Doing Ginger -- Again

As I was getting dressed today, I thought of a joke that was sent on my Yahoo group email.      

A man is sitting at home on the veranda with his wife and he says,

"I love you."

She sarcastically asks, "Is that you or the beer talking?"

He replies, "It's me............. talking to the beer."

I was ironing a shirt that I got from one of my daughter’s best friends that says, “I ‘heart’ beer.”  I realized that I do love beer.  Maybe not more than my wife?  Ok she will read this so I should say not more than my wife.  The point is I really care about beer. Ok I love it.

We were brewing an all grain English Ginger beer on the 26^th of March.  It was our first 15-gallon all-grain beer.  We did the recipe last year as an extract on the fly and loved the results. We named it Doing Ginger. (Let’s face it -- everyone loves Mary Ann, but everyone just wants to Do Ginger.)

We did 3 yeast starters because we were going into three 5-gallon carboys.  It was a challenging brew session due to the fact that even though we followed the brew software we were still short on sparge water!  WTF?  Our gravity turned out dead on with our adjustments.  Our final outcome will be determined upon the the opening of first bottle and tapping of Jeff’s keg.

Now here comes the fun part …

At 7:30 on Friday, as I was getting the brew room ready, my wife Julie came out and said, “You need to come inside now!”  I said, “Why?” thinking the dogs had left a treat, or the cat had brought her kill in the house. I found out water was coming though the tile in my kitchen. Hooray! Come to find out the dishwasher had been malfunctioning for several days.  Did this stop us? Hell No!  We just kept on putting towels down and kept on getting ready for the brew session.  I did cut off the water supply to the dishwasher.  Had to make it look like I knew what was going on.

On Monday the restoration company and the plumber told me to contact my insurance agent.  Yes at this point I am screwed.  Even if everything is paid for, my brew center will be disrupted until May.  Right now we have 15 gallons of Doing Ginger English Ale waiting to go from primary to secondary.  This will not happen until I can clean my kitchen.  Hopefully this will be the week of Monday, April 4th.  Once the fans are removed, I can clean the kitchen of all the debris that the fans and the destruction have caused.

We hope to go into secondary early this week.  We will bottle/keg when the beer is ready.

If this is like the last year, you will love Doing Ginger.  We did.

Muffin (aka Scott)