Category: hobby
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switched
Late Christmas just keeps going and going and going: There’s a guy in New Jersey who sent me a whole mess of train tracks through the mail. Not for free. And he wasn’t my Secret Santa or some goofy shit like that. I paid him what I thought was a fair price, particularly because I’d Read.
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loco update
It’s been a little while since I’ve been working on the railroad, mostly because of the place where the tracks cross on the foreground. I’ve built that crossover three times, and even though it gets better each time, I still can’t reliably roll cars through that crossing with confidence that they won’t jump off the Read.
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mind your head
This is seven kinds of cool: Dennis Parker, looking for a place to play with his trains, cut a trap door in the floor of the kitchen in his house and laid out the track for his pike in the crawl space under his house. Thirty-six years later, the layout sprawls across the footprint of Read.
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Working on the railroad
I spent a chunk of the afternoon installing this bit of bench work for the main railway station on the Lost Continent RR — finding the right height for it, leveling it off, screwing all the bits in place. It turned out to be a lot more fiddling than I thought it would. It always Read.
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brew day
Live-Blogging Brew Day! The Queen has commanded that the next beer I brew be a vanilla porter, so that’s what’s on the agenda today. I looked up recipes for vanilla porters on teh intarwebs because I assumed there must be something special about them, but there’s not. They’re all just recipes for porters with a Read.
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Batch #7 Bottled!
Batch #7 is bottled! For the first time in a fortnight, the fermenters are empty and I can see the top of the workbench. This has got to be the darkest beer I’ve ever brewed. The end of the siphon I use to get the brew out of the big five-gallon bottle it was fermenting Read.
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Batch #6 bottled!
Batch #6 is bottled! I wasn’t sure I’d have enough time to bottle tonight, but I knew I’d have enough time to wash three dozen bottles, so I filled up the sink with warm, soapy water, got the brush down from its hook and got wet. There’s no way to wash that many bottles without Read.
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L’chaim!
Tasting day! It’s Batch #5 and it’s one hell of a lot more bitter than I thought it would be. I knew the Northern Brewer hops I used were high alpha acid, but I thought that, if I boiled them for just a short time, the brew wouldn’t end up bitter. Wrong. Live and learn. Read.
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thanks
Oh yay. Two batches of beer going at the same time: a Belgian abbey on the left and a stout on the right. The abbey is Batch #6, the slow-starter I was fretting over for two days until I finally got fermentation kickstarted by giving it a warm bath. Now it’s got a heating pad Read.
This Is Drivel 