Tag: homebrew

Reading The Warren by Marshall Miller (and a new World Playset: Deck 17-R01)

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This post is a brief overview of an RPG I managed to read through, but not yet try out, called The Warren. It’s a story game about… you guessed it, intelligent rabbits, sort of a RPG adaptation of Watership Down and stories like it. (Did the cover art above give it away?) This post includes short explanation of my (honestly sketchy) familiarity with the family of games it belongs to, an overview of what I found interesting in the game’s design, and a free (but not yet playtested) “World” playbook I designed for the setting, and a pretty wacky one …

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The Taste of Melbourne: Beers Part 2 (BBCE)

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The remainder of these beers, I tried at the Belgian Beer Cafe Eureka, which I highly recommend to anyone in the Melbourne area. The first three are from the first visit, the rest from the second. All of these were bottle beers except the Kriek. Visit 1: Silly Saison: This was the beer I started with on the first trip to Eureka. I wanted to get a better handle on this style, since I will be trying to make one sometime soon, but I still feel like I don’t quite know exactly what a saison is supposed to be like, beyond …

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The Taste of Melbourne: Beers Part 1 (Around Town)

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Well, actually, I could rant about the horror of the meatpie I had at the Aussie Rules football game we went to, but instead I’m going to talk about beer. I had a lot of different beers in Melbourne this week, and many of them are worth talking about: Carlton Draft: This was plain old terrible stadium lager. Pass it, or pass out. I had one cup and shuddered at the idea of drinking more, but it was the stuff that everyone at the football game was having. Apple Cider — Bulmer’s? Mangan?: I’m not sure which brands I tried, …

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Beer Festival (at Homeplus) and man, VB sucks!

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So, a guy I know at work (hi Dave!) alerted me to the fact that the local Homeplus (a grocery store chain) is holding a “beer festival” which means 5 bottles of a number of imported beers were on sale for for $10-ish. (Probably more like $12, but we think of W10,000 as about $10 here.) He specifically noted that Paulaner Hefeweissen was among those beers, and it turned out to be the only beer worth it, unless you have fond nostalgic reasons to want to drink Singha outside Thailand. (I figure there’s a reason why Beerlao — the Laotian …

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For you Home Brewers out there…

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… or anyone interested in beer, brewing, and associated lore. I doubt the whole book will be of interest, but these few pages I typed out are probably at least a little bit interesting if you’re a brewer: From Roles of the Northern Goddess by Hida Ellis Davidson. London: Routledge, 1998. (from the Chapter titled “Mistress of the Household” (Pg 138-141): Yet another important use of water by the women was for brewing ale, the usual drink for all ages at a time when water was often suspect. Its association with a goddess may be seen in ancient Egypt, where …

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IPA, or, The Boys Done Good…

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Yeah, yeah, yeast is not gendered. I’m calling them that because the Belle & Sebastian song “The Boy Done Wrong Again” is in my head. (I never saw that video before looking it up just now — how gloomy — so no, that’s not a cry for help.) Anyway… the IPA I bottled a couple of weeks ago has mellowed some, and the carbonation on it is just excellent, excellent. Okay, the head still isn’t staying long — well, maybe the ring around the top, but not a thick creamy head — but that’s okay. It tastes good, good enough …

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Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

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Okay, this has reached the point of weirdness. My Coffee Stout is still fermenting. Or, rather, once again it has begun fermenting energetically, which is, I think, a fair bit weirder than “still.” I started this one beer on the 17th of November, which puts us at just over two weeks. That in itself isn’t quite so weird, but consider this: it pretty much stopped fermenting after about five days or so. I racked it to a carboy for secondary fermentation. There it stayed until it reached about 1.010, which was the gravity the last time I checked it. I …

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General Update

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Work: I am almost completely caught up on my grading. (The only things I haven’t graded are the reaction papers I was handed last night. I do, however, also need to tabulate participation scores for student discussions — their peers have ranked them; I think I can get a trust office assistant to do most of the data entry, though, which is nice.)”I am almost completely caught up on my grading” doesn’t sound impressive, I know, but usually at this point in the semester, I have a couple of huge piles to get through. I got a bunch done on …

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Café au Stout

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Brewed up another batch tonight, this one a nice coffee stout. Specific gravity ended up at 1.040 right after I mixed the wort with the water. May have actually put too much water in, not sure — the bucket I do primary ferments in now has a more-than-23-liter capacity, so I may be in for a surprise with the carboy. If that happens, I think I’ll keep the remainder in my second bucket, even though it’s usually best to dump it. (I’ll steep it in even more coffee and see what comes of it; if it fails, well, it was …

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More on Beer-Making

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Note, the title of this post could also be read as, “Moron Beer Making”… This weekend, I’ve already moved my wheat beer into secondary fermentation, but I’m also going to start primary fermentation for a second batch, which is — da-da-da-Daaaaaaaaaaa! — Coffee Stout! That is, a nice dark rich Stout with a hint of coffee flavoring. Just, you know, a hint. This is not the bizarre concoction I had one night out with a bunch of people organized by Roboseyo, at some little restaurant, where they made “coffee beer” by putting coffee into a glass of beer. That was …

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