Gettin Stuff Done....

[Thirsty Boy]

Been a busy day...

Today I have

* Made the dough for Vanillekipferl (German Hazelnut Vanilla shortbread x-mas biscuits). They will get baked tomorrow night.
* Re-Upholstered my motor scooter seat.
* Transitioned my "Roggen-Wit" from cube to fermenter.
* Started fermenting my latest Malt Free - Gluten Free Beer experiment.
* Prepared rice etc and started up a batch of Red Rice Wine.
* Prepared and started the Moto for my first batch of Sake.
* Made a batch (well - 2 jars) of Strawberry Jam.
* Made a mess in the kitchen and cleaned it up 3 separate times, 4 if you count cooking dinner. Hid same activity from swmbo.

I get shitloads of stuff done on afternoon shift - get home from work at 10:00pm, wife in bed by 11:00pm - me stay up till 3 or 4 am and need to amuse myself. If it was possible for me to brew full sized batches of beer at this time of night - I would be drowning in the stuff.

Getting sleepy now - shower and bed soon.

 

[Duff]

Impressive.

It's been around 35C here with up to 80% humidity for the past couple of weeks. Lists like yours don't really get past the first point or two before you jump in the pool with a cold beer and call it a day :lol:

Cheers.

 

[beerdrinkingbob]

big day TB!!

if you did brew I hope you wore a snorkel :beerbang:

 

[DU99]

Busy Boy..might as well with the weather being a bit cool

 

[jayse]

The joys of working in an automated beer factory, still have energy to burn when you get home B)

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Damn right - fridays is cleaning day, but apart from that physically difficult work is reasonably thin on the ground.

 

[Josh]

I get shitloads of stuff done on afternoon shift - get home from work at 10:00pm, wife in bed by 11:00pm - me stay up till 3 or 4 am and need to amuse myself. If it was possible for me to brew full sized batches of beer at this time of night - I would be drowning in the stuff.

That list is pretty impressive TB.

I've done a few late night brews. Get home around the same time after arvo shift. Still pretty awake, so I knock out a brew. Only mashing is done inside the house. Transfer to the kettle in the garage and keep the dog from getting shuteye with the lights on and 4-ring burner firing.

 

[Braumoasta]

* Made the dough for Vanillekipferl (German Hazelnut Vanilla shortbread x-mas biscuits). They will get baked tomorrow night.

Yum! You wouldn't happen to be of Austrian descent would you?

I guess I should post something beer related for my first post so.. today I also got something done, I put down my first homebrew! Now I'm just sitting around twiddling my thumbs until it's finished fermenting!! B)

 

[felten]

I guess I should post something beer related for my first post so.. today I also got something done, I put down my first homebrew! Now I'm just sitting around twiddling my thumbs until it's finished fermenting!! B)

Waiting is the hardest part

I wish I had that kind of motivation, a brewday for me takes like 7 hours (including procrastination and cleanup), most of which is spent pacing around the kettle, so I'm knackered at the end of it.

 

[Thirsty Boy]

Yum! You wouldn't happen to be of Austrian descent would you?

I guess I should post something beer related for my first post so.. today I also got something done, I put down my first homebrew! Now I'm just sitting around twiddling my thumbs until it's finished fermenting!! B)

Bavarian (Franconia), so pretty close i guess. They actually aren't my favourite biscuit, but swmbo likes them a lot. They turned out not too bad but a little crumbly.

Good luck with that first brew

TB

 

[StewTurner]

I'm curious about your malt free beer. What kind of fermentables do you use for that? I know that you can use un-malted grain in beer (e.g. Unmalted wheat, rice, corn), but how do you get a beer character without malt? For example, where does it sit on the beer-sake continuum?

Looking back at that paragraph, I realize that the answer is probably 'that's what I'm trying to figure out, you numbskull', but I am genuinely curious about the difference that malting makes (or would make) to non-glutinous grains, and the extent to which you can replicate those beer characteristics. And would malted grains (corn, rice, etc.) be possible, or make a difference?

My wife is an awesome gluten free baker, so we have a cupboard full of flours, and I would be interested to see if any of them translate to beer, which is the basis of my interest.

Sorry for the free-association post. Too much beer, but the idea really piqued my interest.

Stew

 

[Thirsty Boy]

It takes a bit of work to get the GF malt free beers to taste like beer, i have had varying degrees of success. If you do a search on my posts for gluten free you'll turn up a good look at some of the things i have been doing.

Rcently i have been playing with Koji and attempting to make beer by varying the sake making process - getting there. Haven't done write ups yet as i am still sorting out a bunch of stuff about how it works. It does work... But yet to make it produce something decently beer like.

Flours... Work, but are a monumental pain in the arse to work with. So as a matter of fact are the grains, but not nearly as bad as the flours were.

TB

 

[bignath]

I get shitloads of stuff done on afternoon shift - get home from work at 10:00pm, wife in bed by 11:00pm - me stay up till 3 or 4 am and need to amuse myself. If it was possible for me to brew full sized batches of beer at this time of night - I would be drowning in the stuff.

I'm a huge fan of the late night brewing...

In fact, due to family and time constraints, it's the only time i brew. last effort was a week ago on a tuesday night. Started heating strike water at 8pm, and finished exhausted, with two cubes of wort at 5am.

Worst thing during this double session was the "plug" that i have in my mash tun manifold decided to let go and suck all of the "runnings" and grain bed, through the manifold. PITA big time. Fixed it for the second batch by crimping the copper of my manifold shut at the end and doing away with the "plug" idea that had been successful for the last 12 months....

Even with all of the hassle that this particular night gave me, there's something really enjoyable about being out in the shed brewing beer through the night when everyone is asleep. Late night TV, get some tunes cranking - lifes good......

nath

 

[haysie]

I need lists. otherwise I forget.... This week

Culturing some pro103 yeast from the slant......... what ever happened too Wolfy?
Soaking my cubes in boiling water with a dash of pbw, they were starting to stain in places.
Get together a Weizenbock recipe
Order a filter
Get together my fav ESB recipe, which will welcome the 103
Clean the latest keg I emptied
Fill the latest keg I emptied with the springwater German Pilsner.
Check the Dunkelwizen ferment and coincide its finishing the brewing of the bock.

Then of course there are flasks, bottles,tuns,kettles to clean.
Sometimes I wonder, but I like doing it.

 

[StewTurner]

Thanks for the response, TB. When I get my AG process down (I have only done 3 BIABs), I will do a search on GF brewing. For me, it is simply a curiosity. I have no issue with gluten. I should learn how to use barley first, but I am curious about the chemistry of this whole thing, and maybe this is a way to learn more.

In my post I didn't mean brewing with GF flours, rather how the source grains would work. For example, can one make an amaranth beer? I suspect that the fundamental human desire to get tanked means that the answer is yes, even if that Inca hooch might not taste like beer to me.

One thing that I have thought about is that a lot of the GF flours are not even based on grains, so malting is not even a relevant consideration. It must be a bugger to get the right sugars out of the various plants.

Again, thanks for your reply. I have done no research on the topic, and I am not trying to use AHB as a short cut for doing my own work. Obviously you owe me no explanation, but I am a curious observer. I will look at your posts, and see if I can learn about how it all works.

Cheers,

Stew

 

[Thirsty Boy]

You can make beer out of any cereal - thats pretty much the definition of beer - non distilled booze made primarily from a cereal.

So absolutely from amaranth, millet, quinoa, corn, rice, wheat, spelt, rye, oats - anything. Whether you can make good beer or not is an entirely different question. The trick is turning starch into sugar. In the west, we generally do it by malting some or all of the grain and letting the enzymes in the malt do the conversion, in the east they generally do it by letting certain types of mold grow on some grain, which produces the same sort of enzymes. But there are other ways to do it. I used the enzymes in over ripe bananas to convert the starch in sorghum and corn flour (pinched from an african native brewing process) different native cultures have used the amylayse enzymes in saliva to do the same. Its all beer though - you might not recognise some of it as beer, but it is.

Getting something that is not made out of malted barley to taste like something that is made out of malted barley - thats qte a bit harder and one of the main focuses of my exeriments. Just not being made of barley seems to be the biggest hitch... Beers made from unmalted barley, still taste pretty beery and beers made from malted sorghum, dont so much. (and yes, you can malt pretty much any grain, but apparently some of them taste like absolute rubbish when you do, corn and rice for instance) and apart from that, a lot of malted barley's flavour comes from the kilning and/or roasting process so many of them can be emulated by kilning or roasting raw grains.

Mix, match, experiment till i get it right - learn a lot in the process. I'm not gluten intolerent, i'm mostly using this as an excuse to learn and play with a bunch of different processes along the way.

TB