A Complete Kegerator

This article was originally posted on March 19, 2013 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

After many, many hours of work between the three of us, much hand-wringing over which items to buy and many, many trips to the store to figure out the correct-sized chest freezer, the kegerator, or keezer, is complete.

We’re running a four-tap system which means we have four Cornelius kegs jammed into the inside of the chest freezer. Bryce and Leo constructed a collar for the lid of the freezer to sit on, extending the height of the total unit. This was important because we invested in two 10-pound CO2 tanks with double regulators each. These sit on the hump of the compressor and allow us to interdependently control the level of CO2 going into each keg. Our cider keg is set at a much higher pressure than the rest.

The entire system is a dream and amazing for hosting parties, so long as no one bumps into the taps which, in a cramped space such as mine, is a real issue. We’ve yet to tackle the issue of a drip tray. At the moment, the drip tray could also be called a scrap towel folded and sitting beneath the taps.

Our next project, as the cider keg nears running dry, is to ferment five 4-gallon batches of cider with different yeasts so we can just start putting them in the keg once the past batch has been drunk. This also leaves the option of mixing finished ciders open and allows us to try a series of different yeasts we have but have not yet used.

The hope is, if one of the ciders doesn’t turn out, we’ll be able to mix it with one of the others.

All in call, I suggest a 4-keg system with a collar. At least, that’s what worked for us. Although the financial output at the outset is hefty — very hefty — it’s worth it.

Five-year plan: Books

NOVELS/FICTION

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Germinal by Émile Zola
Canide by Voltaire
Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
1984 by George Orwell
Crime and Punishment and Brother Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
Christmas Story by H.L. Mencken
The Juggler of Notre Dame by Anatole France
King James Bible

Condensing the Highton 5-year plan (Original post)

(Note: This is the original post from June 13, 2013.)

I’m on a book kick.

A tanning kick, too, but that’s just a side effect of it being summer and me being on the book kick. (Although I wish I meant animal hides, I only mean my own. If only I had someone to teach me, then I’d be on a hide tanning kick too.) My goal is to read two books every three days, adjusted for the length of the book, or 200 pages a day. Practically, 600 pages every three days, which is around two books.

I paid a visit to my former journalism professor, Jake Highton, who is now professor emeritus. We got to talking about the education at the journalism school and he handed me two columns he had written for the Sparks Tribune. One, part of a three-column series on journalism schools, titled “Five-year reading plan for journalists.” The column is more of an outline, but it has enough book suggestions to get started. I promised Jake I would try to plow through his five years in a much shorter period of time, condensing five years to, one, or a matter of months.

(Highton has set up a scholarship for students. Information here.)

I will, therefore, begin to document my efforts to tackle the Journalist’s reading plan. A few of the books and plays I’ve already read, especially Shakespeare.

“Consider setting a five-year plan to read the 75 to 100 most important books ever written. The lists will vary by individual taste and interest and no list can be definitive. But such lists are a foundation for a real education,” Highton wrote.

The five-year-plan wasn’t the only column Highton wrote on the subject. He also wrote (and gave me a copy of) a column on his world hall of fame for artists on June 21, 2007. The movies on the list, 15 in all, overlap some with his five-year-plan list. Those which appear only on the hall of fame will be marked by an asterisk.

The plan isn’t just for reading: it’s for film and music and art.

Below is Highton’s plan, taken from his column. I’ve italicized what I’ve already completed from the list.

HISTORY

A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen
The American Political Tradition by Richard Hofstadter
The Populist Movement by Lawrence Goodwyn
The Gulag Trilogy by Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
“Histories of Europe and Asia with special emphasis on England, France and Germany,” he wrote.

PLAYS

Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, MacBeth, Richard III, Julius Caesar, Othello, Anthony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Merchant of Venice, King Henry IV (part one)
Tartuffe by Molière
Cyrano by Rostand
Dr. Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
Enemy of the People by Henrik Ibsen
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Long Day’s Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee

NOVELS/FICTION

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Germinal by Émile Zola
Canide by Voltaire
Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
1984 by George Orwell
Crime and Punishment and Brother Karamazov by Dostoyevsky
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (My favorite novel of all time)
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
Christmas Story by H.L. Mencken
The Juggler of Notre Dame by Anatole France
King James Bible

NON-FICTION

Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent Van Gogh
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Diary of Anne Frank
Out of My Life and Thought: An Autobiography by Albert Schweitzer
One Man’s Freedom by Edward Bennet Williams
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Working by Studs Terkel
Sigmund Freud
The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
Friedrich Nietzsche
Niccolò Machiavelli
And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic by Randy Shilts
The Natural Superiority of Women by Ashley Montagu

POETRY

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as translated by Edward FitzGerald
The sonnets of Shakespeare
Anthologies of American and English poetry
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

FILM

Citizen Kane
Casablanca
All Quiet on the Western Front
Grand illusion
Zorba the Greek
Dr. Strangelove
The Seventh Seal
Battleship Potemkin
La Dolce Vita
Fantasia
Birth of a Nation
The Grapes of Wrath
A Streetcar Named Desire
Grand Hotel*
Rashômon*
The Third Man*
Viridiana*
La Strada*
Wild Strawberries*
Jules and Jim*
Birth of a Nation*
(Birth of a Nation is marked in his column by the fact that it is racist. He quotes Pauline Kael: “One can trace almost every major tradition and most of the genres in movies to their sources in (Birth of a Nation.)”
Triumph of the Will*
(Triumph of the Will is marked by this comment: “Riefenstahl, perhaps the greatest documentary filmmaker even though she was a propagandist for Hitler.)”
*: These movies appear on Highton’s June 21, 2007 column, “Introducing World Hall of Fame for artists,” but not in his five-year-plan column.

ART

Van Gogh
Monet
Manet
Picasso
Lautrec
Goya
Rodin
Durer

MUSIC

Beethoven
Mozart
Bach
Handel
Stravinsky
Schubert
Rossini
Richard Strauss
Verdi
Puccini
Wagner

“All of that reading listening and viewing can be reflected in your writing: quoting, paraphrasing and alluding to,” Highton wrote.

As I progress, I will update this list. Probably write about it, too.

Apfelwein #5 Secondaried

This article was originally posted on Dec. 22, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

We secondaried both AW #5 and AW #5C. These two, unlike any other ciders we’d made before, were made with the Windsor ale yeast suggested to us by our LHBS (Local HomeBrew Store.)

Sadly, everything tasted like salt to Bryce and I. Sadly, we’re not entirely sure why. Which means the jury’s still out.

But over all, it seems to have been a failed 6-gallons of experiment.

Limeade Wine

This article was originally posted on Dec. 21, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Today, Dec. 21, marked a great day. A day on which Bryce and I sampled the fruits of our and many a chemist’s labors. They were sweet, they were sour and smelled like ham.

I had limeade in the refrigerator. We calculated out the amount of sugar we needed to add to get it up to snuff with a normal 1/2 gallon cider’s sugar. We boiled the sugar, added it and put in Lalvin EC-1118 yeast at the same time we started a new batch of Apfelwein, both a normal and an experiment.

Right before, because we had boiled the sugar, water and limeade together, we used the wort chiller for the first time. And I can attest, it works brilliantly. I can also attest, our local Homebrew Store was selling an inferior wort chiller (fewer coils at a lesser gauge) for nearly $75.

Woah. Not cool.

Now, we wait a month to see how the limeade fairs.

Hurrah!

We put all the info into our experimental sheet printout. If you’d like a (blank) copy for yourself, here it is: Experiment Sheet

The Limeade wine, after having its yeast pitched.

The wort chiller in the limeade pot.

Flickr gallery of the day’s winemaking: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wcowperthwaite/sets/72157628526106323/with/6554714965/

Wort Chiller

This article was originally posted on Dec. 12, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

After our near-debacle with the pumpkin beer, we decided that a change was in order. And that change was a wort chiller: no more messing with huge quantities of pre-prepared water, of waiting for things to cool, of putting the glass carboy into a giant tub of water while it’s freezing outside.

Eric decided we were done with screwing around, and I agreed and decided we were going to collectively bite the bullet.

The biggest cost of making the wort chiller was the cost of the 25 feet of pipe. All told, it came in at about $48, divided over four people.

We took a carlo rossi jug and wrapped the copper coil around it. We put the rubber tubing over the top of both ends of the copper tubing and fastened and tightened them with fasteners. We then put a swivel barb hose adapter at one end. Fastened it. Voila!

We were done.

How cool is that!

You can do it too! Check out the pictures.

And make sure NOT to crimp the copper tubing.

Uncoiling the copper pipe so we can recoil it.

The chiller once it’s been wrapped around the Rossi jug. Next up: attaching the tubing.

 

Tightening the fasteners

 

Clearing out the pipes.

 

All the pictures on Flickr

 

 

Secondarying Leo’s Stout #2

This article was originally posted on Dec. 5, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

We secondaried Leo’s Stout, batch #2. The grains and trub settled to the bottom and the yeast settled and compacted on top of it.

We used Leo’s jacket to protect the carboy from sunlight and it seemed it deserved a hat.

The stout provided a problem, however: it was primaried in the garage, which gets much colder than the rest of the house. Considering this, the new batch of pumpkin is being primaried in the work room and the stout is being secondaried for a lot longer, for about two weeks or so, so the yeast can finish the job it didn’t get done initially. Because it is an ale and we did put it in too cold of conditions. Our bad!

However, now, it’s sitting in a bucket in the warm.

I think we learned our lesson.

All the pictures here, on Flickr, all released under a creative-commons attribution-only license.

 

Look at that yeast cake! Look at that trub!

 

Trub at the bottom. Big yeast cake mixed with sediment.

Leo’s Stout Batch #2

This article was originally posted on Nov. 24, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Leo’s Stout #2,  has its genesis in the original stout we brewed. As you might imagine.

This time, however, we boosted the batch size to around six gallons to take advantage of our 6.5 gallon glass carboy.

Can you say blow-off tube? Because we have one.

Oh yea. We feel pimpin’. Nay. We be pimpin’.

Much like for the first Stout, we used a White Labs Irish Ale Yeast, pictured below.

We’ll be using this same yeast to ferment a 2 1/2 gallon batch of cider done in the most lovely of Mr. Beer’s with a new spout. Which has been gorilla glued into submission.

Our next batch will be a pumpkin beer.

White Labs Irish Ale Yeast. Done us well so far.

 

Apfelwein #5 (AW)

This article was originally posted on Nov. 19, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Apfelwein #5 was mixed on November 19th. (See the publish date? Regardless of when the article goes live, it’s backdated to the date of the event.)

We used cups instead of grams to figure out how to get our sugar levels right. Otherwise, AW #5 is noticeable for a single reason, besides being our fifth batch of Apfelwein (AW) or sixth batch of cider.

That is to say, this time (it’s also the first time) we’re using the Windsor Ale Yeast from Danstar instead of either Lalvin’s EC-1118 or Danstar’s Nottingham Ale Yeast.

So, it should be interesting to see how it comes out. In a month.

AW #5 in its fermenter.

Apfelwein #5C

This article was originally posted on Nov. 19, 2011 on my homebrew website, Fat Grey Tom’s Cider. It has been re-posted here with the same time stamp.

Apfelwein #5C, aka, should be hooch-tastic but will probably just take forever to ferment. I write this because AW #5C (I don’t know why I settled on the C nomenclature for the sixth gallon on normally 5-gallon batches) is only 1 gallon of apple juice but has an extra 1.5 cups of brown sugar added to it. Which gives it a very dark, almost molasses color.

Just like AW #5, we added Danstar Windsor yeast to ferment it down. And once again, we had no hydrometer to measure. Alas, alas, alas.

That being said, we’ll see how it goes.

 

The 1.5 cups of brown sugar gave the cider a very dark color. We couldn’t do measurements in metric because the scale was out of battery.