Another thing I have been doing lately is trying my hand at brewing beer.  A few months ago a friend and fellow beer lover brought up the idea of making our own beer. That sounded like a fantastic idea to me.  He had found a set of instructions for a basic ale on the how-to site instructables.  We bought the ingredients at The Lil’ Ole Winemaker Shoppe here in Nashville.  I had bought a MR. BEER kit quite a few years back,  so we used the brew keg fermenter from that for our fermenting container.

The basic process is pretty simple. You steep the ingredients in boiling water for awhile, let it cool, pour it into a fermenting container, add yeast, and let it sit in a cool dark place for a week or so. We used the tub in his guest bathroom, just in case of any accidents.

The next step is to prime the beer.  Priming is adding a little additional sugar to the beer so that the remaining yeast will feed on it an produce CO2 that will carbonate the beer. We did this by adding a small amount of regular cane sugar to each bottle before we added the beer.

The final step is bottling the beer. We used pry-off bottles that we had asked our friends to save. We rinsed them and then ran them through the dishwasher on an antibacterial cycle.  Keeping things clean and contaminant free is important throughout the entire process.  We filled the bottles from the spout on the MR.BEER keg and capped them using a hand bottlecapper.

After that, we waited another week or so, and the beer was finished. We ended up with about 25 bottle from a 2.5 gallon batch. Much to our surprise, it turned out delicious! We have started another batch, this time using amber malt extract instead of the light malt extract called for in the recipe. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

Update – May 24, 2009 – We debuted our second batch at a party Friday night! It was a hit. It turned out similar to Newcastle. It was also mentioned that it had hints of cotton candy flavor, but in a good way. 

Delicious Homemade Beer

I like to dabble in many hobbies.  One I have been trying to do more with so as to feel so guilty about having spent so much money on tools and equipment is electronics.

In the past I have wired up electric guitars, built an electric kazoo, repaired a car stereo, fixed laptop power jacks,  and fried a brain machine kit with my handy-dandy soldering iron.  This week I completed a cool LED blinky kit called a Lux Spectralis.

This kit is available from the designer’s website and also from Make: Magazine’s Maker Shed.  It has over 30 different, brightness, color, flash, and wash settings. The two I think are most useful are a five minute night light which runs at full brightness for a few minutes, then fades for a few minutes, before shutting off, and an hour night light that is on full for 30 minutes that fades for 30 minutes, before shutting off.

It was a fun and easy kit to build.  It took me about 30 minutes to solder together. The documentation was very clear, and at about $10, the price was right.

I like stuff, collections of objects that stimulate the mind and comfort the soul.  Over the years I have collected all kind of things, including toy cars, sports cards, stamps, coins, military insignia, and bottle caps. I have been given collections of things like little bottles, old luggage stickers, antique keys, and glass paper weights.  I have bought collections of things like Mardi Gras doubloons and beer bottle labels.  Having interesting things around makes me happy!

One of the things I like to collect are notgeld.  Notgeld  are usually small, colorful banknotes, but sometimes coins,  and other things, that were issued primarily in Germany and Austria by local banks, municipalities, etc., to deal with a lack of small change.

I love notgeld because they have beautiful artwork, there are many, many different ones to collect, and they can be had quite cheaply. I buy most of mine from ebay.

Here is a gallery of notgeld from Flickr that I discovered through MeFi.

A little over a month ago I took some of my yearly bonus and bought a Lanikai LU-21 ukulele.  I had became a secret Tiny Tim fan after buying the CD he did with Brave Combo, Girl,  from the cut-out bin as a joke.  It is mostly covers and it turned out to be funny and fantastic.  His “psychedelic” album from 1968,  God Bless Tiny Tim is great, too. I had toyed with the idea of getting one for years, even going so far at to buy a build your own uke kit that was never completed.  The thing that finally convinced me to take the plunge was seeing a video on YouTube of Julia Nunes playing “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys on the uke.

Ukes are cheap, relatively easy to play, and quite portable.  I am having a lot of fun with mine.  The band I play with has even worked up a few songs featuring the ukulele. (We are called Boy/Girl Party. No, you’ve never heard of us.  We have only ever played in the guitarist’s dinning room with my son, her roommate, and her cat as an audience. It is a blast!)

Thinking about getting one?  Here is a guide from Ukulele Hunt. (By the way, it is abbreviated in their logo as “Uke Hunt”  Say that out loud, but make sure there are no children in the room. *snicker!*)

Gotten one and don’t know what to do next? Ukulele Hunt offers a downloadable beginner’s guide in exchange for signing up for their How to Play Ukulele mailing list.

Want to learn some songs? Ukulele Hunt, Ukulelesongs.com and Ukulele Boogaloo! offer nice selections, much of which is in easy-to-read PDF format.

The Features – Some Kind Of Salvation

I can’t believe I forgot to include this album in my previous post.  The Features are great band from the Nashville area who simply rock.  I try to not to miss them any time they are playing in town.  They always put on a loud, sweaty, high energy show.  Check out the tracks GMF and Lions.

Here are three albums and an EP released last year that I liked.

The Motion Sick – The truth will catch you, just wait…

I discovered this band and their first album, Her Brilliant Fifteen,  from a recommendation that was on a now forgotten music blog.  I like how they blend an indie rock sound with what might be considered folk instruments.  I was super-pleased to hear that hey had made another.  My favorite tracks on this album are “30 Lives“, “Walk On Water“, and their cover of the Joy Division classic, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”.  They seem to be following Rule #2 of Indie Rock Success with their choice of a cover song.

Santogold – Santogold

You have probably heard Santogold’s music, but didn’t know it.  Her songs have been in several commercials and tv shows.  Her sound is a melding of 80’s pop, dub, and garage rock. You can also hear remnants of her time singing for the punk-ska band Stiffed.  My favorite tracks are “Lights Out” and “LES Artists“.

Noah and the Whale – Peaceful, The World Lays Me Down

A friend of mine sent me a link to the video of the song “5 Years Time” earlier this year because of its nod to Wes Anderson’s films.  I liked the song, but forgot about it.  A few months later, I purchased a ukulele, and when hunting for rock bands the use a uke I rediscovered them.

Ema and the Ghosts – Boy In The Milkbox EP

I stumbled across the music of Ema and the Ghosts (Ema is the only member, so the rest of the band are “ghosts”. Get it?) a few years ago on MySpace. She had a vocal & uke cover of “Folsom Prison Blues” posted at the time that I thought was amazing. I had been hoping she would release something for a long time.  She self-relased this EP, and because of that it isn’t widely available. In fact, I haven’t been able to find it at all.  But, she does have plenty of songs on MySpace and YouTube, so have a listen/look. I like her cover of “After Hours” by The Velvet Underground.

I just heard word that Cory Doctorow is putting out a podcast of him reading his book Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.  It is one of my favorites by him.  It is a weird blend of sci-fi, techie, and magic realism.

One great thing is that Cory always releases his books under a Creative Commons license.  That means that free, legal e-book versions are available for download in many different formats shortly after the books are released.  He also, as in this case, sometimes makes podcasts of his books and short stories available for free.

via Boing Boing

Inspired by my friend’s new blog, I decided to get my blog up and running.  My idea for the first few entries is to do a sort of “Best …… of 2008″ for some different things.  Now, I get uncomfortable when I am asked to pick the best or my favorite this or that, so this is just some stuff I liked from 2008.

First off, three podcasts I started listening to last year.

RadioLab - Think of RadioLab as sort of the This American Life of science.  In fact, clips from RadioLab have been featured on This American Life.  In every episode they take a sciencey theme and explore it through interviews, stories, and artsy bits.  Among guests on the show have been Dr. Oliver Sacks and Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran, two nerologists that are always interesting and have written some great books.

Sound of Young America – Sound of Young America is an interview show that has guests from the worlds of television, movies, comedy, music, and other cool things.  It bills itself as “A Public Radio Show About Things That Are Awesome”. You could consider it a hipper, and yet more geeky alternative to Fresh Aire.  John Hodgeman is a frequent guest.

The Moth – The Moth podcast is people, both famous and not, who tell stories about themselves.  It is distributed by a group that puts on live storytelling events.  One of my recent favorites by someone you might of heard of is Joe Jackson talking about when he first started performing as a musician.