nuxx.net
Making, baking, and (un-)breaking things in Southeast Michigan.

Category beer

Beer / Cider Brewing Equipment

February 4, 2007

[Crossposted to and …]

So, there’s a very distinct possibility that I will need to rid myself of beer brewing equipment. This includes:

· Gas burner and two large pots. (Turkey fryer, turkey fryer pot, and other very large pot. Only ever used for beer.)
· Two 5 gallon carboys and one 6 gallon carboy.
· Two buckets, one with spout for bottling.
· Lever-style Bottle Capper.
· Various tubing, airlocks, siphon, bottling wand.
· A good number of clean, empty, label-less, matching bottles.
· A few various ingredients (corn sugar, rice hulls, irish moss, etc).
· Bottle tree large enough to hold enough bottles for five-gallon batch.

Are any of you interested? It’s available in Southeast Michigan, and I’d probably want about $200 for it all, although I’m willing to entertain other offers…

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January 3, 2007


It works!
(Click for more moblog photos…)

1) I have Founder’s Breakfast Stout.

2) My MAME cabinet (photo gallery retired) is working again, this time running completely from Compact Flash. I played Bubble Bobble!

As soon as I figure out why the sound card keeps failing (it’ll just cease to work suddenly, for no apparent reason) and fix that, everything will be good. Oh, and once I get all the controls / display stuffs sorted out. But that’s not too difficult.

I just bid on another card on eBay. I think it’s the card failing, so it’s best to replace it.

Expect more on the MAME cabinet soon. There will likely be photos and a write-up in the projects portion of nuxx.net.

Also, today I:
· Smoked a power supply after replacing the fuse inside. I guess more than the fuse was bad.
· Diagnosed a motherboard bearing a rather nice AMD Athlon XP 1700+ chip as no longer powering on. I hope I can figure out why, as it was working fine a few months ago. (It’s not the power supply.) This was to be the board in the MAME cabinet. Fortunately I still had my trusty nine year old Abit BH-6, formerly of many different computers including bornslippy.nuxx.net (photo gallery retired). Seems to be working well enough with MAME.
· Ate Kraft Macaroni and Cheese w/ curry powder for dinner.
· Played with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, which work great.
· Installed DOS a few times.
· Ate an enormous salad for lunch which had completely too much blue cheese on it.
· Learned that RAMDRIVE.SYS RAMdisks can’t be more than 32MB.
· Found that AdvanceMAME runs horribly from flash unless you turn on write caching. (Not sure of why yet.)

beerelectronicsgamesmoved from livejournal

October 3, 2006


Blueberry & Plain Cider
(Click for more Blueberry Cider photos…)

Just a quick photo to show off my blueberry cider (photo gallery retired). And yes, it is made with socks. ;)

Hopefully I’ll be able to bottle it in about a month, then it’ll be drinkable around three weeks after that. When putting it in the carboy (the large glass bottle seen above) it had a nice, apple-y, bitter, sweet berry taste to it. With any luck this will continue, and with carbonation the taste will lighten up even more.

I’m really looking forward to this cider.

Oh, and the plain one (shown there for comparison) which only has honey in it should be ready around the same time. Mmm. Hopefully this will be a lot better than last year’s cider.

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Magnesium!

September 30, 2006


75′ of Magnesium Ribbon, purchased via eBay
(Click for more Magnesium photos…)

The coil of magnesium I mentioned a little while back showed up today. It’s just as I expected. And yes, I’ve already burned a small piece of it. I’d forgotten just how brightly that stuff burns.

Today has been pretty busy thus far, too. First I mostly finished up the blueberry cider (photo gallery retired), transferring it from the fermenter to the carboy for aging. Before making this transfer I pressed the remaining juice from the berries using a Italian fruit press a friend loaned to me. It worked very well, leaving a bowl of pressed, almost-tasteless, raisin-looking blueberries in its wake.

I’ve got pretty high hopes for this cider. Compared to the plain cider + honey I made a few weeks earlier it has an amazingly deep purpleish color, and its taste is just great. Sort of a tart apple/berry mixture with a hint of alcohol taste. With another month of aging and carbonation I think it could end up being a really nice beverage.

When I pulled the lid on the fermenter I got to see something which looks more like dirty socks floating in the brew. Those are actually natural cotton sacks which I put the berries into (well, most, I accidently dropped a few) to make collecting them for later pressing easier. It seems that most of the yeast grew while attached to them as well, as there wasn’t really much left in the bottom of the fermenter.

Also, here is a picture of Danielle, taken by looking in the wrong end of a pair of binoculars while she stood at the other side.

Now, I think I’ll go acquire some Thai food, or something of a similar nature. Tomorrow will be spent troubleshooting the Casio SK-1 MIDI Mod I assembled today and am having issues with. And doing laundry. And maybe finishing up some things with the webserver. I’m not sure where the problems with the SK-1 thing lies yet, but I haven’t tried much troubleshooting either. Anyway, yes. Food.

beermaking thingsmoved from livejournal

Beer Purchases

September 24, 2006

I meant to post this the other day, but I forgot to. Anyway, here’s Friday’s beer purchases. Three more bottles of St. Bernardus Abt. 12 Special Edition, Coniston Brewing Co.’s Old Man ale, Founders’ Bad Habit Quad, and Dogfish Head’s Chateau Jiahu. Yes, that makes for a total of four bottles of the St. Bernardus Abt. 12 Special Edition, and no, I haven’t tried it yet. (I will soon, but I’m still moving nuxx.net to a new physical server and one of these beers is to celebrate that move.

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Dinner

September 10, 2006


Aecht Schlenkerla Rauchbier, Roasted Michigan Sweet Corn, and Baked Macaroni and Cheese

Here’s what I made for Danielle and I for dinner. Except she had a glass of Yates cider (from the same batch as what I’m currently fermenting) instead of the beer. That’s some sweet corn from Boyka’s on 23 Mile somewhere around Romeo Plank, baked mac and cheese from the Alton Brown / Good Eats recipe (except made with a vidalia onion and Clancy’s Fancy), and an amazingly smoky beer which only becomes available around this time of the year.

Mmm.

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Kentucky Breakfast

April 1, 2006


Founders Brewing Company’s Kentucky Breakfast Bourbon Aged Stout

Yes, tonight I opened my single bottle of Founders Brewing Company’s Kentucky Breakfast Bourbon Aged Stout. It’s just one of those nights…

Also, I managed to successfully etch and tin plate the double-sided PCB for the Casio SK-1 MIDI modification. I’m in the processing of ordering the parts for it now.

The etching seems good, but I did learn something. Hopefully this something won’t cause me problems down the line. It seems that one shouldn’t put the etched copper-clad PCB into the tinning bath until it is warm enough to dissolve all the precipitated stuffs. The solids setting against the copper/tin will leave a whitish discoloration, which may or may not be good for the board. Fortunately there doesn’t seem to be any of this on the pads, and only in a couple spots on the traces, so it should be fine.

It wasn’t a problem on the one affected pad on the FatMan’s Subharmonic Generator, so hopefully it won’t be a problem here. It’s not like the copper isn’t still intact beneath.

Well, back to ordering parts and figuring out exactly which Intel 80C31 I need.

beerelectronicsmoved from livejournal

Java Stout

March 22, 2006

Ahh. My tenth batch of beer (I count the two runs of cider, spiced and non-spiced, as one) is in the bottles and aging / carbonating. It is a Java Stout, made with a recipe very close to my Vanilla Stout, except with 16oz of almost-espresso made from Zingerman’s In-The-House Blend (I think it is called — it’s not available for mail order) in an Aerobie AeroPress. Using the AeroPress I was able to get clear, very nice tasting coffee with almost no bitterness, which seems to have gone well with the beer.

Tasting it tonight it seems quite good, so hopefully it’ll be just as good (or better) after carbonating.

I think for one of my next batches I want to try using the same stout recipe again, but this time with vanilla, coffee, and bourbon-soaked oak chips. And maybe something else… I’m not sure what, though… Maybe some cocoa nibs (if I can find them) or something. Something which will make for an excellent, multi-dimensional coffee. Oh, and the next batch will hopefully be around 10% ABV. This one should be right around 9%, I think…

beermoved from livejournal