Bikerscum - Patrick St. Jean

Well, I had this grandiose scheme to put up a twenty foot tall trellis support for the hops to grow up. Unfortunately, it just wasn't meant to be. The PVC was too flexible to raise to that height, so I dropped it down to ten feet and it's up. We'll see what we need to do once the vines get up to the top. I can try training them another way at that point.

Well, both hop rhizomes are in the ground now. Now I've got to work on a climbing support for them. It's going to be interesting figuring out how to work that in with the bird netting that's currently covering the entire garden. They both looked really happy, throwing off shoots left and right in the plastic bag they came in. I also got some mulch spread over some of the taller plants that ought to help retain moisture, etc. The tomatoes and cucumbers are still really unhappy. I'm thinking they got planted too soon. But there's more still inside so all is not lost.

It was a busy day today, met some of the North Texas Netscum for breakfast at Mama's Daughter's Diner, then headed over to Competitive Cameras to see if I could find a more convenient bag for carrying the camera around D.C. in May. Thankfully, I did. I've now got a SlingShot 300 AW and amazingly enough all of the gear fits in it. I'm happy that I found something that looks like it'll work out. After that I went up to Homebrew Headquarters to pick up ingredients for a batch of wheat beer and some corks and a corker so that I can finally get the mead bottled. Looks like that's going to be next weekend's project. It was a pretty successful and productive day.

I checked the mail today and there was an envelope there with a couple cascades rhizomes. They look nice and healthy, with new shoots coming out already. They're resting in the fridge until I get time to get outside and plant them.

Getting ready to head out to San Jose in the morning for a week of training and one of my last tasks was to get the wheat from the fermenter into the keg. It went as painless as could be and tasting the dregs of the batch from my siphon hose seems to indicate that it'll be a tasty brew. It's under pressure now, in the fridge, aging and getting ready for Pascha.

I kicked off a batch of a plain old basic wheat beer today. It's a simple recipe, and the first all-extract brew I've done in a while. It's also the first one I've done since the Oxynator arrived and it was pretty impressive to watch. Lots of bubbles and I'm hoping that the yeast will be a little happier with all of that dissolved oxygen.

Here's the basic recipe:

• 6.6 pounds wheat extract syrup
• 1.5 oz. Hallertauer hops
• 1.5 oz. Tettnang hops
• 1 pack Wyeast 1010 American Wheat yeast

The procedure is simple. Just get the water heated up, add the extract, and bring to a boil. At 15 minutes in to the boil, add the Tettnang hops. At 40 minutes in to the boil, add the Hallertauer hops. After it's boiled for an hour, remove from the heat, chill, dilute to 5.25 gallons, hit it with the O₂, and then pitch the yeast.

I've been having trouble with one of the taps in my kegerator. It gets stuck, won't open, won't close, and the only time it works reliably is when I've loosened the collar enough so that it leaks out the handle shaft.

I ordered a new tap, a Ventmatic (formerly Shirron) Forward Seal Faucet from Northern Brewer and got it installed a little while ago. It's working well so far and I've got access to my stout again. We'll see how it does over time, and if it works out I'll replace the other one as well.

Today's my birthday, and while it's been a bit slow and quiet because I've got a really early flight to Illinois tomorrow morning, I did do some present opening. The most interesting one was Liquid Bread's Oxynator. I'm going to try it out on my next batch of beer!

I finally got the latest batch of my 50 wt. Wheat out of the secondary and into the keg this evening. It was a two week secondary fermentation, but the final gravity is down to 1.013, which is close enough to done that I'm not going to let it go any further down. I think that the cold snap we got threw off the fermentation. The chiller worked too well and I'm thinking that the yeast slowed down a little too much.

Now I've run in to a problem. I've got three kegs in the fridge, one almost empty, but still three kegs. My CO₂ system has only two taps on the low pressure side, so I've got two kegs hooked up to the gas end, the stout and the new batch of wheat, and the old batch of wheat and the stout connected to the taps. It's not ideal and I think I'm going to be upgrading that part of the system at some point.

A few friends of mine had expressed interest in learning how to brew so I had them over to help out with brewing another batch of what I've decided to call my 50 wt. Wheat. The recipe's pretty well standard now, and I've started using Beer Alchemy to keep track of the batches. We did a partial mash, and it looks like I nailed the conversion because my pre-boil gravity matched what the software predicted it should perfectly.

It's in the carboy and hopefully the yeast will get going soon. About a month and there'll be more wheat beer on tap.