Brewday Redemption

So after our brewday disaster, my brother and I gave it another shot yesterday and it went very well. We now have a brown ale in the primary fermenter with the airlock happily bubbling. We have cocoa nibs soaking in chocolate vodka and 4 pounds of strawberries in the freezer, all waiting to be added to the beer once the primary fermentation is complete.

I don’t know what style beer this will be when it’s finished, but I do know it’ll taste like the best chocolate covered strawberry you’ve ever had in your life. WOOOO!!!

brewday disaster

My brother and I had a brewday last Friday for an interesting beer that we’re extremely pumped for (I’ll post what the beer is when we have a successful brewday for it).  Anyway, the day was going along as planned, we had everything organized and sanitized and ready to go, we did a 1 hour mash, by the end of which we were at a total of about 4 hours of work on the brewday, and then we went to vorlauf and get ready to sparge and found out that during the mash, the hardware in the mashtun had come apart and therefore the wort wouldn’t drain. So we had 10 pounds of grain and about 4 gallons of wort and we couldn’t figure out how to separate them! It sucked! So we put our yeast starter that we had prepared the night before in the fridge along with the hops we were getting ready to use, and pretty much just dumped the wort and grains so now we have to go drop another 20 bucks to get the grains again and restart our brewday probably this coming Monday after repairing our mashtun and making sure that won’t happen again.

Moral of the story: always check your equipment beforehand!

POOP

This beer is going to be awesome though.

warm ups

Something that I have been experimenting with lately in my workouts is my warm up routine, and I realized that my warm ups in the past have not really been sufficient. My warm ups used to consist only of stretching and maybe a little jog. Lately I have also been doing agilities and Elliot Hulse’s bio-energizer routine along with my normal stretching. Generally I do the bio-energizers first, followed by stretches and then about 5 or 6 different agilities that I feel are appropriate for the workout that I’m getting ready to do. I’ve noticed that my workout performance has increased significantly since I started doing this.

walk

Go for a good long walk every morning (like 1 hour, not as a substitute for usual exercise). It’s a great way to get your mind and body ready for the day, give you energy, put you in a good mood, and keep your metabolism up.

So wake up, put the ipod in, and start walking!

smoke a pig in the ground

My brother has been wanting to smoke a whole pig in a hole in the ground for a real long time now, and after seeing a video on youtube of someone doing this on regular smoker that is much bigger than ours, I think I’m ready to give this project a try. I did some research on how to build an in-ground smoker and I think I have it pretty well figured out, although I do have some questions.

The first step obviously is to dig a hole. It has to be big enough to fit the pig we’re going to throw in there plus a bed of coals about a foot and a half high. I think I’ll get that bed of coals by burning regular fire wood, adding more as the pieces break down and once the bed of coals is just about high enough throwing a bunch of apple wood chunks on top.

Once the coals are in place we’ll lay down soaked tree branches with 6 in. gaps or so between them to act as a grate to set the pig on.

I’m not completely sure how I want to prepare the pig yet, I’ll talk to my brother about it when he gets back from Tahiti. We could just put some olive oil and rub on it and lay it in there like that. We could also wrap it in butcher paper and soaked newspaper, or wrap it in banana leaves and chicken wire. I’ll leave a comment on this post when I get it figured out.

Once the pig is laid out over the coals, all that’s left is covering the hole with a big piece of plywood and some dirt, and waiting 15 hours or so. It’s going to be AWESOME.