Captain Video's Mountain Retreat

I haven't had time to go through and start posting pictures from the Halloween party yet, but Cuneyt has some really nice pictures posted up at his photostream -- check it :)

Heathen's Hideaway

Davy Jones' Other Locker

Voodoo Alley

Lecherous Lynn

Horswaggle Harbor

More here....

... or just meet me at the Gunner's Daughter.  I'll be face-down in a tankard big enough to brain a man.  (Some have accused me of tryin' to drown myself in drink... It's unpossible -- I float!)

Being as we're throwing our first Pacific Northwest, Scott&Connie-style, "All Hallows Eve Bash," Connie and I have been discussing whether we should, for the sake of those that have no idea what we're up to, be less secretive about what our Halloween Party is.

Several of our friends have heard the stories of our old Minneapolis Halloween parties.  We've even helped out with the setup of parties for friends, locally, over the last couple of years, so there's some that have had a taste of how much effort we'll put into these things.  Back in Mpls., we had enough people anticipating our parties, that we were able to really keep the theme (or story) a surprise for when everyone showed up, but since this is all new to most everyone we're inviting, here's a bit of background, and, as a teaser, a preview of where we're headed:

Back in Minneapolis, we wanted to have a Halloween party that was staged as if it were in a haunted house.  We've taken community party rooms, our house, or our friends houses, and transformed them, inside and out, into interactive haunted spaces -- these parties were quite the events.

The designs in the past were mostly your traditional, theatrical, goth spaces;  abandoned or neglected Victorian rooms with hidden dungeons, caves, graveyards, crypts, and a smattering of vignettes in homage to images from our favorite classic horror films -- we built false walls, put in hidden doors, and did things that would, as much as possible, make these otherwise familiar homes into confusing, unrecognizable new spaces.

Over the years, we've had to part with all our old props -- now we've spent the last couple weeks planning and collecting materials -- craigslist, dumpster-diving, begging, stealing, etc.  Some very generous friends are donating additional props to the cause, and we've started the "build-in" of a totally new party in earnest. 

This year we're departing from our traditional goth themes and are inviting all our friends to our haunted version of a hidden pirate hideaway, somewhere in the archipelago of the Caribbean -- it could be old Hispaniola, Haiti, or Tortuga or somewhere entirely different -- but wherever it is, be warned, there be dragons.

A couple of recent milestones:  Last weekend, along with 10 gallons of ESB, I brewed up a batch of our Sleepy-Hollow Pumpkin Spiced Porter, and yesterday we raised the 25 foot mast and rigging for the pirate ship which will be parked in the wharf :)  To those of you attending:  You're welcome to play along with the piratical theme, but please feel free to costume yourself however you wish!  It's a Halloween party -- be what you want!  But now you know, our house is going to have it's pirate costume on :)

Stay tuned here or to my twitter feed to keep up with our updates :)

logic probe part 1 from Zac McConnell on Vimeo.

... a guy that makes Spam Musubi, right?

My first Spam Musubi since visiting Sharky in Hawaii :)  Om nom nom....

Finally gettin'round'ta bottling up our (hard) cider!

First step: Blend!  In the background of the photo above, the gallon bottle on the left is fermented-out, bone-dry, apple wine from the apples in our yard - picked, pressed, and fermented in the fall of 2008 (seriously, we picked all the slugs out, I promise!).  On the right is a jug of regular (sweet) cider.  The apple-wine has absolutely no sugar left in it -- not super pleasant on it's own, but it's warm, clean, and has a nice aroma.

So  GF and I mixed up different blends, seeing what tastes good (3 parts hard to 1 part sweet is what we've picked -- I'd estimate that as coming in at about 7.5% ABV at that rate -- just a guess), and bottling up a sample to see if it gets overcarbonated or explodes during bottle conditioning.  If it does, I'll kill off the viable yeast in the hard cider, blend, and then bottle with a primer instead.

First impressions:  Surprisingly good.  The blend we picked has a nice sharpness to it.  I'm totally not minding drinking this sans carbonation.  At this point the retro-taste is where you get the most apple flavor, drawing air through it brings out the alcohol, and the tartness lingers in the aftertaste.  This will be nice if  it carbonates well -- even if it dries out a bit more in the bottle.

Also brewing up an ESB (English style English Special Bitter, not Northwestern style Redhook ESB).  The garage smells awesome :)



I kegged up an previous batch of the same earlier -- which means I got the first taste that's indicative of where this will end up.  I love the hopping on this, and it's hitting the mark with the Maris Otter rather than American 2-row (those are types of barley, for my non-brewer friends).

The novelty of this batch?  I had to leave for an appointment mid-day today, so I had to interrupt the brew.  I sparged the wort to the brew kettle, pasteurized it, and then turned off the heat and left it covered for a few hours.  This created some early sedimentation of some kind in the brew kettle -- I had large flakey things floating around all through the boil -- the beer looked clearer than normal too, so we'll see what happens.  The one I kegged today was pretty cloudy (I don't mind cloudy beers - Manny's, Mac & Jacks, etc.), but it's the same formula, so we'll see if there's any difference.

mmmmm..... beer.

PS -- BREWER QUESTION:  I can sparge quickly without getting stuck, the beer is good, and the numbers are saying my efficiency is in the 75% range (simple infusion mash) -- I could slow the sparge down to be more 'in-spec' with the recipes out there, but do I need to? And if I don't, what am I potentially messing up chemically?  feel free to answer here or catch me on twitter @cptvideo -- thanks

This is turning into a modern Magic 8 Ball :)

What are you?

It rains here in the Northwest, and when it rains you get mushrooms. I'm not a mushroom hunter and while I'd like to learn more about mycology and mushroom info, I'm a total noob. I found these in the backyard about a month ago -- there was probably a hundred different species of mush out there, and I just grabbed a few of the really big ones to see if I could figure out what they were.

This one's the first I found, right outside the door -- a ton of them. I wasn't able to figure out what it was, so I'm not even going to guess here.

The big umbrella shaped mushroom and the spherical topped one are the same type -- just different ages. This was big, about the size of my hand. It was a gilled mushroom that dropped a huge amount of white spores.

This second one is a Bolete of some kind -- I'm guessing it might be a Zeller's Bolete?

I had no idea what a "Bolete" was, and didn't even know that mushroom's can have pores instead of gills. This thing was really heavy and solid feeling and I'm thinking I'd like to get some help to confirm an ID for it -- in case it's a good edible. I did take a spore print from it and the spores were a dark olive green/brown color.

It's not as slimy as it looks in the photo - it was raining out when I picked it. The color darkened and took on a more matte finish as it dried off.

This was another Bolete -- I think it falls into a group that's pretty widely knows as a "Slippery Jack."

I grabbed it because it was so freakish. This one is way more slimy than it looks in the photo. The slime was really viscus and reminded me of using methylcellulose to do stuff like alien drool.

I didn't take a lot of notes -- I took a lot of pictures -- but I was working out of an old, and pretty difficult to use mushroom book, so I was just messing around. I've gotten newer (and way better) books on the topic, and I've found a local mycological club, so I'm hoping I can start to grok some of this strange stuff that grows so profusely here.

When I lived in Minnesota I picked up a lot of local knowledge about wild edibles -- not really much about mushrooms other than puffballs -- but definitely a lot of different plant types. Things like, where and when to find them, how to prepare them, etc. The Pacific Northwest seems completely different, and the micro-climates here seem to really complicate the "knowing where and when to find things" issue.

So, a question... If you grow up here, did your older siblings make you eat a slug?

A couple years ago, after the Heads-Up brewery closed, I was hanging out with one of the ex-brewers at Tizley's Europub in Poulsbo and he talked me into trying a couple bottles of Avery's "The Beast" and "Samael's Ale," (I'd post links, but Avery's whole page is flash, so I can't) which are beers from Avery's "demon" series -- some of their more "out-there" beers -- Since then, I have been looking forward to trying more beers from these, "Small brewery, Big beers," beer makers. I don't recall where I picked up the particular bottle I'm tasting tonight (most likely Bottleworks in Wallingford or the Puget Sound Wine Cellar), but I do believe, when it's in season (see "Availablity," below) you will find this in most decent bottle retailers around around the Pacific Northwest.

Yay craigslist!

I picked up a stack of brewing equipment a couple days ago, and it wasn't until last night that I finally had the time to look over all the new toys. Warning: Beware the incoming train-wreck of brewing lingo -- only a couple of my friends will understand everything in here... Just indulge me while I share :) I'll try to add enough extra info to make this educational and hopefully understandable.

Essentially what I'm doing is moving from a 5 gallon "brewery," to a system with a maximum batch size of about 13 gallons -- this is what most brewers would call a "half barrel" system.

I've now got 3 converted Sankey style kegs -- one is set up as a Hot Liquor Tank ("Hot Liquor" really means "Hot Water" in brewspeek), one is the Mash/Lauter Tun (which you use to steep the grains, and then strain/rinse them), and the third is a Brew Kettle (where you boil the sweet liquid, aka, "the wort", you got from the mash. You can see my old brew kettle in picture). The Brew Kettle and the Lauter Tun both have stainless steel Phalse Bottoms (fancy strainers), and the Lauter Tun has a Sparge Arm (kind of like a sprinkler for straining/rinsing the barley -- aka, "sparging"). On the right in the picture (the white thing on the barrel) you can see the Counter-flow Wort Chiller (a heat exchanger) that I also picked up -- you use that to quickly cool the boiling-hot wort down to a temp that's safe for adding yeast.

Here's a bucket full of random smaller bits and pieces (some of this is pictured later), and on the left of this picture you see two new (new-to-me) glass carboys (big bottles used to ferment the beer) -- this puts me at 5 carboys (I'm not really trying to collect carboys, but they keep showing up -- I want to start moving my fermentation over to some 10 gal stainless corney kegs I picked up.)

The following is a blurry picture of a new dual regulator, which will be nice if I ever want to serve different beers at different pressures.

Here's some of those random bits and pieces: racking canes, bottling tubes, various hose clamps and fittings, cornelius keg fittings, picnic taps....

This interesting stuff was also included: A counter-pressure bottle filler (used to put already-carbonated beer into bottles without having it foam all over), an inline carbonator (for adding carbonation, nearly instantly, and automatically, to any liquid), and a wort aerator (add's O2 to the wort to keep the yeasties happy).

There's also an electronic RIMS control system that I forgot to take a picture of. It's made of an enclosed electric heating element, a pump to circulate the wort, and a PID temperature controller to maintain the mash temperature. I'm not sure I'm going to use this control system the way it's all put together now, but I may part it out and redesign my own system. (explanation)

One of the things that's got me the most excited is the "project" pictured below. It's a for-reals, from England, old, dual beer engine! It's functional, and it's real, but it's roached. I'll probably get into more detail on this thing in a future post.

This all represents the 3rd full do-over of my brewery. I started boiling 1 1/2 gallon wort batches that were combined with cold water to bring the final volume up to 5 gallons. At V2.0, I started boiling and cooling full 5 gallon batches (I also started all-grain brewing). Now I'm likely to be doing 10 gallon batches. Interesting note: Dogfish Head Brewery began by brewing 3 batches per day in a similar 10 gallon system -- 400 batches in the first year!

No big news... just took the bike into the city today -- met TSP for lunch at Hale's. Weather report said "cloudy" but there was a pretty solid, wet mist until later in the afternoon -- only notable because of all the extra layers I ended up putting on and taking off all day.

I took the time on the boat to play with the Zi8 (Kodak ultra cheap, pocket HD video cam). I'm pretty impressed with it as a point-and-shoot, but the video, hand-held, even with stabilization is way to shakey for HD. I did some playing around with attaching a mono-pod to it, and even just using the mono-pod, fully collapsed, as a weight on the camera, greatly reduces the vibrations that come from trying to shoot with a device that's this light (110 g [3.9 oz] without batteries) .

Apparently, I'm the only one that thought a ride today would be a good idea :)

The Zi8 has a little switch that sets the lens for macro, which I used in the image above. If you haven't heard of this thing, it's worth checking out -- the simplicity and flexibility of this cam is really remarkable. And at under $150.oo... wow. That's cheap enough that I'm not gonna sweat abusing it and maybe breaking it :)

Best features: Input for external microphone, and built in USB jack (so I don't have to haul around another eff'in cable!)

rugby so far this season has been suck. been thinking the sport has just passed what I can deal with... then I find out i've been playing with a rib outta place. I get that reset and, "wow.' strength is back... wind is back... and my whole sense of old-age-and-treachery is back. rookies and backs can suck it.

I'm a big fan of the Dogfish 90 min IPA, and the more Dogfish Head beers I try, the more impressed I am with the crazy, and successful directions this brewery goes.

Then I saw this beast at the bottleshop: "...continually hopped over a 120-minute boil and then dry hopped every day for a month." Add in the "20% ALC. BY VOL" warning sticker... and a $10 per 12 oz price-point... well, crap... what could I do?

ABV: 18% (the brewery website says 18% -- the bottle has a sticker on it that says 20%)
IBU: 120
OG: 1.205 (45 degrees plato)
Style: Imperial IPA? (No way. This clearly falls into BJC's "Liquid Insanity" category.)
Website: http://bit.ly/4dBa

Background:
Dogfish Head Brewery (DFH) is one of our quintessential American craft breweries. Based in Delaware, and founded by Sam Calagione, the brewery opened in 1995 and now reportedly produces 75,000 barrels of beer annually. Dogfish Head's tag-line is "Off-centered Ales for off-centered people," and their portfolio of beers backs that statement.

Pre-Tasting Expectations:
The color and IBUs of this beer do fit into what would typically be called an Imperial IPA, but the original gravity and ABV put this beer well outside the lines of typical styles, so I expect this to be much more like a barleywine or some big-ass American strong ale.. I have enough experience with DFH beers that I can assume the beer isn't going to suck, but this is going to be an extreme beer, and it's going to challenge my palette.

Tastage:
The beer is clear, and has a dark golden color -- I'd estimate the color to be about 13 SRM.

The beer foamed up a nice head during the pour, which then dropped down to about a 1/8 inch of nice, fine, smooth foam... solid lacing, continuous nucleation, a very pretty pour.

On the nose, surprisingly for an IPA, I initially got bbq sauce. The hop notes are not as strong as I would expect -- The citrus is there -- but not the nose-full-of-grapefruit that is so common in big American IPAs (so the hopping is probably more bitter based, rather than aromatic, like a cascade or something like that). I also got some mild smoke and single malt scotch odors, which is probably coming from the high level of alcohol.

The taste was a bit of a shock: Candy sweet, with maple sugar and a rich rich barleywine like maltiness -- The beer is so sweet that the 120 IBUs of hops are actually balanced and aren't all in your face. Surprisingly, the beer is so big that the hops are battling to combat the sweetness. There's a mild carbonation on the tongue, but I get a lot of heat. The taste is really much more like a fruity barleywine than an IPA, and the delayed aftertaste is really where the bitterness of the hops make themselves known.

DFH says this should age well, and I'd concur. The flavors in here are a bit contentious, but they should gel over time and I would guess that this will lay down well and should hold up. If it lasts at all, this beer could develop very nicely over years to come.

This stuff is really strong, and really not for the less experimental beer drinkers. 1/2 bottle is almost more than enough of this -- if you try it, plan to split the bottle with someone. Will I shell out $10 for another bottle? Meh. I might, but only to lay it down in hopes of trying it again and maybe doing a vertical tasting of different vintages.

PS. Does beer have a "vintage"?

The robins started robbing us of our fruit so it was time to pick.

The plan: With any luck, Streusel Topped Blueberry Muffins and Blueberry Pannekoeken for breakfast tomorrow. The cherries (sour) are going into the freezer and will probably end up in a porter or stout when we get back.

The beer is an Ayinger Bräu Weisse. I'm not typically a wheat beer fan at all, but I'm liking the complexity and freshness of this stuff. The first time I had it I was really overwhelmed with banana and lemon flavors. This time, not paying attention while just working and drinking it in the heat, I just kept noticing cloves.