Your Mother Was a Hamster

This post is probably going to be boring, as I begin typing without knowing what exactly I'm going to type about; the feeling is akin to buying a scratch-off lottery ticket, you might actually win some money, but most likely the ticket will be a crumpled up piece of garbage on the floor of your car for the next 3 weeks until you get the free cleaning with your next oil change at the Spring Garden Car Wash. And so:

The last week was another cluster-fuck at the brewery. In case you don't know what a cluster-fuck is, it's basically a junk-show on crystal meth. We are still playing catch-up, brewing like crazy: this week we got in another 14 brews (as opposed to our normal 10 brews). Again, it's just me and one other guy doing all this. Oh yea, we also filtered 7 batches during this same time period. Not to complain or anything, but I have woken up each morning so sore that I can barely facebook my email internets.

Normally Friday is our slow day, instead of brewing we just clean up, and usually it's a 6 or 7 hour day (to make up for all the 9 hour days earlier in the week). Oh, but not this friday - we brewed and filtered again. Hotter than satan's crotch in a wool jock strap. Luckily I got to stay late last night breaking down the filters and reloading them for Monday's filtrations. Nothing like working a brutal 10-hour shift to wind the week down.

When I finally got home, around 8pm, carrying a couple cases of beer, my sopping wet work clothes in a bag, and my pre-prepared dinner from Whole Foods, I noticed the apartment was really warm. Baking, in fact. Our building is about 100 years old and made completely of brick. It once was a furniture factory and as such has few windows, so they central aired the hell out of the place. My air conditioning was busted. I did what anyone would do in my situation: freaked out momentarily, and then resigned myself to fate, took a cold bath, and got cross-eyed drunk in my underwear. A few hours later the a.c. sort of fixed itself. Weird.

So this weekend is my first actual 2 days away from the brewery since....early July. See past updates for my last couple weekend re-caps - they all involved work of some kind. I plan on doing a whole lot of nothing for the next 48 hours. There are just two things on my agenda: pick up a CO2 cylinder to complete my keg-readiness for Vermont*, and get my dimensions professionally measurisized for Pink's wedding uniform**. The likelyhood that I get even those tasks accomplished is meek, to say the least.

I take heart that today is the first day of August and soon enough the heat will begin to subside, work may eventually become tolerable again, and the possibility of me cooking and/or brewing something in my own home becomes more and more palpable.

Enjoy your August, folks!

-Wrence

*August 12-15 will see me in my beloved state of Vermont for this year's DAMO-FEST
**August 31 will see me in Portland Oregon for Pink's wedding

Heat Wave Sweatfest Clusterfuck `08

So I managed to crank out that Pale Ale on Friday night, finising up just in time for Diesel Damien, who showed up at my place around 11pm straight outta Hartford, with his sister Nicky in tow, whom I hadn't seen in probably 5 or 10 years. At this point, the weather was still cool; we enjoyed a mellow night with beers and smoked Hungarian sausage. Then the next morning, this whole heat business started. Saturday Swimming at Walden Pond was a godsend, even though it was a complete clusterfuck. I mean it, it was sincerely crowded; the place was lousy with Redneck picknickers, Yuppies pushing their babies in those "mountain bike-style" baby pusher alongers, old people floating in kayacks but unable to row any measurable distance under their own power. By the time we got home from that it must have been 97 degrees (the exact temperature of my balls) but we still stopped at Whole Foods for mangeables, undaunted in our quest to cook an awesome meal in this hellish weather. I made cevice; normally I just use shrimp but the local scallops they had at the store looked too good to pass up, so I used some of them as well, and it came out great. Dry-aged Ribye steaks and lamb chops were the other protiens, cooked on a sweet little Weber model I'd never seen before. The venue was Diesel's cousin's awesome's pad in Somerville, just a hop skip & a jump from my place (in fact, that is just how I got home later that night). Inexplicably, it seemed to only get hotter as the night progressed; our only recourse was to drink beer. A lot of beer. We pretty much floated Tom's house in it down Spring Hill. After 8 hours of that I basically felt like the condensation-coated bottle of Sierra Summer Lager in Nicky's hand, which she had wrapped in a paper towel to keep from completely soaking herself (which we all pretty much did anyway). When I finally stumbled home that night I gave in and threw the old reliable AC unit into my bedroom window. The Pale Ale from the night before, which had spent its first 20 hours of fermentation at a glorious 72 degrees, was now actually too warm for the little thermo strip to even register. It was frightening. The yeast was Wyeast 1272, with which I've gone a little warm before, but this was totally crazy-time. Anyway, that shit got hauled up to my room before you could say "Goodnight, Gena." The following few days were alternating blurs of sweat, air-conditioning, and hallucinogenic napping episodes; all the while battling to keep my fermenter at a somewhat reasonable temperature. Oh well, the krausen has long died down and it seems to be finishing up now, just as the weather starts to mellow back out (thanks for nothing, God). All there is to do now is dry-hop the shit out of it and hope for the best. _____________ Last night the Greeks & I went out, in an effort to escape our swampy apartment. This place is so freaking bad-assed I don't even know how to put it into words! We crushed about a hundred of those ice cold 22 ouncer Sapporos, in addition to my first ever Sho Chu, a Japanese distilled spirit made from rice & barley (kind of a distilled sake, I guess), which was awesome served on the rocks. I only wish I could have put my entire body on the rocks at that point and it would have been the perfect night. Oh, and I ate my weight in sushi. It was killer. -'Wrence