Cameron Stokes’s Blog

Since taking up homebrewing I’ve brewed 6 beers:

1. English Pale Ale – Crap!
2. Weizenbier – Crap!
3. India Pale Ale (IPA) – First drinkable beer.
4. Brown Ale – Definitely drinkable.
5. Pale Ale – Definitely drinkable.
6. Pale Ale – Undetermined, still fermenting.

As I mentioned, the first 2 were crap, flavorless crap.  Some of them are still in my kitchen cabinet reveling in their crappiness.  The IPA was the first drinkable beer and was actually quite enjoyable.  It was the first beer I was proud to give out to others and claim as my own.

Since then, each beer has been better and better, but I’m still not brewing as much as I want; I’ve done 6 beers in almost as many months.  Brewing 5 gallon beers I don’t get enough practice and don’t get enough chance to experiment.  I can’t drink or give away the beer quick enough.  So with some inspiration from Brewing One Gallon Batches from Ted’s Homebrew Journal I decided to try a one gallon batch this evening.

I purchased a 4 liter bottle of Carlo Rossi Chardonnay to use as a fermenter (found at Kroger, Publix only carried the 3 liter bottles), after a quick trip to Home Depot I had parts for a blow-off hose, and a couple hours later the boil was done and we transferred it to the fermenter.  One fatal flaw in this plan was noting being able to take a gravity reading.  I’ll pick up a graduated cylinder before doing my next batch.

For the first batch we didn’t stray too far from a typical recipe; a pale ale made from some light dry malt extract (DME) and U.K. Fuggles hops.

One gallon batch of homebrew.

I’m excited about the opportunities this opens up; more frequent homebrews and more experimental homebrews.  I plan on learning as much as I can about brewing in the coming months.

We ventured up to Bogart this past weekend to check in on the hop farm.  My expectations were low after talking to my cousin who had stopped by the farm the previous week and not seen any seen anything growing.  My mood quickly improved when we arrived Saturday morning and found 4 plants that were peeking out of the ground, 2 Cascades and 2 Willamettes.  The Chinooks haven gotten off to a slower start.

The hops are growing.

While there we strung up the lines for the vines to grow on and gave each row a good watering from the nearby creek.  We’re working on a way to pump water from the creek to make watering easier and will hopefully put an automatic watering system in place shortly after that.

More photos of the hops are here.

Pandora has finally released a BlackBerry version of their Internet radio player.  While not officially supported on T-Mobile (according to Pandora’s website) it installed and works great on my T-Mobile BlackBerry 8120.  Just go to www.pandora.com from your phone and click the download link.

The player has worked flawlessly while on WiFi, but I have had a few skips while on EDGE, not enough to make it unusable though.  Song transitions are quick as long as you don’t skip.  Skipping songs while using EDGE takes several seconds.  Skipping on WiFi takes only a couple seconds.  For fun I enabled WiFi while a song was playing to see if the application crashed and burned, but my music didn’t skip a beat and kept right on playing.  What remains to be seen is how quickly my battery is going to deteriorate due to downloading and playing music all the time.

I have a feeling my Mp3 player (also my BlackBerry) is going to take a back seat to this and the FM radio in my truck will see even less use (except for NPR).

Having taken up homebrewing lately, I decided to take it a step further and grow my own hops.  After doing some research regarding growing hops in Georgia, of which there is very little information, I picked up the book The Homebrewer’s Garden.  The section on hops is really short but has some good information on how to plant, care for, and harvest your own hops.

After waiting a few weeks for the hop rhizomes to become available, I ordered from Freshops on March 1st and received my goods a few days later.  I ordered three varieties: Cascade, Chinook, and Willamette.

Cascade, Chinook, and Willamette Hop Rhizomes

This past weekend I planted them on the farm up in Bogart.  It was the first nice weekend of the year and was a great excuse to get outside and have fun on the tractor.  The hops are split into three rows, one for each variety.

Bogart Hop Farm

There are 23 vines (Freshops sent me extra Willamette on accident).  From what I’ve read we won’t get much off them in the first year.  Next year I hope to be drowning in hops.

More photos are here.

Winter must not have liked my Spring is on the way post as today it decided to snow. I guess I underestimated the ability of a pea-brained rodent to predict the weather.

Snow

More photos are here.