I got into hammock camping with the Eno Doublenest. It’s probably the gateway hammock for most campers. It was ok. It was way better than sleeping on sticks and rocks with a little foam pad underneath, but really it was just OK.
Pictured here is my current setup, which is actually a bit in flux.
From left to right on the top we have:
the Warbonnet Becket straps, The straps are 15ft long, and the pair of them together weighs 2.2 oz. No carabineer or hooks are intended for this method, but as the name implies a becket hitch should be used. This means the hammock can connect anywhere from right up next to the tree trunk (if that’s the best you can find) or all the way out to the end of the 15 ft strap with as little tail as you’re comfortable with. I don’t know how little I’m comfortable with yet. I can always fall back to using these hooks with the Eno Helios straps.
Next there’s my tarp, followed by the stakes that came with it. This is the Hummingbird Hammocks “Heron” tarp. It’s super light and packs super tiny. It’s made of 0.9 oz silpoly. The cordage is 1.5ml dyneema. I’ve tested this tarp in fairly extreme rain and wind. It’s a champ. The tarp and stakes together weigh 12.65 oz
At bottom we have my hammock, the Dreamhammocks Sparrow. It’s not the lightest hammock on the market. It’s 11ft long, 70″ wide, 26.2 oz. It’s super comfortable and includes a built in bugnet and integrated ridgeline with organizers for my glasses, water bottle, hygiene kit, e-reader etc. This isn’t an asym hammock but it’s plenty wide for a good asymmetrical lay, and has guy-outs for tying off to stakes on the ground.
It’s not necessarily smaller or lighter than a comparable tent, but it’s amazingly comfortable and I love it.
Continuing on this theme of “What is normal, successful homebrewing like?” I wanted to share a quick update.
Last weekend I prepared a simple pale ale. I purchased 8 lbs of Simpsons Maris Otter, 2 lbs of Breiss American Honey Malt, 1 oz Challenger hops, 2 oz Mosaic hops, and one pack of SafAle US-05 from Fermentis. Yes, dry yeast. I nearly always go for dry yeast. I’ll get into why later.
So here we are on day 4. Excuse the shoddy camera work. One take. That’s all you get.
Bubbles about 96 hours after inoculation.
If I really wanted to be picky, I could adjust my keezer to 68 degrees, but apparently December and my non-air-conditioned garage achieve 64 degrees just fine. I have been a perfectionist about temperature, and other things at other times in my life but these days I like easy. Easy-going, easy process, EASY easy. Got it? cool.
So that’s a shelf in the garage, right by where the car gets parked, next to an inside wall. If I wanted colder I could probably go to an outside wall or closer to the garage door, but US-05 actually prefers 64-74 degrees Fahrenheit. If anything, my space here is a bit cool. but as you can see in the video we’re coming along just fine. I’m not pushing for a super fast fermentation.
So let’s talk about inoculation a bit. I mentioned above I tend to use dry yeast. I also mentioned, I like things easy. This is a hobby after all. I will geek out at times and get complicated, and I’ve got some procedures that are arguably “the hard way” when I know a couple hundred bucks could make it a lot easier, but generally easy is right. Begin right and you are easy. Continue easy and you are right. The right way to go easy is to forget the right way and forget that the going is easy. Got it? Good!
So, my easy method. I buy a single pack of dry yeast for a few bucks and put it in the refrigerator when I get home. Yeast doesn’t like to freeze, and it doesn’t like to be warm and dry, but it does just fine in stable, cool/cold conditions for a pretty long time. I learned this from making bread. Active dry bread yeast can live for years in the back of my fridge, so I put it in the fridge. Easy.
On my brew day, I do all the normal stuff. Heat up water, set my temperature, wander off until it’s hot enough, add grains, walk away and do other stuff. Come back one and a half hours later, pull the grains up, circulate through the grains until I stop seeing particulate, set my temperature up to boiling, walk away for a while and do other things. Twenty or so minutes later check the volume on my wort, pour through the grain bed to pick up any residual sugars and reach my boil volume. Wander off for another 20-30 minutes, check the alpha acid content of the yeast, use BeerSmith to work out the hop timings that will land near my desired IBUs. Yes, really, I do that on brew day usually after the mash. I’m not kidding. You should try it. Anyway, come back and pull the grain tower off the kettle and set it aside. Spoon away anything un-tasty-looking that’s collecting on top of the liquid. You don’t want that stuff. Trust me. Or don’t trust me. Spoon some of that thick foamy stuff on your wort into a glass and taste it. I’m betting you’ll keep spooning it off and throwing it away like I do. Do that a few times while coming up to a boil. Wander off and do other stuff at random intervals, but check in on temperature and remove nasty stuff off the top every now and then.
Reach a boil, let it boil a while, lay in a mesh bag across part of the kettle. This will contain the pellet-hop mess while giving it plenty of room to infuse in the wort. The bag is nylon. The heat is electric so I’m not worried about melting nylon on the outside of the pot. Used to have that problem over propane fire, not anymore. Easy. Drop in the first hop addition, do some math, set a timer on my watch for second hop addition, walk away until the timer goes off. Clean and sanitize the fermenter bucket in the meantime, clean and sanitize the lid, filter media (another spare mesh nylon bag, maybe two), filter frame (a big metal colander, like you use for pasta, large enough to just cross the bucket), the siphon, the airlock, am I forgetting anything? Conclude I’m not forgetting anything. Go back for second hop addition, set the timer again, then remember to clean and sanitize the drop-in hydrometer and leave it floating in the sanitizer bucket because why not, it won’t get into trouble there. Timer ding, go back for third hop addition. Before twenty minutes from flame-out remember to clean up the wort chiller. It needs cleaned and 15 minutes at least in the boil to be sanitary, but really doesn’t need to be in for the whole boil. Maybe there’s a fourth hop addition, maybe a fifth. Maybe not. Probably the last hop addition is at 5 minutes, because I really like dry-hopped flavor but I hate dry hopping. I haven’t made dry-hopping easy yet so I just late-hop instead. Results are good but definitely not equal.
At ten minutes from flame-out, tip in about 1 teaspoon of Irish moss. Is that too little? Too much? Ehh, it seem to usually be enough. Note this isn’t at flame-out. Irish moss needs about ten minutes to work, but at fifteen minutes in a boil it really starts to degrade, so aim for just ten. If you have to choose between early, late, or none, choose late. Even at flame-out it helps, just not as much.
At flame out, cut the heat and start the wort chiller. Mine is a big copper coil that I drop into the kettle. It works fine if my tap is running fairly cold. Water runs in cold, comes out hot, then warm, then nearly cool. Pull the hop bag, give it a spin and tie the end to a kettle handle so it’s above the liquid. Let it drain. Stir occasionally with a sanitized ladle or spoon. Wander off occasionally and enjoy life, but not too long. Check temperature and stir it sometimes. Wait for ~80 F. Don’t let stuff fall into the kettle. The boil is over, this all needs to remain sanitary now. Only sanitized things can enter the wort, and yeast.
Set up for filtration. Clean and sanitized bucket on the floor (preferably air-dried), colander on the bucket, filter fabric lays across the colander, kettle goes somewhere up higher. Put the raking cane end of the sanitized siphon into the wort, get the siphon going. The other end of the siphon should just reach the top of the colander and filter cloth so that the finished beer runs down the side and then filters/drips down into the bucket.
I said I was going to talk about inoculation, right? That’s now. At this point I head to the fridge, fetch my still-cold pack of dry yeast. Yes. Seriously. Look, I own a stir plate. I made it myself with a computer fan, hard drive magnet, epoxy, a small wooden crate, and the dimmer switch from a 1984 Volkswagen rabbit. It works great. I use it when I make something super-high-gravity like an RIS. The thing is that is NOT today. Today I fetch my cold, dry yeast from the refrigerator just after I start siphoning for filtration. I cut the pack with a clean knife and sprinkle it into the wort that’s collected in my filter set-up. This is the key.
The yeast is soaking in ~80F wort, waking up in a nicely agitating solution of deliciousness. Those grains of dry yeast soak in some liquid and start breaking up into many, many little yeast cells, they slip past my filter and fall like rain to the bottom of the bucket. This rain action oxygenates the wort and the yeast is right there in the middle, tossed around with all this warm tasty oxygenated liquid. As far as I can tell, it happily gets right to work.
That’s it. I cut open the yeast sachet and sprinkle it on at the start of filtration. If it clumps a bunch I chase it around with the output end of the siphon and it breaks up nicely and filters down. That’s all. For a simple 5% ABV pale ale like I described here, that’s all I do.
I joined my local homebrew club. I like the club and all the ideas they throw around and all the geeking out over controlling this or that variable. I get into that stuff, sometimes. It’s fun.
Most of the time though? I like it easy. This was easy. This was fun for me. It was a good brew day. I took my kid to a farm stand and got ice cream while waiting for the boil. I played with the dog. I went for a walk with my wife. I made a good beer. Probably. Like, I haven’t tasted it and I’ve never made this recipe before but I’m really, really sure it’ll be good. I’ve been doing this a long time and the club guys really like what I bring, like a lot. I always want constructive feedback but it’s not often I get any. Mostly they just ask if there’s any left after the bottles make the rounds.
Anyway, I do like to geek out on stuff, so please feel free to tell me what you’d do differently.
Final note, much like my hop timings, I create recipes on the fly. Often pretty good ones. I used to look for clone this and award-winning that and brew other people’s beer, but I guess I grew out of that. Half the time the brew store is out of at least one specialty grain, so these days I wing it, write it up after I bought it, and set the hop timings on brew day. I like it this way. It’s fun for me. I might write about that process some time. Maybe.
Recently, someone on r/Homebrewing posted asking to see more pictures of normal brewing process and results (as opposed to infected or otherwise ruined batches).
Turns out, I can’t add pictures to a post there, at least through the app, and no pics in the comments so thought I’d share some pictures and thoughts here.
Now, brew-day had already passed but in this case I did stop and take at least one picture. This is me dealing with the fact that I don’t have a pump to recirculate wort through my grain bed, to filter out solids before the boil.
Pretty boring stuff maybe, but I was enjoying the color so I snapped a pic to share with friends.
This was a creative brew, meaning rather than pick a recipe from some magazine or forum or whatever, I just went online at my LHBS and started selecting n lbs of base malt, and m lbs of this or that roasted malt, just selecting things I like and know that came together to taste nice in my head. It turned out to be more or less a porter. Now the next bit is what was directly relevant to the redditor’s request.
Looks a bit messy but this is par for the course for me.
So that is my hydrometer, two weeks after brew day, taking a reading of about 1.014. That’s about as low as I have any reason to expect, so it’s “done” in many respects. 5.5% ABV. Normally I’d wait another week to move forward, hope for the yeast to settle down even more, but I wanted to have this ready in time for a visit so I’m charging ahead, moving to force carb.
I may come back and add a bit more later, but that’s pretty much it for now. I have some thoughts about what’s seen here, and maybe I’ll get to hear some (hopefully constructive) criticism, but yeah that’s just about it.
Aerin was a young boy in all ways. Young at heart, inexperienced, and uneducated, but not stupid. He had a curious mind and long skinny arms which always reached into some kind of mischief. His legs, though slender, were quite strong. Excellent for running, as he is right now. Aerin loved to run in fact. He ran for sport, he ran because he was late, he raced alongside the hill deer just to feel the wind on his face. Right now though, he ran to save his skin from a sound beating.
Aerin had heard that old Ruen had a stash of seal’s tears. A seal’s tear was a small, round, pinkish gem which, under sunlight, reflected all sorts of colors like the inside of an aak shell. When you dipped one into water though, the colors all vanished and the gem nearly did as well. This made them terribly hard to find, since they came from the ocean, and quite valuable as well. Aerin had never seen one in person before, which made this just the kind of want he simply couldn’t put down until it was satisfied.
Early this morning Aerin snuck out of the house and down the road. He waited in the shadows for Ruen to head down to the pier. Once the geezer was well out of earshot he slipped past the gate, crept round the house until he found an open window, propped up and scaled a bench, scrambled through the window, and began to search the house.
Aerin was expecting, quite reasonably, that old Ruen would be gone ’til at least lunchtime and possibly until dinner. He’d be long gone by then. Luck, however, was not on his side today. While Aerin browsed the shelves and cupboards, old Ruen was having a bit of trouble down at the pier.
As soon as Ruen dropped into the water, he found his mask had sprung a leak. The glass was sealed with wasp-wax, and once in a while the wax would start to flake away. The resin used in newer goggles lasted much longer, but when it failed there was nothing for it but to buy a new pair. Ruen said he’d rather fix his goggles a hundred times than give them up for a newer model. It would cost him a day’s work but tomorrow, next week, and next year they’d still fit him perfectly.
When Aerin found the tears, Ruen was halfway home already. Aerin counted them, he felt their weight, he filled a cup of water and plopped one in to see it disappear. He even stuck one in his mouth. He decided it tasted like nothing.
He set the leather pouch on the table, and took three of them in his hands to see how they looked in the sunlight.
When Ruen closed the front gate and turned around, he wasn’t expecting his door to open in front of him. He certainly wasn’t expecting to see the oil merchant’s son walking out with three of his most prized posessions. Half a year’s wages in those grubby little hands.
Aerin’s eyes were fixed on the seal’s tears as he stepped out into the sunlight. The colors truly were dazzling, likely exaggerated as he had just left the dimness of Ruen’s hut. A giant minka bird could have been standing wings wide in front of him. He still would have seen nothing but the myriad colors of the seal’s tears.
“Thief!”
Ruen’s yell shook him like a thunderclap! The tears fell to the dirt and his feet were moving before he’d even thought “run!”
Aerin was over the fence and up the hill, almost to the alley when a hand closed on his arm and hoisted him off his feet.
“I thought that was you I saw lurking about. What kind of trouble are you into now Aerin? I doubt your parents even know you’re out of bed! Now what’s this I’m hearing about a thief?”
Hilda, Aerin’s aunt, is decidedly burly. Perhaps not a kind word to describe a woman, but there it is. Years of digging and hauling clay, wedging it and working it, had ,,,
You’ve probably guessed since I didn’t start with a title like “Found it!” that I did not, in fact, find it. You would be correct.
After a brief uncomfortable interaction with a semi truck driver who needed me out of his way, I again came to the shore of the marsh for another pass across the water.
The good news is, my little DJI Mini came home with me again. No goose attacks for me, yet.
Bad news? I don’t see any submerged drone in this footage either. I almost think I spotted something in the last video but I didn’t spend long enough over that spot to be sure, so I’ve got some areas to focus on when I go back.
I’ve been trying to help a friend find something that was lost lately. This particular lost thing is a Mavic Mini 2. He didn’t simply misplace it, it isn’t a case of absent mindedness, nothing like that. No, the drone was in fact attacked by a goose.
Normally if your DJI drone was brutally knocked out of the air by a goose this wouldn’t be a big deal, at least if you’re smart and got the care plan from DJI. The catch is, you’ve got to be able to return the drone. That’s where it got tricky.
The moment at which this drone was attacked, it was surveying a local beaver lodge. That’s not a euphamism, as you’ll see in the videos attached. I’m talking about a legit beaver lodge.
pass number one
Now, if you’ve watched the video I think you’ll agree the goose attack isn’t particularly surprising. That does appear to be a canada goose nesting on top of the beaver lodge.
Unfortunately, you’ll also notice we’re not seeing any clearly identifiable grey X in the water. On the upside, despite catching some definite attention from the geese they did not decide to take flight and pummel my drone, the slightly older DJI Mini, into the same water leaving it to the same watery fate.
The plan was to return the next day for hopefully clearer waters. Part of that plan was fulfilled, but for now this saga continues…
This is not a complete list, yet, but is a compiling of the rules of how this place works expanding as I learn them.
1. If you lose a thing and can’t find it for several weeks, you will find it shortly after you purchase a new one. (Pro tip: keep packaging and receipts. Toss the packaging as a last resort if it hasn’t shown up)
2. Rain loves two wheeled and uncovered vehicles. If you want it to rain, ride a bicycle or motorcycle to work. If you prefer dry weather and you own a convertible, leave the top up.
3. If you plan ahead for time off, you’ll probably end up sick. This is doubly true if you plan ahead to fake a sick day because you didn’t plan further ahead for regular time off. If you want healthy time off, surprise yourself.
4. Planning your day brings chaos, but if you don’t plan your day you’ll never know the difference. For best results, plan just enough to get all the important bits lined up, then just wing it.
