Cameron Stokes’s Blog

I’ve always been a big fan of Amazon.com; they have a huge selection of products, a great website, and great customer service, not to mention the Kindle is awesome.  My fondness for the company may have reached fanboy level based on my latest interaction with Amazon’s customer service.

A few months ago I purchased an Xbox 360 Live subscription card from Amazon to extend my Live subscription and be able to keep watching Netflix movies.  Previously I had purchased the subscription cards on Ebay for a decent discount but decided to go with Amazon as the price was only slightly higher and I had always had a good experience with the company.  I received the card and somewhere between the office, the truck, the kitchen table, and my desk at home the card was lost.  I searched for it several times and eventually gave up.  I was about to purchase another card from Amazon when I thought to email them, explain the situation, and see if they could do anything for me.  I sent the email Sunday evening and received a response the next day that they would ship me a replacement.  Two days later (today), I received the card.

Amazon already had a loyal customer in me, but my loyalty has gone up a notch.

Brewing slowed in recent months but we kicked it back into gear a few weeks ago and now have 2 brews fermenting.  Our first foray back into brewing was a 1 gallon all-Simcoe IPA.  This was our 6th brew and the first using Simcoe hops.

Here’s the recipe:

• Recipe Type: Extract
• Yeast: Safale S-04
• Batch Size: 1 gallon
• Boil Size: 1.5 gallons
• 2.00 lbs light DME
• 0.33 lbs Crystal
• 0.375 oz Simcoe – 60 min
• 0.375 oz Simcoe – 15 min
• 0.25 oz Simcoe – 5 min

We changed three other steps in the process.  The first was to add the steeping grains once the water reached 150 F instead of starting it in the cold water.  The second change was dumping the malt extract in prior to the water boiling.  This allowed us to control the boil better and not have to worry about boilover as much.  Our last change in the process was to wait until the hot break to add the hops.  This led to a longer boil time but again helped to control the overall boil.

The IPA sat in the primary fermenter for 10 days when we racked it to secondary.  In between the primary and secondary it tasted incredible.  All previous homebrews have been ok but nothing spectacular.  This batch was the first that made me say “Wow!”  It’s been in the secondary for 2 weeks so we’ll likely bottle it in the next few days.

Two weekends ago we brewed a full 5-gallon wheat beer.  We followed the same new techniques as with the Simcoe IPA but also decided to control the fermentation temperature which we had not done previously.  The fermentation bucket has been sitting in a cooler for 9 days and we’ve been cycling frozen water bottles every morning and night keeping the temperature between 66 – 70 F.  We’ll take a gravity reading in the next couple days to monitor fermentation.  The plan is to split the batch and keep half for a straight wheat beer and make a peach wheat out of the other half by racking to secondary and adding 2.5 lbs of fresh Georgia peaches.

I’m excited to taste each of these once they’ve conditioned, particular the IPA and peach wheat.  The next batch will be a stout.

A few weeks ago on Father’s Day, we took Rhonda’s dad out for brunch at Fado’s Irish Pub in Buckhead.  We had a great meal and after getting back home Rhonda realized she didn’t have her phone.  We called her phone hoping we would hear it somewhere around the house, called her parents hoping they somehow had it, called her sister hoping the same, and eventually called the restaurant to ask them to look for it; nobody had it.  When trying to think where else it could be Rhonda screamed “Google Latitude!”

Google Latitude

You see back in February when Google Latitude was released I signed us both up on our Blackberries and shared our locations with each other.  Since then it was mainly used for jokes that we were stalking each other or manually setting my location to random places to see if she would notice.  It soon lost its cool factor but it earned it all back when we pulled up Google Maps on my phone and could see her phone was still at the restaurant as of a couple minutes before.  I’m not sure what the hostess thought when Rhonda called her back and told her she knew it was there and could prove it, but she hopped in the car and went to pick up her phone.