(This post was contstructed last night--All Repeal's Eve. Very timely am I.)

I currently have 7 gallons of a rye IPA boiling away on my kitchen stove. The two pots--I have to have two, because my stove burners aren't powerful enough to boil 7 full gallons--are situated among all four burners. Ingenuity at it's finest. It's also a good way to have the flames shoot out from under the sides of the pot and burn, say, the counter and, oh, I don't know, the refrigerator.

My apartment is hot, and because I didn't plan ahead and open the windows, they froze. I need to wait another twenty minutes before the steam will soften the ice around the storm windows so they will open.


You can clearly see this is after I was able to pry my window open. Also, please note the 17 lbs of spent grain in the background.

Of course, after completing tonight's tasks, I'll completely forget to close them, assuring a frozen, open window. In December.

I converted one of my closets, a closet that is very important to storage because my apartment is so small, into a make-shift fermenter. The buckets sit in cold water, which holds a fairly constant temperature compared to the air, allowing the fermenting wort to also stay fairly constant. The bucket on the left(it has a 5 lb weight on it because it wants to float away. You could say I n...you know what? I'm not going to go there. I'm not a racist asshole, no matter what mom and her boyfriend Darrell say) is...something. It's a double IPA, I think. The bucket on the right is a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale clone. It isn't the floaty type, I guess.





I haven't outgrown my apartment--my hobby has, though.

Oh. OH! I was just sitting on my couch typing this up while the wort boiled away in the kitchen, when I felt a small splishitty-splash hit my mouse hand. I passed it off as a weird muscle spasm, because I'm getting old and that's what happens to old people. But, it happened again. I looked up, and the molding around my windows were not only dripping, but bringing six months of unattended dirt down a make-shift waterfall. I may have to re-think this boiling large quantities of water in the winter thing, because condensation of this caliber might cause problems. Yes, might.

Fuck.

Last week I mentally tabulated all my beer-brewing expenses and was a little bummed that my hobby was getting too expensive. Is it a problem that I've considered eating spent grain from the brew process in order to save money on food and still be able to brew beer? It does? Oh.

Fortunately, though, I was able to track down all of my receipts* and was pleasantly surprised (probably a little drunk, too!) to learn that it wasn't as bad as I thought. Not even close to weekend's bar tab in Vegas. If I was going this weekend, that is.

Sigh. If you'll excuse me, I have 15 gallons of beer to drown my sorrows in. I might even drown my balls in it, I don't know. And the funny thing is, you won't know either!

*This coming from a guy that hasn't balanced his bank account in over 5 years--why in the hell would I save every fucking receipt from beer-making related purchases?