Quick Tip: Using a Spray Bottle to Sanitize a Conical

I'm starting a new feature called quick tips. These are simple tips to help one's brewing process.

My first tip is this: Filling a spray bottle with Star San can be really useful for sanitizing a conical, and all its little parts. Before I attach the racking port and the dump valves, I spray the sanitizer under the bolts that attach them. Also, I spray sanitizer on the lip of the conical, before attaching the lid. Finally, after fermentation, when I go to use the racking port, I spray the inside of it before I open the valve.

The foaming action of the Star San gets in all the little crevices, killing all the nasties. I keep a rag handy to wipe the floor, as these parts will drip.

Cold Liquor Tank

Okay, you are a homebrewer and you know what a Hot Liquor Tank (HLT) is, right? Exactly, it is a vessel of some sort that feeds hot water to the mash and the sparge, as it is needed. What the hell then is a Cold Liquor Tank, and why the hell would you need one? Well, I've got one, and I'm going to tell you.

Let's face it. It is hot in Arizona, where I live. In fact, as I am writing this, it is 108° F. What that means for brewing is that I cannot cool my wort down to fermentation temperature, after the boil . The water coming out of the tap is 80+° F degrees and the best that I can cool to is maybe 88° F, with my immersion wort chiller.

That is where my Cold Liquor Tank comes in. Basically, I have a big tub that I can fill with ice and water, hook up a hose to, and gravity feed ice water though my immersion wort chiller. This will drop my wort temps, not just to ale temps, around 65° F to 70° F, but even to lager temps, at 45° F to 50° F.

The process works like this: After I turn off the heat to my boil, I immediately turn on the tap water to my chiller. After this, I cool the thing down. Once it levels off to as low as it will go with tap water, usually around 88° F, like I mentioned above, I turn off the water. I then move the inlet hose over to my Cold Liquor Tank, which sits on a wine refrigerator in our house, about 6 feet off the ground. I get on a chair and fill the thing with ice and water, and feed the ice water through the inlet hose, wort chiller, and to my outlet hose. It usually moves at a slow trickle. As it does this, I keep adding water to the ice, to keep the ice water flowing. This will eventually get my wort to fermentation temperature.

I'd first heard of a Cold Liquor Tank when I toured Live Oak Brewing Company, in Austin Texas, a while back. In fact, I blogged about that trip right here. When I was on that trip, I saw the thing and said, "I got to have one of those." It's made my summer brewing better ever since.

Mental_Floss: The Porter Flood of 1814

I love Mental_Floss, a magazine devoted to interesting intellectual factoids that may be useless in everyday life, but makes for oh-so-cool water cooler talk. This month's issue of Mental_Floss (July-August 2007, volume 6, issue 4) contained an article entitled "10 Drinking Stories That Put Yours to Shame." This article, as the title suggests, is made up of 10 amusing stories about alcohol production or consumption, which is right up my alley.

One particular story in the article regales the reader with a historical anecdote about a brewing disaster that took place in 1814, in London, at a brewery named Meux's Horse Shoe. Apparently, that brewery used wooden fermentation vessels and one of the metal support rings that held a vessel together failed, causing it to dump its contents. Upon doing so, the vessel, at 4,000 barrels, destroyed the rest of the wooden vessels in the brewery causing a beer flood of biblical proportions. One and a third million gallons of porter flooded the streets of London, destroying buildings and killing all in its path.

When I read this story, I became very excited. It is a cool thing to read about beer. It is even cooler to read about beer history. But to find a story about beer history in a non-beer publication is simply the coolest thing of all. If you can, pick up a copy, or even better, a subscription. You won't regret it.

Sideways: the Movie vs. the Book

Note: this post contains spoilers for both movie and the book.

I've seen Sideways a couple of times, about a year ago. Recently, though, my wife bought me a copy on DVD, and I watched it again this weekend. After seeing the movie, I got a bug up my butt to read the book. As a result, after a couple of quick calls, I found a copy at a used book store nearby. This too, I read this weekend. Both are fresh in my mind, therefore I thought that I'd give a critique, comparing the both of them.

For those who have not seen the movie or read the book, basically, the story unfolds as a tale about about two middle aged men. One character, Miles, is portrayed as a depressed, divorced, aspiring writer, who is also a wine buff. The other character, Jack, is a washed up actor, who is getting married in a week. They travel from LA to nearby Santa Ynez wine country, to spend a week drinking wine and playing golf, as a sort of send off for Jack, before he stumbles into married life. Needless to say, it does not quite go as planned as Jack decides he is going to have one last fling with a girl he meets behind the counter of a wine tasting room. Miles also falls for a long time acquaintance from previous trips that works at his favorite wine country restaurant, the Hitching Post. The whole thing is wrapped up in a sort of bitter-sweet comedy of sorts, building on one absurd situation after another, up to a climax of Jack's marriage that almost does not happen.

Though the story is fiction, the places in the book are very real. In fact, Julie and I visited many of the places featured, last year, including the wineries, Sanford, Foxen, and Fess Parker (aka Frass Canyon, in the movie), and also the restaurant, the Hitching Post.

Comparing the movie and book, first, the movie unfolds like a Cliff Notes version of the book. Though most of the scenes in the movie also appear in the book, they do not appear necessarily in the same order, and are abbreviated compared to the book. These scenes include going to Miles mom's house to get money, traveling to different wineries, the double date with the girls that become their love interests, drunk dialing Miles' ex-wife, a night of wine at one of the girl's house, golfing, getting Jack's wallet back after it is stolen, crashing the car they drive, the wedding, and so on.

There are some things, though, that give the book a slightly different feel. First and foremost, the book unfolds as a first person narrative from Miles' point of view, which gives the book a more personal feel than the movie. The reader really gets to know Miles: his anxiety and depression, his personal feelings women, and so on. Especially, though, you get his take on wine, and his love of Pinot Noir. In fact, the book reads like wine tasting notes with a story interspersed in-between.

In addition, like many books with a movie adaptation, the book version simply has story elements and details that are left out of the movie version for brevity.

One example that is in the book, but not in the movie: there is an important chapter about boar hunting that sets up some details for later. During that scene, Miles tries to avoid the absurd situation of his best friend cheating on his soon-to-be wife by convincing him to go boar hunting with another character we meet earlier in the book. That scene turns crazy as they are the ones getting hunted, not the boar. Jack gets the first of his injuries in that scene. In fact, unlike the movie, Jack's injuries occur throughout the second half of the book, not as a single instance brought on by a scorned woman, like the movie portrays.

There are also details that are changed for seemingly no apparent reason. For instance, the character in the movie, Stephanie, who Jack hooks up with for some hot sex, is named Terra in the book. Even the details of that character is changed. In the movie, she is a hot Asian chick, who rides a motorcycle. In the book, she is a blond New Yorker that drives a Jeep. And speaking of cars, in the movie, the two men drive an old Saab through wine country. In the book, it is a 4Runner. However, in both cases, the vehicles get wreaked at the end.

Because movies are often abbreviated versions of books, like mentioned above, there are common sentiments that movies, in general, are never quite as good as the book versions. However, that is not necessarily true, in my opinion. In fact, there are important scenes in the movie that simply do not appear in the book. Two scenes come to mind.

First, there is a powerful scene at Stephanie's house when Miles is asked by Maya, his love interest, about Pinot Noir, the wine varietal he is so obsessed with. When asked why he likes it so much, he says the following, as quoted from IMDB in the memorable quotes section for the movie:

Uh, I don't know, I don't know. Um, it's a hard grape to grow, as you know. Right? It's uh, it's thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It's, you know, it's not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and uh, thrive even when it's neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. You know? And in fact it can only grow in these really specific, little, tucked away corners of the world. And, and only the most patient and nurturing of growers can do it, really. Only somebody who really takes the time to understand Pinot's potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Then, I mean, oh its flavors, they're just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

What makes the scene so powerful is that we, as the audience, realize that he is describing himself to Maya, the girl he is falling for, not just the wine he loves so much.

Another scene comes to mind: Throughout the movie, Miles talks about his prized bottle of wine, a 1961 Cheval Blanc. The movie climaxes after he has been dissed by the woman he loves and humiliated by his ex-wife; he drinks the wine in a fast food restaurant out of a plastic cup, gulping it down like soda. That powerful idea simply does not appear in the book.

Which is better: movie or book? I do not know. They are two different art mediums that both effectively tell a similar story. I like them both for different reasons. I recommend experiencing both. As a result, I've added both to my sidebar as recommendations.

"Show Me the Way to Go Home"

When someone talks about the movie, Jaws, all they have to do is mention the words, "the scene," and people know exactly what they are talking about. It is a scene that involves drinking, showing of scars, and a famous story about the sinking of the Indianapolis, the ship that delivered "the bomb" during World War II. It is in that scene that we learn, as the audience, that sharks have "lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes."

There is a song that accompanies that scene, where they are drinking, and coincidently, when I have a couple of cocktails, I tend to sing that very song. I was curious about it so I looked it up. Apparently the song was written by Irving King and is covered by the Andrews Sisters, Ben E. King, Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, and possibly others. Unfortunately, there is simply no other information on Irving King that I can find, other than he authored the song.

The lyrics to the song are as follows:

Show Me the Way to Go Home

Show me the way to go home
I'm tired and I want to go to bed
I had a little drink about an hour ago
And it went straight to my head
Everywhere I roam
Over land or sea or foam
You can always hear me singing this song
Show me the way to go home.

Thanks to the magic of the Internets, I am a little wiser about one of my favorite drinking songs.

My Worst on the Job Injury

And now for something completely different.

My oldest friend Brian has a excellent blog called Neutral Buoyancy. There he is doing a series on a job he and I had together at a steak sandwich shop in the late 80s, my first job. I suggest checking it out right here.

Inspired by his series, I'm going to tell a story, not about the steak sandwich shop, but rather about my second job, working at a pet shop.

As anyone can guess, working in a pet shop is a little nuts. My job there mostly involved taking care of the animals before the shop opened. In fact, one of my many duties included cleaning aquariums.

One particular morning, I was wiping the inside of the aquariums as I did every morning, when I came to the Firemouth Ciclid tank, a particularly aggressive form of fish. My hand gripped a green scrubby that I used wiped off the algae spots.

As I cleaned, the ciclids regarded my hand closely, watching it move up and down, and up and down, over and over. After a time, one particular ciclid decided to chomp down on the back of my hand, thinking that it looked a little like breakfast.

Startled by the sharp pain, my hand pulled up quickly, mostly on reflex. In doing so, it hit the lid of the aquarium, which unfortunately tumbled into the water, beside my hand.

This lid, like most aquarium lids, had a florescent light attached to it. The light blinked out with a zap as the power rerouted from light through my freshly bit hand and the rest of my body, out to the floor.

Stumbling back quickly, pulling my hand out of the water, I smashed into a large display of 10 gallon aquariums for sale that were neatly stacked about shoulder height. These came crashing down about the same time that I hit the floor, one after another, with the sound of breaking glass.

Just then, the owner walked into the shop to see me flailing on the floor, surrounded by broken glass and water, half electrocuted. I thought that I was to be fired on the spot. However, she simply pointed and laughed, thinking that it was the funniest thing she ever saw. That is how it goes when you work in a pet shop.

And that, my friends, was the worst on the job injury I've ever had.