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Today I received my official purple Science Center shirt so everyone will know I’m a person they can come to for asking questions, complaining, and seeing cool science experiments. I call it the Purple Shirt of Authority, and I’m glad to finally be a full employee, rather than just someone in training. Of course, learning is a continual process, but I’m now knowledgeable enough to point out the restrooms, the place where women can breast feed, the times of the Amazing Science Demos, and the cost of the special exhibit. I also just drip with interesting information and exciting scientific tidbits. The shirt informs everyone that I know said things. Sweet.

I also just started a batch of beer tonight! Last night I popped the yeast, which comes in a shiny mylar bag, with some fluid in it, and a smaller internal pouch containing more fluid. The inner pouch is hibernating yeast, and the fluid is a rich nutrient mixture. After popping the inner pouch and leaving the packet in a warm place overnight, it swelled up like a balloon as the yeasties woke up and began to feast on the nutrients, releasing copious quantities of CO~2~. I prepared a ‘mini-brew’ of just one liter of water, and 130mL of pale malt extract. I put it into a 2000mL erlenmeyer flask, added the now vigorous yeasties, and capped it with an airlock for sanitation. Hopefully by tomorrow it will be nice and frothy, and I’ll be able to make the 5 gallon main brew, with fresh hops, and quality malt, and start primary fermentation. Exciting!

Theoretically, primary fermentation will take about a week, after which I’ll move it from the 7 gallon bucket to the 5 gallon glass carboy. About two weeks after that, I’ll add some priming sugar to wake up the last few yeasties, then I’ll bottle the beer, wait a few weeks for it to carbonate, and enjoy! The beer is going to be an American-style Pale Ale, similar to Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. I’ve been saving up beer bottles, and I’ve got 22 so far that I’ve cleaned out and are ready for reuse. Unfortunately, I’m going to need a little more than twice that number to actually bottle all the beer. I might go for a mini-kegging system for the remainder, just to make my life easier. Cleaning and sanitizing 50 glass bottles isn’t my idea of a good time.

In case anyone out there is interested in brewing as well as computers, I might recommend the software QBrew, available at “http://www.usermode.org/code.html”:http://www.usermode.org/code.html. It is written with Qt, and works on Win32, Unix/Linux and OS X! I had to compile it myself, but it worked fine on 10.2.5, with Darwin Port’s Qt and Apple’s X11 server. The software uses a simple XML based recipe format, includes lots of preprogrammed ingredients, complete with their color values, bitterness values, extract values, and all sorts of other stuff that is hard to calculate yourself. Tweak the values to your specific ingredients, and it lets you know what specific gravity to aim for, an estimated alcohol percentage, and some standard bitterness and color values for comparing your brew to others, and to determine which style it falls under (if any). Its also nicely cross platform and open source! I’ve already become rather attached to it, and as I progress, I’ll be posting my recipes in .qbrew XML format (and maybe even write a PHP script to display them nicely for people without QBrew).

And finally…

Madalene leaves tomorrow for Florida for an international vision science/research conference where she and her team are presenting on their research! She’ll be gone all week, so I’ll be bored. Then shortly after she gets back, on the 17th, she graduates with her Master’s degree! Three cheers for Madalene!

Our house has a lot of gnats in it. I hope they keep away from my stash .. .. Mustache.

Ten points for whoever gets that mustache reference (its a hard one).