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A perfect Fall weekend for brewing… After requisite yard and house chores I jumped into transfering the Belgian Strong “Golden” from the primary fermenter into the secondary. Although far from finished, I took a specific gravity reading to see how things were coming, and if my calculations are right, I’m already looking at close to 8.5% alcohol by volume… Not bad considering there was still good yeast activity, and there’s 5 more months of aging/fermenting to go. Although still very green the beer had a nice full feel, and nearly all of the sweetness was gone. I have strong hopes for this beer!

I don’t feel quite as excited about the batch I started today though… It was just one of those brewing sessions where nothing goes quite as it should…

After a sucessful boil, transfer and topping up, I snapped the neck of my racking cane while attempting to remove the racking hose… Considering I use the racking cane to ’stir’ the water into the wort for topping up, this did not bode well… I did my best with the shortened cane, but I think I may not have had a thorough mix… Or should I say I’m hoping I didn’t have a very good mix, as my pre-pitch gravity reading was nearly .018 points off where it should have been… Time will tell… Hopefully the beer will be fermenting nicely in the morning. This is a relatively quick beer, so I should be racking it into secondary in 7-10 days or so, we’ll see how the reading is then…

At this point Geetha and I are scheduled to have 3 beers in secondary when we depart for India at the beginning of December. It will be good to “force” myself to let the beer age, but it also means the first of January I will be force carbonating 3 beers at once! With 15 gallons of beer on hand at once time will be right for one heck of a party!

This week is the first that the weather has started to turn towards cold. Nothing too bad as of yet, but it’s getting more comfortable for me… and “too damned” cold for Geetha.

This change in temperature allows for the perfect conditions for brewing beer. I’ve been involved in Zymurgy off and on since I was in college, and have brewed most all types of beers to varying success during that time. At one point in time I was a purist, brewing only All grain beers… Now a’days I’ve given into extract brewing… And I have found that Northern Brewer provides very high quality kits, and strongly recommend them for beginners and lazy long time practitioners as well. This year Geetha and I will be putting up 3 batches: California Common, Bavarian Hefe Weizen, and a Belgian “Strong” ale. That’s 15 gallons of beer… hmm…

My second Fall hobby is robotics… Specifically the design and building of little autonomous devices that skirt around the house under their own power… Mostly I’ve built straight from kits as to learn the basics of circuitry and electronics… This year I’ve jumped off the deep end and have actually aquired the equipment necessary to actually program embedded microcontrollers, specifically the microchip PIC based MCUs (16F877A). Long and short? I’ve been spending quality time wrapping my head around hex numbers and assembly programmers, and toying with such fun stuff as hardware based PWM, and the like… Yes, declaring my geek pride to the world, but for some reason these types of challenges I find so totally intriguing…

That’s it for now, I may create new sub-sections of the blog to account for my adventures this year into these two hobbies… Maybe even perhaps draft some “how-to” on microcontrollers as the general information available to newbies is relatively scarce…