I popped open the chiller to swap out the ice (mostly melted) and checked on the beer. It’s been ticking away now for about two days and looks great. There’s good activity in the airlock and it smells like beer. I guess nine month old Wyeast without nutrients will still work.
Even better news is that the thermometer on the side of the carby is showing 67 degrees. That’s excellent and should really help my quality. I’m really looking forward to tasting this one.
Now that I’ve got the chiller built, it’s time to test it out. I’ve been planning to do another batch of my dunkelweizen for some time now and since now’s as good a time as any, here goes nothing.
Ingredients:
Procedure:
Steep crystal and toasted barley in 2.5 gallons water for 40 minutes (use grain bags to make this easier). Add extract, honey and bittering hops. Boil wort for 1 hour. Remove from heat. Add finishing hops and steep 2 minutes. Chill and pitch yeast.
One minor disaster averted by Wyeast. When I popped (or thought I popped) the yeast pack this morning it turns out that all I did was knock it loose. It still swelled up, though not as much, and looks viable. We’ll see how well it works…
I’ve hopefully got the thermostat set so that it’ll be fermenting at around 66 degrees so we’ll see in a couple days where it stabilizes.
I put the finishing touches on the chiller today when I added the top and front panels and got everything sealed up. The first of the ice jugs are freezing as we speak and I’m going to get a batch of my dunkelweizen going this weekend. I’m aiming to keep the fermentation at 68 degrees so we’ll see how well it does. I’m hoping that this thing works out. If not, I’m going to find some stuff to sell to raise the money for a glycol system.
Since the last batch of beer turned out so badly I’ve been looking in to ways to keep my fermentation temperatures under control. It looks like the gold standard is some sort of glycol jacketed conical fermenter, but since they run somewhere in the $1000 – $2000 range, that’s out for a while.
But, I found these plans on the internet and decided to try them out.
The first stumbling block was that it seems like nobody in the DFW area sells the 2″ foam board. So I’ve had to settle for making a sandwich of 4 1/2″ boards. The upside is that the R value is higher so it might be marginally more efficiently insulated. As of right now all of the boards are cut into pieces and I’ve started gluing them together.
The ride home. I checked out of the hotel, snagged a quick breakfast at the gas station, and pointed the bike west. I took a nice detour over some US routes through Mississippi and Arkansas before picking up the interstate outside of Little Rock. The rest of the ride was blessedly uneventful and I arrived home no worse for wear at around 6:30 PM. I rode around 2200 miles on this trip, a little shorter than my previous ones have been, but still a lot of fun.
Pictures will be posted once I’ve had time to rest, recover, unpack, and process them.
I got up this morning and headed south, over to Clarksdale, MS to the home of the Delta Blues Museum but since I was starving, I stopped at a small restaurant/blues club called The Depot. They had the best, hand made fried okra I’ve ever had. The sweet tea was just this side of syrup, and the burger was delicious.
Having gotten my hunger under control I went over to the museum, paid my money to get in, and wandered around. They’ve got some really good exhibits on the artists and the environment that shaped their music. It was truly educational and fun at the same time. If you’re in the area, you should definitely stop by. I brought home a shirt, a book on Robert Johnson, and a CD of his recordings.
After that I went back to the hotel and arrived just in time to avoid the downpour. It seems like every road trip ends up with me getting rained on. I had been planning to ride back to Clarksdale to go to a blues show, but with the weather being as nasty as it was, I didn’t want to ride 100 miles (round trip) in that kind of rain. So instead I went over to the casino and gambled for a little while. I didn’t strike it rich so I ate dinner and went to sleep.
The bike was all packed and ready to go but I couldn’t find my XM receiver so I stopped in town and picked up another one and got it activated before I hit the road. That was another minor annoyance that added some time onto the trip. In fact, I didn’t get out of Knoxville until almost noon.
Today was a straight shot over to Tunica, Mississippi, a small outpost of casinos and hotels just south of Memphis, TN. It started raining on the way south and the rest of the ride in was a little damp. I got checked in to the hotel and called it an early night.
This is the last day in Knoxville so I went over to Roaring Fork, one of the drives through the Smoky Mountains National Park for some more picture taking opportunities. I got to see a black bear and a cub near the beginning of the loop. The pictures of them aren’t that good because of the thick undergrowth messing with the autofocus, but it was still a treat. After that, it was slow going, winding through the park, stopping to take pictures where I saw something that looked good. I got a few good shots of some of the streams, but the locals say that the water levels are extremely low due to the drought.
After that I headed back to pack the bike up for the ride home.
Boomsday. Not much more to say. It’s the biggest Labor Day fireworks festival in the country. They closed down a bridge over the Tennessee River to launch the fireworks from and it really kicked ass. We managed to get a spot really close to the bridge and were treated to an awesome fireworks display.
Today was a down day, just hanging out and relaxing. I did head in to town to pick up some oil because the bike’s been eating a little more than I like. I’m also getting some valve clatter from the front cylinder which sounds like a lifter’s going out. Not good being this far from home. Right now it only does it when the engine’s cold. Once it’s gotten warmed up everything’s OK, so I’m going to watch it and stop if I have to.