Into the Secondary

Hey everyone, today I racked my beer into my secondary fermenter. The specific gravity settled at 1.007, and all the yeast solids had fallen to the bottom, so I decided it was a good time to go ahead and transfer it. Here is a picture of it in the carboy. The beer is nice and dark, but still tastes kind of nasty. Hopefully, sitting in the carboy and then later conditioning in bottles will help the taste settle a little.

Fermenting Wort

Hey everyone, I opened my ale pail today to see how my beer was fermenting, and here is what it looks like!

The foamy looking stuff on top is called krauzen, and its basically the junk that the yeast produces during fermentation. I was afraid it wasn't fermenting, because the airlock was not bubbling, but now its bubbling away!

Below is a picture of my beer in the hydrometer test tube, just to give you an example of its color.

As the video shows, fermentation is going well and I should be able to transfer it to the glass carboy in about a week!

Brewing with John

So earlier today, 2 o'clock this morning, I boiled up my first five gallon batch of beer in a long time. Right now its sitting in my pantry, fermenting away and slowly becoming alcoholic. It was a lot of fun, but boiling the wort (unfermented beer) for an hour can get pretty boring. Now I have to let it sit in the pantry for about a week, maybe two, before I transfer it to a 5 gallon glass bottle called a carboy.

After it sits in the carboy for another week-14 days, I can put it into bottles. A 5 gallon batch of beer fills about 52 twelve ounce bottles. That's a lot of beer! Hopefully it comes out good. I was a little scared at first because the airlock wasn't bubbling and bubbling is a sign of active fermentation. However, plenty of people assured me that sometimes beers don't make the airlock bubble at all because they don't produce enough CO2. Finally tonight, at around 6pm, it started to bubble and has been bubbling consistenly since then.

Well Sarah and I got our Christmas tree set up, and tomorrow my parents are heading back to Houston. It was nice having them up here for a few days, I wish they could stay longer. Everyone enjoyed their Christmas gifts and we just had fun hanging out together. In a few weeks I get to go to Oklahoma to visit Sarah's family for Thanksgiving. Well that's all I have to say for right now, so check back for new posts!

Daily Update

So today I went to work at noon, and got off around five forty-five. It was an extremely boring day. Barely anyone comes into the store on Sundays, so I got to just sit around and do nothing all day, and get paid for it! When I came home, I really didn't do anything. I need to finish cleaning the house before my parents come up on Thursday. Luckily, I got most of the laundry done yesterday so that's one less thing to worry about.

My parents are having a hard time finding Mr. Beer stuff in Houston, so they are going to get me a real homebrew kit that will make about 5 gallons of beer at a time. Tyler, you are going to have to help me drink that! I don't think my fridge has room enough for 48 bottles, so I will most likely be giving this stuff away. I'm glad I am getting the real 5 gallon kit because it allows you to make a better tasting beer than the Mr. Beer kits do. You have more control over the whole process and can make more creative beers.

So if all goes well, I will be brewing my first batch of beer on the 29th of this month, and it should be ready to drink around Christmastime. Well it's late so I think I am going to go to bed. Night everyone!

House cleaning

Today I didn't have to work, so that means that I get to clean the apartment. It's really not that bad, all I have to do is some laundry and straighten up. So I woke up early this morning about an hour after my girlfriend, Sarah, went to work and started on the laundry. Being a guy, I'm never 100% sure how to do laundry, so I worked out my own system. Sarah has explained to me many times about seperating the colors from the lights and the whites and something else, but it never quite sticks, so here's what I do.

I only make three piles: Whites, Towels, and everything else. It is so much simpler to do laundry this way. Occasionally, I will make a pile of all black stuff if I have enough clothes to justify it. The way I figure it is that it doesn't matter how everything gets sorted as long as it all gets washed, right?

One of the things that bugs me the most about laundry is the fact that the washer gets done a lot earlier than the dryer. When I first started doing laundry, I would put clothes in the washer immediately after I moved the already washed clothes into the dryer. Doing this caused the clothes in the washer to sit there for a long time, and I didn't like that. Now I wait a bit after running the dryer before I start the washer, but even still the dryer finishes first.

Well, I need to go check on the clothes now, and finish picking up around the apartment. Sarah gets home at 4, so I need to have the place looking good. I'll write more later if something interesting happens!

First Post

Hey everyone, this is my first blog post in a long time. I used to have a deadjournal, but my life wasn't interesting enough to write about. Now I am in college and living in an apartment, and interesting is a very accurate way to describe my life now!

Being a poor college student, I was looking online for ways to earn some extra money. I have decided to start donating plasma, and I also came across the website CashCrate.com. You do surveys and stuff and earn some extra money. I haven't received a paycheck yet as I just signed up for it today, but when I do receive a check, I will post a scanned image of it here. If you are interested in signing up with CashCrate, visit www.moneymaker936.tk or click the button below to get started!



Ok, enough of my desperate push for referrals on CashCrate. Nothing much is going on in my life right now. I'm getting ready for Thanksgiving. My parents are coming up from Houston to stay with my girlfriend and I at our apartment for about three days. Since I will be going to Oklahoma for Christmas this year, my parents decided to exchange Christmas presents two days after Thanksgiving. I was happy with that decision, and I will be getting a Mr. Beer kit for my present (www.mrbeer.com). I have brewed my own beer before, but this will be the first tim I use the Mr. Beer system. I am pretty excited because as of right now, I really have no hobby and I have a lot of free time.

Well I guess that is all I have to say right now. Thanks for reading! Be sure to check out www.moneymaker936.tk if you want to make money taking surveys!