Rank Amateur Pale Ale

This past Saturday was the official unveiling of my first ever beer. It came from a kit and I was unbelievably anxious about how it would go. The process plays to all of my weaknesses: cleanliness, paying attention, doing things in the proper sequence, not burning myself, etc. I had little angels and devils on each of my shoulders giving advice: my anal retentive Wildlife epidemiologist friend stressing the importance of sanitizing EVERYTHING, and my hippyish environmental education friend telling me not to worry about it--after all, people were making beer long before they even knew what yeast and bacteria ever WERE!

The worst thing was having all this equipment and trying to figure out what silly jargon word meant which thing. OH you mean the plastic bucket, OH this time you mean this plastic tube. Now that I've got that stuff down, I feel like the next batch will go smoother. (=I will be less anxious about it =I will be more likely to fuck it up.)

When I stand back from what I actually did, it seems pretty silly. It's basically boiled (sterilized) sugar water, that you introduce yeast into, to metabolize the sugar into alcohol and co2. (That flip remark betrays the fact that I worked from an extract kit, I've yet to try the "all-grains" method.) In any case, what seemed like sorcery before now makes some sense to me--there are some folks out there making beer that aren't exactly chemical engineers.

The actual final product, an English pale ale, looks quite beautiful to my eye, and tastes perfectly nice and surprisingly beer-like to my palate. I am distributing bottles to my beer snob friends to get the real review. Keeping in mind that many of them prefer beers the color and flavor of roofing tar.

3:00 snapshot #1315: Life in the yard

Ah weekends in the (almost) summer. A piña colada slurpee enjoyed at the backyard picnic table. By practicing Assal Horizontology for most of the day I found some creatures:

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