Return to the kitchen brewery

We named our little brew operation 'Beat Attack Brew Shack' to note our common obsession with a certain sport. At the urging of a certain financial backer of ours, we opted to do a wheat beer for our second attempt, and due to the enthusiasm of several of our members, we opted to go for a whole grain brewing process. This required us to go buy pounds and pounds of grain at our local homebrew mart, which was met with much enthusiasm.


To make a beer from whole grain, you have to make your malt from the grains. To do this, you cook the grains, not boil them, for an hour in order to leach out all of the sugars.


After we cooked it, we had to sparge it, which basically means rinsing the grain with hot water to ensure that all of the sugars wind up in the malt.


Then we just boiled the malt to make the wert like we did last time, and then tried something new. We had a cooling coil with some rubber tubing, and after some fancy taping, we managed to hook it up to the the hose and run reasonably cold water through it, shortening the cooling process to about one hour.


Then we added the yeast, and started the two week waiting process again. Until then!

UCI Spring Fling!

Well, to chronicle those things I'm working on, I must discuss fencing. And so, here we go.

UC Irvine's fencing club threw a fund raising team tournament, so we got a small team together and headed up! The line up was myself, Ron King (the bearded fellow), Rose Forcier (the read headed one), and Ryan Richards (the other guy).


It was a collegiate style team tournament, best of nine five touch bouts, and we wound up going undefeated for the day. I dropped two bouts, one of which to a USC epee fencer who continually tried to hit my toe.

Still, gold! More on brewing next time.