Brewing beer

Well Folks, it’s apparently been ages since I last blogged. You’ve probably been worried. Where is Russ?  What has he been up to?  How can I go on without knowing what Russ is doing?  Right? … (Insert the sound of crickets chirping here).  OK… so maybe you aren’t holding your breath.  For all I know, you deleted me long ago, or only keep me bookmarked for a laugh.

So, whether you’ve been waiting with baited breath for my next post so you can go on with things, or with finger poised over the delete key, threatening to remove me from your life if I ever post again, if you’re reading along now, you are in for a treat. You are finally going to find out what I have been up to these last several months. Well… maybe not everything I’ve been doing over the course of the last years absence, but at least something that I’ve done and want to share in yet another witty and thought provoking post. If you’re as clever as I suspect all of my discerning readers are, you will have seen the title and saved yourself a whole lot of reading already.…but for those of you who may be a bit slow on the uptake, I’ll spell it out….this weekend I brewed a batch of beer.

Beer brewing has become a favorite hobby over the last year. It actually all started about 20 years ago, when I decided to try brewing beer after my friend Bill had completed a few successful batches. He got sick of it and gave me his gear. I tried to make beer 3 or 4 times. I had a couple poor batches, one that never fermented and one that fermented real well but tasted like what plastic band-aids smell like. …undrinkable to say the least.

Last June, a new shop, Brewtopia, opened up near Central Square in Keene. I was excited to see what they had for craft beers, so I stopped in. What to my wondering eyes did a appear, but a beautiful beer store AND a home brewing supply store, all in one. I talked about brewing to the guys a little bit and picked up a great book on making homebrew that they recommended.

I went home and read the book in one evening. It became quite clear why my original batches 20 years ago were so un-spectacular to downright horrid. The next weekend, I rummaged around in the basement and found my glass carboy and some of the other beer making stuff I still had and decided to give it a go again. I went back and asked AJ at Brewtopia to hook me up with the ingredients for a pale ale recipe, which he did. I didn't even bother to ask what they were or in what amounts. I just wanted to try out the brewing process.

My first brew came out ok. Very drinkable. Not an award winner, maybe, and not particularly reproducible, since I had no idea what I made it with, but good. I was hooked. I joined some online communities like Hopville and  Homebrewtalk , and got a subscription to Brew your Own magazine and a home brewing website called Beer Tools.(Ya, I know… I get a little obsessive at times)

So one evening, I was enjoying a Shipyard Export, and wondered if I could figure out how to make something that tasted like that. I opened up the Google Machine and Wham!  clone recipes galore.

The next weekend, I hit up Brewtopia, got my supplies and brewed up a batch. As luck would have it, we had a pig roast for the Elm City Derby Damez on the same weekend that the beer was ready, so I brought out a cooler full. It was a hit and disappeared pretty quickly.  I decided to call it “Pig Roast” and to keep tweaking the recipe and brewing it until I had something super delicious and of my own make, and so I have brewed the last 3 times the same recipe with various little additions, changes or subtractions. I’ve also picked up, or been given, better brewing gear, which has enhanced the whole brewing experience, as well as helped things look and taste better.

This weekend past, I brewed it again. This time, I used yeast that I had farmed from a bottle of an earlier batch. I had made a starter earlier in the week and built up a good sized yeast cake.

Once again, I messed around with the hop schedule and the various amounts of malt to try to find just that right combination.

The process is pretty easy and fun. It feels like working at the Alchemy Lab for all my Skyrim addict friends. First, I steeped my Wheat and Crystal-30 grains in a small pot on the stove for about 1/2 hour at 150+/- degrees.

 

Since it was a glorious Sunday, with the sun shining and the temps in the 70’s (a very rare occurrence in NH in March), once the steeping was done, I set up my burner and kettle out by the fire pit and played all afternoon at being a brew-miester. I brought my water to a boil, then added my steeped wort, my malt extract and the first addition of hops. I was trying something a little different, so I had to stay close in order to add hops at timed intervals, especially near the end of the hour long boil.

When I first made beer, I would get so wound up and have my books and directions out the whole time, checking to see if I was “doing it right” I have the process down now, so there’s less checking and more enjoying. That’s not to say stuff doesn’t come up that causes a panic now and then. I stepped away yesterday for just a moment and had a boil over that put out my burner. So I lost a little propane and about a quart of wort. That was a bummer. The dogs enjoyed liking the the fire pit patio stones though.

Once I was done boiling, I cooled the wort with my handy little cooling device, and then poured the chilled wort into the carboy. I found that I boiled down more volume that expected in an hour, so my 6 gallons to start with turned into about 4.8 in the carboy.

I expected 5.5 gallons, so the batch is a little denser than I expected. (An O.G. of 1.071 for you brewing types, whereas I was aiming for 1.060) The beer is also going to be a little hop-ier (more bitter) than the recipe goal, but I think it’ll be good anyway. It meets all the style characteristics of an OLD ALE, so I’m sure I’ll like it.

 

I pitched my home farmed yeast, and it took off…. the airlock started bubbling within a half hour of pitching. I hope that’s a good thing….sure seems so. It has a lot of work to do.

So now the beer is at its primary fermentation in the basement at about 65 degrees. Hopefully, I’ll bottle in two weeks and be sampling deliciousness around the 1st of May.

 

    Pig Roast Old Ale

My Busy little Sweetie!

My 10 year old daughter  Grace has always been a busy little bee. She always has a project or 12 going on somewhere in the house. It has even added the phrase “ a Grace-mess” to our vocabulary, because all these projects tend to go unfinished for days, but can’t be disturbed. 

I never worry about finding something for her to do, because given a few free moments, she makes up a project….often wildly imaginative and creative, but not necessarily something anyone else would ever have thought to do.

 

So I wasn’t terribly surprised Thursday afternoon to come home and find Tracy on the computer, Jeremiah doing homework, both in the living room, and Grace in the kitchen with every possible baking ingredient out on the counter. She had flour(s) eggs, milk, baking powder, baking soda, brown sugar, granulated birch sugar, a bunch of spices and god knows what else. There was a bowl on the counter with a rather nasty looking mixture inside, something akin to what you get mixing a bit of milk with 4-5 rotten, black bananas.

“Grace, What are you making now,” I hesitantly asked.  The answer was of course, “I wanted to make something, don’t worry, I’m almost done”

Tracy came out and helped her set the oven to a good temperature and time and they put the glass bread pan with “the mixture” into the oven. Then they cleaned up and Tracy and I made dinner and the stuff just cooked away, somewhat forgotten.

As we got ready to sit down for dinner, the girls checked “the stuff” and it seemed done so they pulled it out to let it cool. I guess somebody forgot to grease the dish, so after it cooled a bit, there was a minor struggle to get the bread-ish creation out, but it finally popped out onto the rack without any visible harm.

That’s when Grace told us she had made a card and this bread for a little friend in class who had broken her arm the day before. We thought maybe someone should taste it before it was given as a gift, so Tracy cut an end off and quartered it, and we all slowly picked up our pieces, sniffed a bit and took a bit. Holy Moy and what a surprise!!  It was delicious… kind of like a lighter, fluffier zucchini bread in color and it tasted a lot like ginger bread. I was very impressed and amazed. We asked her what what she put in it, but she didn’t really know…”a bunch of stuff” - Zen baking at its finest!

Grace never ceases to amaze me.  xoxo

September 17th: 1966 to 2011 ~ My Annual Birthday Blog

Well, folks, Once again, we are back to my birthday and I invite you into the little windows of my life that I post every year. This year, I'm 45 (for those of you who don't want to do the math) and life is good.

If you’ve followed me here on “Life as Russ,”  you have probably been wondering, "where the hell is Russ?"  I really haven't blogged much this year. If you follow me on Facebook, you probably know why... I've spent a lot of time playing there and posting pics, comments and other little snipets of my life.

This year was different, that's for sure. The beginning started out soooo slow at work. Thus my ability to play on Facebook. The economy just kept tanking. Something happened around May, though...at least in our area, and we have been crazy busy ever since, with no apparent end in sight.

Maybe because of this, I just really didn't do much gardening this year (maybe its also because until I built the outside pen, the chickens ravaged my garden to the point of my giving up on getting any summer vegetables...only beets, carrots and potatoes remain unscathed) We have made some good friends with people through Tracy's Derby team and I've been lucky to get to hang with some old friends as well.

Once again, we had another great vacation in Maine at Acadia National Park, which I still have yet to post about. The kids are in school at Waldorf. Grace in 5th and Jeremiah in 8th (his last year) Tracy is still working all but full time there as well as working on survey research projects for me.

So here we are, again this year, checking out what was going on in my life in years past. What were the big events in my history?

5 years ago: 2006/7 - 40 years old
Not a great year... but a life changing one. Lots of stuff happened, and I think in the long run, we all ended up much better for it. Work was booming.

10 years ago: 2001/2 ~ 35 years old
The Biggest events this year? Lets see...

I'm a Dad to a beautiful baby girl.

I started working out, which I continue to this day. We bought a Bowflex and that was the beginning. It's long gone now, but that purchase was a life changer. My back is still weak and healing from breaking it over a year ago, but working out is what stops the pain.

Work has taken a downtown at CHA and we are struggling to keep my survey department viable, but we have had some big projects with Vermont AOT and with the Army Corps to keep us going.

15 years ago: 1996/7 ~ 30 years old
We live in the little red school house on Belvedere Road in Gilsum until late winter, when we move into our FIRST house on Juniper Hill Road in Stoddard.

I'm a survey tech at CHA and I've been travelling A LOT, all over New England on projects for Sprint, AT&T and some others, surveying sites for cell towers.

The BIG thing that happened? ... Tracy and I decided to have a baby on our 1st anniversary at Tony Clamatos (October 7, 2006), so we went back to the school house and made one. On July 10th, 2007, Jeremiah is born! The poor little guy took 14 hours to come out, his heart rate kept going down to almost nothing and when he finally did pop out, his lungs had collapsed and his internal organs weren't functioning. The best and worst day of my life! Actually, that was one of the worst weeks, as both he and Tracy almost died and we ended up in the hospital in Hanover for the week.

20 years ago: 1991/2 ~ 25 years old
Tracy and I are a couple now, and live at the condo on Sugar maple lane with two of my best friends, Molly Legg and Chris Rickson.

In the spring of '92 we decide to get our very own apartment on central square in Keene, third floor above China Wok. Yup, we eat a lot of Chinese food now. Being down town is pretty fun. We hang out a lot in "Beak Alley" behind our building and the Stage.

I’m still kind of a long haired Dead head hippie freak, but at least my old crew chief is gone and I start working with my friend, Bill Cadmus. I also spend a bit of time on the road, surveying in Vermont and Mass.


25 years ago: 1986/7 ~ 20 years old
I’m a Junior at Keene State College. I left the dorm scene and live kind of a nomadic lifestyle between Mom & Dad's house and my girlfriend's place. I'm still a Geography major and still goofing off. Case in point...Spring break in Fort Lauderdale with a bunch of college buddies. We drive down in one 28 hour stint, fueled by chips, beer and will power. One big blurry party all week. We did a lot of stuff we shouldn't and are lucky to make it back to NH in one piece.

30 years ago: 1981/2 ~ 15 years old
I'm a sophomore at Keene High school. I can't say I like school, and to make matters worse...I discover the wonders of beer. I play football on the JV squad and I make the travel team for the Varsity squad, and I even have a few forays onto the field. Its a big deal for me, having just learned about football the year before. I live in Westmoreland, and I dont have my drivers license yet, so its tough sometimes to hang with friends or fit in.

35 years ago: 1976/7 ~ 10 years old
We live in Westmoreland at our new house, and I'm in the 5th grade. My sister Sarah was born a month ago. Dan & I spend a lot of time playing in the woods and swamps around our house, hiking and building forts at the "sand-pit."  We draw lots of maps and figure out what all the trees and bushes are. I guess my love of my current career choices of Land Surveyor and Wetland Scientist get their start here.

40 years ago: 1971/2 ~ 5 years old
I honestly don't remember. I know we live in Keene, on Laurel Lane and Nana and Bup live down the street. Dan is just a baby and I think we do a lot of travelling with Dad on his business road trips.

~Hopefully, I have my years straight, but there it is, a little glimpse into the history of Life as Russ

The Zen of Karaoke

Well, Folks, September is here and my fall quarterly meeting for the New Hampshire Lands Surveyors Association will soon be upon us. At each quarterly meeting, I have to give a report, as Director of Education, about the success or lack thereof of seminars we have put on, and to give some insight into upcoming seminars.

Some quarterlies are sparsely attended, 25-30 people, maybe. The Fall quarterly and the Annual  in December usually have over 100 members. Now if you follow me here, or on Facebook, you probably realize that giving reports, presentations and public speaking are one of my un-favorite things. I usually feel the specters of fear and anxiety start to hover over my bed in the early morning hours, weeks before the day I have to do my thing..

So I was thinking about the upcoming quarterly this morning, and what I would have to report on, as I slowly drove along Poocham Road, and it occurred to me… I don’t have a even a tad of fear or anxiety. I’m looking forward to the meeting, and I have stuff to say. What gives?

I have to chalk up it up a lot to experience I guess. I’ve been doing these presentations in front of the membership for over 4 years now, and I have even presented a few seminars myself. It gets easier every time. Still, even as late as last spring, I was tortured by the thought of having to stand up in front of people and talk. And really, it doesn’t just pertain to my professional association duties, but public speaking in general; I go to planning boards, zoning boards and school functions. Yet, today, I feel fine.

    I was mulling this over, and for some reason, karaoke popped into my head. So I have to tell you, recently I went to an event hosted by my wife’s Roller Derby Team, The Elm City Derby Damez…. A karaoke fundraiser. … And I got up and did a number!

Of course, I’m not that over the fear and anxiety of being in front of a crowd, but I have a lot of new friends lately who seemed adamant that I participate. Daisy heckled and manhandled me to give it a go; John decided we should do a duet, it was our duty as the Derby men; and Spark came up and sang with us. She knew neither John nor I were too thrilled to get up on stage, so she brought the courage. And really, what could be better than having a pretty, confident girl who likes to sing on stage with you to focus eyes away from the nerdy white guy. (That’d be me) So we did it, and I had fun.

So I was thinking about this and how Karaoke, before recently, would seem a fate worse than death; but I did it with only minor prompting (and maybe a couple glasses of bravery) The thought occurred to me that karaoke was both a strengthening experience and an insight to where I’m at in life.

If I could stand up in front of a 100+ crowd, mostly drunken strangers who had no reservations about heckling me, while attempting to sing a song whose lyrics I only half knew and make an ass of myself, then standing up in front of a small group of sober, polite, respectful fellow surveyors and delivering a small report on a topic that I have expertise in, is a walk in the park. The same holds true with planning board or client meetings.

Now, its not that I think it was all because of karaoke or that I’m going to seek out karaoke every weekend as a means to build character and find my true path… I’m just saying…

A Pirate needs a ship

So, for as long as I can remember, I have loved boats. Do I have one?  No.  Have I ever had one?  No.  We actually, that is not quite true. I have a canoe, but what I have dreamed of since I was a little kid is a sail boat. Actually there have been two dreams, a small square rigged ship like a brig to live on and sail around the world with, and a Danish (Viking) longboat. Maybe its in the genes. My Uncle Jim has been building sailboats for years.

These things have been on my “someday” list forever. Well, we all know what “someday” means. I think you’ve all heard me write about my ideas on ”someday “ before. “Someday” never happens. “Someday” is how we express dreams we’ll never see. Things that would be cool, but that will never, ever, happen, unless “someday” we win the lottery.

I don’t keep a someday list. To quote Master Yoda’s philosophy, “Do or do not, there is no try” (read …try = someday) In the last few years, I’ve come up with goals that I have in life and either scratched them out as a “someday” thing not worthy of taking up brain space, or put them on an active list of things I’m tackling. Another trick I learned from some classes I took years ago, either Dale Carnegie or the 7 Habits Covey stuff; (I can’t recall) is to put your goals out there. Let people know what you are doing. For some reason (the theory behind it I can’t quite  put into detail) once you put it out there and let people know, people who you trust, people that you look up to, like, feel responsible toward, whatever, you create a superior inner power and motivation to get it done. I guess maybe you don’t want to come back later and say, “oh that? naw, I was just full of shit.”

So, back to the post I was trying to write.  Recently I was blabbing with a friend on Facebook about my boat desires. Turns out, he builds boats and ships…wooden ones. I mentioned that I would at least like to build a small sailboat, but one that somehow looked a little like a Viking ship.

Well, Wade’s the man. Apparently, there is exactly such a thing. He showed me some pics of just what I was looking for. So this is kind of exactly what my first boat wants to be in my mind. The guy who posted at this link already did it. Now I want to.

• http://woodenboatrescue.org/archive/oselvar%20details%20of%20Faerings.htm 

No… I’ve never built a boat, and I’m sure I wont be circumnavigating the globe with my first creation, but its set in stone now… I’m going to build one… at least one. This seems like a great first project, and pretty close to what I’m picturing in my head.

http://www.woodenboatstore.com/16-Double-Ended-Pulling-Boat-Shearwater/productinfo/400-058/

By next time this year, I’ll be conquering and plundering up and down the Connecticut River in my “ship”

Sad but True

This weekends Elm City Derby Damez vs Mad Knockers roller derby bout has been cancelled due to the fact that FEMA needs the arena to deal with problems that Hurricane Irene caused.

Sorry, folks.

I'll keep you posted on further developments and up-coming scheduled events.

Elm City Derby Damez Vs. Mad Knockers

~ Saturday September 10, 2011 at  6:00 PM

I know, I haven’t written anything in ages. Its been a crazy busy summer. I promise soon I’ll be posting my annual Acadia summer vacation blog to keep in tradition with my 2009 and 2010 posts. I also have a Good Eats in Town post to put up about this fantastic BBQ & Brewery that we visited in Bar Harbor.

In the meantime, I want to give a shout out to The Elm City Derby Damez. Any of you who follow me on Facebook know that my wife Tracy (a.k.a Mae B. Tū TuFF #222) is a member of the Derby Damez. They are a killer Roller Derby squad, and a great bunch of people that we are glad to have become friends with. This upcoming bout is in Brattleboro,Vermont, one of the Towns recently devastated by Irene, so we are hoping that the ice rink where they bout in Living Memorial Park is still there.

So here I am, shamelessly promoting the Damez on my Blog. Come see them!!!

Oh yeah!  Don’t skip out at half time. My sister-in-laws boyfriend’s band Midnight Jump is rocking the half time show.

Here’s a little map to help you find the place: