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Back in the olden days
Walking in to work this morning I noted that the Board of Regents for the University of Maryland is being held at my campus today. It reminded me of something that happened 26 years ago, a few months after I started. The story in the Baltimore Sun the next day says it all:
An animal rights activist in a full-body, yellow-feathered chicken suit shoved a cream pie in the face of poultry magnate Frank Perdue today during a wild demonstration at a University of Maryland Board of Regents meeting in Baltimore.
After a 10-minute chase around the University of Baltimore campus, police finally cornered the chicken impersonator and hauled her off to the Central District lockup, along with three other activists who interrupted the regents’ meeting.
Baseball talk
Fenway Park’s scoreboard operator is retiring after 25 years, and has stories to tell. https://t.co/e38yjBWn4K
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) September 27, 2016
Big Brew Day
This past Saturday, the homebrew club I belong to spent a lovely day brewing variations on an IPA for the National Homebrewers Conference taking place next month here in Baltimore. In case you are interested, my variation to the base recipe used rye. And because “Pics, or it didn’t happen,” here are some of the pictures I took.
Jim Harrison
My favorite author, Jim Harrison, died last week. I thought I’d post the bookmarks I’ve collected over the years so I’d have them all in one place.
The Hammock Papers blog has a ton of great Harrisonia.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-23/jim-harrison-interview/
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/25/the-rodney-dangerfield-of-literature.html
http://www.grasslimb.com/sallis/GlobeColumns/globe.03.harrison.html
http://www.gq.com/blogs/the-q/2010/01/a-warbling-guttural-baritone-comes.html
http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/celebrities/The-Last-Lion.html
http://www.undergrounddetroit.com/2011/08/the-spirit-of-wine-by-jim-harrison/
http://midcurrent.com/books/older-fishing/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/video/blog/2009/07/poet_jim_harrison_finds_inspir.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=1&pkg=harrison&seg=1
http://www.all-story.com/issues.cgi?action=show_story&story_id=12
http://montanaheadwall.bigskypress.com/montana/force-of-nature/Content?oid=1673894
http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/the-hungry-crowd-mario-batali-interviews-jim-harrison
http://davidburn.com/blog/2011/04/29/harrisonian-heroics/
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2511/the-art-of-fiction-no-104-jim-harrison
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-j-healey/four-meals-with-jim-harrison_b_3221380.html
http://www.toptenbooks.net/authors/jim-harrison
http://www.bookslut.com/fiction/2014_01_020466.php
http://mynorth.com/2014/09/jim-harrison-a-northern-michigan-literary-icon/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-j-healey/four-meals-with-jim-harrison_b_3221380.html
http://sportingclassicsdaily.com/issue/2015-1/article/jim-harrison
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/life/2015/01/31/author-qa-jim-harrison/22668327/
http://www.anglersjournal.com/people/the-gospel-according-to-jim/
http://time.com/4275120/mario-batali-jim-harrison/?xid=tcoshare
http://www.fieldandstream.com/node/1005010606
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/04/02/jim-harrison-and-the-art-of-friendship.html
http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a43440/jim-harrison-death/
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/jim-harrison-mozart-of-the-prairie
http://glenarborsun.com/northern-michigan-authors-remember-jim-harrison/
Yearly post?
Haven’t posted in a really long time. Shame on me. 🙂 I’ll try to post a little more. Now that the weather is getting warmer, I’ll fire up my brew kettle and regale you with my attempts at brewing drinkable Weizen and Belgian-style beers.
In the meantime, check out Books I Have Read page, which I have been updating on a regular basis.
Baltimore Tool Brew 3
The Third Annual Tool Brew was held this past Saturday at Baltimore’s Tool Library in Station North. Brewers from a couple of the brew clubs around the area, including mine, got together to brew a bunch of different beers and listen to some bluegrass.
I went in order to learn how to brew using all grains instead of the mostly extract brewing I have been doing. I teamed up with our club president to brew an English style brown ale.
He took apart his home brewing setup and devised this on-site setup. The water kettle at the top was heated to a temperature of slightly above 170 degrees Farenheit. We then ran it to the mash tun – a cooler fitted with a pipe manifold – to mix with the crushed malted grains our recipe called for. This water was kept above 165 degrees for about 45 minutes, by which time the grains had released their sugars into the water. The water was then piped into the brew kettle. We also rinsed the grains with water from the boiling kettle – enough to create 13 gallons in the brew kettle. This sugar water is more commonly known as the wort and was a wonderful brown ale color.
We brought the wort to a rolling boil and added the bittering hops (for flavor) and boiled the wort for about 45 minutes before adding in some aroma hops. Five minutes later we added som more aroma hops. Ten minutes after that we turned off the flame and hooked up our wort chiller in order to bring it down to our fermentation temperature of 70 degrees. When that was achieved, we siphoned the wort into 2 separate 5 gallon fermentation buckets and added some English ale yeast. 9 days later I’ll transfer it (rack it) to a fermentation carboy and dry hop it. A week or so after that comes bottling/kegging day. It should be ready to drink by the first week in May.
All in all, a very good day
Trip to Bavaria, teil 3 and 4 months after the fact
When I visit my relatives my trip, like Gaul, is divided into 3 parts. I usually spend the first part with my relatives in Oberammergau/Bad Kohlgrub, with a side trip to Munich. The second (usually short) part is spent with relatives near Augsburg. This year I saw the Augsburg relatives when they visited my aunt in Bad Kohlgrub, so I skipped that leg. I usually end my trip visiting another cousin and her husband near Mühldorf. In a bit of good fortune, one of her sons was having his son baptized that weekend, so I was able to go to that.
The Taufe was held in a itsy bitsy chapel within walking distance, so we walked.
The ceremony was lead by a deacon and not a priest and was absolutely lovely. Afterward, we gathered at my cousin’s son’s house for some Leberkas and Alte Liebe
My last evening in Bayern was spent at the Unertl restaurant in Mühldorf, where we had a lovely dinner, great conversation, and a Weissbierlikör that was pretty amazing.
Christmas decorations gone wrong
Don’t know why walking by my neighbor’s house
always reminds me of this song by the Toten Hosen/Roten Rosen:
A perfect day to homebrew some medicine
Since it was cold and rainy here in Baltimore, I decided to make some chicken stock and to brew some medicine to counteract the kidney stone attacks I’ve been having lately. Back in the olden days, when I was working in Munich, I first experienced the joy of kidney stones. I ended up having an operation at the Klinikum Rechts der Isar, because one stone had gotten so large and had lodged itself in a place where they couldn’t use shockwaves to break it apart. After the operation, my doctor (who was Czech), told me to drink at least one Weizen per day to prevent another one from getting that large.
Flash forward 27 years. I stopped drinking my weizen in a misguided attempt at getting healthy. Lo and behold, I start feeling the twinges in my kidney that tell me I have made a BIG mistake. So today being cold and rainy, I decided to brew a Weizen. I found a recipe from a brewery I like:
Homebrewing works best if you clean and sanitize everything. Here you see my brew kettle making the wort, and my cleaning bucket and fermentation carbuoy.
A peak at the wort (mashed grains):
After 30 minutes at 150 degrees Farenheit, Add water. Bring to a boil. Add the malt and the Bavarian hops. Boil for an hour.
Cool to 70 degrees, add more water to bring it to 5 gallons. Pitch your yeast, take your specific gravity reading and siphon into the primary fermentation carbuoy. Next week I’ll transfer it to the secondary fermentation carbuoy.