Project Updates

Hello interblags!

Since last I blogged, I actually managed to achieve my season goal of earning my C rating in foil by taking third at a recent tournament. Huzzah!

Another project I was working on was preparing the guacamole for my friend's Tim and Chelsea's wedding. It took me a little while to figure out how to go about doing it, and I eventually came up with this basic recipe: 6 avocados, 1 mango (diced), 1 jalapeno(diced), 1 clove of garlic (mashed), garlic salt, and the juice of 4 limes, all mashed together. The avocado slicing and pitting was all done by the intrepid wedding crew, and I just had to mash it all together. Good times!


On a less winning note, we finished fermenting and bottling our beer. We named it 'Twue Wuv Wheat' in honor of Tim and Chelsea's wedding, and it was well received at the wedding. It was less enjoyed by the judges at the San Diego County Fair Homebrew Competition, who commented that it was, to quote "not a pleasure to drink". Ah well, win some, lose some.

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.

Adventures in Brewing

First of all, let me apologize, I've left this blog lay fallow for awhile despite my resolution not to do so. I've been pretty busy with fencing this year, and haven't budgeted out a lot of time for this blog.

Myself and several friends have been batting around the idea of brewing some beer for a while now, and we finally got around to buying all the equipment yesterday, at our local homebrew mart, which may now be my favorite retail location ever. After several weeks of hard research, we decided to go with a red ale, because, well, red ales are pretty awesome.

So we went out and got the kit, which consisted of a large stock pot, a six gallon glass carboy to serve as a fermenter, a plastic bucket for use in bottling, an iodine based disinfectant, and all the ingredients we'd require (yeast, malt, sugar and hops).

We schlepped it all over to Dave Eltgroth's place to begin our day of brewing fun. We started by disinfecting everything that might come in contact with the beer.


We then boiled up two gallons of water. It turns out that a lot of brewing is boiling stuff, so there's a lot of time to spend doing other things. Namely drinking beer and playing video games.

After we'd gotten those out of the way, the pot had boiled and it was time for adding ingredients! We poured in the two bags of malt and 1.5 ounces of hops, which had been turned into pellets and looked vaguely like rabbit food, yet smelled amazing.


After that, it was time for more boiling. At the aforementioned homebrew mart, a very helpful guy had mentioned that one thing we wanted to avoid was a boil over, and so when we started the second boil, we made sure to continuously monitor and stir it, keeping the lid off. We kept it boiling for another hour (which translated to a few levels of The Force Unleashed, which is AMAZING), and then poured it into the carboy for fermenting.


Then followed the phase of waiting for it to cool down so we could add the yeast and begin the fermentation process. Let me tell you, waiting for five gallons of hot beer to cool down takes a long time. Which translates to a lot of video games, a visit to best buy, dinner, some more video games, a pretty significant amount of youtube, and then just waiting around. But lo, beer with yeast!


Then we just had to wait around for two weeks for it to ferment! More later!

A new year, and a whole new batch of resolutions.

Wow, it's been an unfortunate amount of time since I last posted. Sorry, December wasn't a good month for me to do projects, and I kind of let that slide by. But no more! I will, in fact, resolve that no such thing will occur! Actually, now that I think about it, I should resolve to do a bunch of other things. So, without further ado, my New Year's Resolutions!

1. Post to this blog more regularly. Which, in turn, means more projects. But if I don't manage to do a project every week, I'll try and find something to talk about, either in my own life or a little op-ed thing.

2. Exercise every day. Fence, work out, bike to work, yoga at work, swim, hike, whatever.

3. Hike more often, hopefully once a week.

4. Try to swear less, or at least more creatively. I think goats and their mother's will feature prominently. Also, the word 'frak'.

5. Do a better job of keeping in touch with friends. Getting back from Santa Fe, I realize that I don't speak to those guys and gals as much as I'd like to.

6. Earn my 'C' rating in fencing.

7. Study for and take the GREs.

8. Make a nerdy fan film.

I'd make more resolutions, but I feel like any more and it's just planning for the stuff I want to do this year. Which includes brewing beer, learning a new programming language, and getting wicked good at Guitar Hero. Here's to 2009!