Friday Night Videos

This is probably as far removed from a holiday song as possible, but "Tusk" is probably my favorite piece by Fleetwood Mac. As a reaction against the overwhelming success of Rumors it is brilliant, and as an example of Lindsay Buckingham's bugnuts insane creativity, it is uncanny. But for sheer, over-the-top excess (the entire USC marching band!?) nothing else even comes close.



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Go West.

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Polkadots!

Santa dropped off a little pre-Christmas surprise last week:



Monkeyshine, our 14-year-old pound-rescue beagle, is quite happy. She's been lonely since Precious disappeared right around the 4th of July. Bug has claimed the new puppy as his own and dubbed him "Polkadots" because of the tan spotting on his legs. It's quite the friendly dog, and destructively chews anything he can get ahold of as puppies are wont to do. He even has the classic beagle howl, but since he's young, it's squeaky and several octaves above what you'd expect. Quite funny, actually. He looks to be of the 15-inch beagle variety, with over-large feet that flop as he walks or runs. Reminds me a good deal of Sigfreid, actually. Let's see if we can keep this little guy from vanishing on us.

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Apfelwein

So I'm gradually taking a liking to my dark, malty, brown sugar ale, and I have five gallons of plum wine fermenting in a water bath to keep temperatures low enough to prevent the formation of harsh fusel alcohols. The other empty fermentation vessels in my office, though, are a depressing sight, and I decide I need to start another project. Normally I'd start a mead, but I almost always use the 6-gallon container for that (which I then rack into smaller containers to which I add different fruits/spices to experiment), not to mention honey is expensive. What could I do that's cheap and fast, scalable to small batches? On one home brew forum I occasionally visit, there's a permanent thread about "Apfelwein." The Wife and bought a bottle at EPCOT when we visited Disney last summer, and enjoyed it quite a bit. Apfelwein is essentially German apple wine, distinct from cider because it is drier and made with wine yeast as opposed to beer/ale yeast. It has a modestly higher alcohol content as well. It struck me that this would be just right for my 2.5 gallon fermenter, so I set to work.

In the fermenter I combined 2.5 gallons of Tree Top Apple juice (no preservatives!) and a pound of table sugar (the recipe calls for dextrose corn sugar, but I didn't have any and didn't feel up to a run to my local homebrew supply), along with two teaspoons of yeast nutrient, 1.5 teaspoons of yeast energizer and a packet of Montrachet wine yeast (which I'd started in a glass of water/apple juice earlier). Once everything was well-mixed, I closed it up, put water in the air lock and set the whole thing in the water bath next to the plum wine.

The water bath has been an interesting experiment. I've got the vessels wrapped in towels, and pour cup fulls of water over the towels to keep them wet. I add ice to the water every night, and the ceiling fan in my office keep the air circulating to aid in evaporation. The result is that my fermenting wine musts are significantly cooler than the surrounding temperatures. Having come into homebrew via ales, which ferment at much higher temperatures than other beverages, I never gave much thought to temperature issues before--which is probably why so many of my early mead attempts were so incredibly harsh. Wine yeasts ferment faster at higher temperatures, creating fusel alcohols that take months or years to break down. Fusels aren't harmful to drink, but they are harsh and unpleasant. By fermenting these at a water bath-aided lower temperature, the resulting wines should be drinkable at a much younger age and simply be a better drink overall. Also, by fermenting more slowly at lower temperatures, fewer fruity flavors and aromas should be "blown off" due to overly aggressive fermentation. Plus, unlike other projects I've had, there's been no foaming blowouts while using the water bath. Cool.

Will post an update when it's time to rack.

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Friday Night Videos

This... now this is truly a "Friday Night Video" throwback. Go West popped up on the late 80s music scene and scored a handful of modest hits. The first I ever heard of them, though, was through the video for "We Close Our Eyes", which earned heavy rotation status on Night Tracks and Friday Night Videos. I don't think the song actually charted, and have no idea if it aired on MTV, but it was quirky and original and got me to recognize the name of the band whenever I saw it. I'll never look at artist's dummies the same again...



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Noncy Sinatra.

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Once more unto the breach: Homebrew edition

Although my last attempt at making plum wine didn't turn out so well, I still have a deep freeze stocked with many, many frozen plums, quartered and pitted, so I had to give it another shot. This time, however, my intent is to be more careful and not repeat the errors that doomed the last batch. First off, I had major blowout issues with the first fermentation, stemming directly from using an insane 30 pounds of plums in a six-gallon batch of wine. Learning from my mistakes, I drew up a batch using 16 pounds of plums in five gallons--thus allowing more head space for the foam and cap. We'll see. I pulled the freezer bags of plums (roughly a 75/25 mix of juicy purple Methleys and yellow flesh, tart Santa Rosas) out on Saturday and let them thaw overnight. I have to say I'm a fan of freezing fruit for homebrew, because the juice gushed from the fruit and needed little additional mashing. The juice/pulp mixture was syrupy thick, incredibly fruity in scent and very sweet and fruity to taste.

I squeezed the juice from two large oranges and added a couple straw's worth of plum juice and cut the mix with an equal amount of water to make a yeast starter. I emptied a packet of Lavin 71B-1122 yeast--particularly well-suited for fruity wines. I covered this and set it aside to let it do its thing.

The recipe I'm attempting is a hybrid from Pattie Vargas & Rich Gulling's Making Wild Wines and Meads. Scaling up their one-gallons recipes for my 5-gallon effort, I put in:

• 16 pounds of plums
  
• 12 pounds of sugar
  
• 1.25 tsp of grape tannin
  
• 5 tsp pectic enzyme
  
• 3 tsp acid blend
  
• 5 tsp yeast nutrient
  
• 1.25 tsp yeast energizer

I put the plums into my 6 gallon fermenter, and dissolved the rest in heated pots of water on the stove, then added that to the fermenter, which brought the total volume up to around 4 gallons. I topped up with cold water and stirred vigorously to oxygenate the must. It was about 90 degrees at this point. So I waited until the temperature had dropped to 80 degrees and pitched the yeast. One thing I learned in recent months is that wine yeasts don't like high temperatures. Well, they like it just fine, but ferment faster and produce harsh fusel alcohols in the process, which is why all my meads up to this point tend to taste like Listerine. Years of homebrewing ales have spoiled me this way. Lavin 71B-1122 yeast, specifically, like temperatures in the 50-70 degree range, preferably 55-60. To get around the problem, or at least minimize it, I've set up a water bath in my office--a shallow plastic tub which holds the six-gallon fermenter. I've wrapped a towel around the fermenter, and filled the tub with ice water. I soak the towel, and keep the ceiling fan in my office running. This, in theory at any rate, keeps the plum wine must fermenting at a lower temperature to produce a higher-quality beverage. We'll see. It was bubbling happily when I left this morning, but I may well find a blowout when I return home.

In other brewing news, I bottled the six gallon batch of Coopers Dark Ale I started way back in November. It took more than three weeks for it to fully ferment out, which my be a result of my belated addition of the brown sugar after the initial vigorous fermentation had peaked. In any event, the beer is a pretty, rich, dark color. I double-checked each bottle to make sure I added priming sugar (an embarrassing omission from some bottles in my last batch of beer) and they've been aging for a little more than a week and a half. All told, I filled 36 24-ounce bottles. They'll benefit from more aging, obviously, but curiosity is getting the better of me and I might try one tonight.

My other homebrew projects--both meads--are producing mixed results. After the plum wine oxidized, with grim resolve I decided not to chance it and bottled the plum melomel I'd started at the same time. The color wasn't quite so bright as I remembered, so the fear of losing another batch (albeit only 2.5 gallons) was too much to bear. I dosed it with potassium sorbate and campden tablets to knock out the yeast, then back-sweetened with a little more than a pound of honey before bottling. I opened a bottle several days later, just to check if there was any quality to it at all, and was happy to find it surprisingly drinkable. I think, yes, that a tiny bit of oxidation had occurred, but nothing tragic. It's extremely fruity, and the honey isn't apparent. It's also sweeter than I expected--before back-sweetening it was very, very dry--but not port wine sweet. It's not perfect, but entirely drinkable, which I consider a success. Aging may or may not help, and in any event, fruit wines generally don't age as well as grape wines. Not sure how all the honey in the mix will impact things, as meads generally benefit more from aging.

The other experiment, the 1.5 gallon braggot with smoked malt and jalapeño is still a work in progress. I back-sweetened with the remaining honey from the plum melomel back-sweetening attempt, added clarifying agents and was disappointed to see that it's being stubborn. Clearing is coming very, very slowly. A sample revealed the flavors to still be very harsh, with little blending. I expect I'll bottle this stuff up in a few days and hope aging will sort it out, otherwise I risk oxidation (which I'm now paranoid about, although I've gone 10 years without ever having that happen before).

I've got several empty fermentation vessels available now, but nothing cooking. I wonder what I'll try next--time to start another mead.

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Friday Night Videos

Who's in the mood for retro? Good! Because that's what we've got today--Nancy Sinatra's signature hit, "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'". Dig those crazy go-go dancers and Nancy's oh-so-hip 60s dance moves. Groovy!



Previously on Friday Night Videos... Dream Academy.

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NASA discovers new form of life

Arsenic-based life. Yes, that's an over-simplification, but still. I've heard theories on chlorine breathers and silicon-based life (made famous by the Horta in Star Trek) and even hydrogen- and methane-breathers, but dang, this is bizarre:

At their conference today, NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe Simon will announce that they have found a bacteria whose DNA is completely alien to what we know today. Instead of using phosphorus, the bacteria uses arsenic. All life on Earth is made of six components: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. Every being, from the smallest amoeba to the largest whale, share the same life stream. Our DNA blocks are all the same.

But not this one. This one is completely different. Discovered in the poisonous Mono Lake, California, this bacteria is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible. While she and other scientists theorized that this could be possible, this is the first discovery. The implications of this discovery are enormous to our understanding of life itself and the possibility of finding beings in other planets that don’t have to be like planet Earth.

Two possibilities come immediately to mind: 1) this evolved elsewhere and came to Earth via panspermia, or 2) life evolved on Earth twice, separately. Either way, this implies that at least simple life may be common in the universe. Simply stunning.

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