i just had a good warfish turn….nothing like a good warfish turn to bolster your mood. i must say, ben’s civil war map has always treated me well. the way i word that makes me feel like i’m talking about some vegas game. which brings me to the next natural point: why don’t me and all my friends make warfish games interesting by betting money on games? how would that change everything? i mean, “ranked games” translate easily into “skins games”. the whole medal system? jesus. I’ll let ben read this before i go shooting my mouth off. a very interesting proposition though, i would say.

on to more immediate things! coming home with a complete beer recipe and all your hardware cleaned is awesome. you walk in the door after finishing work, and turn on the burner, since you left your clean pot with 3 gallons of water on the stove with the lid on. that was a nice little treat. the carboy even has about 2.5 gallons of water that has been sitting capped up and wrapped in a towel outside in the concrete alcove. you clever bastard!

so some other quick tips that you think were clever and awesome while you were brewing. get the pot stirring in a good vortex while adding all the malt, then lean the end of the spoon on the edge of the pot and barley dip the tip of the spoon in about 2/3 of the way to the edge of the pot from the center, in the foam that comes from adding all that sugar all at once. it spins for about a minute, keeping it from boiling over. more tests needed, though.

pinning the grain and hop bag down in the pot by pushing in the middle of the bag with the spoon, then using the strings on the straining bag to tie the other end of the spoon to the pot handles, keeping the bag in the boil, without pinning it to the bottom of the pot. it does force you to untie the spoon to stir the pot up though, which will happen more often than you think. more tests needed.

simple chemistry hit me upside the head during this brew as well. although i hope to not be using liquid malt extract too far into the near future, there’s no reason while i’m using it now not to get it as hot as possible in the pan of warm water without melting the plastic, so that it won’t pull so much heat from the wort when i add it. i’m not sure how far to push the whole plastic melting thing on my own right now. more tests needed.

i feel like i should be doing this with every batch i brew (making sure i always remember to wash my hands when going from computer to beer). online blog journal thing, in my corner of the internet, why the hell not. ben, is there a reason there’s not a brewing link on the friv mainpage?

you know, when i think about it, is there a reason we aren’t somehow collaborating to make Friv Brew? create the beer to match our sensibilities? goods god, there’s a tag-line right there “the beer to match your sensibilities”. copyright friv enterprises!

my head is swimming with ideas. i’ll admit i’m tipsy, but an idea of this caliber probably wouldn’t have popped up otherwise, and dammit, this feels big. i’ll let my head simmer while i wait for ben to read this.