Election and Pics

First off, since election day is tomorrow, I'd like to make a few predictions:

1) Obama wins by a pretty good margin

2) Obama wins Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, PA, New Hampshire and the rest of the NE states (WV is the only state north of VA and east of IN that McCain wins).

3) I think McCain will squeek out North Carolina.

4) I want to say McCain will win Florida by a hair as well, but I'm going to predict Obama wins Florida by less than 2 points.

5) Obama loses Indiana by less than 3 pts, comes within 5 pts of taking Arizona, McCain's home state.

6) Election is called after Obama wins Virginia and Pennslyvannia (I'm not sure on this one, some polls may close before others, like if Obama won Virginia, Florida and OH and PA wasn't announced yet, most people would likely call it for Obama).

7) Chicago will be nuts, I'm staying in.

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Now, to non election stuff.

Our brewing setup is functional. We've brewed 2 beers, one on each of the last 2 Wednesdays. The first was a hoppy red ale, or hoppy amber ale. This recipe was based on one I found from a very respected brewer known as Jamil. We used a similar grain bill (basically you can seperate a beer recipe into malt or grain, hops and yeast) to what he used, but changed the hop profile and yeast. It is going to be kegged Wednesday, and should be ready to taste in about a week. Initial partially fermented-non carbonated tastes have been very promising.

The other beer we did was a pumpkin beer. I know, Halloween was Friday and it won't be ready for a few weeks, but I've always wanted to brew one of these and so did my friend, so we did it.

I have some pics of this beer and the brewery below, but we basically took a light amber ale recipe, tuned it up into a stronger alcohol/sweeter beer and added 5 lbs of organic pumpkins doused in dark brown sugar and some spices (cinnomin, ginger root and nutmeg). It was really fun to brew and I think it will taste delicious.

Most importantly, we've hit all of our targets during the brewing process, meaning our brewing setup is very efficient. This was one of our major concerns when building it, that we would not be very efficient and would spend a lot of time and effort trying to calculate and offset recipes so that we could duplicate them or get the taste we want in our beers. Fortunately, it seems we will have very little adjusting to do.

We have also encountered no major problems with the setup. While we have figured out a few improvements that we would like to make, there is nothing pressing that is required.

Here are some pictures of the pumpkin beer and brewery.



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Above is a picture of the pumpkins being prepared. The night before we had to slice, skin and gut the pumpkins, douse them in dark brown sugar and put them in the oven for about two hours until they softened. We then refrigerated them overnight.



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Above is a pic of our setup. It's not a great picture, I realize I'm going to have to take more now, but on the top we just to the left of the fan you can see a pot sticking out (better viewed in the next picture). That is the water pot, where water is heated up to a certain temperature. It is then dropped into the converted keg-pot below the fan, called the mash ton. The water is added to the grain there. Some time later (for all your brew savvy people out there, I know I'm leaving a lot out) the result of this, the wort, is transferred into the boil pot (the yellow striped pot in the bottom back end of the picture). After we're done boiling and adding hops or whatever else we're going to add for a particular recipe, we'll transfer the wort into a 6 gallon plastic fermenter (picture a plastic bucket). All of this transferring is done via copper or stainless steel pipes, meaning we don't have to lift a damn thing during the brewing process. Not lifting 13 gallon pots with 5-10 gallons of 210 degree water in them is very +EV.



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The above is the side view of our brewery setup. You can see the water pot I referred to in the last post a bit better (the top pot), as well as the mash tun (the middle pot) and the boil pot (the bottom right pot with the blue stripe in this picture). You can also see the fire on the water pot, our setup is powered by propane and there is a burner under each pot.



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This is a picture of our removable sparge arm. Basically, after the water is added to the grain in the mash tun, it sits for about an hour, soaking up the sugars from the grain (this is called the mash). After this, you drain most of the water from the mash tun into the boil pot. But there are still sugars left in the grain, so you add some more water and drain it into the boil pot. This is called the sparge. You want a gentle flow of hot water going into the mash tun during the sparge, thus we took some copper, put a T on it and made small slits into it, giving the water a wide, yet soft flow into the mash tun.



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Above is a picture of one of us adding the chopped up pumpkin into the boil pot. The copper tube is connected to the mash tun, we put a stainless steel, flexible hose on the end of it so that the wort from the mash tun transfers into the boil pot with minimal oxidation (I think that's the correct term off the top of my head). Basically, you don't want the wort falling into the pot and splashing around, you want minimal contact with air.



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Above is a picture of the pumpkins in the boil.



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Our final picture is of the boil, after the hops are added. I'm sure most people think this looks disgusting. Normally the hops are put in a hop bag, so they aren't just floating around, mainly this makes for easier filtration from the boil pot to the fermenter, but our brewing supply store was out of hop bags, so we had to add them directly in the boil. It was a pain in the ass to filter them out afterwards, but it won't be a regular problem because we will have hop bags in the future.

I'll get some better pics up soon, but this should give you an idea of what I'm always talking about.

If anyone is in the Chicagoland area in 2-6 weeks, feel free to shoot me an email or message here if you'd like to try one of our brews.

Until then, have a good November.