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My trip to alcoholism is nearly complete! Behold The Kegerator!

This is a Sanyo 4910 compact refrigerator from Best Buy and a dual faucet draft tower from Beverage Factory and several hours of my life. It will hold 2 5 gallon “Corney” kegs, which are the kinda you used to see soda being delivered in and a 5lb CO2 bottle, which is perfect. Eventually I will hopefully have two kegs of my very own homebrewed beer in there. Since I only have a single batch ready to keg now I have a keg of Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat being delivered on Friday. That should hold me over for a while!

My cider is about ready to go to the keg so I’ll be sampling that this weekend. I made it very strong, probably too strong, by adding a lot of white and brown sugar. This was probably a bad idea as the result is a very “raw” tasting drink. I’ve just finished adding some stabilizers to it which will need about 8 hours to do their magic and tomorrow I am going to cut the cider about 60/40 with fresh apple juice. Right now the cider is super dry, and about 11% ABV so adding that juice will sweeten it up and drop the alcohol content some.

More about the kegerator:
In case you want to do this yourself, here is what I did, or actually, what I would have done had I not made all the mistakes I did.
Obtain a Sanyo 4910 fridge.
Obtain a 3″ PVC draft tower.
Obtain a 3″ hole cutter that will go through thin metal. I bought mine, and the thing that it mounts to to use in a drill at Home Depot for about $25.
Obtain some large outside diameter washers with small inner diameters. The washers that come with the tower are too small.
Obtain a piece of 5-3/4″ square by 1/2″ plywood.
Obtain a tube of hand squeeze silicone sealant.

Take the lid off the top of the fridge. This is a plastic facade that can be removed by taking out 7 obvious screws. Look at the underside of the plastic top and you will see a diamondish shape in the plastic. Dead center of that is where you want the center of your draft tower. Drill a small pilot hole right in the middle all the way through the plastic. Use a dremel or razor or anything to remove the plasic fins that are inside that diamond. What you will end up with is a 1/2″ by 5-3/4″ by 5-3/4″ depression. Your piece of plywood should fit in this perfectly and flush. Make this happen.

Use some double sided tape, or tack or something to stick that wood inside the lid so you can put the lid back on without the wood falling out. Screw the lid back down nice and tight and make sure it’s aligned properly.

Now the fun part! Take your 3″ hole cutter, put the pilot bit in the pilot hole you made earlier and go to town. Slow and steady wins the race. They recommend you use cutting oil during this but I didn’t bother. Use a nice powerful drill and take it slow and keep it straight. Go all the way through the lid, the wood, the metal top of the fridge, the foam insulation of the fridge and the plastic interior of the fridge.

Now, take the template that came with your tower, or use the tower itself to mark the spots and drill the 4 mounting holes. Drill them slightly larger than your bolts cause those bolts are going to have to go through a lot of material and it’s a pain in the ass.

Take that top back off and take the piece of wood out. Use your sealant to make a ring or two around the outside of the holes. Hell, put some wherever you like. We just want a nice airtight seal between the wood and the top of the fridge and the wood and the inside of the plastic. Put it all backtogether, put your rubber gasket on top the plastic, bolt down the tower and take pictures!

You’ll note that I left out the parts where I had to redrill everything three times, cut the wood 4 times, make a big mess of the plastic top, spill my beer, kick the dog, scream at the neighbors and give up in disgust. I took the fall for you. I hope you appreciate it.

It was all worth it. I got a dual faucer kegerator that will hold 2 Corney kegs for about $300 total. A similar “real” kegerator would have run me about $1500. Mine isn’t as nice, and it’s not all stainless steel but it looks fine and it works great. One thing I intend to add is a 120v axial/biscuit/muffin fan wired into the lamp assembly that will force air up into the tower. One of the major complaints about making your own kegerator is that the first pint of the day will foam a lot because the cold beer hits a warm faucet or warm tubes. My brother has a real kegerator and the way they do it is by having a 1″ wide flexible tube running inside the tower to the top so that cold air is being blown up and out of the tower. I think a small fan will do the same trick nicely.

I saw Kill Bill tonight with Adam, Scott and Christine. Very cool movie, but weird. Weird man. It’s Tarantino so it’s gonna be weird but this was pretty weird.

To be honest, I was expecting more action. It was actually a little slow for my tastes but don’t get me wrong, it was super good. Looking forward to Volume 2.

Go see it.

So I was reading an article about some 107 pound woman who won a BBQ sandwich eating contest by eating 26 BBQ sandwiches.

Impressive.

Of course I sent the link over to Ryan for him to peruse. We can both appreciate a man or a woman with super eating powers and we consider ourselves accomplished eaters.

You know where this is going already, don’t you?

Ryan picked up 14 McDonald’s cheeseburgers on the way home and we set to eating. We set a 1 hour time limit. I decided to sprint to the finish and polished off my 7 within about 20 minutes. Ryan took the slow and steady route and finished his last one about 10 minutes after me.
We didn’t feel like going out to get more so the contest was a tie.

Needless to say (but I will anyway) I don’t feel so good today, but I am definitly not hungry! No indeed!

In other news, cats are funny.

As I have well documented on this site and others, I love The Mermen and my favorite song is probably Splashin’ With The Mermaid. It just came up in my playlist and it’s so damn good I thought I would share. So, have a listen and tell me what you think, or better yet, tell them what you think by going out and buying all their albums. If you aren’t tapping something by the end of the song, you may want to check your pulse.

So I was screwing around with TomCat, thinking of using it to replace Orion which is the web server I run. I made a symlink to the vonnieda.org web application in TomCat, started up and installed it. I played with it a bit in the manager thing and decided to “remove” it, thinking this would remove the information from TomCat’s configuration about vonnieda.org.

Oh no.

The page was taking much longer to come back than I expected it to so I quickly kill -9ed TomCat. Not before it had deleted most of my web site, including all the photography.

I had a backup of course, but backups are never as good as the original so let me know if you find anything missing.

…

Not even a warning. Damn.

I mixed up my first ever batch of hard cider yesterday and tonight (this morning?) it’s bubbling happily away. In case it turns out to be the best thing ever, here is what I did:

– Put 4 gallons no name, supermarket, unpastuerized apple juice into sanitized fermenter.
– Added 4 crushed Campden tablets and covered with saran wrap. Let sit 24 hours.
– Heat about a half gallon tap water, and dissolve 2 lbs white sugar and 2 lbs brown sugar.
– Add Acid Blend, Grape Tannin, Pectic Enzymes and Yeast Energyzer (in approx. amounts specified on packages) to syrup.
– Mix juice and syrup into primary fermenter.
– Pitch Wyeast Labs 3766 Cider and airlock it.

I did all that around 3pm yesterday afternoon. It’s now about 3am, so almost 12 hours and there is good activity in the fermenter.

I bought a 6.5 gallon glass carboy and used that as my primary fermenter for the cider. All my other fermenting has been done in plastic buckets and I wanted to see the process as it happens. Honestly, it’s gross. About 4 hours in, little blobs of yeast were forming all through the wort. When they got big enough the floated to the top and started to form an ugly mess. Now 12 hours later there is a fairly think kreusen (I think?) of yeast on the top of the wort and it looks pretty cool. Kinda creamy with brown splotches.

My goal with this cider was to produce a very sweet, potent cider. After doing some reading it seems that might be hard to do. Most homebrewers end up with very dry ciders. I guess the yeast they normally use (champagne) yeast will ferment every last drop of sugar out. The starting gravity on my finished wort was about 1.075 and most people say that their finishing gravity is 1.000 or under. If that’s what I end up with I should get something along the lines of 10% alcohol, which will definitly meet the potent goal. The sweetness will be a little harder.

Being a novice at this, I have some ideas that are probably terrible. I believe my homebrew store sells an additive that will kill the yeast in the wort. So I could wait till the gravity is about 1.020 and then kill it. I don’t know if that’s feasible. The other thing I was thinking was throwing the whole fermenter in the fridge which should knock the yeast out, let it settle and then siphon to a secondary. That would get a lot of the yeast out and should slow down any additional fermentation.

Who knows? Anyway, I am excited about it. The cider was so easy, and cheap to make I don’t mind experimenting a little bit. Should be a learning experience, and hopefully will give me something good to drink over the winter 🙂

I got the cartilage of my ear pierced tonight. I think it looks pretty decent, and I am happy with it but I almost keep throwing up cause I keep remembering the sound of the needle breaking through the flesh.
*shiver*

Here are some pictures of it.

Aoccdrnig to rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe.

The last time I received a package via UPS the driver delivered it to the house across the street from me. I found this out because when I checked the tracking information for the package, it said “DELIVERED: PORCH” but when I got to my porch it was not there. I called UPS and they said “It was delivered to XXXX Whatever Lane.”
I explained that that was not my address and I checked my receipt to make sure I had my shipping address right. I did. I asked the UPS rep what they had down for the shipping address and they read my address back to me. So why did the driver deliver it somewhere else, and then record that he delivered it somewhere else without realizing it?

So today I am all excited because I am receiving a package full of yummy electronic components for me to play with tonight. Paid extra for 2 Day Air. Check tracking and it’s “DELIVERED: PORCH”

Uh oh.

I get home and no package. I immediatly run across the street to ask for my package but they are not home, so I call UPS. This time the driver delivered it to the right house number… two streets away. The names of the streets are not even slightly similar. I ask the rep to confirm the shipping address and it’s correct. Once again the driver has delivered the package to the wrong address and recorded his stupidity. I bitch loudly at the UPS rep and he thinks something is fishy too so he sends an urgent message to the local UPS distribution center.

A guy from the distribution center calls me about an hour later and appologizes profusely. He says “I will talk to the driver and find out what is going on.” He says “Maybe he just thought he was on the right street?” and I explain how the driver recorded that he delivered it to the wrong street. I ask him if he still thinks the driver thought he was on the right street and he says no. He’ll check in to it.

So I go to the address of where the package was supposed to be delivered. The package is not on the porch, and they aren’t home so I assume they took it inside. I leave a note on the door for them to call me. Hopefully I will see my stuff sometime this weekend.

Moral of this long winded story? UPS Really Sucks. I don’t know if my driver has a personal grudge against me or what, but 2 packages to the wrong address in two weeks (a 100% ratio!) is pretty bad. What the hell?

This is so wrong…
So why did I laugh so hard?
Free Cat