It's All About Patience

I decided to rack my latest brew (Sierra Nevada pale Ale Clone) to the secondary fermentor yesterday. It had been in the primary for 2 weeks, which is plenty long enough. Typically, 1 week in the primary is enough to finish fermentation, but I spent last week in Tucson at the Waste Management conference, so the beer just had to wait.

One basic tenet of homebrewing is that one must DRINK beer while making beer. So with this in mind, I decided to crack open one of my hazelnut porters, of which I've written much about lately. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that good things come to those who wait...

That's right, kids...the beer has CARBONATION! After thinking about it for a little while, a tiny light bulb went off in my engineer head. Yeast takes longer to do its thing when temps are low. Well, my kitchen rarely creeps above 60 in the winter unless the pellet stove is raging. Since this batch is sitting in boxes on the floor, I imagine the remaining yeast in these bottles was working at a snail's pace. No matter, the beer is now carbonated and the brewers are happy. The lesson I learned from this is that most things that happen during brewing are cause & effect, provided you know what to measure and where to look to see what it means. This all comes with experience and a few messed up batches along the way. The good part is the longer you do it, the higher the probability that the batch will turn out good.

Getting back to that Sierra Nevada...Russ & I have high hopes for this one. The first tasting was very positive. Nice bitterness and clarity. Should turn out even better since we just dry-hopped it with another ounce of cascade. We'll bottle in a week, then wait another 2-3 to try it out.

I'm planning to post some Tucson photos next. Wife stuck me with a film camera out there (the horror!) so I have to get it developed first.

Cheers!

Project for a Good Friend

A little ways back, my friend Dominic asked me to help him make a chess table for his new house. He priced out some tables in catalogs, but the nice ones he liked were well over $1000. Plus, he wanted the satisfaction of building one himself the way he wanted it. The plan was to make it almost entirely out of walnut, with an inlaid chess board made from alternating walnut & maple squares. Here's the finished product...

I've been meaning to take a few photos of this table for the last 2 years, but for those of you who know me well, I can be quite the procrastinator... The photos are from Dom's upstairs den, with some very nice chairs that I'm sure his wife Sue picked out :-) This was the first piece I made for someone else and have to admit that it's the one project I'm most proud of. Dom tells me that he & his family are pleased too.

If memory serves, it took us about a month to complete the construction, working mostly nights and weekends in my shop. The walnut was given to us by another friend, who also happens to be a professional woodworker. A very generous gesture indeed. We reverse-engineeredg the design of a similar table from a magazine, using a traditional shaker design. The table's legs are tapered on both inside edges and the stretchers have a bead detail along the bottom to dress them up a bit. The finish is 4 coats of a high-gloss Sutherland Welles polymerized tung oil. Dominic applied the finish himself. It left a very nice smooth finish but it took a little while to dry between coats.

Seeing this table again really has me motivated to get another project started. Any ideas?

Tink, Tink, Tink...

That's the sound of sleet against the windows of the house today. I'm just grateful that I can work from home.

New Tools!

Hello all. One peripheral benefit (errr...weakness?) of the windsor chair class I took is a new appreciation for good hand tools. So, I've been perusing Ebay lately looking for a few bargains. Luckily for me, I've found a couple.

I recently bought a Stanley #4 Type 11 smoothing plane (from about 1920), an outside caliper for doing lathe turnings, and an antique Stanley bevel gauge. A photo of a similar plane is shown in the photo. I doubt mine will be in this good of condition, but half the fun is restoring these old planes & bringing them back to life. I've put bids in on a few others as well, but they weren't successful. My wife is pleased that I still have the ability to practice restraint in this area, although I have been accused several times in the last week of having an Ebay problem...

Well, gotta go, there's auctions I'm watching (not...) :-P

Beer's still flat...

Now I'm stuck with ~1.5 cases of it. Disappointed...

Flat Beer & Frozen Pipes

There aren't many things that piss me off more than the two things mentioned in this post's title. I'll share a little bit about both today.

First, the beer...this being the hazelnut porter Russ & I made a few weeks ago. The yield was a bit low due to the crappy siphon I had. It wreaked havoc on my primary to secondary racking and cost me a little under a half-gallon of beer. That being said, when it came time to bottle, I cut back on the priming sugar since I didn't want to over-carbonate the beer and potentially cause bottles to spew their caps all over the kitchen. The last few beers I've made have been too carbonated, not to the point of exploding, but those that have to wait for 10 minutes after pouring due to the 4 inches of head in the glass. I definitely wanted to avoid this. SO, what happens next? I crack a few of these beers with great expectation only to find out they're flat. I mean TOTALLY flat. I can't tell you how disappointed I was. However, not wanting to throw in the towel, I decided to try & re-prime some of the bottles with more sugar. I figured the batch had nowhere to go but up, so what the hell? I haven't cracked one open yet but will share the results with you soon.

Now for those pipes...Beth has been very good at keeping the friends & family up to date on our house woes, so shouldn't be new to any of you. However, it IS relatively new to find out that you have a house can have pipes on the 2nd floor freeze when those on the 1st are fine. Sound strange? Well, giving full credit to the idiot who owned our house previously, our feed pipes to the second floor are right next to an uninsulated outdoor wall that happens to have some draft issues. I must admit that a little influence is also due to sub-zero wind chills we've been having in NY lately too. All of these things together equals no water in upstairs bathrooms. Luckily for me, the pipes were in reach and could be insulated and heat-traced without needing either a sledge hammer or a chiropractor. 3.5 hours on a ladder in my basement's stairwell was all it took. In my house, that's not too shabby...

On a completely unrelated note, I urge all of you who visit here to read the following. Over the last few weeks, there has been ALOT of press on the recent findings of the IPCC on global warming and the potential influence of man (and his CO2) on it. What I find fascinating about this topic in the press is the near addictive quality of buzzwords and sometimes unsupported conclusions that are reported. I'm of the opinion that much of what gets reported on this topic (given the current level of understanding) is likely more due to politicos and not scientists. I'd like to see far more SCIENCE reported and far less propaganda. However, science doesn't sell. That is unless geeks like me are reading it...

All's Well that Ends Well

Hey all. My apologies for being so lazy with my posts. BUT, thanks to my lovely wife bustin' my chops to get something done, I'm back....!

The title of this post says it all about the latter portion of my windsor chair class. I spent the better part of last weekend finishing it up. This was the second 3-day weekend (out of 2), with the expectation that I would be able to actually complete it. Luckily for me, I actually did, but not without some drama and a few near disasters...

I should have known that problems would arise when glue-up began. My first ever chair glue-up was no exception. It started out well, with turning tenons on a lathe. My first mistake was using too much of my prior woodworking knowledge as a basis. Rule #1 - CHAIRS ARE DIFFERENT. The sooner you accept this, the better off you'll be. So, with that in mind, I started assembling the legs & stretchers. This is shown on the right in the first photo (with Ferris making it look way too easy). Mine didn't go so well.

When I attempted to glue up the base assembly, I learned that I had made the tenons too fat, which didn't give me near enough time to make adjustments before the glue set up (Reference Rule #1 above). What happened next almost made my cry. When twisting the legs and stretchers to line them up, I heard a loud CRACK! The side stretchers both sheared right off . The 'lining' on this black cloud was that the legs were saved.

The rest of the class went much better. And I actually finished a day early. This took a colossal effort on Sunday (at the shop until 9 PM). I saw first hand what makes these chairs so strong. Every major arm, leg, and spindle piece is a wedged, through tenon joint. When done properly, it makes the parts near impossible to take apart. Below is an example of some of these wedges. It's a shot of the top bow where the spindles get secured. I just love the way the uncut wedges look like a bad Coolio-style hairdo. I deem this photo "Bad Chair Day". Bad pun, but I thought it was funny...

The whole process was quite enlightenening and very satisfying. Up until it was actually done, I had SERIOUS doubts about whether I could actually make a chair. Now I know I can, which is a really cool feeling. The last photo is the graduation shot with me & my chair, freshly painted and looking spiffy. The other chair is the one my instructor made. I must admit, mine didn't turn out too bad...Hooray!

The next thing I'm planning along these lines are a couple of stools with hand-turned legs. I want to do the proverbial "crawl-before-I-walk" thing in my shop since I won't have an instructor correcting my mistakes at every turn. I hope to start on those in the next few weeks.