I woke up this morning still snickering over a comment from one of my housemates over dinner last night.
What she said was, "I think you’d make a great parking analyst."
It makes no sense to me either. Maybe it was a dream.


(another edition of Irregular Zymurgy)

This is my week off from brewing beer. My wheat ale with cloves and cinnamon is sitting in bottles as we wait for it to carbonate and settle. One more week before it will be ready to taste.

One of my housemates brewed a porter with coffee and chocolate. During its first few days of fermentation, the surface of the wort, as the carbon dioxide percolated through the cocoa butter, looked like Solaris. Last night he transferred the young beer to a clean carbouy, leaving the precipitated grain bits and the oily residues in the former. Another four days until it goes into bottles.

We found a recipe for an herbal root beer in the back of a brewing book. Next week, this will become the basis for a real beer with root beer flavors, something I tried with only moderate success last summer.

Beer, beer, beer. I had not taken such an interest in it until I moved back to California. It must be a sort of last hurrah, since any year now I expect my metabolism to come to a full stop, at which time I’ll have to stop drinking beer and start exercising.