Long Time No Taco

When we last left our hero, I was about to transfer my first batch of home-brew to a glass carboy for the first time! Did that go smoothly? Did tiny single-cell organisms perform the miracle of converting sugars into alcohol and carbonation? Does anyone get my PUN-ny blog titles?!? All that and more in this next installment of Long Time No Taco: I have been very busy in the kitchen, and a lot has happened! This is an Alot, by "The Oatmeal". Sadly, Alot has not happened. Transferring my peanut butter porter to the glass carboy for secondary fermentation went smoothly. I rarely get to use words like "smoothly" when describing home brewing; something unexpected always seems to crop up. such as 10 days later, when I went to bottle the beer, using my brand new bottle capper... Porter goes is... ...Porter comes out! After transferring the beer back to the ale pail with some maple syrup to help bottle condition (the yeast eats this new sugar source t...

Against the Grain's "Massage a Mystic", Wood variety My days of drinking until I puke ended when my passion for craft beer began. I still get drunk occasionally, but now it happens after drinking a few different, usually new, beers with higher alcohol content than what your sports bar has on tap. Honestly, I cannot remember the last time I drank more than two of the same thing. Ten years ago, as my college days of binge drinking were getting started, a new phenomena was also born: Binge-watching television shows! I am just as guilty of this today, and Karl Marx could never have predicted, Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the great pushers of this new opiate of the people. Currently I caught up to the still-airing CW series "The Flash", and I am pacing myself to try and make Netflix' "Jessica Jones" last a little longer, but I only have two episodes left. As much as I loath marketing, I must also confess how much I love this clever commercial...

Here is an update on my hard-cider brewing! If you read about my trip to Dutchess County , you may recall I mentioned doing some weird measurement taking. That was using a hydrometer to take the apple-pear cider's "Original Gravity" - indicating how much sugar (and other "dissolved solids") are in my cider to be fermented. That number was 1.047. That number, on its own tells me very little, except that the maximum potential  alcohol content is almost 6.2%.  Two weeks have passed, and yesterday I bottled that cider. I'll describe that step in a second, but wrapping up the heavy, gravity talk (hey, you should know by now: I love my puns), I took another reading to find the new specific gravity was 1.002, meaning almost all of the dissolved solids had been turned to alcohol. This tells me two things: My apple-pear cider will have a 5.88% ABV, and with almost no sugars left unfermented, it will taste extremely dry! As I type this, I am drinking a "...