For the most part, it’s been a pretty mild winter here in the Great White North, so we were cautiously optimistic that the weather would be decent when my stepdaughter and the grandkids came to visit. So of course they flew in on the coldest Valentine’s Day in history, with the official temp hitting -23 (and colder out our way). It finally warmed up a bit yesterday, at which point we were blasted by freezing rain up until the rain turned to snow. I plowed about 5 inches of slush out of the driveway in the morning, and another 6 inches or so of snow in the evening. It was fortunate I didn’t have to go anywhere, because the commute both ways would have been a real mess.

On the bright side, my new brew toy showed up yesterday. It’s called the GrainFather, and it’s a sorta all-in-one electric mash, sparge, and boil pot (plus a built-in pump for recirculating and transferring the wort, and a nifty counter flow wort chiller). I’ve been using a big-ass propane burner to brew in my basement, which you’re not supposed to do (something to do with carbon monoxide poisoning or something). I have bulkhead doors to my basement, so I’ve been opening them up and putting a box fan on the steps to draw fresh air in and I haven’t died yet. Still, it’s kind of a hassle (and you have to keep going out and buying propane), so I started looking at going electric.

Besides hopefully not succumbing to CO poisoning, it has the advantage of being able to dial up the correct temperature for whatever it is you’re doing. I won’t bore you with the details, but basically you let the milled grain sit in hot water for a while to extract the sugar from it. Depending on the temperature, you can get a dry beer or at a slightly higher temp, a sweeter beer (because the higher temp creates non-fermentable sugars). Too hot, and you extract tannins from the grain husks and you get less-than desirable flavors.

And of course there are multiple-step mashing techniques where you take it to one temp for a while, then increase it, etc. After you’re done mashing, you can do a “mash out” where you bring the temp up for a while in order to stop the enzyme action that’s going on, and then you drain the sugary water mixture out and then you run more hot water over the grain in order to flush out any leftover sugar. The sugar/water mix is called wort, which you then boil, add hops and whatever else you want to toss in there along the way and when it’s done boiling you cool it off, transfer it to your fermenter and add yeast.

And then of course your little yeasties eat the sugar, fart CO₂ and (most importantly) pee alcohol.

So, anyway, there are a lot of steps involved and it was my hope that this GrainFather thing would make my life a bit easier and I was really looking forward to trying it out this weekend. Sadly, the goddamn thing came without a bunch of parts, leaving it unusable. They said they’d get the parts out to me ASAP and I understand that shit happens, but, damnit, this is pretty disappointing.

And today I’m back at work, which is not a big thrill, more snow in the forecast for this afternoon, and tomorrow it’s supposed to get frigid again (though not double-digits below zero), and if that wasn’t bad enough, I have a goddamn dentist appointment on Friday.

I’m ready for spring.