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

Top Ten Carl10

For the sake of remembering, I thought I'd record my top ten memories from my 5-year reunion.  But first I'm going to list the bottom four:

1. Three people who were a huge part of my Carleton experience were not there to share in the fun.
2. Goodhue bathrooms- I do not miss the communal bathroom situation in the dorms.
3. The beer provided was awful.
4. The worst 5k I've ever run, which may have had to do with too much of #3...

But really, no part of the weekend was actually bad.  Overall I'd say it was amazing and exhausting; just one emotional high after another.  So here's my top 10 favorite moments/activities from last weekend in no particular order:

1. Sharing the beer Kevin and I brewed with our class.  My favorite part of brewing (and cooking for that matter) is sharing what I made with friends having them (hopefully) enjoy it.
2. Constantly seeing and spending time awesome people I hadn't seen (at least very often) in 5 years (so many hugs!).
3. Being reminded just how beautiful Carleton is. The Chapel, the buildings, the sign, the Arb, the Turbines... Plus the weather was gorgeous, the clouds were huge, and everything was so green.
4. Tubing down the Cannon River (how did I never do that when I was living there? So relaxing and so much fun!  And my tube had cup holders for beer, and what could be better than that?).
5. Hanging out with chemists at the Cow out on the deck with some good beer and free sunglasses.  Getting golf cart rides there and back from the cool student workers wasn't half bad either.
6. Touring the new wind turbine (we got to go inside!).
7. Re-visiting Wang's Corner with a few of my Geo-in-the-Field classmates and finding out current students had read my Comps, which is either exciting or embarrassing (TBD once I dig it up and re-read it).
8. Frisbee! (because this is Carleton, after all).
9. The Ten Talks which I almost didn't even go to and was glad I did because my classmates are amazing and interesting and inspiring.
10. Dancing and partying and general merriment every night!

Beer and Running; or: a disjointed life update with pictures!

From the Turkey Trot
last November.

I seem to be partaking in a lot of beer and running recently, and I am perfectly okay with that.  Especially because I now have sweet penguin tights to run in.  And I could drink in them too, I suppose.

Thanks for the photo,
Amy's snapchat!

I've now tripled the amount of beer I've ever brewed, first spending Valentine's day by myself making a delicious, hoppy, 9% IPA, and then brewing a yet-to-be-tried single hop ale with my friend Kevin to bring to our 5 year college reunion later this month (hell yeah #Carl10).

Surprisingly not blurry since we were running when I took this.
Also I think I look a lot like Amy in this picture for some reason.
Well, more like her than usual.

We also adorably raced Bay to Breakers as Calvin and Hobbes.  A lot of people didn't know who we were, which makes me sad for todays youth who will never know the wonders of Calvinball, Hamster Huey and the Ooie Klabooie, or Spaceman Spiff.  Calvin and Hobbes is easily my favorite comic strip.

BoulderBolderBoulder

Then for Memorial Day weekend, I went to Colorado with Amy, Abe, and Scott and visited Lauren, Grant, and Colin and it was awesome and we drank lots of beer and ate lots of food and ran the BolderBoulder 10K and watched the Giants beat the Rockies and got rained on and it was awesome.  I also got a hole-in-one in mini golf, learned a challenging drinking game called four quarters, and saw dinosaur fossils/trace fossils.

Mike had run 50 miles at this point.

My cousin decided to run a 100 mile race for some insane reason, and my mom, sister, and I helped pace a 25 mile chunk of it, mostly in the dark.  I don't know what makes people want to go through that- but Mike finished it and I am incredibly impressed and also sore from the measly 12ish miles I ran with him.

Baby's First Bottl(ing Day)

As promised: a blog entry about bottling!

I broke my bottling into two days of work.  Day one was infinitely worse.

DAY 1:  Label removing from approximately 57 bottles of beer (on the wall*)
It was tedious and after I was about 2/3 of the way done, my dad found a more efficient way to achieve my goals of removing all the adhesive.

Washed, de-labeled, and ready for sanitizing!

DAY 2: The actual bottling
First I transfered all of the delicious smelling uncarbonated beer into the bottling bucket along with a sugar solution (same kind of bucket, just with a spigot).

That's my "stop taking pictures and help me" look.

Then I filled forty-some odd bottles with the beer with a nifty little filling tube thing.  My mom helped a lot.  The red contraption on the counter in the picture below is what closed down the caps on the bottles.

And now we wait, again.  The beer should be fully carbonated in about two weeks.  And then I can drink the fruits (hops?) of my labor!

Side note: I'm still taking suggestions for my "brewery" name!

*No beer was actually on the wall.  Hopefully you don't have that song stuck in your head now like I do.

Adventures in Alcohol

Maybe it's because I'm a geologist, maybe it's because I collect bottle caps, or maybe because it just goes so well with baseball, but the truth is, I drink a lot of beer.  And I think my parents noticed, since for Christmas they bought me a beer brewing kit.

So what did I do while that super exciting Super Bowl was on yesterday?  You guessed it, I brewed some beer!

Ingredients: grain, hops, malt, and yeast! (not pictured: water)

I thought I'd enjoy a beer while brewing.

Science!

And ready to ferment.

And now I wait.  In 3-6 weeks it should be ready to bottle.  Which means in 3-6 weeks I need to accumulate about two cases worth of beer bottles (as if I needed an excuse to drink more beer).  So check back here in 3-6 weeks to hear how bottling goes!  And a couple weeks after that, I'll hopefully have 5 gallons of delicious red ale (name TBD).

A recent history of my life in photos

Boston has a lot of US History.  There are a lot of statues of Paul Revere.  I even saw his grave.

I found the nearest ship... 

...also the nearest penguins.

The Williams-Mystic reunion started out on a boat, so you know it was an awesome weekend.

Here is Jim Carlton auctioning a narwhal puppet.

Back to California, here we are in Golden Gate Park watching The Head and the Heart at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.

And then The Head an the Heart were at Sophia's in Davis.

Then I went to Colorado to visit Grant, Colin, and Lauren, and apparently some penguins at the Denver zoo.

We went on the Coors tour.  Golden was lovely.

We toured SLAC in Palo Alto and got a crash course in particle physics.

The Baylands Preserve was nearby and pretty.

The Giants won the Wold Series and San Francisco went crazy.  I was there and very happy.

Amy and I were both historical figures (in a way) for Halloween.  We also made a devil-chicken scarecrow.

Our pumpkins! Can you guess which two are mine?