Hallowvideos

Screamin Jay Hawkins - I put a spell on you


Disney Silly Symphony - Skeleton Dance


Bob Prickett and the Crypt Kickers - Monster Mash


Legend of Sleepy Hallow - The Headless Horseman


Oingo Boingo - Dead Man's Party


Nightmare Before Christmas - This is Halloween

Salt and Vinegar - Miss Vickie's

Miss Vickies Sea Salt & Vinegar potato chips are unofficially/officially September's chip of the month. I had a bag of these every day for lunch for about a week while in the field for work in September along with a Subway sandwich. I was surveying / water sampling out on the Platte River near Louisville and that was the easiest food option. I would have reviewed them sooner, but to be honest I forgot what they tasted like so I had some last night to remind my self.

Flavor: Good, but not terribly rememerable (as mentioned above). They definitly have the malted vinegar flavor going for them with just a little bit of tang. You might start to pucker if you ate a whole bag in one sitting. Good balance between the salt and the vinegar, but not the chip - the kettle oil showed through. Basically there just wasn't enough flavor for the chip.

Texture: Kettle style. Good crunch not to greasy. Small in stature.

Overall Impression: I liked them - I'd get them every time with my Subway sandwich, but otherwise would probably not seek them out.

3.5/5

Flatwater

The company I work for is currently undergoing a facelift of sorts. Flatwater recently moved to a bigger / more suitable location. Now we are updating our logo. Flatwater recently hired an advertising company to come up with something. Those of us inclined tried our hands at it as well and my design was selected to be sent back to the advertising company to develop the final product.

My Design



Final Product


I like the final product - definitely more professional looking than my more "natural" looking concept. Plus now I don't have to worry about being self-conscious. The overall concept is the box (engineering) with a meandering stream going through it (natural systems, specifically water), which is what we do.

Pale Ale continued

So I kegged / bottled my pale ale last week. As I hinted I had some special post fermenation plans for this beer and boy howdy I implemented those plans. For starters I decided to split the batch into 5 separate containters. One was my new keg into which 3 gallons of the beer went. The other four were 2liter plastic containers. I decided to force carbonate the keg to make sure it was ready for this coming weekend, therefore I made sure to only use 2oz of priming suger for the 2 gallons going into the 2liter bottles.

My tests - I decided to try two very different styles for my pale ale. An IPA (or at least close to it) and a Chilli Beer.

IPA - I haven't done my research so I don't know if this would qualify as an IPA, but it tastes similar to one. I decided to dry hop my pale ale. This means I added hops to the secondary fermentation, i.e. the keg. I took 0.67 oz of willamete pelleted hops, put them in a tea ball and dropped it in. The tea ball was probably unnecessary, but I didn't want an undissolve chunk of pellet to clog my draw tube. So far tastes good. Definitely has a noticible, but not overpowering hop flavor.


Chilli Beer - My goal was to create something that resembles Devil's Spit - Hoppy and Spicy. I decided to add peppers. Since I had 4 different vessles, I decided to try 4 different kinds of peppers - jalepeno, fresno and serrano and smoked serrano. I washed and boiled each pepper for 30 seconds. The smoked serranos i did on the grill with some mesquite chips, which mainly ended up burning most of the peppers. I salvaged as many as I could and that is why I did 4 different kinds of peppers. As for the number of peppers to add to each 2liter, I totally had to guess. I decided to do 1 pepper per 12 oz beer. Since the jalepeno's were so big I only did 1/2. The bottles were bloated one day later, so hopefully that means I didn't screw up. Hopefully they'll be ready to go this weekend.

Salt and Vinegar - Tom's

After too long a delay, here is an other salt & vinegar chip review. This month I am going to try to do 3 reviews to make up for missing august and september. The first one being "Tom's Vinegar and Salt PotatoChips".

I picked up a bag of Tom's while on the road to Kansas City at a gas station in St. Joeseph, Missouri. To be honest I am not sure if i've seen these in Nebraska (please let me know if you have). I'll start with the name, which places the vinegar before the salt. Upon reading this I was expecting a very tangy chip and recieved quite the opposite.

Flavor: These chips are salty, very salty. There is a hint of tang that comes through, but not near enough to provide balance.

Texture: The texture was good - a nice crisp thin chip, however the size was on the smaller end.

Overall Impression: All in all a good chip - will do in a pinch.

3/5

old brew - new techniques

So about 2 months ago I broke out an old recipe to try out some new equipment / techniques. The recipe is for a brown ale, which was the first beer I ever brewed. I went with the brown because 1) I haven’t made one in at least a year and 2) I had some leftover ingredients I wanted to use up. The latter reason caused me to substitute in some Belgian specialty grains rather than the typical crystal malt, which was an experiment in of itself. I also wanted to try partial mashing again, which I tried for the first time with the hefeweizen. The real thing I wanted to do, however, was test some new equipment I have.


Partial Mash - So after being reasonably please with the hefe, I decided to try the partial mash again. The process I used was to I hold the wert at set temperatures for a specified amount of time on the stove at low or no heat with the lid on. I stirred and checked the temps every 5 minutes. The tempurature ranges and times were 130 - 135F for 30min, 145 - 149F for 45min and 155F for 10min. The process seemed to work well with temps varying only a couple of degrees over the entire time period. One thing I noticed was that by holding the grains in the wert for almost three times longer that just steeping is that more grains tend to escape the grain-sock. To combat this I started straining the wert before boiling.




Turkey friar – I purchased this puppy during the last holiday season when it was on sale at target for $20. I bought it for one main reason. Eventually I want to at least try all-grain brewing. To all-grain brew, you need a stock pot that will hold all 5 gallons of wert because you have to boil it all at once. That means I need something bigger than my 5 gal pot, and the 7.5 gal kettle that came with the turkey friar is the perfect size. I hooked the friar up to my propane tank outside, filled it up, fired it up, cracked open a beer and enjoyed the show. Brewing beer outdoors is something everyone should try - there is just something strangely natural about it. The friar worked great. It produced great rolling boil and didn’t scorch the kettle.




Carboy – I got a new carboy for my birthday from noel’s folks. It’s a 6gal glass carboy, which leaves plenty of head room for respiration. Getting the beer in was no problem. My airlock / stopper I got when I borrowed brian’s carboy worked fine with it. Watching the respiration and fermentation was awesome. The first day the yeast activity was churning the beer causing huge chunks of trub to zooming up and down. The second and third days things slowed down but there was still visible movement, with little eruptions occurring from the bottom. After that the stratification began as all the suspended trub began to settle out. It was quite entertaining. Getting the beer out was a bit harder than getting it in, so I’ll have to rethink my siphoning, but all in all it was a great experiment and I think I’ll be using the carboy generally from here on out.



Since brewing I have kegged and tasted product and plan to serve it at the Halloween product. After letting others sample I will post how I think my experiments worked out.

Newest pseudo-Cermak

Allie and Jerry just had their baby.
Her name is Lucy and she was born on October 6th

new brew - pale ale

Brewed a new batch Monday night. This one's a pale ale that I hope to have ready for Halloween. I bought a "american pale ale" kit from Kirk's, which is supposed to be comparable to a Sierra Nevada.

I have two post-fermentation plans for this beer, neither of which have I tried before. I am going to show some restraint and wait to unveil my plans until after fermentation so that I can have some pictures to share when detailing said plans. For now I'll just show this picture of my latest attempt to better aerate my wort before fermentation.