, a ride, a free professional service, or something else of value. Rhodah says T.B. Joshua said that if you have nothing else to give, give your ear and your heart. Sometimes people just need to talk.

I may crank out a wheat beer today.

Glerp Glerp Glerp

Your humble narrator has big news to announce.

Big to me. Insignificant and silly to the rest of the world.

I managed to draw a beer today!

When I started ordering things to make beer a couple of weeks back, I had to order things I needed so I could brew, ferment, and serve. Three things. Serving homebrew is complicated, because there are so many ways. Do you want a fancy bar with built-in taps? Do you want to be able to take a keg to a picnic? Do you like bottles? I wasn’t sure what I wanted, so I ordered a little hand faucet I could attach to a keg with a little bit of tubing.

Since then, I have started work on a keezer, which is a freezer with a temperature controller and taps.

Things took a while to arrive, and they came in dribs and drabs. The brewing stuff came earliest, so it only took a short time to get that going. I put a freezer in the garage for fermenting, and shortly, I had beer. But I could not get at it to drink it.

It was torture. That sweet little 5-gallon keg of excitement and old memories, sitting there locked up like Rapunzel.

Today, finally, some stuff I needed arrived, and I was able to move the keg to the keezer and pour myself a beer. I started by pouring off a little bit of the beer on the bottom of the keg, because that beer usually has floating yeast that makes it too bitter. Then I poured this glass and gave the beer a real try.

I remember this beer now. It’s exactly the beer I have been thinking about for the last couple of days. Hurricane beer.

I used this stuff to get through 2005 in Coral Gables. Wilma, Rita, and Katrina came through, if memory serves. I used to put a keg of this beer in a big cooler with ice along with lunchmeat, cheese, and bread, and I was all set. When the power went out, I was irie, mon.

It has a wonderful banana and allspice aroma. That comes from fermenting it fairly warm, I think. I designed it to be fermented at room temperature. This time around, though, it was a little cooler. Around 71°, I think.

It’s cloudy. I think that never changes for this beer unless a flocculating agent is used. A flocculating agent is something you put in beer to make stuff fall out of it. One such agent is carageenan, a seaweed also used for thickening root beer and ice cream. It’s also called Irish moss.

It has hops to burn, but I used crystal malt to make it sweet, so it’s extremely easy to drink.

The temperature control for the keezer arrived, and this is why I was able to move this ale there. I can get to work on a wheat beer any time I want. I already have the ingredients.

This is a blast. Finally, I don’t have to buy factory beer and live with disappointment.

I don’t drink much, but I do have a policy of forcing myself to drink three beers in one day, occasionally, to fight kidney stones, and I have not been doing it. Maybe this is just the loophole I need right now.

Beer Done Changed!

The brew biz is moving right along.

When I used to have a keg freezer, I used the technology of the time to connect gas bottles to kegs, and kegs to taps. Since I decided to brew again, I’ve been learning about new stuff that makes things easier.

One of the neatest developments is the Duotight connector. This is a tool-free connector that attaches beer and air tubing to things. You can use it on both the gas and beer sides. It works with a new tubing called EVAbarrier which is supposed to somehow reduce beer’s exposure to oxygen.

With the old tubing, to attach tubing to barbs, you had to use hose clamps, or at least I did. I didn’t trust friction. You would get yourself some tubing, cut it to length, heat the end of it in water, and then slide the softened end onto your fitting. If it was tight, as it was supposed to be, it would hold on for dear life, and if you wanted to remove it later, it was not very easy. The whole business required considerable work.

EVAbarrier slips right into Duotight fittings. You pull a little collar, and the fitting grabs the tubing. Then you have a seal that won’t leak. To take if off, you push the collar the other way, and off the tubing comes.

Leaks are one of the big issues with draft systems, and the new stuff is supposedly less prone to leaks. If true, that could save me a lot of aggravation.

Because I have been in a hurry, I have ordered some old-tech products to go between the kegs and taps, but now I plan to send almost all these things back. I have newfangled stuff on the way.

I am continuing to research changes in craft beers.

The other day, somebody told me about “juice bombs.” A juice bomb is a sweet beer without much hop bitterness. I believe they’re for soft millennials (but I repeat myself). Real beer is an acquired taste. It’s not Hawaiian Punch. It takes a while to learn to appreciate bitterness and hop flavors. To the detriment of humanity, beer has become cool, so there are a lot of people out there who want to be seen drinking craft beers. My guess is that juice bombs were made for millennials who want to be seen drinking the latest thing, without going to the trouble to learn to enjoy actual beer.

This is just a theory.

I also read about milk stout. I know it sounds revolting. The person who named it made a big marketing mistake.

It’s called milk stout because they put lactose in it. No milk. Yeast doesn’t like lactose, so after fermentation, the beer is still sweet.

I wondered: are milk stouts juice bombs?

Yesterday I tried one. It was quite nasty. The name is Nitro Milk Stout, and people give it good reviews. It comes in a big can with a little nitrogen charger inside it to give it nice bubbles and sweetness.

When I poured it, it looked a lot like a draft Guinness, complete with the little bubble waves going up the sides of the glass, but the waves seemed to shut down quickly.

It tasted a lot like Guinness, except that I didn’t notice much bitterness. What I did taste was sugar. It was like a stout egg cream.

At first, it wasn’t all that terrible. I felt I understood it. People like to compare Guinness to sweet things like milkshakes, so somebody tried to make a sweet stout. Maybe I needed to give it a chance and expand my horizons.

It was no good. I had to quit. After about 4 ounces, I was looking to get rid of it. Hop flavors are important. Bitterness is important. This stuff was not going to do anything for me.

It occurred to me that I had an ale I wanted to clear out of the spare fridge, so I decided to see if a half-and-half would work. I tried Bell’s Two Hearted IPA the other day, and I thought it was just okay. I found the malt taste watery, and the hop aroma was brutal and free from any type of complexity. Some character on the web claimed this was THE best beer, and all sorts of alleged experts are in love with it. I thought it was a little clumsy. But maybe it was bitter enough to save Nitro stout.

No dice. Together, these beers were worse than Nitro all by itself. Down the sink they went.

I wrote an unfavorable review for Bell’s and posted it somewhere. Boy, did it make people mad. Like I was wrong. Not liking THE best beer is incorrect, apparently. It was really funny.

I tried to redeem the evening with a Blithering Idiot barleywine.

Barleywines were developed by the British while they were feuding with France. Their wine supply was not looking good, so they created very strong beers to fill the gap. Their alcoholic content is up close to winy numbers.

I once made something I thought was similar to a barleywine, and it was spectacular. It was really more like a Belgian tripel, but anyway, it was magnificent. Complex. Sweetness balanced with nice hops. It got better and better in the keg. I thought bottled barleywines might be similar.

Blithering Idiot was a disappointment. It was syrupy-sweet. It had a heavy flavor sort of like caramel and sort of like horehound. It also smelled and tasted the way Carnation milk smells, only the taste was overwhelming. I thought Watney’s Red Barrel or Whitbread might have that smell if you spilled it on the floor and let it congeal for a month.

It may be a great beer for other people. Not me. I finished it, but I would never buy it again.

My big new beer discovery is Old Rasputin Imperial Stout. Imperial stouts were supposedly made by the British for export to Russia. Imagine Guinness with about half the water removed. These beers have very strong stout flavor and aromas. You drink them from wide glasses that have a lot of room for aroma.

Old Rasputin is about 9% alcohol, so you won’t want to drink it all day. One ought to be plenty.

I wanted to learn about imperial stouts because I had what I thought was an imperial stout at a party long ago, and I loved it.

Old Rasputin is so good, it changed the way I think about beer. I had been planning to focus on thinner beers, but this stout made me realize beer had more potential than I understood, and to exploit that potential, I would need to make some high-gravity ales.

The head was thick and high, and so dark it seemed to have hints of purple in it. The beer itself was almost black. The aroma was heavy and fruity, in a wonderful way. I would say a Chunky bar might smell similar if you burned one corner.

The beer itself tasted somewhat like coffee, chocolate, and fruit. It was just about exactly what I had hoped for.

As the beer warmed up, it kept changing. The fruit and chocolate flavors increased. I thought I tasted a little licorice.

I found myself moving the glass from one nostril to the other. You can actually smell things in one nostril but not the other. The smell sort of pulsated as it went from one side to the other.

I swished it around in my mouth and enjoyed the way the taste changed after I had swallowed it. The flavor sticks to your teeth and keeps giving you pleasure after the glass is empty.

I can’t say enough about this beer. I felt genuinely sad when the last one was gone.

I am used to telling people I like the beers I brew more than anything I can buy, but that is no longer true.

I don’t have the right glass for heavy beers, but a pint Ball jar works very well. The internal shape is similar.

There is a well-known homebrewing guru named Denny Conn. I used to interact with him on Usenet in the Dark Ages. He makes heavy beers. His online signature is the same now as it was then: “Life begins at 60 — 1.060, that is.” He’s referring to the original gravity of beer. A heavy beer starts with an original gravity of 1.060 or higher, and it gets lighter as it ferments.

I always thought he was a fringe case, but he’s onto something.

I’ve also tried Brother Thelonious, a dark ale made by the same brewery. Really excellent stuff, but after Old Rasputin, it’s not very exciting. Brother Thelonious couldn’t make me rething everything I believed about beer.

Back when craft beers started popping up, I learned that small breweries could make bad beer. Worse, big breweries pretended to be small breweries, and then they made bad beer. There were craft beers out there that were like Budweiser with dye in it. Now I see another danger: small breweries that use excellent ingredients and careful methods to make sugary beer that appeals to people who never liked beer in the first place.

If you think I’m talking to you, check your tattoos. You may be right.

Pv=nRT

Today I went through what remains of my beer gas equipment from the Coral Gables days. It’s not all that pretty.

When I quit brewing, I kept the expensive stuff. I held onto it until I left the area. When I moved, I had to throw a lot of things out. I kept my gas tanks and regulators. Things like that can be useful even for people who don’t brew.

When I started rooting through this stuff, I didn’t remember exactly what I had done in Miami. I knew I had had a 4-keg keezer with 4 taps on lid-mounted towers. I knew I had a CO2 tank with a regulator and fittings for 4 kegs. I also knew I had a beer gas tank with a regulator, set up for one keg. I didn’t remember anything beyond that.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. It’s commonly used to dispense stout. If you’ve ever seen a nice stout with pretty bubbles moving up the inside of the glass, you’ve had nitrogen beer.

Today, I found I had 4 tanks and three regulators. It appears I bought two CO2 tanks and two beer gas tanks. One regulator was for beer gas only and had a single out line attached. Both of the others had manifolds and multiple lines.

I guess I must have put kegs in my garage freezer at some point, because there is no other reason to have a second CO2 regulator and manifold.

When I got tired of brewing back in Coral Gables, I neglected my keezer, and one day it stopped working. It had always been quiet, so I had no reason to think anything was wrong. Eventually, I opened it and found a sea of stale beer inside. It had died on me, and the heat had caused pressure to develop and blow beer out of one or more kegs. One of my regulators was soaked.

I went over the regulators today. The one that was soaked seems to be functional except that at least one gauge may not be working. That can be replaced. I have to test it to be sure what’s going on. Another one had two bad gauges, so I yanked them off and ordered new ones.

As things stand now, I can definitely run 4 CO2 kegs, and I will be able to run an additional stout keg when my gauges arrive.

The great thing I’ve discovered is that I’ll be able to put 4 tall kegs and one short one in the keezer, so I’m getting a 5th faucet. When I thought I would only have 4 kegs, I ordered 3 very nice beer faucets plus a stout faucet, and today, one of the beer faucets arrived with a broken part. I told the seller, and he’s sending another one. Thing is, I can probably replace the part. So he’ll get paid by the Postal Service, as he should, and I ought to be able to put a $90 faucet together for the price of one part.

It’s too bad I threw out my old faucets. They were really good. The company that made them has apparently been sued to death, so they aren’t available now.

I can’t get small beer gas tanks filled or swapped here. I can get CO2, but if I want beer gas, I have to buy a big tank or drive to Orlando to fill my little ones. If I get a big tank, I can either put it in the keezer and forget the small ones, or I can use it to fill the small ones. I’m thinking of putting it in the keezer and keeping a small one as a spare in case I get a leak or something. At all depends on whether the big one will fit in there with kegs. If it will, it would be stupid to drive to Orlando over and over.

To sum up, things have worked out well. I have all the CO2 storage I need. If I have to invest in regulators, I will only have to buy one. I can get beer gas locally. I’ll be able to have 5 kegs instead of 4.

I have to go buy wood for the keezer. Then I’ll slap it together, and a week from today, I should have a truly exceptional beer center. By then, I should have gas and one keg installed, and the temperature control should have arrived. I may even weld up a mobile base for the keezer so I can move it and clean under it. Lifting it on casters will also give it more air, so I should be able to put it closer to the wall.

I’ll be brewing again by the weekend, so wheat beer should be in my glass in less than 10 days.

I’ll post a photo when that happens.

Tithing was More Fun Than we Know

I think I know why God wants me to make beer.

Yesterday, I wrote about the rapture. The birth of Jesus was the first Christmas. The rapture will be the second real Christmas, not just a yearly observation. The second coming, to rule the earth, will be the third Christmas. The Bible says we will know when the rapture is coming. People who don’t read carefully get hung up on a scripture that says only Yahweh knows the day, but the Bible also says it will not take us by surprise, and it’s clear we are expected to know the season, meaning we will have a good general idea of the timing, and this will help us prepare.

Look, Jesus told us there would be signs. That proves we are not to be taken by surprise. It serves no purpose to tell people about signs of an upcoming event if you want them to be ambushed.

So if we will have a pretty good idea that the rapture is nearly here, we will have reason to celebrate, and what did the ancient Jews celebrate with? Alcohol. Yes, they did. Stop with the legalistic teetotaling sophistry. What was the first miracle Jesus did?

I won’t tell you. You should know.

His first miracle took place at a wedding. The rapture will take us to heaven for the wedding of Jesus. It will be a celebration. There will be wine. Jesus said he would drink wine in heaven. The Song of Solomon, which tells about a man gathering his fiancee to him, is about the rapture. It makes sense that we would celebrate here on Earth before we leave.

I believe God told me another reason why he wants me to make beer. He wants to pick a fight.

I can hear people yelling at the screen. “The Prince of Peace doesn’t pick fights!” Sure he does. You should read the Bible some day. God picked a number of fights in the Bible, to glorify Himself. Read Exodus, if you want an obvious example. Let me spell it out. He picked a fight with the false gods of Egypt and their followers. He humiliated those spirits one at a time with plagues showing he ruled their supposed spheres of influence.

It appears God is picking a fight with Christians who worship men and rules.

We are supposed to be under the law of the Holy Spirit, not laws carved in stone. In law, there are two principles you need to know about: supercession and preemption.

Preemption means laws from high authorities outweigh laws from lower authorities. Federal laws sometimes outweigh state laws.

Supercession means new laws replace old ones.

The law of the Holy Spirit supercedes the written law, because it is newer.

The law of the Holy Spirit preempts the traditions of men because the source is God Himself, who has the highest authority. A lot of our religious rules are traditions of men with no authority.

What does “testament” mean? It means the same thing in the Bible and on Earth. It means “will.” What do we say in our wills? We say we revoke all previous wills. While the new covenant doesn’t exactly render the old covenant invalid, where it conflicts with the old covenant, the old covenant is superseded. This is why Messianic Jews can eat pork and drive on Saturday.

As for preemption, Jesus came and let the world know fabricated traditions of men had no validity, and when he gave us the Holy Spirit, he put the one who wrote the law inside us. That person has the right to overrule baseless tradition and tell us things that disagree with the written law.

When mom and dad go out and leave a list of instructions on the refrigerator, that list doesn’t have to be obeyed forever. It stays up until they come home, and then they tell the kids what to do in person. That’s the difference between the written law and the law of the Holy Spirit.

We are supposed to be commanded by the Holy Spirit these days. Very few Christians are. Most of us live by wacky traditions and rigid Old Testament laws. If you took the invalid traditions out of Catholicism, there wouldn’t be much of it left.

Jesus healed on the Sabbath. His disciples violated the Sabbath with his approval. He spoke disrespectfully to priests who were chosen by the Romans, not God. He interfered with a lawful stoning. The Holy Spirit told him what to do, so his authority was higher than the authority of the written law.

These days we have Christians who teach tithing, which is wrong. We have Christians who teach teetotaling. Some Christians teach that we can’t serve in the military, which is crazy. Many Christians think you get to heaven by going to church or volunteering. Many think we are supposed to obey a bunch of rules we do not understand, and God will tally up our scores and see who gets in. These things are not Christianity. They are traditions and legalism.

We can be very stuffy and pretentious. We often argue when we have no idea what we’re talking about. “The pope said THIS!” “Daniel Kolenda said THAT, and he works miracles, so he’s right!” “I rode around in Reinhard Bonnke’s bus for two years, so I’m right!” “God is going to get you for criticizing Benny Hinn because you’re touching his anointed!” “If you have a Christmas tree, you’re worshiping Satan!”

Christianity is actually a supernatural relationship. It’s like being inhabited by demons, except you’re inhabited by the Holy Spirit. Just as demons command and influence people who are depraved and make people similar to themselves, the Holy Spirit will influence and command you and make you similar to Him.

We argue because we are not in touch with the one who makes the rules. The Holy Spirit tells us all the exact–EXACT–same things. He doesn’t pit his children against each other. When God picks a fight, he picks it with other spirits and people who listen to them.

If you speak in tongues a lot, you will be brought into agreement with God over time. If not, you’re going to end up guessing, not to mention fighting with people who are right.

I think God is telling me to make beer for celebration and to provoke and expose the ignorant and proud. The rule-followers. The preacher-worshipers.

In the end, some people will win, and those people will be the ones who heard God in the first place.

I was talking to Rhodah about all this today, and she showed me something about a scripture I had mentioned to her the day before. Deuteronomy 14 says that Hebrews who were too far from the temple to take their tithes there (and tithes were not money) were to convert the tithes to money and then give the money to rich priests who could buy fancy chariots sheathed in gold.

NO! It says they were to convert the tithes into “‘anything you want — cattle, sheep, wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please,’ and then feast before the Lord.”

How about that, tithe-craving preachers? God wants us to eat and drink your yachts and $7,000 basketball shoes.

It also says they were to store food and drink so the Levites could come and eat. Nothing in there about giving them money to buy jets.

A lot of Baptists would explode if they read Deuteronomy 14.

Maybe not the Forty-Gallon Baptists. My dad used to claim they existed. He said they were only allowed to drink 40 gallons per year. I think he probably got that wrong.

So this is where we are. I am brewing, and it’s going very well. Just slides along without any real problems.

Obviously, I don’t encourage anyone to get drunk or even to drink. That’s another subject.

I can tell you this: alcohol is perfectly fine. It’s not like tobacco or LSD or mushrooms, which have no place in a Christian’s life. People and demons are the problem. If you can’t drink safely, the problem is you. Most people can be surrounded with alcohol all their lives and never have any trouble, so it’s clear the individual is what makes the difference.

Some Asians can’t handle alcohol, and some can’t process it well. This is said to be a biological thing that can’t be changed. The rest of us aren’t like that. It’s all down to demons and character problems.

My grandfather, who died from drinking moonshine with methanol in it, was an alcoholic and a mean drunk. Family lore says he beat my grandmother on the steps of the courthouse where he lived. My dad was an alcoholic. When I was young, I did stupid things when I drank, but was I an alcoholic? I’m definitely not an alcoholic now. I barely drink, and when I do, it causes no problems.

They say there is no way to for an alcoholic to be free from alcoholism, so either they’re wrong, or I have never been an alcoholic.

The general rule is that when another person thinks you’re an alcoholic, there is no way to change their mind. It is not possible. They can always come up with an argument. I don’t have a drinking problem, and I never will again because it isn’t in me. When I did have a drinking problem, the problem was immaturity, not bondage.

I hope to be imbibing moderate amounts of the results of my labor and God’s grace very soon. Of course, you will read about it here.

Getting Ready for Next Year’s Christmas Party

Twelve days ago, I had nothing but a twinkle in my eye and a computer mouse in my hand, and now I have an AIO (All-in-One brewing machine), a fermenting freezer, a future keezer (freezer modified to hold kegs and dispense beer), and two fermenters, not to mention an ale in the keg.

Making this ale has been a fascinating experience. Tumultuous. Touch-and-go. I made several bad mistakes, and every time, I had to come up with a solution, like a paratrooper trying to splice cords on the way to the ground.

I put way too little water in the brew machine at first, so I had to bulk the wort up with extract. Because the machine was too dry, it burned the insulating jacket that helps it heat. I had problems using my new refractometer, so I kept opening and closing the fermenter, and that made me think I had let too much CO2 out, so I tried to solve the problem with a pellet gun cartridge.

A lot of pellet guns use tiny CO2 tanks the size of your finger, and they are called cartridges. They are also used in things like seltzer bottles.

Among homebrewers, there is a lot of mythology. Things that are known facts often prove to be fantasies propagated by the ignorant. There have long been questions about gas.

Homebrewers use tanks of CO2 and nitrogen to pressurize beer systems and carbonate beer. For years, people have argued about whether industrial gas from welding shops is the same as gas from beverage-gas shops.

In case you’re wondering, yes, it’s the same. Airgas, one of the leading gas suppliers for welders, confirms it.

I thought the fuss about welding gas was stupid, so I assumed the same was true about the cartridge controversy. Some people said cartridges for guns contained oil that would contaminate beer and possible poison people.

Yesterday, I decided to try using a cartridge to shoot beer into my fermenting bucket. I had a bunch of Crosman cartridges for pellet guns, and I had a little keg-charging device that used cartridges. I wanted to see if it would work. I shot gas into the fermenter, and then I shot some into a two-liter bottle of Coke that had gone flat.

Later, the Coke tasted gross. The gas stank.

I was not pleased. The Coke was worthless, but the beer cost money to make, and it also required a lot of work and time. I opened the fermenter, and sure enough, it smelled off. I thought I would have to throw the beer out.

I decided to use a CO2 tank to blow new CO2 in and displace the cartridge gas. I also shot a whole cartride into my utility sink with the charger held against the side. I did this to see if oil came out. To my relief, there was no residue on the sink after the cartridge emptied. That means the gas can’t poison me. A little gas floating above beer could conceivably flavor it, but unless oil got into the beer, it wouldn’t harm me.

I tasted a little bit of the beer, and I couldn’t taste anything unusual.

Today I kegged the beer, and it seems okay. I shot CO2 into the keg, and now it’s chilling to 38°. By tomorrow night, it should be carbonated, and then I can have a beer and see if it’s worth keeping.

Ordinarily, I would use tall, skinny Cornelius soda kegs to hold my beer, but when I got ready to brew this time, I decided to start out with a Megamouth Torpedo keg. This is a keg made for homebrewers. It’s short and wide. I bought it because I hoped it would be short enough to fit in my spare fridge.

I must have been confused about the measurements, because it’s not even close to short enough. I am keeping it, however, because it has another benefit. It will allow me to get more beer into my keezer (beer freezer), and it will probably let me keep one keg a little warmer than the others.

Chest freezers have steps or platforms inside them because compressors have to go somewhere. These steps, commonly called “humps,” reduce the floor space. That means tall kegs can only fit in the areas beside the humps.

A shorter keg can sit on the hump next to a CO2 or nitrogen tank. In my case, this should make it possible for me to have 4 Cornelius kegs plus a short keg. Humps generally give off a little heat in spite of being insulated, so a keg sitting on a hump may be slightly warmer than the other kegs in the keezer.

Different beers like different temperatures. I like lagers coldest. After that, most ales. After that, stouts. I should be able to have 5 gallons of stout at a warmer temperature than the beers around it. Even if it’s the same temperature, I’ll have a total of 5 beer varieties, not 4.

If I can pull this off, I’ll be the king of small keezers.

I have 4 used Corny kegs on the way, along with 4 beer faucets and 1 stout faucet. If the kegs will work with the Torpedo, nitrogen, and CO2 in the keezer, I’ll need to buy faucet number 5 and incorporate it in the design of the keezer.

Generally, a keezer will have a wooden collar between the body and lid. The collar is a frame made from things like 2×6’s on their sides. It sits on top of the keezer, and instead of having the lid rest on the keezer, it rests on the collar. This gives you additional internal height and lets you install your faucets, which people like to call “taps,” through the wood. If you do things this way, you don’t have to install taps on top of the lid or drill holes through the side of the chest.

I’ll need one hole per tap. I’ll also need a drip tray I can fasten to the front of the keezer. I can’t undrill holes, and I probably can’t make a drip tray longer or shorter, so I have to wait for the Corny’s to decide how to make the collar and which tray to buy.

Once all this is decided, I have to decide how to attach the collar to the top of the keezer.

I know a lot of people use Liquid Nails. I’m wondering if silicone is better, mainly because silicone will come off when you want it to.

I used to have a regular appliance repair guy, and I always pick tradesmen’s brains when they do work for me, so I peppered him with questions. I asked who made reliable refrigerators. He worked on everything from Haiers to Sub-Zeros. He said they were ALL junk, so I should buy whatever was cheapest. And there wasn’t a whole lot he could do when they went bad. They were all Chinese, and once the systems started leaking, they had to be replaced.

Back when the world was sane, freezers were made in Caucasian countries by skilled workers, and they were expensive. They ran forever, and when they broke down, they could be fixed. My grand mother got her deep freezes in the Sixties as far as I know, and they were running when she died in 2003. I suppose commercial freezers are still like that. Things are different now. If you get 10 years out of a refrigerator or freezer, you’ve hit a home run.

If what the repairman said was true, then it seems like a bad idea to fasten a collar to a freezer permanently. If I use something I can undo, and the keezer dies, I can take the collar off and put it right on the same model. 

I had an idea about using Velcro. I could rout shallow pockets in the underside of the collar, just high enough to keep the Velcro from lifting the collar off the keezer. Then I could run silicone around the joints. The Velcro would be invisible, and if the keezer expired, I would be able to get the collar off.

But maybe it’s a stupid idea.

I don’t like the idea of using silicone all by itself because it’s not much of an adhesive.

UPDATE: I consulted some people who had already built keezers, and their ideas are much better than mine. Really excellent. I think I’ll listen to them and adapt their concepts.

I would guess that by Wednesday night, I should know what to do. I should be able to have my second beer fermenting before then, too.

Again, I wonder why I felt moved to do all this. I truly think God is in it.

I wonder if it’s connected to the rapture, or at least to celebrating it. The rapture will be the second real Christmas. Jesus will be coming to Earth for us one more time. Recently, I got that revelation from God, and it made me feel like celebrating. Maybe when the rapture comes, it won’t be instantaneous, and we will have a little time to get together and vent our joy. A beer or two would certainly be in order.

Sehr Gut

My first post-2006 brew day is behind me, and it went great. Sort of.

I bought myself a used Braumeister 20L V2 brewing system, which does everything for you up to the point where it’s time to chill the wort. It mashes and boils, in other words. That’s a lot of help. You just put your water and grain in the machine, turn it on, pull the mash thing out when it beeps, throw hops in when it beeps, and drain the wort into your fermenter.

In the past, I had to mash in a huge kettle on the counter wrapped in towels. Then I moved everything to a big cooler and sparged with hot water I had prepared separately. Then I lifted the refilled kettle back to the stove and boiled. The kettle and cooler were too big to wash in the sink. I had to stand in the kitchen most of the time, because nothing was automatic.

Instead of typing “Braumeister” over and over again, I’ll just call the machine Helga. It’s much easier to type.

I made a major mistake this time. I read the manual, and it said to use 12 liters of water for mashing. This sounded crazy, because I was making around 20 liters of beer. I figured the Germans had come up with a way to use less water. Some kind of greeny thing.

As I was doing the mash, I heard weird noises from Helga. It sounded like liquid was hitting something very hot.

Helga mashes in the following way. She is a cylindrical kettle with a ring-shaped heater in the bottom. You put a smaller cylinder (mash pipe) inside the big one, with screens on each end and grain inside it. You add water. Helga heats up and starts pumping water up through the grain, so it overflows out of the inner cylinder, down to where the heater is.

It sounded like liquid was hitting the heater. Seemed to me the heater should have been submerged, so I added water until the noise stopped.

I got a bunch of error messages. They said, “Temp Err.” I Googled, and other people had had the same problem. There were no answers.

After a while, there was a burning smell. It wasn’t bad, so I let it go.

Helga has a cute insulating jacket she wears to make her more efficient. When I took it off later, I found a big burned place on the inside.

When I looked back at the manual, I saw that it recommended 12 liters of water for a smaller model. Helga was supposed to get 23. The heater was exposed part of the time, and it heated up one side of Helga so the jacket was scorched.

When all was said and done, I had a specific gravity (reflects sugar concentration) of around 1.040. I should have had 1.056. I turned up the boiling temperature, and eventually I added around 5 ounces of malt extract I had on hand for making yeast cultures. I got up to 1.054, which is good enough.

The lack of water prevented the mash from going as it should have, so I didn’t get as much sugar as I had hoped.

The funny thing is that before adding the wrong amount of water, I checked the manual several times.

Cleaning up was pretty easy. I took the mash pipe and screens out. I put the screens in the dishwasher. I washed the pipe and Helga herself in the kitchen sink. Not too bad.

I made the mistake of using loose hops instead of putting them in mesh bags, so I ended up with a lot of hop mush in the bottom of the kettle. I ran a lot of clean water through the pump to make sure there were no hops in it, and I tipped Helga over and rinsed everything down the drain.

When I was done, I drained Helga into my fermenting bucket, Franz, and put it in the pool, where the water was at 65°. Two hours later, the wort was down to about 71°. It only needed to be below 80° in order for it to be safe for yeast, so I suppose I can take fermenters out after an hour or so from now on.

I have gone back and forth about fermenting temperature.

I chose to begin my return to brewing with this recipe because it ferments at room temperature, but after buying the grain, I bought a little freezer for fermenting. I put a temperature control on it to get it to 68°. Fermenting at 75° can produce strange alcohols that cause headaches and hangovers, if certain people on the web are right, and I thought maybe I should ferment at a more conventional temperature.

Upon reflection, I decided to move the temperature back up but still use the freezer. Higher temperatures produce chemicals that can make beer taste better, and I didn’t want to miss that, nor did I want to violate a sound principle of cooking: never mess with a recipe if you need to learn something from it.

Brewing beer is a type of cooking.

I needed to know how the original recipe would work, and using a lower temperature would prevent that from happening.

I could have fermented on the floor in the house, but that could have caused problems. First, beers sometimes overflow when fermenting. Second, I am doing this fermentation with a loose lid to let gas out. Bugs could get in if I didn’t put Franz in a container. I don’t have a lot of bugs, but I do have a few.

I am using a brand new freezer to keep something at more or less the same temperature that surrounds the freezer. Sounds odd.

Now I’m waiting for my kegging stuff to arrive. I ordered something called a Torpedo Megamouth keg. It’s about 18″ tall and 11″ wide. Shorter than a Cornelius keg, which is what most people use. It will fit in my spare fridge so I don’t have to get a beer fridge yet.

I’ve also ordered a fancier fermenter. I chose something called a Fermzilla All-Rounder. It’s a clear plastic jug with a big mouth. The one I got comes with a valve on the lid, so you can do fermentation under pressure. My understanding is that this allows warmer fermentation, faster fermentation, and some other things I forgot. The All-Rounder is easy to clean, you can see what’s happening inside, and it’s generally better than a bucket.

Should I get a beer fridge? I guess. Not sure what to do. I don’t really want a big fridge with taps sitting out in my Christian house, scaring Christian guests, but if you’re going to make beer, you really need to be able to keep at least three types ready to drink.

I felt tremendous peace after brewing. The process was rocky when I got started, but as time passed, things went more and more smoothly, and I started to feel as though angels were doing things for me. When I got to the point where it was time to clean up, I was surprised to see how little there was to do.

I can’t explain any of that.

I still feel like God wants me to do this. I am not all that excited about drinking beer. I don’t look forward to being lectured by legalists. I’m enjoying myself, but I don’t know what it’s all about.

Beer With Me

My brewing system arrived yesterday, so today I’m brewing beer again!

No, I’m not. Of course I’m not. It’s never that simple.

Some poor guy had to give up brewing, so he sold me his 20-liter Speidel Braumeister for a small fraction of the original cost. It arrived yesterday. Since then, I’ve been working on getting it going.

The Braumeister line is German, so all of it runs on 220V. Guess what kind of power I have in my kitchen? Yes, 120V, not including hardwired 220V appliances. I really wanted to brew in my strangely enormous and comfortable kitchen, so I had to find a way to get 220V juice into it.

Yesterday, I bought a 14-gauge 50-foot extension cord, a NEMA 6-15R connector, and a NEMA 14-30/50P plug. I cut the ends off the cord and attached the connectors. I configured the plug for my 30-amp dryer socket.

Various online sources insist I need 12-gauge wire. Yada yada yada blah blah blah. Not listening. This is not my first rodeo. Those sources always seem to be written by lawyers and insurance companies, not engineers. I’m not paying $100 for one extension cord.

Today, I sat the machine on my counter, plugged it in, and added about 5.5 gallons of water. Right now, it’s running. It thinks it’s making beer. I wanted to make sure the electronics worked, and I wanted to see if the cord would burst into flames, so I’m running it with plain water.

The electronics are remarkable. It has wifi. I have not looked into the reasons for this. It stores beer recipes, too. You turn it on, choose your recipe, add your water and malt, and tell it to start.

Because it’s German, it has some annoying features. It keeps asking me to confirm things I’ve already chosen.

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME WHETHER YOU WISH THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “Yes.”

Braumeister: “YOU WILL TELL ME THE MASH TO START NOW PLEASE.”

Me: “I just did.”

Braumeister: “DO YOU WANT TO INVADE POLAND?”

Me: “No.”

Braumeister: “ARE YOU SURE? POLAND VERY NICE IS THIS TIME OF YEAR.”

The manual says you have to contact the German government and let them know every time you brew beer. I am not kidding. It even has a form you can use. Obviously, this does not apply to Americans. I’m pretty sure.

There is something different about the Germans. That’s all there is to it.

I do not understand why they would pass this law. It makes no sense. They have laws that prevent Germans from making bad beer for money, and I guess that is understandable given their mistaken belief that they make the best beer on Earth, but why they need to know about some guy brewing a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone in his living room is beyond me.

I can brew whatever I want without telling anyone, and from time to time, I open my bedroom sliding door and shoot squirrels with unregistered semi-automatic weapons while still inside the house. Go, America!

While the Braumeister is somewhat controlling, it is also very well made, and it does lots of stuff automatically. It’s sort of like a BMW or a Panzer tank, except it’s not hopelessly unreliable. As far as I know.

It looks like there is no problem with the cord I made. The 14-gauge part I added stays cool when the Braumeister is running, and the original cord, which is probably 18-gauge, gets slightly warm. That’s the Germans’ fault. I may replace it with a fatter cord. The original cord is like the cord you have on your PC, except it has a different plug. The female end is called C13, and you can get C13 cords in 14-gauge.

The cord I made is rated for 13 amps, and the Braumeister’s manual says it draws 10. Not a huge margin of safety, but enough. The manual also says not to use a cord more than three meters long. Okay, sure. If you use a scrawny German cord instead of a properly-sized cord.

Well, guess what? I just learned the above paragraph is wrong. The manual says the Braumeister calls for a 10A fuse, so it draws less than 10 amps. I didn’t notice this because when I looked at the manual, which was all serious and stuff, I chose not to pay much attention. Most of the time, this pays off for me.

Anyway, more reason to buy a cheap cord.

I made a yeast starter night before last. I paid $8 for exotic liquid yeast, and I added it to a malt extract solution in an Ehrlenmeyer flask. I put the flask on my laboratory stir plate and stirred it for about 36 hours. This created a huge quantity of new yeast. Now it’s sitting on the counter, waiting for me to use it.

The flask is a bad idea. It has a narrow opening so you can put a cork in it, along with a valve that makes the CO2 bubbles go out through water. This valve, or airlock, is supposed to keep bacteria out.

The instructions for the starter kit say to heat water in the flask in the microwave. As far as I know, there is no microwave oven on Earth that will hold a 2-liter flask in an upright position. It also says to add the malt extract to the water when it gets hot.

Malt extract is almost 100% sugar, and it’s very fine and gummy. When you get it near a flask full of steaming water, it turns to gum instantly and sticks to your funnel or spoon or whatever.

I had quite a time getting MOST of the malt extract, or DME, into the flask.

I have decided it’s stupid to use a flask and airlock. It’s overkill. Bacteria are a problem, but they aren’t Navy SEAL’s. You don’t need an airlock to keep them out. Anything that covers the fermenting vessel will work. I’m going to get a beaker and cover the top with sanitized aluminum foil when I make starters.

I think I’ll be okay from here on out. I just have to brew, pour the wort into my fermenting bucket, cool the bucket in the pool, add the yeast, and put the bucket in my new fermenting freezer. Then when my new keg arrives, I’ll stick it in there and move the keg to my spare fridge.

So far, I think the Braumeister is wunderbar. I am not brewing today, but if I were, I would already have saved myself considerable aggravation, and later on, the Braumeister would have saved me a lot of work. I kid the Germans, which is something history teaches us not to do, but I think they hit a home run with this thing.

A home run is a goal. In baseball. Which is a sport. Where you hit and throw a ball. “Throwing” means you hold something in your hand and…

Oh, forget it.

A-I-AIO!

Yesterday was pretty interesting. I drove to Orlando to get beer ingredients and equipment.

I used to have all sorts of brewing items. A fermenting fridge. A freezer turned into a kegerator. Brew kettle. Lautering tun. Stir plate. Kegs. Gas bottles. Measuring stuff. When I left Miami, I had no help and a parent with dementia, so I must have thrown out or given away $10,000 worth of belongings, and most of the beer things went. Also, my kegerator died one day without warning, so that had to be hauled off.

Over the last couple of days, I rooted around, and I learned that I had a cornucopia of brewing paraphernalia. Here is a comprehensive list:

1. A brew kettle I no longer need.
2. A wort chiller I no longer need.
3. A hydrometer I no longer need.
4. A mercury thermometer I no longer need.
5. A control to maintain a high temperature in a freezer.
6. A $6 handle for lifting carboys.

So all I lacked was the other $90,000 worth of equipment.

Brewing used to be cheap, apart from equipment. I used to spend $20 for 5 gallons of the best beer on Earth. Best to me, I mean. People like different things for some reason. I nearly always ordered ingredients online. I placed orders large enough to get free shipping, so all was well.

This week, I went to Morebeer.com, which has apparently absorbed and digested some of the other companies I used to use. The cost for ingredients for one beer had shot up to close to $50.

I realize Joe Biden is president, and this is the beginning of the apocalypse, but that seemed unreasonable to me.

The problem was made worse by their unwillingness to sell me the amount I needed at a uniform price. If you need 9 pounds of a malt, you can’t order it. You can order 5 + 3 + 1, with the per-pound price going up sharply as increments shrink, or you can order 10 pounds and either throw out or try to store the excess. Holding onto extra grain is not practical. It’s mouse bait, it takes up room, and you have only 6 months to use it. Basically, you have to pay for something you don’t want.

On top of this, Morebeer charges about 10% to crush the grain in preparation for brewing. You can spend $160 on a machine to crush grain–one like the one I threw out–or you can pay as you go.

The nice thing about Morebeer is that they kill shipping on big orders, but by the time you’ve given them a lot more money than you want to, you’ve paid for shipping.

The local place I found 1) charges way less for malt across the board, 2) crushes it free of charge, 3) lets you order malt and hops in tiny increments, 4) bags things separately and labels the bags, and 5) charges about 40% less for yeast.

I probably spent $30 or more in tolls and gas yesterday, but I saved about $30 on ingredients alone, I got exactly what I wanted, I got it fast, and I was able to look around the store and see if I needed anything else. Yes, you can do that at Morebeer.com, but it’s not the same as being there in the flesh. You don’t have to scroll and flip pages.

During the drive, I prayed and listened to the Bible, which is what I always do in the car unless someone distracts me. Guess who I heard about? Naboth.

Talk about good timing.

Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth didn’t want to see. Ahab started crying, literally, so his wife Jezebel paid two losers to accuse Naboth of blasphemy. Naboth was stoned by a mob, and Ahab took the vineyard.

Why is this interesting? Because Naboth, a man who made wine, is the good guy in the story.

Please don’t try to con anyone with the idea that “vineyard” was a mistranslation. The Hebrew word clearly means a place where grapes are grown. Naboth wasn’t growing tangerines.

I really feel that God pushed me back into brewing, and I find it confusing, so I have been thinking and praying about it. Very often, when there is something I need to know, related material pops up on my car stereo. Looks like it happened again.

A lot of Christians are intolerant teetotalers. They insist that no Christian should ever drink anything alcoholic. I don’t know where they get this idea.

1. Jesus drank wine. Hello? He also ate meat. In fact, it was a sin for a Jew to be a vegetarian because of the Passover requirement. Jesus drank wine during Passover, which was months after the grape harvest, so fermentation had to have occurred.

2. The Bible says wine is a blessing. Psalm 104 says God gave it to make man’s heart glad. And no, doesn’t mean we’re glad because we’re not thirsty. Come on. Don’t torture the text.

3. Losing a vineyard’s production is a curse in the Bible. See Deuteronomy 28:39.

4. In Deuteronomy 14:26 the Lord commanded the Jews to have a feast and have “wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please.”

Back in Biblical times, Jews were not knocking themselves out in their vineyards because they liked table grapes or raisins. If they were excited about fruit, the Bible would be full of material about things like figs and pomegranates, and it isn’t. Wine and grapes are mentioned much more often. The Jews wanted wine. And God had no problem with it. Misuse of alcohol was what he hated. It has never been much of a problem among Jews.

Some Christians make the ridiculous claim that the wine ancient Jews drank was just unfermented grape juice. The problem with that is that ancient Israel had no refrigeration and plenty of hot weather. Heat plus grape juice and a couple of weeks equals wine. It takes considerable work for a low-technology person to eliminate or reduce grape juice fermentation in a hot climate.

It is very obvious that Christian teetotaling is a post-Biblical creation. At the same time, the Bible condemns drunkenness beyond any doubt.

Some of life’s pleasures are wrong all the time. Others are only wrong when they cause problems. Food and drink fall into the latter category. If alcoholic drinks cause you no problems, there is no reason to avoid them. If they do, you should abstain.

When I was young, I drank to get drunk. Often. It was one of life’s great pleasures for me. The thought of doing that now is repulsive to me. I remember the dizzy feelings and the way I smelled of alcohol. I remember the stupid things I did. I remember hangovers and vomiting. I don’t want any of that, ever. To me, now, alcohol might as well be mineral water, except for the taste.

Since the idea of returning to homebrewing arose, I’ve had several beers (never two in one day), but before that, I was having maybe two drinks per month. By “drink,” I mean a real drink, not a 14-ounce martini or a huge cocktail. I mean a small glass of sherry, a shot of expensive whiskey, or maybe a beer. If I couldn’t have another drink for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice. I keep alcohol on hand primarily for cooking. I use sherry for pork roasts and soup, whiskey for barbecue, beer for barbecue, and wine for lots of things.

Actually, I should come clean. I forgot that I had several beers and one gin and tonic in Singapore last month. I was in a foreign country, and I wanted to see what the beer was like, so there were times when I had one beer with a meal. I had the gin and tonic because tourists in Singapore are supposed to go to the Raffles Hotel Long Bar and have cocktails.

Alcohol doesn’t cause me problems. It used to, but that ended a long time ago. There is no reason for me become a teetotaling legalist fanatic. Avoiding alcohol because it messes up your life is not legalism; it’s common sense. Avoiding it because you think God will put a black mark on a scoreboard in heaven is legalism. Christianity is not a game of points.

Listening to Naboth’s story made me feel a lot better. I don’t want to do anything God hasn’t told me to do, and alcohol has been involved in the destruction of many, many people. For example, my dad and his father were alcoholics. Also, I would prefer not to upset future guests any more than necessary. Sooner or later, I’ll probably have to get some kind of kegerator, and there it will be, in my house, staring people in the face.

You have to fear God’s disapproval, not other people’s.

I suppose many people think there is no reason to drink alcohol except to get drunk. That’s a problem of limited perspective due to lack of knowledge. If you’ve never had alcohol, or you’ve never drunk except to get hammered, maybe you could get the impression that alcohol has no other purpose. It’s not true at all.

It’s a lot like saying there is no reason to own more than one gun, which is like saying drugstores should only carry one medicine or there should only be one size spoon. It reflects unfamiliarity with the subject.

I have never been much of a wine person, but I know a little bit about beer. It’s an exhaustive topic.

Beers start with grain. Most beer is made from barley, but there are zillions of different barleys. Dark ones. Light ones. Barleys that provide sweetness to beer. Cheap, nasty barley for beers like Budweiser. Beers are also made with corn, oats, wheat, and rice. I’m sure you will find other things beer can be made from. Anything with starch should work. They all contribute different flavors and colors.

The next main ingredient is hops. There are many different varieties, and they taste different. There are American hops that taste like oranges, grapefruit, and lemons. There are European hops that taste like cloves. Using the wrong hop in a beer can ruin it. Adding the hops at different times during brewing also makes a big difference in what you end up with. Many recipes use more than one type of hop.

The last important ingredient is yeast. The Wyeast company, one of the two big suppliers, lists over 60 beer yeasts on its site, and there is a reason for that. They work at different temperatures. They produce different flavors. Yeast doesn’t just produce alcohol and gas. It produces chemicals that change the taste of beer.

With all the different ingredients and brewing methods, there are many, many very different types of beer. The range of flavors is staggering. They suit different occasions, seasons, and foods.

Anyone who thinks all beer is the same should try a weissbier next to an imperial stout and an IPA (India Pale Ale).

If you can understand why there are so many different wines in the world, you should be able to understand the reason for making different beers. No one with any brains would say champagne is interchangeable with chianti. You should be able to understand that it’s not about getting drunk. If it were, I wouldn’t ever have one beer by itself. Lovers of good beer are actually pretty sophisticated.

If I start believing God is against the brewing operation, I’ll sell my stuff and take the hit. I am not married to the notion. I can go either way.

My brewing appliance, a Braumeister 20L V2, should get here tomorrow. That means I may be brewing Sunday.

For anyone who is still reading, the Braumeister is a self-contained system, commonly known as a self-contained system or all-in-one. There are a bunch of these things on the market. I don’t think they existed when I quit brewing.

I picked the Braumeister because the others appear to have problems. The Braumeister is German and more expensive than most. Sometimes those things mean something. I have seen new ones prices at $3000, but the great thing about brewing is that guys give it up, so I found a lightly-used one for a small fraction of that.

AIO’s, to use brewer jargon, let you do everything but fermentation in one vessel. When I used to brew, I mashed first. This means I put the grain in a kettle of hot water so the enzymes in it would turn the starch to sugar. Then I moved it to another device, and I rinsed the liquid and sugar out, back into the kettle. This gave me a sweet solution called “wort,” which rhymes with “squirt.” Then I boiled the solution with hops and drained it into a fermenting container. After the first fermentation, I could choose to move it to a big bottle, or carboy, and let it finish.

This is how I remember it, anyway.

With an AIO, you dump the grain and water into the machine and leave it there until you move it to the fermenter. It controls the mashing temperatures and times (there may be several for one batch). When mashing is done, you remove the grain and boil the wort with hops and whatever else you want. The machine has a timer. Then you cool the wort, put it in a fermenter, and add your yeast. This is called “pitching.”

You end up with less stuff to wash, and you don’t have to stand next to the kettle all day. The electronics prevent a lot of fussing with a clock, turkey fryer, and thermometer.

Here is what people say: AIO’s don’t make better beer; they make better brew days.

I plan to make an ale I named “Senseless Cruelty.” Maybe I’ll change that. It’s a high-IBU (bitter) ale like an IPA. I chose it because this is the only beer I ever fermented at room temperature. To ferment cooler, I will need another fridge or a fermenter that will fit in the little one I have. I expect to put the fermenter on the garage floor. Sometimes fermentations go too fast, and things leak, so I want to make my return to brewing with a safe approach.

In order to be ready on Sunday, I need to make a yeast starter today. I have yeast, so I have to boil some yeast extract in a flask and add yeast. Then I’ll let it ferment until I brew. The more yeast you have when you pitch, the less likely a problem is.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I look forward to seeing what the purpose is.

Plus Unexpected Beer Content

Here is something I have believed for a long time: if you pray in tongues a lot, instead of hearing God’s truths for the first time from preachers, you will hear them from the Holy Spirit, and if preachers mention them later, it will just be confirmation.

This has been my experience, and there is also evidence for it in the Bible.

Here are some words from Galatians 1:

But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man.

For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.

For ye have heard of my conversation in time past in the Jews’ religion, how that beyond measure I persecuted the church of God, and wasted it:

And profited in the Jews’ religion above many my equals in mine own nation, being more exceedingly zealous of the traditions of my fathers.

But when it pleased God, who separated me from my mother’s womb, and called me by his grace,

To reveal his Son in me, that I might preach him among the heathen; immediately I conferred not with flesh and blood:

Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me; but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus.

Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days.

But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.

Now the things which I write unto you, behold, before God, I lie not.

Here is something John said:

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

This idea makes a lot of Christians angry because they have been raised to worship preachers, not the Holy Spirit. When Christians argue, they often say this preacher said this and that preacher said that, instead of referring to the Bible and the things they have received from the Holy Spirit. Because of this, one corrupt preacher can corrupt a lot of people.

Jesus said to avoid the leaven of the Pharisees for this reason. Leavening is something that grows in dough until the whole loaf is infected. “Infection” is the correct word. Brewers use it to describe things that grow in beer, including yeast.

The Jews fell into the same trap as Christians who rely on preachers too much. They are taught to rely on sages to tell them what the Bible means. When they discuss religion, they quote Maimonides and Rashi and so on, and they discourage people from forming conclusions without relying on learned men.

If everyone hears from the Holy Spirit, Satan has to deceive a huge number of people in order to get anywhere. That’s hard for him to do, because he is weak and small. If people listen to a few preachers instead, all he has to do is ruin the preachers. Then the rot gets into everyone else.

This is what has actually happened to the church.

Today I watched a recent Mark Hemans video, and I enjoyed it, because he confirmed things I had been telling people for years. He says that if you want to be Spirit-led, you should be praying all the time about little decisions. You shouldn’t divide your life into a secular part, where you do whatever you think is best, and a religious part, where you try to do what God tells you. You should pray all the time, even about things like ordering at McDonald’s or picking out new socks.

Even if the decisions aren’t that important, the practice is. And nobody wants unsatisfying socks.

A long time ago, God directed my attention to the fact that in the Bible, doing what you think is right is evil. It sounds strange, but it’s true. If you read through the Bible and look at the occasions when people “did that which was right in their own eyes,” you will see that those people were disobeying God. That’s what doing that which is right in your own eyes means.

I would hate to have to sit here and list all the verses that confirm what I’m saying. “There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” That appears twice in Proverbs. “The way of a fool is right in his own eyes: but he that hearkeneth unto counsel is wise.” “There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.” Moses said: “Ye shall not do after all the things that we do here this day, every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes.”

I could sit here for hours doing this.

We are supposed to do what God says is right, and while the Bible is helpful in determining that, its advice is general, and not every verse applies to every situation. If you doubt that, look at these consecutive verses:

Answer not a fool according to his folly, Lest thou also be like unto him. Answer a fool according to his folly, Lest he be wise in his own conceit.

How can you do both, in every situation? It’s not possible. Someone has to tell you which course is appropriate. You need the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible. Talking to the author is even better than reading the book.

It is tiresome, listening to people who say the Bible is perfect and that we don’t need any other guide. The Bible itself contradicts this belief. Consider what the Ethiopian eunuch said to Philip when he was asked if he understood Isaiah: “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Philip, who heard from the Holy Spirit, was able to interpret Isaiah correctly for him, which is something generations of Jewish sages have never been able to do on their own.

To me, the challenge is distinguishing what the Holy Spirit says from what my wishful flesh says. You can sometimes compare what you hear to the Bible, but that’s not always helpful. The Bible doesn’t tell you which socks to buy.

Your flesh, and demons, can pipe up and pretend to be the Holy Spirit. “Go ahead and marry another man; God loves you as you are.” “Marijuana is fine; didn’t I create it?” You have to speak in tongues a lot, remove corrupting things from your life, and cast out your demons.

Lately, I have been getting a powerful urge to brew beer again. I don’t understand it. I miss the astounding beer I used to make, but I barely drink these days. I think I’ve had one drink this month. Also, brewing is work, and it costs money. Part of me is interested in brewing, and the other part thinks about the work, expense, and my low rate of consumption, not to mention the awkwardness of entertaining other Christians with a kegerator in the house.

I prayed about this several times, and I finally decided to go with it. I ordered a modern machine that does a lot of the work of brewing. I plan to order ingredients for a wheat beer. We’ll see what happens.

Christians don’t have to be teetotalers, and Jesus certainly wasn’t one, but it seems strange for God to suggest homebrewing to anyone. A similar pursuit got Noah in trouble.

Hemans also talks about the problem with assuming you can handle things. It doesn’t work. I try to avoid it. I tell people that when you tell God, “I got this,” he folds his arms and stops helping you. It’s pride, and God fights the proud, according to his word.

This is one reason why I fight the self-reliance culture many Christian men have picked up from things like football and military service. God isn’t looking for tough guys who strive in the flesh, working hard to please him. That would be like running a construction company and hiring people who refused to use power tools. It would be asinine. But men’s groups all over America are using football and soldiering as teaching tools. God is not a sports fan, and soldiering is about using carnal tools to fix problems caused by carnal people.

Sports nuts and military people teach pride, and that destroys Christians. Armies are not led by God these days, and God has never been behind competitive sports, so they have to have something to compensate, and pride and toughness are their crutches. They are substitutes for God’s help. Like all such substitutes, they get us into trouble.

You can’t take a breath without God’s assistance. Telling him you can fix your complex problems, which involve other human beings, demons, and who knows what else, is extremely arrogant. You are weak. Nobody can stand up to the world without help.

I’m very glad to get confirmation that some of the things I believe came from God and not my imagination. It gives me hope that life will continue to improve in spite of my own efforts.