Things we Should Have Figured Out by 2023

More remarkable than the fact I got married at all is the nature of our marriage.

Rhodah keeps getting revelation with or without me, and her positions on things change all the time. She doesn’t rely on me to drag her through life. I’ve told her a few things, but God teaches her when I’m not around.

I wrote about a friend of mine. He married a childish, emotional, selfish, dangerous woman, and now there is a restraining order, and he says he just found a bottle of fentanyl in his closet, waiting for the police to come find it. For as long as I have known him, he has had to treat his wife like a child, cajoling, humoring, negotiating, and so on. It wasn’t enough.

A lot of people have mates they have to drag like manure wagons with broken axles. Their mates never get on their feet and start walking for themselves. They continue making their spouses miserable because that’s what Satan sent them to do.

Last night, Rhodah had a dream. She was in a little European church, about to be married. She wasn’t marrying me, however. She was about to marry Jesus!

That’s sobering, but I can’t complain. It shows she belongs to him, not me. No matter how happy our marriage is, she’s only partly mine, and that only while we live here on Earth.

She doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter, but she posts Whatsapp statuses. In foreign countries, people actually read those. She keeps posting about the errors of the money gospel and the preacher-worship gospel. Both are big problems in Africa. I don’t have to prompt her. She does it on her own, providing scriptural references that are right on target.

If you’re thinking of getting married, please think first. Do your best to get God to choose your mate. Marrying the wrong person is worse than getting cancer.

In other news, I have new beer taps. When I got started building my keezer, I thought I should go all-out and get the best taps I could find. I researched, and it looked like Perlick flow control taps were best. They have little levers on them to restrict flow, and this makes the pouring process shake less CO2 out of the beer. If you agitate beer too much, you end up with a mile of head but no carbonation in the body of the beer. It’s a huge problem.

After I spent like a hundred bucks on these things, which would have been worse had I not received a free one due to an error, I learned the flow control mechanism makes beer turbulent, so in a way, it’s self-defeating. I had problems getting beer to pour well.

Eventually, I learned about Kegland plastic flow control disconnects. These are fittings that connect beer tubing to kegs. They have valves inside them, and you can adjust the flow restriction right on top of the keg, far from the faucet, without making the beer too turbulent.

I also found out about Kegland Nukatap faucets. They don’t have flow control, but if you have the disconnects, you don’t need flow control faucets.

I ordered Nukataps a long time ago, and UPS lost them. I keep having shipping problems. The enemy is interfering with my homebrewing, which seems ridiculous. If anyone should be in favor of homebrewing, you would think it would be Satan. My second order got here today, and once I got them installed, I poured this wheat beer.

That’s about as good as it gets. Wheat beer tends to produce a lot of foam no matter what you do, so you shouldn’t hope for a little two-finger head. This beer had a manageable head and plenty of fizz. I am sold.

The beer has some hop issues, but I have another wheat beer in the keg waiting to replace it.

I ordered myself a couple more faucets, and I already have more flow control disconnects installed. When the faucets get here, I’ll have 4 Nukataps with flow control disconnects plust one stout faucet which doesn’t need flow control.

I’m no expert, but I would encourage anyone who is trying to deal with beer lines to look into my solution.

The alternative is to do a lot of math and try to figure out exactly how long each beer line has to be. This is called “line balancing.” The longer a beer line gets, the less the beer will foam in the glass, so you try to make lines long enough to end your problems.
This is a chump solution, or so it seems to me. You end up with lines as long as 11 feet, coiled up in your keezer, in the way. If my disconnects and faucets keep working the way they are now, I’ll be able to make the beer lines any length I want. I’ll be able to make them long enough to make them convenient to handle without having loops of tubing all over the place causing trouble.

If you choose a one-size-fits-all length for your lines, you can have problems when you adjust pressure up and down for different beers, and I’m sure there will also be problems with beers that are naturally foamy.

It just seems stupid to ignore the latest technology when it’s right there in front of me.

Some brewers would argue. Brewers are vulnerable to old wives’ tales and outdated theories. A great deal has changed since I quit in around ’07, and there have been substantial changes even during the last three years. If you don’t keep up, you make a fool of yourself and waste a lot of money. Then suddenly you’re that crotchety guy on the forum who thinks it’s stupid to send email when the good old US Postal Service is at our beck and call. The guy who didn’t have a cell phone until his children brought him one in 2015.

I’m also having shipping problems with kegs. I decided to buy three stainless 6-gallon kegs for fermentation.

You can ferment beautifully in a plastic pail as long as you don’t care about fermenting under pressure. You can ferment beautifully in a stainless keg and have all the pressure you want. Neither solution will give you a conical bottom.

A conical bottom concentrates all the junk that falls during fermentation. It puts it in one little place, and supposedly, this can improve your beer, because the more contact your beer has with old yeast and hops, the more likely it is to take on flavors you don’t want. Also, a conical bottom may result in less junk being transferred to your serving keg when fermentation is over.

Okay; I don’t care about conical bottoms. For a bazillion years, people have made perfect beer in containers with flat bottoms, so exposure to trub is apparently not very important. As for avoiding sucking trub into serving kegs, they have a new gadget that helps.

A homebrew keg sucks beer from the bottom using a long stainless tube. If you want, you can get rid of the tube and replace it with plastic tubing with a float on one end. The float makes the system pull beer from the top of the keg where it’s cleanest. You can ferment in, and serve from, kegs with floats. One reduces the crud that goes into the serving keg, and the other reduces the crud that goes into your glass.

Put it all together, and to me, it says you don’t need a conical fermenter. That’s good, because a decent one runs $1500. Oh, sure. They say they sell them for $600. Try using one without the $900 worth of additional “accessories” they offer after you click the “Add to Cart” button.

Nobody in his right mind would buy several $1500 fermenters, and no good brewer is going to be satisfied with fewer that 4 fermenters. If you only have one fermenter, you can only make one batch of beer every two weeks, and that means you and your friends will empty one keg after another before you fill new ones. No real brewer is satisfied with a one-keg life.

My plan is to ferment in kegs by default. They work for every beer. I’ll go to buckets or my All Rounder when I run out of kegs. If I really want to ferment under pressure, I’ll do it in a keg.

The All Rounder is really not that useful because I can’t pour hot wort into it without ruining it. Chilling wort is a real hassle, and because I have a swimming pool, it’s unnecessary. I don’t want to get into it. There is no reason to right now. If I don’t put wort-chilling equipment together, the All Rounder will not see any use.

Of course, the 6-gallon keg I ordered a long time ago turned out to be a 5-gallon keg when it arrived, and it was very late. I should have had it days ago, and had it been here, I would have a new stout fermenting. It’s amazing how many brewing-related things have arrived late or failed to arrive at all. Supposedly, a 6-gallon keg will be here tomorrow. Even if it’s not, I can do a stout in a bucket. The weak point of a bucket is that it’s not that easy to move beer out of it without exposing it to air, but I figured out a way to do it with nothing but CO2, so unless I need pressure, a bucket will work as well as anything.

So to recap, I think Nukatap faucets with short beer lines and Kegland flow control disconnects make the best system. I believe kegs are the best fermenting vessels under $1500 except for people who enjoy the hassle of wort chilling. I think buckets make fine fermenters for everything that isn’t pressure-fermented.

I believe it’s time to see if my second Nukatap does my latest lager justice.