More Hard Times Ahead

My father and I spent yesterday fishing with my cousin Robert and his friends, who came down from Kentucky on Thursday. Nothing big and interesting is biting right now, so we went out and dropped some lines on a couple of artificial reefs. Caught some extremely weird-looking snapper and some porgies and about 3,000 grunts.

It's always weird, taking freshwater fishermen out on the ocean. They want everything fileted and skinned. I filet reasonably big fish like dolphin, but the small embarrassing fish just get scaled and gutted and have their heads chopped off. I don't bother skinning them. The skin on a snapper fries up just fine.

Anyway, they wanted filets, so we fileted. Thank God today we're planning to fry the results. I can't handle the shame of having four-inch-long filets in my freezer.

I figured I should also make a few sides and a dessert, so I'm about to hit the grocery store. I'm going to roast corn and make twice-fried fries. And brownies. I contemplated making a huge container of macaroni and cheese. I still might.

I don't have much beef fat on hand to fry the fries in. Luckily, I saved the grease from my last turkey. I threw it in a sauce pan, and I had half a pound of beef fat in the freezer, so I put it in there to render down. I should come out with around a pint of animal fat to flavor the frying oil. Maybe I can get a little more fat at the store.

We're going to sit outside by the pool and eat like pigs.

The ale I brewed day before yesterday is scaring me. I decided to try oxygenating the wort with a tank. I had never done that before. I thought it was overkill. However, it is safe to say that I was mistaken.

Yeast needs oxygen to thrive, and when you boil wort to make beer, you drive the dissolved oxygen out. You have to get it back in if you want the yeast to do well. Some people just shake the fermenter. I used to use a hand mixer or a paddle-y thing called a Mix-Stir, which you attach to a drill. I thought I was doing okay, but lately I've had batches where the yeast pooped out, so I didn't want to take chances.

An oxygenation setup consists of a disposable Bernzomatic oxygen tank, a small regulator, a filter, and a stainless "stone" at the end, like an airstone in an aquarium. The stone breaks the oxygen up into tiny bubbles that dissolve well. You put the stone in the wort and pump bubbles out for a minute, and then you seal the fermenter.

I did all that, and when I got up the next morning the beer was bubbling away. I thought that was nice. Then I came home from fishing, hours later, and I noticed that the lid of the fermenter had been blown open and was sitting at a thirty-degree angle, with the low side still attached to the bucket.

I rigged a blowoff hose, which is a hose that goes from a fermenter's gas outlet to a container of sanitized water. The gas goes out of the hose and up through the water, and hopefully, no bacteria finds its way up the hose and into the beer. Ordinarily, I only do this for wheat beer, which ferments furiously. Generally, I use a little thing called an airlock, which is a tiny container of liquid that sits in the gas outlet. The CO2 goes up through the liquid and out. But this batch was nuts. I needed something bigger.

All night long, it sat out in the living room going "WHORRRRRRT" every three seconds as the bubbles escaped. It sounded like Darth Vader was snorkeling in my beer. It's still going pretty strong. It's kind of scary to walk by it at night. I think the beer will be great, if it doesn't jump out and attack me.

In other news, my Barley Crusher grain mill arrived, and I used it to re-crush the barley for this batch. The barley was supposedly crushed when it arrived, but I wanted to be sure, so I ran it through again. The mill pulverized it pretty severely. I was worried that it would gum up when I tried to rinse the sugar out of it after the mash. But it worked ridiculously well. I was expected an original gravity of 1.056 for about five gallons, and I ended up with 1.060 and six gallons.

The mill works fine, although cranking the handle by hand is impossible. It would take fifteen minutes to do eleven pounds. I attached a drill to the handle, and all was bliss.

That's all I have for now. Time to raid the grocery store and demand fat.