Call me Ishmael, the award-winning brewer

Guess who entered her first homebrew competition and placed?

That's right: it was me!

This past Saturday was the 5th Annual Monterey Bay Oceanographic Homebrew Competition.  Entrants were from MBARI, NOAA/UCSC, MBA, and MLML* (though I was the only person from MLML there this year- had to represent the MoLa MoLa Brew Club!).

The beer I entered was a 5.3% alcohol content grapefruit IPA I called the Ishmael Pale Ale.  Here was my description:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul... then, I account it high time to brew a beer as soon as I can.  But for a whaling voyage, what a fine, hoppy brew, an India Pale Ale is; one that can be drunk on the first and last day at sea.  And shipmates- lest ye fall ill of scurvy- citrus be your friend; for in this beer I add that queer fruit from Barbados, the grapefruit." -Herman MelvAle

So pretty much I catered to the maritime nerds out there, which may have been lost on a few scientists (like the one who asked me what an "Ishmael" was), but I though I was pretty clever.

Here is a photo of all of the entries:

None of the beers were bad- most were pretty good (I would have been happy if I had brewed any of them- even the pilsner which turned out to be just PBR in a growler- but I was impressed at first since pilsners are hard to brew!).

The winner was Get Your Tiny Hands Off Our Public Lands! (which was an absolutely delicious Northeast style IPA- I voted for it), followed by Kitten Mittens, and then I got third place with my Ishmael Pale Ale.  Which I know I got for merit alone since I knew no one there to stack the votes (well, aside from myself and Kevin, but based on the number of voters, I doubt we swung the vote one way or another).  Considering we had some issues cooling the wort quickly, and I tried to siphon into the bottling bucket with a broken siphon at first, which definitely caused some oxygenation of the beer at a point where you don't want oxygenation, I am very pleased with the result!

If you're curious, the grapefruit flavor was added via a tincture of grapefruit zest and peel in vodka, dumped into the carboy two days before bottling.  Kevin did all of this since the beer was fermenting at his place, which was a HUGE favor considering he doesn't really like grapefruit (thank you, Kevin!).  The dregs of the bottle tasted the most grapefruity, so I may try inverting (gently) a bottle before drinking it next.

There were also a lot of dogs at the event, which is always a plus in my book, including this incredibly soft one who looked like a bear:

She posed for me because Kevin was holding a sausage, but still.  Speaking of Kevin and meat, he drank some of the beer after eating a spicy Vietnamese beef stew and said it was amazing, so apparently I made a great beer to pair with spicy foods.


*MBARI: Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
NOAA: National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Association
UCSC: University of California at Santa Cruz
MBA: Monterey Bay Aquarium
MLML: Moss Landing Marine Labs

Life at Sea

Life is pretty routine now that we're over a week in. We travel from seamount to seamount, survey and name them, and then dredge promising looking places. Every dredge has come up differently so far: we've lost one, gotten one tangled, got pelagic ooze, only sediments, only manganese nodules, pillow basalts, or some combination of those and other rocks. We've also pulled up some corals and even a starfish. I believe we've dredged 13 times now. We have been naming the seamounts after characters in Moby-Dick or other whale-inspired names since Walvis means whale in Dutch (we're studying the Walvis Ridge if I haven't mentioned that).

If you click on one of the links in my last post before I left, you can see some deck cameras, and the one of the rear hanger with the A-frame is where we deploy and pull up the dredge. The dredging itself is not too exciting, we sit and watch the tension of the wire, bottom depth, how much wire is out and other data (on screens inside) as we travel over the dredge tract and then pull up the dredge and hope there are some good rocks. For a couple of dredges I was allowed to control the winch, which was kind of cool, though not really as exciting as it sounds.

One of my favorite jobs so far is throwing the rejected rock samples overboard. That may sound silly, but it allows me to get outside and just throw rocks into the gorgeous water. Another favorite on the ship is in the food department: the Elvis Cake one of the cooks made yesterday. It's basically banana cake with chocolate chips and peanut butter frosting. It was amazing, but also means that all of the bananas have basically gone bad. But that's ok because we still have other fresh fruit which I will continue to eat copious amounts of since by the end of the cruise, the food will not be based so much off of fresh produce.

I know this is kind of a random post, but I thought I'd email something in to document what's going on out here in the south Atlantic (I can't actually access my blog out here- I basically can only access email).

Dredging!

We got to our first seamount yesterday! This means we first surveyed it and then deployed a dredge. The first dredge seemed to be going well until the end when it got stuck on something (presumably rocks) and after a long time trying to free it, the chain broke and we lost the dredge. The second dredge wasn't much more successful: we came up with a dredge, but only a few sad little rocks. The seamount (more technically, a guyot) we called Ishmael, and it looks like we may be naming our seamounts after Moby-Dick characters.

Otherwise, this is basically what my life has been looking like during the day:

Call me Kimmael

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off - then, I account it high time to get to the sea as soon as I can.

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick chapter 1