Wednesday, December 30, 2009

A watched pot never boils.....

...but if you turn your back it will always boil over!!

I brewed my American IPA yesterday out in the fridgid cold, and stepped inside to warm up a bit and had a boil over. It was so cold that the bolied over wort froze as soon as it hit the ground. Other than that, it was a succesful day.

I've been very lucky these past few months. Things at work were slow.....very slow. So slow that I had a lot of time on my hinds. Time to do things like plan out 6 brew sessions....Belgian Tripel (3 seperate batches), Munich Dunkel, Winter Spiced Ale 2009 and recently American IPA. I also had the time to look for a new job....which I accepted a few weeks ago and start on January 4th! :-) While this new job won't give me access to great homebrew shops like my old one did, it will put me right next to my favorite beer bar in Boston (Bukowski's) and give me a 45 minute shorter commute.....each way!!!

Anyway...enough rambling. My Winter Spiced Ale turned out ok, but had no carbination. So in order to fix this issue, I sanatized a keg, and dumped them all into the keg and I'm in the process of force carbinating it. My sister-in-law helped me make an AWESOME label (which I'll post when I can get it off my thumb drive which I don't have now) and I think everythin will be saved, just not in time for Christmas. Oh well.

I brought my Munich Dunkel today to a meeting I had at Cape Cod Beer. I was lucky enough ot have the opportunity to meet with Todd and Beth Marcus, Owners of Cape Cod beer, for some insight into the business and starting out as a brewer! It was awesome. And, in edition, he tried my Munich Dunkel and had some good feed back. They're going to serve a few of them at his next homebrew meeting and send me some additional feedback as well. SWEET!!!!!!

Other than that, my wife and I are getting ready to welcome our first child in March. I'm trying to get a few more brew sessions in before then, for two reasons. One, so I'll have enough home brew to last me through the summer, and two because I don't want to assume I'll have enough time to brew much at first.

I hope you all have a happy and safe New Year!!

Cheers,
Jason

Sunday, December 20, 2009

I'm a winner!!!!!


So, Alan who writes at "A Good Beer Blog" holds a yearly yuletide photo contest. He gets a lot of amazing photo's from around the world (I use one from last year as my desktop photo). So this year I decided to enter a few of my pictures that I took while at Magnolia's in San Fran.

To my excitement, I received an email from Alan this morning informing me that I was one of the winners. I won a copy of 33 Bottles of Beer. It's a beer diary sort of that allows you to review beers on a flavor wheel so you can visually see how your beers tasted. Very cool. Hell, you could have given me a free bottle opener and I would have been psyched. Anyway, check out what Alan had to say here. Thanks Alan!!!

Back to shoveling snow!!

Cheers,
Jason

Monday, December 7, 2009

Spam Comments

I've had to turn on the comment moderation recently.  I've been getting a TON of spam comments (15-20 per day) so I turned it on so people didn't have to see them all.  Has anyone else had problems with this?  It's really annoying!
 
Cheers,
Jason