Greetings to all from sunny San Diego, CA! That's right, we have sun again! I never thought I'd say this...but I was beginning to worry about how much overcast we were having.
So -- since the title of this blog is WoW oriented, I'll go ahead and get the obligatory festivities out of the way:
Suhli - Destroyer's End. iLvl 396. His raid team disbanded a few weeks ago and I was left high and dry at 172/333 of the crystals he needed to complete the next part of the legendary dagger quest. My inability to find a suitable raid team stems from the fact that the primary raid night (Tuesday) is already devoted to another team and I'm not looking for a raid team that raids more than once per week. I also tend to be shunned by teams that have another rogue because they don't want to have to share the legendary loot.
Freegrazer - Destroyer's End. iLvl 393. Raids on Tuesday nights as a healer for Insane Horde Posse. We've finally started to hit our stride and have an actual DPS/Heals rotation going on. This team is only one night a week, so it leaves the rest of the nights open for ??? or ????.
Ilhus - The bastard child of unorginal names has actually hit level 85. I don't raid with him, but he does the LFR weekly in the hopes that the loot on Madness of Deathwing wont blow giant Kong-sized monkey balls.
The rest (while not incosequential) will be saved for another day. Even though Suhli is not in a raid team and Freegrazer is, I still consider him my main.
Oh, did I mention I'm in the MoP beta? Ya..there's that...and that's for a different time. I didn't come here to talk about World of Warcraft....I came here to talk about something far more important: Beer.
A couple months ago I picked up a homebrew kit from www.windriverbrew.com. It only really required that I picked up some bottles and a brew kettle. Other than that, it was good to go.
I whipped up the first batch shortly after. "Black Bear Brown Ale". The batch turned out pretty good overall. I was kinda impressed at the ease of the entire process. Before I go too much further, I should mention that I am brewing extract kits from the same website. I wont go into the details about what that actually means yet, because it is not important to the topic.
The first batch stayed in primary fermentation for about 6 days. (Short, I know...I learned.) I then bottled it and started drinking a bottle every two days. The brew was really good. Carbonation was perfect by the time I got to the second week of bottle conditioning.
The second batch was a dunkelweizen. I picked up a glass carboy for secondary fermentation with this batch. I left it in primary fermentation for about 8 days. I then moved it to secondary fermentation for 10 days. This was an interesting thing to see. Although there was little to no airlock activity, being able to actually see the beer let me watch the remain "free" yeast cells floccuate to the bottom of the carboy. Although dunkelweizen is a darker beer, it was easy to see the difference in clarity from the first batch of Brown Ale. We bottled this beer about two weeks ago. The initial tasters were from Grolsch bottles that had conditions for 2 days, 6 days, and 8 days. The Grolsch bottles seemed to do wonders for speed carbonating, but I saved one for this weekend. What I noticed this weekend (12 days) is that the beer in the Grolsch bottle was actually losing some of it's carbonation. Interesting, I enjoy those bottles because they are sturdy and flip-tops are awesome, but I worry that I may not always get the best result from them.
The third batch is an English Bitter. It has been in primary for 6 days. I plan to leave it in primary for 10 days and then move it to secondary for 2 weeks. From the hydrometer tube, I can tell that this beer has the potential to be one of my favorite recipes. I really, really love hoppy beers and this beer smells heavenly. Patience is going to be key here. I really want this to turn out well.
Up next (when the primary is free) is "Deep Woods Stout". I'm excited to brew this one too. I plan on letting it sit on the yeast cake for a couple weeks and then moving it to secondary. In secondary, I am going to shave some of the high end 99% cocoa baker's chocolate into it and let it sit for two to three weeks.
This should be exciting.
I'll keep everyone posted on here.
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