All the fun, without the smell

I was just going through the pictures from this summer and realized I forgot to post this one of a pub in Dublin. It’s really just for my buddy. Not many others will appreciate it, but we’re okay with that. Sorry for the poor quality, but I was on a bus.

Dispatches from London V

What you’ll notice in the picture above is that it’s late afternoon (long shadows), and it’s a public park.  What is important about this photo, however, lies in what you can’t see.  First, this photo doesn’t provide quite enough detail to show you that nearly everyone of age in this park is drinking.  Bottles of wine, glasses of beer, a little champagne.  It’s 6:30 on a Friday afternoon and many groups of people have headed to the park to have a little end of week happy hour.  What you also can’t see, because it doesn’t exist, is the entire social fabric of Britain being ripped apart.  You don’t see young people losing their morals.  Nobody is having sex in the park, the sky is not falling, Armageddon has not occurred.  Yes, that’s right.  People drinking in public places and everything is okay.  Well ho-lee crap.  There’s like no place in the U.S. where you can do this (save N.O.).  We’ve been told it’s because it creates too many problems.  Well I suggest that relegating alcohol consumption to marginalized spaces and cordoned off areas is what creates the problems.  I mean for god’s sake, if the Brits can figure it out, we should.  We’re the greatest country in the history of the world.

On a related note, are all my posts from London about alcohol?

Dispatches from London IV-Ireland Edition

What a view, huh?  This is the Sky Bar at the top of the Guinness Brewery in Dublin.  Full 360 degree views of the city.  Everyone drinking free beer.  How could you possibly screw this up?  Well let me tell you.  First, you don’t actually let people see how or where the beer is made.  Instead of showing off the production facilities like they do in every other brewery tour I’ve ever been on, they let you watch some videos and climb through 5 stories of noisy, crowded, confused people in the most disappointing thing I’ve ever come across in my travels.  I mean, here stands the Guinness Brewery-the place that makes so many dreams come true-and yet what we get to see could just as easily have been located in Los Angeles.  It was just a museum tour.  Ahhhh, suck.  The rest of Ireland was great, but this was sooo sad.  Oh, did I mention it’s $15 a person for the tour and a “free” beer?

Your Epidermis is Showing

One half of STN drinks more often than the other half.

One half of STN brews his own beer.

These are not the same people.  Weird huh?

Well not quite as weird as these freakin Coors Light commercials advertising a new can which will let you know when your beer is cold.  WTF?  Despite our different relationships with beer we at STN rely on an age old technology to tell when our beer, homebrewed or storebought, is cold.  That’s right, we just touch the bottle.  We use our skin to tell us if something is cold.  Revolutionary, I know.

(Of course, we’re totally fine with our computer keyboards turning red whenever we write a new post cause we’re on fire, baby!)

We’re learning

It’s been almost two full weeks since I brewed my first batch of beer. I’m hoping that this batch will taste good as Seventonine plans a get together in a couple of weeks. The beer is a wheat beer, and it’s my first beer to brew by myself.

Here’s a couple of things I think everyone should know, should they plan on ever homebrewing themselves.

1) Ship your dog off somewhere for a couple of weeks. I don’t care how much fun they are to have around all of the other times a year—but when it comes to me homebrewing, my dog has become my number one nemesis. From hair, to stealing the ingredients, to chewing up some of the plastic pieces of equipment—my dog has certainly hindered the entire process. If you have a dog, ship it off somewhere for a couple of weeks while the initial process is going on, or at the very least quit storing your brewing supplies & ingredients on the kitchen counter.

2) Bigger isn’t always better. Consider the stockpot. Your fear is that while brewing, the contents will boil over onto the stove creating a sticky and stinky mess. So, you figure that you’ll outsmart the laws of physics and get a bigger stockpot, one that will have more room for the contents to boil inside. What you don’t consider is that the size of the stockpot will make it more difficult for your electric oven to heat the mixture to a boiling temperature. You try to position the pot onto part of two burners, and discover that this doesn’t really help. Then you get smart and position the lid over most of the pot, which enables the mixture to boil. Problem solved, right? Wrong. What you didn’t consider was that the stockpot won’t fit into the kitchen sink. And that’s where you planned on cooling it off with a sink full of ice water, just like the instructions advised.

3) They weren’t kidding about the hydrometer. That tool which measures the density of the liquid is evidently pretty important. It helps you to see how active the yeast is while brewing, and will help you determine when the yeast is finished doing its job. According to the books and directions, if you bottle before the yeast is finished working, your bottles could explode, which in all likelihood is a pretty bad thing. With this piece of equipment, you can diagnose any potential problems (i.e. stalled fermentation), but only if you take an initial reading after you’re done brewing. By the way, the hydrometer is not included in the basic brewmaking kit.

I’ve spent a couple of nights awake until about 3:00 AM brewing and transferring. As I’ve said, I’m hoping that this batch will turn out ok…given all of the things I’ve discovered during my first solo brewing, I’m just that—hopeful. We’ll let you know how it all turns out in a couple of weeks.