We’ve just set a record in Minnesota for the most snow in the month of February. So, of course, my mind wanders to thoughts of warm weather and baseball. Spring training has begun for the Twins; our real spring can’t be too far behind that.
Or can it? It’s also the time of year when false optimism reigns supreme. Every fan feels their team has a chance to have a great year. Since I became interested in baseball, I have been told every spring by Sid that the Twins have a good team with a shot at going all the way. Baseball has always been my favorite sport. While it’s a team sport, it’s also a one on one person vs. person confrontation between the pitcher and the batter. It’s the only major sport where points are scored by a person. Instead of a ball or puck crossing a line or going into a net, in baseball a run scores from a person touching home plate. There’s also more of a sense of the history of the game. I have the feeling that while some NBA fans would recognize who George Mikan was, they wouldn’t be able to tell you much about any of his feats on the court. While a large share of baseball fans would be able to tell you the story of an obscure player named Fred Merkle. But for now, I’ll just say I enjoy being able to look outside and see mountains of snow at the end of my driveway and dream about baseball and summer. Go Twins!
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I’ve always been interested in our family history, but not to the point of doing anything like family trees and things like that. However, I’ve started a project that I’m finding enjoyable.
My Mom has many photographs in the house. We went through a lot of them when we looked for photos to put out at Dad’s funeral service. I don’t know who a lot of the people in the photos are or the stories behind them. So, I’ve been sitting down with my Mom and going through the photos and having her tell me about them. I use my phone to record everything and then I take pictures of all the photos so they can go together. Mom says she enjoys doing that. It brings back memories for her. I love to hear all about things, not only the photos but the stories behind them. One photo was of Mom and the other women she worked with at Cargill. That led into a discussion of what working was like in her day. I’ve got ancestors from both sides of the Civil War. There was a Great-Uncle who was “passing”. Meaning he was African-American, but he was light enough to pass as a white person. However, he and my Great-Aunt never had children because they weren’t sure what color they would be. I’m learning family history and what the times were like in the past and I am delighted to share the time with Mom. I’m attaching a photo from a wedding album. Going around the table are my mom’s siblings; Louis, Mary Gayle and Terry; the Bride and Groom; my Grandfather Al and his Mother Pauline (“who was NOT happy about her daughter’s choice for a husband”); Mom’s Uncle and Aunt; finally, on the far left my Mom, Patricia. I did something with this blog that I haven’t done before. I went back and edited a post. I’ve gone back before and fixed grammar errors or made clarifications of what I said. But I’ve not gone back and made big changes to a post.
The post that I changed was my Serendipitous Stout post from a last month (http://www.timkwrites.com/blog/serendipitous-stout). I wrote the post and focused mostly on what I had done wrong in the brewing process. Which unfortunately is typical of everybody. We focus on our errors and not on what we’ve done right. It’s like having a popcorn kernel stuck in a tooth as soon as you notice it, you’re working on it with your tongue trying to work it loose and it becomes your focus. We all spend too much time worried about our weaknesses instead of our strengths. It’s almost as if a concert pianist decided to not practice and work on cooking instead because she wasn’t a good cook. So, I went back to my earlier post and added what I had done right. When I won the competition with the beer, I felt a bit as if I were a major league baseball pitcher who had just hit a home run. I know there are homebrewers out there who are more knowledgeable than me, that have better equipment, better processes and more experience. And some of them might be miffed that I won. But, as it turns out, when a pitcher hits a home run the runs scored count in the final score. An update on my Serendipitous Stout. I entered it into another competition, The Minnesota Mashout. This is a bigger competition with more entries. My stout won first place in its category. The American Homebrewing Association sponsors a national homebrewing competition. I signed up for that. It’s a process just to get into the contest, so we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I’m nearly out of bottles and will need to brew another batch in case I get into the contest. What the heck, when you’re on a roll it’s ok to swing for the fences. I made my first million as a currency smuggler.
In 1990 I was travelling in Europe. Northwest Airlines advertised round trip tickets to Frankfort in the paper for $375. Wow, great deal I thought. I’m going to go. Unfortunately, I couldn’t talk anyone into going with me. So, I decided I go on my own. I planned to land in Frankfort, do a big circle through Europe and then return. Part of the circle brought me through Yugoslavia. I took an overnight train to Belgrade, rented a car, drove through the countryside and then went dropped the car off in Zagreb. A whirlwind tour of the country. The country I was in before that was Italy. This was in the time before the Euro became the currency for the countries in the European Union. Italy’s currency was the Lira. When you exchanged money, you got about 1,000 lira for every dollar. When I was done with my sightseeing in Venice, I went to the train station for my train to Belgrade. I wanted to convert my left-over lira in Yugoslavian money, which I learned was called dinar. For every lira I got about 1,000 dinar. Yugoslavia had been through hyper-inflation, so their currency was not worth much. It worked out to be that close to 1,000,000 dinar would equal one dollar. By exchanging my money, I became a multi-millionaire. Like many people who become multi-millionaires overnight I proceeded to blow most of my money. On things like ten million dinar to fill up the car’s gas tank. Driving through Yugoslavia was interesting. It included a section of road where photography was forbidden, getting stopped at a military checkpoint and picking up some hitchhikers. One hitchhiker rode with me for quite a distance. I knew a little French, he knew a little English and he was disappointed that I didn’t speak Esperanto. But we managed to communicate. There was one point where we crossed the border of what would be their equivalent of a state. He pulled out his pass to show me that he was authorized to be able to cross the boundary. After I dropped off the car in Zagreb, I took a cab to the train station. When the cabbie dropped me off, he told me the fare. I gave him all the dinar I had left but that wasn’t enough. But everyone took foreign currency as it would hold its value better than dinar. I gave him the dollars I had in my wallet. Still short. I had some German Marks left from the first part of the trip, so I paid the rest of the bill with some of those. I did still have some dinar left that I could have used for part of the cab fare, but it wasn’t accessible. I had read that the government of Yugoslavia had limits on how many dinar you could take out of the country. I don’t remember the exact amount, but it was less than one million. I hid a one million dinar note and took it out with me. I am no longer a multi-millionaire. However, even if it is in a country that no longer exists, I am still a millionaire. A new year. Just like every year at the beginning of baseball season when we read Sid Hartman in the newspaper telling us the Twins have a chance to win it all, this year we all start off with a chance to do great things. And unlike baseball where only one team can win the championship, we can all be great.
I know for many of my friends 2018 was not a good year. I’m sending you an electronic hug. (If you want a real one, go ahead and hug me when you see me. I’ll return it.) Hopefully 2019 will bring glimmers of hope. Or you might have had a good year in 2018. Hopefully, you can continue that in the new year. (You can still get a hug, if needed.) In any case 2019 is a countdown year. This is the first year since 1918 when the digits start a countdown, by that I mean 20, 19, etc. We’re all counting down this year. Something exciting is coming for each of us at the end of our countdowns. Anticipate greatness for yourself this year. I wrote an earlier post (https://www.timkwrites.com/blog/brewing-notes) about an experimental batch of Black IPA that I had brewed. I mentioned at the end of the article that I would be brewing a larger batch of that beer. I brewed that in October. You might be wondering why this post is titled as a Stout when my experimental batch was a Black IPA. I’ll explain that.
I had two new things I was going to try out. In the earlier batch I had cold steeped the black grains. This means that instead of putting all my grains together and then heating them up as I would normally do, I put the black grains in a mesh bag and soaked them in water overnight. Since the grains had been roasted previously to make them black, they didn’t need more heating. Then when I was done cold steeping that was added to the rest of the beer when it was time to boil it. I had read about this technique in the book Brewing Better Beer by Gordon Strong. Rereading it later I see that I should have put in this liquid towards the end of the boil and not at the beginning. I decided that this time I would put the black grains on my stir plate to circulate the water while it was steeping. I had a little metal stand that came with one of my kitchen pots that I was going to use to keep the grains off the bottom of my kettle, so the stir plate would be able to keep the water moving. I put the metal stand in the kettle and then the bag of the black grain. Then I added water to cover the grain. What I didn’t realize until it was too late was that it took much more water to cover the stand and grains than I had used when I did the experimental batch. For the other grains I was going to use my new brewing kettle that I had purchased. My selections of what I can buy are limited because I brew on my stovetop using a method call BIAB. (That stands for Brew in a Bag; you put all the grains in a bag.) The new kettle was supposed to be five gallons, but it turns out it’s really nineteen quarts. That’s a half-gallon less than the kettle I usually use. Meaning I ended up being able to use less water than planned on that. In comparison to my experimental brew the mix for this one ended up different in two ways. First the dark roasted grains were over what they had been. Secondly the other grains ended up being less proportionally than the earlier batch. Enough about the grains and what went wrong with those. To make beer you also need hops and yeast. I did a couple things that went right with those. If you’ve shopped for craft beers, you may have seen Dogfish Head’s 60 Minute IPA or 90 Minute IPA. Or even their 120 Minute IPA. The times mentioned have to do with when they add hops during the boil. Typically, when you see a beer recipe the hops will be added during the boil at specific times – 60 minutes, 10 minutes, etc. The time refers to how much time is left in the boil when the hops are added. Earlier additions add more bitterness while later additions add more flavor and aroma. What Dogfish Head does is to add the hops continually for the amount of time that is the name of the beer. I had always figured that to be kind of a gimmick. But I was recently reading the book IPA Brewing Techniques, Recipes, and the Evolution of India Pale Ale by Mitch Steele, and there was a section where the founder of Dogfish Head talks about why they do that. Sam Calagione says that he was watching a cooking show and the chef said that he added the pepper the recipe called for a bit at a time instead of all at once, so it would add more nuances to the flavor. That’s why he decided to add hops a bit at a time instead of all at once. I decided to do a version of this. I took my hop additions that were in the final part of the boil and instead of doing them every five minutes, I spread them out doing one addition every minute for five minutes. After the boil in order to start the fermentation process you add yeast. There are many choices for the various kinds of yeast to use. Some are designed to work with a variety of beers. Others are specifically for certain styles of beer. There are dry yeasts and there are liquid yeasts. There are various manufacturers of yeast. Some breweries obtain their yeasts from the same manufacturers that homebrewers use. Some breweries have their own proprietary yeast strains. It was that last category that interested me. While you can’t buy these yeasts from the manufacturer, it is possible to get some and grow your own. Many breweries carbonate their beer by using bottle conditioning. In that process as the beer is bottled some extra sugar is added to the beer. This reawakens the yeast which eats the sugar and produces carbon dioxide. Since the bottle is sealed the beer becomes carbonated. When this is done there is yeast in the bottled beer. Some people I mention this to have given me a strange look. But it’s not a problem; if you’ve been drinking beer, you’ve been drinking yeast in many of your beers. That yeast in the bottle can be captured and grown to the point where there is enough to pitch into homebrew for fermentation. That’s what I did with this beer. I used some yeast captured from Bell’s Two Hearted Ale. Part of the process of capturing the yeast involves drinking the beer, so it is enjoyable. When it was all said and done, I ended up with a very dark beer that had a very roasted flavor. I had a glass of it in mid-November. I could tell it was a very good beer. However, there was a coffee flavor to it and I don’t like coffee. This wasn’t a beer I was going to personally enjoy. Tasting the beer again later I realized my original taste was of a beer that hadn’t aged fully. The coffee flavor was muted down to just a roasted flavor. So, I didn’t make the beer I had intended to make. On the other hand, as I said it was a good beer. I saw that a local home brew club, Nordeast Brewers Alliance, was having a home brew competition. I thought I would enter the beer. The style guidelines for a black IPA say, “flavor characteristics of an American IPA, only darker in color – but without strongly roasted or burnt flavors.” This beer definitely didn’t fit that description. Reading the guidelines, I realized that what I had brewed was an American Stout. I entered the beer in that category giving it the name Pitch Black American Stout. This was the second time I have entered a competition. Last year I had entered an IPA in a local competition. It hadn’t placed or anything, but I got back the judge’s scoring sheets which were good to see for feedback on my beer. In addition, that competition reports their results to the Midwest Homebrewer of the Year. Even though my beer didn’t place I still end up ranked in 447th place of the standings for that; tied with over 900 other people. The judging sessions finished on Sunday, December 9th. Awards are made for the top three in each category and from the category winners there are awards for first and second place for best of show. That evening I received a text asking me if I would like some news on my beer. I thought this was a good sign, maybe I had placed. I texted back that I would like to hear. The text back said that my beer had won first place in its category and also it won first place for best of show. Yay! It’s a cool feeling to win that. I’ve been having fun telling people about it. One of my friends suggested that based on how I brewed it, I should rename it Serendipitous Stout. I like that. In life we all do things that don’t go according to plan. Maybe if we step back and relabel what we were doing we’re award winners. May your life be full of serendipities, because in the end the plan that matters isn’t ours. I grew up in a house that had a library. We moved into the house the summer before I went into third grade. Dad turned the front room that had been a mother-in-law’s apartment into his office and put bookshelves up all the way along one long wall. So, we called it the library. I grew up around books and grew to love books and reading.
On Facebook my son was challenged to post pictures of ten movies over ten days. Following along with I couldn’t help but think of what my ten movies would be. Then it was only natural to think about what books I would choose. I decided that I would not put the Bible on my list. Just because it’s too easy. It’s had a major impact on my life plus it has shaped our society for the last couple thousand years. After that I would try to think of my top ten when I would go to bed as something to help me get to sleep. That led to many different lists of ten. And the tough part became cutting them down to just ten. I ended up cheating on a couple and taking a whole series of books as just one book. Every time I would think I had finished my list I would remember another book. I finally ended up with a list of ten. Some were books that got me interested in a genre, some were the first book I had read by an author I ended up liking, some because I remember the emotional response I had when I read it and some because they taught me something. On Facebook people post an image a day for each movie. I’m too impatient for that. Below are images from my ten book covers, all at once. I tried to pick the picture from the edition that I first read. At least for the ones that I remembered. One book ended up getting two pictures because I couldn’t choose which one to use; they both came from the same cover though. On Friday we watched a game in Bowling Green and on Saturday we were on our way to Peoria for a game that evening between the Peoria Chiefs and the Beloit Snappers. Our GPS led us on an interesting route. There were a few times where we were questioning it. But there was a car ahead of us doing the exact things we were doing, including slowing down at some of the more obscure turns.
We stopped for gas at one point and Gunnar went to use the ATM. There was a person there using it, so Gunnar left and then came back. When he went to use the machine there was twenty-dollar bill in it. Gunnar took it and found the person who had been there before him. He returned the bill to its rightful owner. We arrived in Peoria in the afternoon and the temperatures were in the mid-nineties. Our hotel was located near the baseball stadium. We walked over the to the stadium and were surprised that we could see the whole field while standing at the fence and looking in. We kept walking and found a restaurant where we ate dinner. Then it was on to the taproom for Bearded Owl Brewing. I tried two beers. One was called Sister of the Moon Pale Ale. It was brewed from Illinois grown hops, Illinois grown grains and Illinois sourced yeast. We chuckled about the yeast’s tenuous Illinois connection. But in reality, as the yeast converts the sugars into alcohol it multiplies. So, most of the yeast had been created in Illinois. I liked this enough to buy a mini-growler of it later that night. The second beer was made with Idaho seven hops. I’ve brewed a pale ale with these hops before and like them. The beer was very light; it was too close to water for me. We went back to the stadium. As we were standing in line waiting to buy tickets a man came up to us and asked if we needed tickets. When we said yes, he gave us his two tickets that he wasn’t going to be using. They were great seats, right behind home plate. Gunnar attributed getting free tickets to his good karma from returning the twenty-dollar bill he had found earlier in the day. Just to be difficult I attributed it to my wearing a red shirt as Peoria is a farm team of the Cardinals. Gunnar was nice enough not to point out that his karma could have caused me to pick that shirt. The game was a loss for Peoria. I made a comment about seeing Clint Eastwood fielding at the end of the post about Bowling Green. We saw The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The good was that in the first five innings Peoria ended each inning with a double play. The Bad was that Peoria had more errors than hits in the game, 7 errors and 6 hits. The Ugly was the Peoria third baseman’s four errors including two in the ninth inning. As you would expect from hearing that Peoria lost the game. After the game we wandered around and heard some music. Following the sound, we came to an outdoor concert at Kelleher’s Irish Pub. We had a beer and listened to the band. They were playing some older rock and roll songs. I am musically challenged, so the only songs I remember for sure were The Last Train to Clarksville and Wipeout. Gunnar could probably recite most of the playlist The next day brought us to Cedar Rapids, Iowa for our final game on Sunday afternoon. The Cedar Rapids Kernels were playing the Kane County Cougars. Cedar Rapids is a Twins minor league farm team. The game was enjoyable; the Kernels won ten to four. At this point we were happy because the bottom of the ninth inning didn’t need to be played and we could leave sooner to get home that evening. It was a good trip. We had fun watching baseball, trying out beer and traveling. I had dreamed of making this trip for quite a while; it was great to have it turn out so well. Of course, any trip where you don’t have to shoot your travelling partner is a good trip. I have to apologize. I missed my schedule for posting yesterday. Between having a meeting of the Governing Board at church, Andrew coming home from college for Thanksgiving and doing the dishes writing a post slipped my mind.
I will post on Tuesday next week to make up for the missing post. I will then go back to my schedule, so I will post two weeks in a row. I hope those of my readers celebrating Thanksgiving this week have a joyous time. As I look at the blessings in my life I realize that one of them is my readers. I am thankful for you all. Our next leg of the tour took us from Tennessee to Bowling Green, Kentucky. The drive was short and because we didn’t spend the morning going through a baseball museum as we had the day before we arrived in the early afternoon. This left us sitting in our hotel room after we checked in wondering, “what is there to do in Bowling Green?” Of course, the joke before we left was that we should look for the memorial for the school shooting. This being a reference to Kellyanne Conway’s defending Trump’s ban on Muslim travelers by talking about the Iraqi’s behind the “Bowling Green Massacre.” There was no such massacre. And, so there was no memorial for us to visit. We found two things that might have been interesting. There was a cave and there was a Corvette museum. We decided to take a walk downtown and see what there was to do there. My Beer Guru app showed that there was a homebrew supply store and a taproom on the way. The store ended up being close to our hotel. I might have been interested in seeing the store, but I didn’t think Gunnar would be interested. The taproom was White Squirrel Brewery. We stopped in for a beer. I ordered a flight and was not impressed with any of the selections. Reaching downtown we realized that there was nothing to do there. We decided to go to the Corvette museum. We took an uber out to the museum which is located near the plant where they build Corvettes. My AAA card got us a discount on admission to the museum. The museum ended up being interesting. It was fun to see the progression of Corvette styles through the years. There were some special models there. One was the only 1983 Corvette in existence. There were some big design changes that year. When they didn’t get everything ready in time, they waited a year. There were 43 of the 1983 models produced for testing, and this is the only one left. Another one we saw was the 1,000,000th Corvette produced. This one had been restored. It was heavily damaged while in the museum. In the early morning of February 12, 2014, a sinkhole opened up beneath part of the museum and eight Corvettes fell in. You can see the security camera video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smhOL8I4T_o. In the picture of me above, you can see yellow and red lines on the floor. The red line marks the section that fell in. The yellow line marks the extent of the cave that is below the museum. After the museum, we went back downtown. We had time for dinner before the game and ate at restaurant named 643 near the stadium. I wasn’t thinking about the name too much, but during dinner I realized what it stood for. When people use a scorebook and keep track of the game the notation that is used for a shortstop to second baseman to first baseman double play is 6-4-3, those being the position numbers of the players. We bought seats at the stadium in a cheaper section and ended up being in the front row on the aisle. down the left field line. The stadium was a big upgrade from our last stadium, which was to be expected with the change to a higher level of the minor leagues. While we waited for the game to start a pretty blonde woman came down the aisle and stood next to us at the edge of the field. One of the players came over and they talked. As they talked a small boy came down the aisle and was standing next to me looking at the ball player. He had a ball and a pen in one hand. The player, understandably, didn’t notice him. The boy reached out a hand. He had one finger extended. Slowly, the hand approached the arm of the player until contact. Then it jumped back. The player looked down and saw the boy. He asked him if he wanted something and the boy asked for an autograph.
Suddenly, three or four more boys showed up. The player signed autographs for them all. I thought it was classy. I looked up the player in the program, his name was Simon Rosenblum-Larson and he was from Wisconsin. The game was fun. The Bowling Green Hot Rods first batter doubled and scored for the game’s first run. They scored two more runs in the fifth. Their opponents the Lake County Captains hit a two-run home run in the sixth to keep the game close. In the ninth inning Bowling Green put in a new pitcher. It was the autographer, Simon Rosenblum-Larson. He closed the game out to get a save and Bowling Green won the game. We walked back to the hotel from the game. On the way we passed the home brew supply store again. Now they had a canopy out front with a bunch of people sitting at tables and we could see a lot of people inside. Deciding that there must be some sort of event going on we decided to check it out. Walking in we realized that this was more than a store, it was also a tap room. There was a few hundred square feet of brewing supplies for sale. Maybe there’s a quirk in their tax laws or licensing that being a store and a taproom gives them an advantage. They were selling their own beers along with others. I bought one of their beers, an IPA, I think. It wasn’t bad, just not memorable. That ended our day from there it was on to Peoria where we found good karma, good music and Clint Eastwood fielding. |
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