Naturally the first post after the one where I complain about how hot it is would be followed by the one where I say that it is starting to feel like Autumn, right? Not that I am complaining or anything. Granted, part of this is probably inspired by the recent glut of e-mails that I have been receiving about Halloween products. I mean, I always get Halloween related e-mails, but everyone is revealing their 2025 product lines, so there have been a ton of them recently.
It’s kind of weird, but there haven’t been a whole lot that have really inspired me to run out and take a look. The new moving skeleton from Home Depot is kind of cool and there is an alien that I would love to get from Horror Dome, but I don’t know that I will be spending a whole lot on decorations this year.
Full disclosure: I have already received two huge shipments of the Lemax Spooky Town stuff, so I kind of already have. It’s just all interior stuff this time. Looks like I will be using all of the table space available in the house this year.
Not a whole lot of exciting stuff going on this week. The Mrs is struggling with a bum knee, but the swelling is down and her range of motion is returning.
I had one of those bad news/good news/bad news moments yesterday morning. I went into the basement and noticed a bunch of rusty looking water had made a trail into the floor drain. I immediately assumed we had a leaky pipe. After looking around for a while I found a cork on the floor. It wasn’t a leaky pipe. Two of the bottles of the triple berry mead had popped their corks and poured out all over. Apparently I hadn’t pasteurized those as well as I thought I had.
Fortunately I still have two bottles left. I re-pasteurized and recorked those for later consumption.
Listening To: I’ve once again been burning through the audiobooks. I finished The Lost Tomb and moved on to Every Time I Go On Vacation, Someone Dies by Catherine Mack. I adored this book about a mystery author who gets tied up in a real life murder plot. The story is told in the first person from the POV of the author of the books with plenty of hilarious third wall breaks. You have to love it when the author asks if you have solved the mystery yet, when she herself hasn’t in terms of the narrative. After finishing, I immediately put the second book in the series on hold in the library.
After that I burned through Chuck Tingle’s Lucky Day. If you only know this author from the hysterical Tingleverse books, you owe it to yourself to pick up his more mainstream fiction. Lucky Day focuses on Vera, a wunderkind in the area of statistics and how her life is torn apart on the day of the Low Probability Event when fish rain from the sky and other highly improbably events occur. For most people, the day was traumatic, but for someone who lives a perfectly ordered life based upon how things are likely to turn out? Vera is thrust into a world of shadowy government agencies and shady casino owners with a healthy dose of extra-dimensional oddness thrown in.
I highly recommend both of these titles.
Currently Reading: How to properly keep from making bottle bombs out of fermented beverages.
Current Obsession: Nothing rising to the level of obsession this week, but we did start Alien Earth and the new season of Wednesday. I’m interested to see the Alien take on evil corporations other than my beloved Weyland-Yutani. Also, so far the show has been black goo and Engineer free which makes me exceptionally happy.
Dragon’s Roost Press News
Lots of boring behind the scenes work going on: editing, formatting, etc.
This Week’s Rambling: Tales of the Big Fermenter
I finally went ahead and started the finishing process on the giant ass batch of mead that has been sitting downstairs. It’s a simple show mead, just honey and water, but it was made in one of the giant carboys the previous owners of The New House™ so generously left us. I’ve been putting it off because those things are heavy as Hell. That was how I spent all afternoon yesterday. I shlepped the carboy upstairs, then siphoned it into the 6.5 gallon fermenter so I could back-sweeten. Surprisingly, this one didn’t require too much additional honey.
Sidenote: this was the batch that erupted in primary and I ended up losing about a gallon of. I was worried that the taste would be off because I had to add extra water to make up for the loss. Fortunately, it was pretty damn good.
After getting the taste to where I wanted it I siphoned the mead into smaller containers for pasteurization (see above for why). This meant that I got to use my new immersion circulator which I will be referring to as a sous vide because that’s a lot easier to type even if it’s not particularly accurate (sous vide is the cooking method if we are being totally accurate). Basically it’s convection cooking with water. The actual device looks like a really thick curling iron. You place the items (in vacuum bags if cooking) into a water bath and the sous vide brings the water to temp and circulates it. This is perfect for pasteurizing, if you have a big enough pail for the water.
In order to kill off the yeast (sob), one needs to use heat. While there are chemicals that can make them go dormant, as will cold, in order to insure the cessation of fermentation, you need to bring the material up to a higher temp.
Sidenote: this is also a great way to kill off bacteria which will prevent you from getting sick, despite what the worm vehicle in charge of the nation’s health might tell you. Just you wait, next year they will be trying to foist spoiled milk off as “dairy cubes.”
Ahem. Sorry about that.
Anyhoo, as you want to get the mead up to around 140F for 20 to 25 minutes to be sure, I was setting the sous vide for 35 minutes. This allowed the mead in the bottles to get up to 140 from room temp despite the fact that the water was already there after the first gallon jug. Fortunately, the one I acquired (via gift cards from doing online surveys) has a phone app so I could set it and leave the room. I still monitored it with a thermometer, just to be on the safe side.
The plan is to let these sit for a couple of days to let any left over material settle out, then bottle. Not pictured above is the half gallon I have in the fridge for immediate consumption, and another gallon that I have put aside for another project.
Insert evil laugh here.