Beer again. Count yourself lucky. It’s either this, or space geekery. I don’t have the brainpower to come up with anything more original than this right now.

A lot of nice details in this photo, as bad as it is, and it’s pretty bad. I couldn’t even be bothered to angle it so the overhead fluorescent lights weren’t glaring off the surface of the glass fermenter. And I used to take photos professionally. For a small-town newspaper with a circulation of 1,500, I admit, but I still got paid to do it, so I’m counting it as professional.

If you click on it to get the full-size, full-suds version, you can see the carbon dioxide bubbles fizzing up through the toasty brown juice that will soon be beer. I stirred nine pounds of malt extract into this batch, enough to raise the original gravity, the density, of the soup up to 1.076 – in other words, there’s a lot of sugar in that bottle, so much that it’s driving the yeast absolutely batshit crazy. They’re having a drunken orgy in there, gobbling up all that sugar and making lots of little baby yeast at a furious rate. Even so, it’ll take them more than a week to eat up almost all of the sugars and poop it out as ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide.

Besides being a great buzz, alcohol moderates the malty sweetness of beer, making it much more drinkable. Carbon dioxide, of course, gives beer its fizz. And watching it through the glass walls of the fermenting bottle is lots of fun, at least for nerds like me. Since Monday morning, I’ve been watching it with the slack-jawed admiration of a YouTube addict.

But I’m done watching for tonight. It’s been a long day, and tomorrow’s going to be more of the same, so off to bed. G’night.