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3:56:34PM on 07/06/2009
1 Comments
| | Beer Unveiling!
Over four years ago Sean and Marty bought me a starter beer making kit as a wedding gift. The kit moved down to Dallas, back to St. Louis in our temporary situation, then finally into our house last summer. It went unused until this May.
Boycotting AB because they sold out St. Louis and the rest of America caused me to look elsewhere for my beer. Luckily an alcohol mega-store, Friar Tuck, opened up close by and my options were many. Problem is it gets expensive. I started to get more and more interested in making my own, but I was always very intimidated by the process. I had the equipment, but I had no idea where to begin. Sean planned a trip to St. Louis around Memorial Day, so I decided to take advantage of the situation and finally dive into the world of homebrewing . Sean has several batches under his belt and did a great job teaching me the basics. We went to the local homebrew shop and I decided I wanted to try an Amber Ale recipe. We picked up the necessary ingredients and extra equipment and went back to my house. The whole process took about three hours and I had a lot of fun along the way. We cooked the batch and put it in the primary fermenter.
Then came the hard parts, waiting and naming. Beer, on the low end, takes about four weeks until it is ready to drink. After ten days in the primary fermenter I transferred (or racked as I have come to learn it is called) the beer from the primary fermentation bucket into the secondary fermenter. Then a week or so after that I had to rack the beer out of that fermenter into a bottling bucket which I made out of the original bucket I had gotten as a wedding present. The five gallons of beer we had made ended up making 44 bottles of beer. The bottling and labeling part of the process was definitely a labor of love. I spent several days designing the label, but I had a ton of fun doing it. Once the design was finished and printed off it took me over four hours to waterproof the labels, cut them out, and glue them on all the bottles. It was worth it though as the end result was very well received (more on that later).
As mentioned above another hard part of making the beer is naming it. I stewed over this for days trying to come up with something unique, relevant and fun. Then one day at work not only a name, but an entire theme of beers came to me. Growing up I had a ton of pets. Everything from dogs to rabbits to iguanas. To some people on our street we were known as the Chinnici Zoo. So I thought "what better way to memorialize all my beloved pets then to name my various brews after them"? After I came up with that concept, ideas for my current beer and several to follow just started pouring out. I decided to name the first after one of my family's favorite dogs, Reggie. For some reason or another I decided to use his more formal name Reginald, and thus Old Reginald Red was born.
I also had to name the brewery. That came easy to me. Sometime in high school Marty decided to try brewing in his basement closet. His most famous creation was Evil Coach Ale (well it is famous in our small triangle anyway). He was the first of us to start brewing. Sean then picked it up in college/grad school and has done several batches and continues to brew. The two of them knew of my interest to start and bought me the kit for my wedding. When we would bum around in highschool we came to call ourselves the "Three Schifosos" which I was told roughly translates from Italian into "Rat Bastards". And thus the name "Three Rat Bastards Brewery" was born. The logo honors the influence my friends had on me and also incorporates my Italian heritage with the green, white and red rats.
In July Erin and I threw a "Brew and Que" party at the house. I was to debut Old Reginald to my friends and family. It seemed to go over really well. Since then this hobby has become an obsession. I have spent many hours researching and learning everything I can about beer, brewing beer and using more advanced techniques. I currently have fifteen gallons of beer fermenting in the basement (Apfelwein, Chocolate Stout, and a second batch of Old Reginald). This weekend I am going to make my fifth batch, which will also be my first partial mash which involves going beyond just using a kit. I set the bar pretty high with my first beer and am excited to see how my current and future ones turn out. Stay tuned to see what they are called and how the labels turn out. I'm really excited about the label for the stout!
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3:48:49PM on 05/12/2009
1 Comments
| | Back To Blogging
I have been wanting to update this blog for a long time, and it has needed it badly! The problem is that I felt like we were so far behind on posts that I had to catch everyone up with the details of what is going on in our lives. So I am going to write this brief post to very quickly summarize what has gone on since the last post. There were some notable birthdays, happy birthday Mom, Stephen (21!), Sam (8), Denise, Alex (6), Kellie, and Mike. Then of course there were the two big ones...Erin and I both turned the big 3-0!
Happy belated Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years to everyone. On January 15th Erin and I celebrated our 4th wedding anniversary. On January 20th our country swore in its 44th president Barack Hussein Obama and our national deficit has quadrupled since. The economy continues to spiral downward and the best solution to solve debt is to create more of it! As predicted in a previous post, defense spending is on the chopping block. Here's to hoping I stay employed. Also in January our good friends from Texas, Ryan and Angela Conlon, decided to venture into Cardinal nation. Ryan got a job with my team at Boeing and the two of them moved up in February/March-ish. Welcome to St. Louis Ryan and Angela!
In March I went to the annual Game Developer's Conference in San Fransisco. This time Erin got to come with me. We got to spend the evenings together and enjoy some of the San Fransisco sights. Mid-week Erin went to Modesto to stay with her cousins and I joined them Friday. We stayed there through the weekend and some great memories were created!
April saw the start of softball season, Cardinal baseball, and wedding season for Erin. Marty and Erika Kennedy also welcomed their first-born, Patrick, in April. Congrats to both of them.
May is here now and the weather is finally cooperating. We have had a lot of rain, but a lot of really nice days too. It has been a great feeling going out and mowing my own lawn again, and I am still very grateful that Erin and I are done with our crazy house situation in Texas.
Okay I think that roughly covers all the bases. Now that I have this post out of the way it will be easier for me to comment on current events. When the thought crosses my mind to write a blog about something that I have experienced, observed, or read about that thought will no longer be set in the queue of forgotten blogs to rot. My apologies for missing any event or birthday. Hopefully Erin will respond with anything I have failed to mention.
Godspeed
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12:33:51PM on 10/22/2008
25 Comments
| | Scary Halloween Story
In the spirit of Halloween, this post is intended to scare and frighten any who reads it. I will lead this off by saying I do not like John McCain and I once again feel like in this election I am voting for the lesser of two evils. I will not be casting my vote for McCain, however I will be casting my vote against Barack Obama. I hate getting political, but lately it seems everyone around me is throwing Obama in my face and I am finally tired of sitting back and saying nothing. Here is a list of reasons why I will be voting against the media's Golden Calf:
- Reproductive Justice: What a horribly disgusting term for abortion. Obama supports the Freedom Of Choice Act and has stated that it will be one of his first acts as president to get it passed. The FOCA will do three horrible things:
- Allow for late-term abortions (partial birth abortions). People always bring up the question "When does life begin" when the abortion argument is brought about. Erin and I actually know a family who had a child 6 months into the pregnancy. He is living proof to me that third trimester abortions are murder.
- Use tax payer dollars to pay for abortions. In this case we are paying for someone else's mistake. This drives me nuts. I cannot stand the fact that not only do I morally disagree with abortion, but the Obama government is going to use money I worked hard for to fix someone else's "problem". If I make a mistake in life I own up to it and take responsible actions to first resolve any issue caused by the mistake, and to never make it again!
- Allow a pregnant child to get an abortion without parental consent or knowledge! So a teenage girl that gets raped and impregnated by her perverted uncle and is too afraid and ashamed to tell her parents about it can now go get an abortion and her parents will be none-the-wiser. That aside, this is major surgery being done on a child! I don't have kids yet, but when I do I want to be informed every time they get a nose bleed at school for crying out loud. Not only does this have physical ramifications to the child, but it also has lasting emotional ones as well.
- Obama On Defense: He wants to cut and run from Iraq which basically tells the world we won't finish what we started and we are willing to lose this war to terrorism. I took a cab from the airport to my house back in February of last year. The driver was a native Iraqi and he and I discussed the war. He was very much in favor of what the United States is doing in Iraq and says his family in Iraq loves their new freedoms, freedoms we take for granted here in the states. War aside, Obama wants to cut defense spending as a whole. This will either directly or indirectly affect my job as I happen to work for a company that benefits from defense spending doing research for the government and building aerospace technologies.
- Redistribution of Wealth: With the government's recent bail outs we are on a fast track to becoming a socialist society. Obama's tax plans will get us there a hell of a lot faster than the alternative. One quick example: he wants to put an extra $50 - $65 billion dollars into the government's hands. Where is he getting it from? He is getting it from increasing taxes on Americans and American companies making over $250k a year. Damn that's a lot of money, and yes I don't make nearly close to that but simple common sense tells you that a company being taxed extra will be able to employ fewer people, thereby increasing unemployment, stymying the creation of new jobs, and ultimately putting less money into the economy via consumers. In addition to that, common sense also tells us that while Corporate America will be paying higher taxes, they will need to raise their costs for goods and services to make up for the losses they are passing out to the government. So ultimately it will be everyone who will be paying those taxes. Our cost of living will go up as a result. You think things are bad now?
My wife has busted her butt for the past two years trying to start a photography business out of our home. It takes a lot of her time and she is really close to it all coming to fruition. She has been able to do this because we have been fortunate enough to be able to rely on my income to pay for life's incidentals and invest all her earnings into her business. If the cost of living rises, odds are she will need to get a daytime job which will utterly destroy everything she has worked so hard the past two years to obtain. She may no longer have the time or the energy to put into her own dreams and our plans for her staying at home, running her own business and raising our children could be smashed.
- Obama's Associations: William Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and ACORN. Why is it that Obama has so many shady bedfellows? He claims that he sat in Jeremiah Wright's church for over 20 years and never heard him spew the hate speech that is often part of his sermons. He also claims to have been unaware of unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers's involvement with the Weather Underground, yet has read and commented on one of his books early in his political career. The man is a flat out dishonest scoundrel, not that all politicians aren't, but it really is amazing with whom he is associated. You are only kidding yourself if you believe that these people haven't influenced him in any way.
- Promotes Dumbing Down America: Not only does he want to continue the failure that is No Child Left Behind, but he wants to throw more money at the problem. The students in United States of America place poorly worldwide on standardized tests. Why is that? No Child Left Behind sets lower standards for students in order for everyone to "succeed". The educational system has lost touch with it's objective and has become a corrupt and greedy government entity, our children and this country's future are at stake. The results of No Child Left Behind have been mostly failure, even Obama admits to that, yet he still wants to continue along a failed path instead of finding a new one.
Here is a great Wall Street Journal article detailing more things that could come from an Obama presidency.
In super short summary, in my opinion, a vote for Barack Obama is a vote for:
- Murder of innocent babies.
- Possibly getting me laid off and sidelining Erin's photography business.
- Socialism - because it worked so well for Russia!
- Continuing to support a failing education system.
- An inexperienced man with a ton of charisma and a very shady past.
I will reiterate the fact that I do not like John McCain, so replying with crap about how terrible he is really does nothing for me because odds are I will agree with you on many points. And if you do respond with a rebuttal, please do so with facts backing it up. I did my best throughout the post to link my references.
Happy Halloween!
Boo-rack!
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