Curling eh. Years ago I knew a man who was a member of the St. Paul Curling club on Selby Ave. I don't know if it is still there or not. He even got the sport going in the high school ranks for a while in the 1960's. Sadly he passed away about 20 years ago. He was also a whale of an oarsman in his day.

Cheers

Sgt.Joe

Minnesota Crunchers

NASCAR season does not start until the middle of Feb... You might as well off season test with the brewers.

That would make two TRUE NASCAR fans in this team...Nothing wrong with having a HOMEBREW (or several) while watching the RACE.

Where else on WCG are you going to get recipes and brewing advice so you're ready for the new season?

Cheers
FB

Hey, we're 97th now!

Brink, do you brew ... or have you ever tried anyone's homebrew? For those of us who do, what sort of recipes have you been preparing? This week I bottled a batch of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale and a batch of Brown Ale, and also a small batch of excess wort from the two that I combined in a third carboy; don't know what that will be like, but it will be beer. Whenever I transfer into my carboys -- (I know, I should use the larger capacity) -- I never seem to have room for all of the wort because of all the foam that I create during aeration (pouring back and forth between buckets). So I usually end up fitting only about 4 gallons or a bit more in a 5 gallon carboy, which is probably okay because it minimizes blow-off. So, depending on what I have left, I will either save it for a starter, or put it in a very small fermenter.

Anyway, I have an Irish Red and a Stout fermenting right now; trying to get ahead for the holidays. ... and I'm still trying to master my new BeerToolsPro software, so that's how I justify all this brewing to my boss (wife).

By the way, Fred, I'm sorry to hear about all your problems. I'm not electrician or computer guy, but that's weird -- that a ballast from a flourescent light could do that. Hmmmm. Maybe you had a spike in voltage or current that caused the ballast and the computers to go out at the same time. Hope you get things straightened out, and it's good to have you back.

Cheers.

Bill Velek

I am SO grateful to Brink for his help, and to the rest of you for sticking around and pushing.



* 2 gallons of water
* 5 lbs honey (orange blossom)
* 2 cans packed pumpkin
* 1 tbsp pumpkin pie spice
* twist of orange peel
* yeast

Procedure:
Boil, skimming, for one hour. Strain out the fruit and transfer to the fermentation container and add the orange peel. Cool overnight, add your favorite yeast and stopper with your fermentation lock. Ferment approximately 3-4 weeks. (Makes a killer pear mead and cherry melomel.) Both fruit and spices can be adjusted to taste. The general finish turns out on the dry side, so if you like really sweet mead, you may also want to increase the amount of honey.

I got this recipe from HBD.org... fermenting now. I put the spices and orange in a cheesecloth bag, left the mead in a bucket overnight with the spices in it, then removed and aerated to carboy, pitched Wyeast Mead liquid.



It was... the guy in the shop had just turned on the lights minutes before I got there. After spending 20 minutes shutting down machines on the UPSes, the facilities manager arrived and we looked at all the breakers, panels, transformers, sub-transformers, and nothing was tripped. Wierder yet, the very back end of the building and one 110v circuit in the lab close to the font of the building were still on. We called in a 24-hour electrician (this was about 5:30 am) who did the same circuit chasing we did, but he went to the service disconnects by the power company transformer out back, and the one feeding one of the two subtransformers had tripped.

For whatever reason, the short didn't trip the circuit's breaker, or the subpanel's breaker, or the main out of the transformer, or the main going into the transformer, but went all the way to the power grid before tripping something. That means the entire building power was in some unknown strange state for some period of seconds. What I found amazing is that servers on APC 5KVa Matrix (enterprise-class) UPSes lost drives, as well as one workstation that just got wierd. Whatever the characteristic of the power problem was, it wasn't filtered by the UPS.

Unfortunately, my computing troubles aren't over yet, I have been directed to find out the new company's policy on running "nonessential programs" (ie BOINC) on company computers. In the meantime, I'm limited to about 10 machines. Though I am planning to attempt to influence the corporate execs into donating the computing cycles if my inquiries show no guidance, the same "active dislike" that we're encountering in our recruiting efforts also lives in boardrooms. Stay tuned...