Guitar amp project, a long time in the making

I know it's not beer related, but I thought I'd post on this anyhow since I'm proud of myself. What you see to your left is a guitar amp I built from scratch. The head is all tube, Class A with an EL34 power tube. The head itself is made with 1/2" plexiglass. I had it fabricated at one of those sweet plastics places on Canal St. I built it a while back, so I can't remember how many watts it is exactly. It has two gain stages, one of which can be switched out for a cleaner tone. The bass/treble tone stack can also be switched out - a feature I added so that you could conceivably test out the audio qualities of different preamp tubes more accurately. It sounds pretty cool, though it does buzz quite a bit at really high gain. I wish I knew how to fix that.

The cabinet is what I finished recently. I had the wood cut forever, but just recently got around to assembling it. It's a 2x10" cab with two different speakers. One Fender, one unknown. I wrapped it in some upholstery that I bought a long time ago and finished it with some antique looking upholstery tacks. They don't quite match together - the head looks almost like some kind of 70's arena rock deal and the cabinet looks like it should have a victrola on top of it playing Take The A Train. But I'm proud of the work and at least now I have an amp that I can play out of in the house.

Rolf's

I think that this blog post can be filed under "too little, too late" considering that the holiday season is over and the decorations are already most likely down, but I thought I'd give a shout out to Rolf's. Located on the southeast corner of 22nd St and 3rd Ave in Manhattan, Rolf's (sorry, no web site) is a small German restaurant that goes absolutely bonkers with Christmas decorations. Think the Indian restaurants on 1st Ave in the East Village, but with all of the lighting and hanging decorations Christmas-themed instead of random-themed. And with higher ceilings.

There was a spell in my teenage years where we used to go to Rolf's every year around Christmas time to take Grandma (of Austrian heritage) to get some old school grub and to see the decorations. These days, the food at Rolf's isn't what it used to be. Not bad, don't get me wrong. But there are much better German restaurants that you can go to (Nurnberger Bierhaus being my current favorite). Rolf's has done some weird thing with they've added American and French dishes and the German food seems to have suffered at their expense. But it's totally worth a trip if you're in the Christmas spirit. I took R there on New Year's Day date and I wouldn't be surprised if we do it again next year.

While there I had one of these bad boys. A delicious, bready, full-bodied doppelbock that went great with my beef stew and spatzle. The Altenmunster Doppelbock has just the right noticeable level of alcohol without being overwhelming. Great stuff.

Dollar tacos are back

Been a while, right?

Before last night's NYCHG meeting, I stopped by the Hop Devil Grill on St. Marks Place and was pleasantly surprised to find that dollar tacos are back on Tuesdays. So now you know where you can find me on the third Tuesday of the month some time between 6 and 7:30. And in addition to beef, chicken, and vegetarian, there's now an option for chorizo too. Are they the greatest tacos in the world? No, they're not (that distinction belongs to Taqueria in downtown JC (sorry, no web site)). But for $1 apiece and with a nice selection of micros on tap, it will definitely fit the bill for the pre-meeting ritual.

Last night's guest speaker at the meeting was Dave Hoffmann of Climax Brewing. Always entertaining, Dave brought along some of his stellar beers for the club to sample (ESB, Nut Brown, Porter, IPA, Helles, and Doppelbock) and shared some of his secrets. Thanks, Dave!

I'll try to be back soon with some stuff that happened over the holidays - motorized my grain mill, picked up some interesting beer books, brewed a few times...

Culturing Yeast Part 4

Aaaaaaand.... we're back.

So the last step in culturing up this yeast was to sample the 100ml starters to make sure that they fermented properly and grow them up to a full sized yeast starter. That and to innoculate the agar slants, but I'll post on that later.

I decanted some of the fermented wort (hereon refered to as beer) from each of the 100ml starters. Here they are. I knew those beer festival sample glasses would come in handy one day!

I tasted each one and each tasted exactly the same. Neutral, clean, no off flavors at all. Well attenuated. So the next step was to prepare a 3000ml yeast starter with some yeast nutrient, 5.2, and a drop of olive oil. The yeast slurry from each of the 100ml starters was pitched into cooled 3000ml starter and it was set on the stir plate to ferment out.

Culturing Yeast Pt 3

With our trio of 10ml yeast starters having fermented out, it's time to step them up to 100ml. I've read that it's best to step up at a rate of anywhere from 4:1 to 10:1. I go with 10:1. It has worked just fine for me, so I see no reason to drag the process out any longer than that.

Equipment (in addition to what was used in previous steps):

1) 100ml pyrex flasks

2) Foam stoppers - a stopper and airlock setup would work just fine too, but I prefer to use these guys

Steps:

1) Prepare the starters - fill the pyrex flasks with 100ml of 10 brix wort. The yeast nutrient and drop of olive oil can be used here too, though I bypassed that step this time. Stop up the flasks with the foam stoppers.

2) Sterilize the starters - flasks in a water bath on the stove top works just fine here. Boil for a few minutes to kill any dirtbag germs that might have made their way in there and allow them to come back down to room temperature.

3) Innoculate the starters - I sprayed sanitizer around the mouths of each 10ml test tube and the 100ml flasks before opening anything. I then decanted the top 5ml or so from each test tube, swirled up the remaining starter beer and yeast from the bottom of the tube, and dumped into the 100ml flask. Put the foam stopper back in there when done and give a gentle swirl to get everything mixed up and to aerate a bit.

4) Wait.

After a day we've got something that looks like this:

Cluturing Yeast Pt 2

As promised, here's some more on the latest steps in my yeast culturing project... We left off with a petri dish streaked with yeast from my slurry. Here's what it looks like now:

The next high-level steps are to:

1) Prepare 10ml starters

2) Innoculate those starters with single colonies from the petri dish

Equipment (in addition to what was used in the previous steps):

1) 10ml test tubes - I prepared three starters

2) Airlocks - I treated myself and got some of the fancy glass ones so that I could sterilize them in the canner if needed

3) Drilled stoppers - I was unable to find drilled stoppers that fit test tubes and would accept an airlock, so I was forced to take matters into my own hands. I took stoppers that fit the test tubes and drilled them myself. It's a huge help to have a drill press handy when doing this.

4) Autoclavable test tube rack - Mine has turned out to be not so autoclavable

5) 10ml pipette

6) Prepared sanitizing solution - Use this to fill the airlocks. I just use my handy spray bottle of Star San.

7) Olive oil and a tooth pick.

Steps:

1) Prepare the starters - Using the same 10brix wort (with a dash each of Five Star 5.2 and yeast nutrient, no agar this time) and the pipette, fill each test tube with 10ml of starter wort. Also at this time, I dip the tooth pick in the olive oil, and put a tiny drop in each of the test tubes. I won't get into that in this space, but here's the rationale behind it (the fatty acids in the olive oil are a substitute for aeration of the wort). Put the stoppers and airlocks in. Fill the airlocks with sanitizer. Presumably you've already got the test tubes in the rack.

2) Sterilize the starters - This is a basic water bath procedure. Place the rack with the starters in your stainless steel sauce pan. Add enough water to the bottom to come about 1/3 of the way up the test tubes. Heat the water to a simmer. Wait for the starters to come up to a simmer and then give them about 10 minutes. Take off of the heat and allow them to cool to room temperature. Now you've got yourself some sterile 10ml starters. Note: at the same time that I'm doing this, I also like to prepare my sterile distilled water for cooling the innoculating loop. Put some distilled water in a small pyrex flask, cover with foil, and let it serilize in the sauce pan next to the rack.

3) Innoculate the starters - Take the starters to the clean, draft free area where your petri dish is hanging out. Put on your dust mask to contain your disgusting germs. Flame and cool your innoculating loop. Open up the petri dish. Quickly grab a small colony from the center of the petri dish with the innoculating loop, quickly open one of the starters, and quickly add the colony to the starter. Quickly put the stopper and airlock back in the starter. Did I mention that you should act quickly? Quickly repeat until all starters are innoculated.

4) Wait - Let your starters culture up in a clean, draft free room temperature environment. You should see activity within a day or two.

Next steps... Once these starters have finshed we'll repeat the above steps with 100ml starters, innoculating them with the 10ml starters.