The Rack
First off a little house keeping. Anonymous reader R is complaining that this web log thingy isn’t all that exciting without pictures. I blame the web 2.0 crowd. Web 2.0? Show me the RFC for that.
Anyhow, just to prove that yes, there was abalone for dinner the other night, well, here you go:
And that’s all that’s left. It was……okay. I think we’ll stick with their oysters.
And now on to the rack. I’d mentioned previously a batch of beer. Here it is just hours ago:
It’s now racked to a secondary fermenter. It will sit for maybe a month. It could stand to clarify out and I’m not convinced fermentation completed. The yeast were about 18 months old. The rest of the recipe was more or less:
- 7 lbs American 2-row
- 1 lb crystal malt
- American Ale liquid yeast
- 1 oz Cascade Hops
- 1 oz Fuggles Hops
- 0.5 oz Wilamette
I used a 2 step infusion mash this time. I normally do a decoction mash but I didn’t feel like I had the four or so hours. After a protein rest at 130F for 20 minutes I added 4 gallons of boiling water to get a nice 155F mash for 45 minutes, sparging with 4 gallons of 170F water.
The boil was 75 minutes. the cascade half of the fuggles went in at the boil, the other half of the fuggles and the wilamette were used for flavor and aroma. The primary fermentation was six days which is abnormally long but the yeast were so old. The brew didn’t start bubbling until a couple days into the process. When this is all over the beer will be kegged and I’ll make the next batch with 6 row barley (to avoid a stuck runoff) and livelier yeast.
Beer, schmear! What I want to know is: What’s in the weekly CSA?
Patience.