Once again, I’m obliged to pass along something I saw over at Daringfireball. If you’ve ever read Slaughterhouse Five, you need to stop what you’re doing and go read the letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote home after being held POW in Dresden:
Letters of Note – Slaughterhouse Five
In fact, even if you haven’t read Slaughterhouse Five, go read the letter. Then go read Slaughterhouse Five.
Some days just hit you out of nowhere. This morning I got an email informing me that CDBaby.com sent me a payment.
Wait. What?
After Call it Karma dis-banded I left our CDs up for sale on CDBaby*, but it’s been forever since we sold anything. July of 2008, to be exact.
Needless to say, I was a little surprised that we sold two copies of “Days Go By” last week. What’s even more surprising is that the purchaser was a music wholesaler in Irvine, CA that specializes in vinyl, indy and import music. I’m still trying to wrap my head around that.
*I ended the digital distribution (through iTunes and whatnot), because I didn’t want to have to keep track of sales of the cover songs for royalty purposes.
I had been wanting to brew a Hefeweizen, and the latest issue of Brew Your Own had a Hefeweizen recipe, so after a trip to the home brew supply shop to pick up some ingredients early this week, I finally got around to brewing it today. I strayed a bit from the recipe, changing the malt extract amounts to make it easier to purchase what I needed. The recipe called for 4.4 pounds of liquid wheat extract and 2.2 pounds of amber. Since the liquid malt extracts come in 3.3 pound cans, I just did 3.3 of each. If I hadn’t done that, I would have had to buy 6.6 pounds of the wheat extract and end up having to store left-overs from both extracts. That would have made the recipe needlessly expensive, and I hate trying to store liquid extract.
Also, the store didn’t have hallertau hops in stock, so I made a substitution there. Also, the recipe only called for a single hop addition (the bittering hops), but since I didn’t need the entire ounce of hops I purchased for bittering, I used the remainder as a flavoring addition.
Anyway, the biggest news for this batch is that it’s the first batch that I used an aeration kit to properly aerate the wort. I’ve gotten decent results without aeration, but I don’t think I’ve hit the target final gravity on any of the beers that I’ve done. The last batch, which was an Imperial Brown, so it had a high starting gravity, was not even close. (The beer still tastes good, but it’s definitely not “Imperial”.)
So, we’ll see how much of a difference this makes. I have high hopes. I’ll finally be able to do a Barely Wine, and other higher gravity brews, now that I have the aeration kit. There’s no way I could have attempted any thing like that in the past.
