The Rainshadow Cafe'

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more old stuff on the DV tourists
A day later, as temperatures climbed to 124 degrees, the tourists drove south and then west in their 1996 Plymouth Voyager van, heading toward the stark Panamint Mountains.
The dirt trail they were on was being reclaimed by the desert. It was covered by loose rocks, large and small, as well as sand bars. Climbing from below sea level, the canyon road ascends to an abandoned mining camp at an elevation of about 2,500 feet. Known for his adventurous spirit, Rimkus must have found the drive to the camp an exciting adventure, according to people who knew him. Egbert stopped at the camp and left an entry in the log book that is kept in a steel box atop a short metal post. In German, it read, "7-23-96. Conny Egbert Georg Max. We are going through the pass."
Rimkus probably was referring to Mengle Pass, located near 7,196-foot-high Manly Peak on the southwest border of Death Valley National Park. After stopping at the cabin, the green minivan turned about a mile short of the pass and headed east along a sandy wash into remote Anvil Spring Canyon. Investigators familiar with the disappearance of the foursome are puzzled why they would have chosen to travel into such an isolated area.

Among items in the van were two Coleman sleeping bag boxes, along with a new Coleman sleeping bag, various pairs of shoes, and clean clothing for a woman, man and two children. There was also a 12-pack carton of Bud Ice beer, two unopened bottles of beer, empty one-gallon bottles of water and apple cider and a Swiss cheese wrapper. A camera, numerous rolls of exposed 35-mm film and a portable CD player also were found, along with an American flag, which had been taken from a stone cabin in Butte Valley, five miles away. A beer bottle was found a half-mile away that matched bottles in the vehicle, other than these clues, nothing else conclusive was found.

from http://www.websleuths.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-41771.html

I'll have to look into this cabin and Mengle Pass later.

B-day

As in, brew day. Ausipcious, fitting? Frank Ellis kit, Safale-US05, very likely primary in glass carboy, followed by kegging. Cut the labor in half that way, and if I cork this one up too, less time wasted.

Other improvements involve pre-chilling 3 gal of water, and maybe hop-bagging.

Butterfingers for the kids, should any wander by.

Problems with cornys
The "liquid out" side of my 3 cornelius kegs have always been an everloving biatch to connect and disconnect the black plastic quick disconnects from. In the past I've had to use a piece of wood to get them to snap on and seat properly, and trying to get them off has involved a channel lock pliers and a hammer... with only a 50% success rate at not shattering them in the process. In contrast, the gray "gas in" disconnect connected to my CO2 tank has been relatively easy to get off and on.

The fittings on the gas-in side have a different nut style than than liquid-out side- the gas-in has a standard hex nut, while the liquid-out has a funny star shaped fitting that nevertheless works with the same deep socket I got for the gas-in. I wonder if the liquid-out star nut fittings are a slightly different diameter- anyone ever heard of this? I might try swapping the gas-in from one of the unused cornys with one of the liquid-out on the others- problem is, two of my cornys are currently filled with liquids under pressure.

Which brings me to the other issue- one corny I have filled with lime flavored carbonated water has a slow leak somewhere. Not only is the soda going flat, it's draining down the gas in the regulator if I leave the tank valve closed. I think this started when I connected the picnic tap, so maybe my liquid-out disconnect didn't seat too well. Gah!

bummer
Last night I couldn't stand it anymore, and tapped the keg. It took a suspicious amount of CO2 to bring it up to 7 psi, considering all the priming sugar I'd dumped in it. The taste- thin (no body- where the heck's the malt?? or the hops for that matter??), hot (fusel alcohol), sour (acidic?). Nice color, but overall, unpleasant. I think I sipped maybe an inch before I poured the rest of the pint out.

I'm going to try a kit the next I do this, rather than a recipe substituted with the home-grown hops. If that works, maybe I'll try something with the second jar of hops from August's harvest.

Beer's end
In a fit of energy (surprising considering I'd just flown back into town from Vegas), I racked from secondary to keg yesterday afternoon. For the life of me, I could not get the siphon started short of sucking on the end of the tube... <i>Acetobacter</i> here we come... or maybe not. I did try valiantly soaking the end of the started siphon hose in the bucket of Star San I had the beer bottles soaking in before I moved it into the keg. Hopefully the priming solution mixed well enough during the racking, I didn't think to shake the corny keg afterwards (I blame Palmer).

Lots of yeast in the bottom of the secondary, the beer ran quite clear during the siphon transfer.

I transferred from the keg under light CO2 pressure to a handful of swing-top Grolsch bottles, maybe 15 salvaged 12 oz beer bottles, and six 22 oz bottles, by shoving the end of the racking cane into the picnic tap- amazing how well that worked after the disappointment of the siphon. I'm not convinced the bottlecaps are airtight, though. We'll see in two weeks.

It occurred to me that the substantial headspace in the (hopefully still purged) keg may prevent proper carbonation of the ~2gal of beer in there. I may touch it up to 3psi when I get home from this sandwich shop.

I was going to take a hydrometer reading, but when I didn't recover enough out of the siphon to fill the cylinder properly, I decided to drink it. The verdict? I taste fusel alcohol, not much hop, and I think maybe a note of soy sauce. A shame, but it's simply been too hot the last three weeks for a proper ferment. Only now is it getting cool.

Netflix Sux!
Twice now I've rented movies I've seen in the theatre that I'm *certain* were heavily edited somewhere along the way to my mailbox. If you liked "Bad Education" (an Almodovar film) or "Traffic", don't bother renting it, they butchered it.

racking to secondary - the adventure continues
We-el, things didn't go smoothly yesterday when I racked to my large glass carboy. First off, lots and lots of bubbles in the transfer line- I'm really hoping that was CO2 coming out of solution. Transferred veeery slowly (over an hour I would guess) as I let the vaccuum draw air through the airlock, rather than crack the lid- until the very end, where the flow rate needed some help. There's more headspace in the top of the carboy than I'd like, and when I went to affix the stopper and airlock, the damn thing wouldn't stay corked. Amazing how it works just fine dry, but not with slippery sanitizer foam all over it. Pissed, I raced back to MoreBeer Los Altos for the second time that day (see below), but of course they didn't have the stopper one size down, only a 10.5, which I bought, as well as one of those rubbers that looked like it wouldn't fit (this is an odd carboy). Of course the 10.5 was too small, so was the carboy condom, so I stuffed the #12 in as best I could, wrapped the lid with foil & took a walk.

Partway through the walk it occurred to me I might be able to clamp the stopper in place. I diverted to the hardware store downtown, bought a couple of those spring-clamps and a metal wall utility outlet faceplate, and ended the walk in favor of trying to save the beer from oxygen staling. Sure enough, my jury rigged pressure plate did the job. As of this morning, there was a tiny bit of yeast pretending to krausen, and the airlock was half-heartedly burping a bubble every couple minutes or so. Hopefully I didn't wreck this batch from oxygen exposure.

During the first trip to MoreBeer, I bought a hydrometer, and checked my gravity during the racking. With temp correction, the gravity is 1.0125, from an estimated OG of 1.045. With two weeks to go in the secondary, not too bad! As for the taste, it was hard to taste much through all the yeast, but I'm wondering if there wasn't a bit of alcohol linger- I'm thinking fusel alcohols from the high ferment. Seemed cloying as well- I probably under-hopped this batch, big surprise.

Did I mention washing bottles is a colossal pain in the ass?

Albionwood- I was planning on priming the whole batch, bottling half and kegging half. Do you know if the yeast sediment from priming would cause a problem in the keg? Alternatively I could somehow keg half first without priming sugar, prime the rest, and bottle it, but that runs a chance of too much / too little relative to the bottles I have.

Bubble bubble boil & trouble
...or how I spent the *vast majority* of my Saturday

The world's oogliest wort chiller, featuring 88% post-industrial waste:

She ain't pretty, but she dropped a 3gal boil to 28C in 20 minutes.

NotaBeergeek: Two potential problems with this batch, 1) not sure I did a terrific job aireating the wort before pitch- too worried about contamination I guess, and 2) I pitched hot- 28C. Hard to avoid when ambient temps were 23C. I'm definitely going to rack to a secondary and bottle condition at least part of this batch to try and mellow whatever happens from the hot primary.

As of ~12h post pitch, the ferment was burping about a bubble a second. Sweet, green and hoppy smelling- no off-notes, somewhat pleasant. I think there's enough hop in there so I probably won't dry-hop.

pneumatic geekery
Last night after work I rebuilt my three Cornelius (syrup) kegs. On Sunday I gave 'em a good soak with PBW and a bunch of rinses. Tossed all O-rings and poppets, left 'em to dry overnight. After a couple of beers I reassembled them, then put my regulator on my CO2 tank and pressurized each one to 10psi to see if they'd hold. Who knew playing with compressed gas could be so much fun!

Harvest of Hops
Hotter than Hades, too, here in Santa Rosa

( cut for pictures )

The dudes at Beaverage People smelt a couple & say it's Cascade. Albionwood wins.

***

I'm going to try making a "pale ale" using nothing but these hops- bittering, finishing, maybe even dry-hopping if I'm feeling reckless. It'll be a partial boil, because as it was, I already dropped $150 today on brewing stuff, & didn't want to spend $200 on a notched brew kettle and a wort chiller. That's just stoopid.

So if this works, I'll have ~5gal of beer that needs drinking. Someone throw a party & invite me.

Tortured Plot Summaries
http://www.postmodernbarney.com/2009/04/uncomfortable-plot-summaries/

Some gems:

BATMAN: Wealthy man assaults the mentally ill.
DIE HARD: Dysfunctional cop saves marriage by murdering foreign national.
SERENITY: Men fight for possession of scantily clad mentally ill teenage girl.
KARATE KID: Boy gains acceptance through violence.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
SPIDER-MAN: Nerd gets bitten by spider, complains about how this ruins his life for years to come.
THE GOONIES: Physically abused, retarded man finds love with overweight preteen.
THE X-MEN: Minority group seeks overthrow of social order.
TITANIC: Crazy old widow disregards lifelong memories of husband, children, and grandchildren in favor of that one time she [slept with] a bum.

word to the young
*if there's any of such reading this, which I doubt..

If you haven't at least tried to start saving for your retirement by the age of, oh say 30, consider yourself screwed... in many cases, you've got 20 good years of employability in you at the level demanded by the corporate world. By the age of 50, many of you will be burned out, too tired, or too slow and unproductive to keep up with all the new information and skills your younger coworkers will be sucking up like sponges. All you'll have going for you is politics, guile and maybe some wisdom. Some of you will be able to trade on that well into your 60's, but for the rest, you'll either be relying on the state (and good luck with that) or become a burden on your children, should you have any.

For the love of stone fruit
I have a deep an abiding love for stone fruit. The trees themselves I view with a touch of reverence and awe. Someday I hope to own a bit of land with apricot, peach, cherry, and plum trees on it.

Apricots: When I was a Boy Scout in high school, the Los Altos city rec center we used to have our meetings in was immediately adjacent to a modest apricot orchard, possibly on city property. Although signed No Trespassing, that did little to keep us from grabbing fruit off the trees early in the summer. I can still remember how amazingly sweet, warm, and juicy those tree-ripened apricots were. I haven't had their match, since.

Before disease ended it, my grandmother had an apricot tree in her back yard. She would make jam every summer the old fashioned way, in Mason jars sealed with wax. That remains the best jam I've ever had.

I have not had an apricot this year.

Peaches: A few Sundays ago I went on an afternoon hike near Mt. Umunhum with a quart of water and a ripe peach. It was hot and before I was at the highest point of the hike, I was nearly out of water, some four miles from the car. But I still had the peach. When I bit into it, I literally drank the juice from thirst. It was like a sacrament.

I've been eating a peach a day for the last several weeks. There's one waiting on my desk now.

Cherries: The first cherries of the season came from Chinatown, and cost $1/lb. They were amazing, and for weeks afterwards Julie and I were on a quest for $1 cherries every time we went to a grocery store. She had luck at a Chinese market in Seattle; I could never find them for less than $2. But when I did, I'd buy them, and eventually broke down and bought even at $3. I've watched over the last couple months as their point of origin marched north- first California, then Washington. I bought the last bag on display in the Nob Hill grocery store yesterday, they came from British Columbia, $1.99/lb on special. I had a handful with breakfast this morning. This bag could be the last of the season.

Plums: The occasionally give us mottled plums here at work in the fruit basket set in the breakroom. I grabbed one this morning, it is keeping the peach and banana company on my desk. My dad has a pluot tree in his yard, along with an apricot tree that succumbed to disease early this year and a cherry tree from which I only had half of a bird-pecked cherry this year. While up inspecting my hops last weekend, I ate a couple of large, warm pluots my dad had picked. They nearly spoiled my dinner.

motorcycle people
Go watch "Dust to Glory" if you haven't yet. It's a documentary about the Baja 1000 offroad race. Crazy sh!t... my favorite is a passing scene in which the Honda B team tries to pass the race leader by detouring down some bluffs onto a beach... at 110 mph.

RIP: John Bachar 1957-2009
John Bachar, one of a legendary group of free climbers during the 70's in Yosemite and Joshua Tree that revolutionized rockclimbing, died while free soloing July 5th near Mammoth Lakes. He was 51.

Back in my rockclimbing days, this guy was one of the legends I'd read about in magazines but never met. He is one of the last climber anyone would ever think would die in this way.

The crazy thing for me, I first found out about this in <i>The Economist</i>.... *sigh*, how times have changed.