Drunken Pumpkin

depression’s got a hold of me
depression, i gotta break free
depression’s got a hold on me
depression’s gonna kill me.
-Black Flag Depression

I attempted to brew some Root Beer this past week. The result was catastrophic failure. Okay, maybe not catastrophic, per se, but the end result was absolute crap.
For those of you so inclined to brew your own sodas, make sure you follow a single set of instructions, unlike myself. You see, you can make this stuff in pretty small batches right in a 2 liter bottle, or you can make bigger batches of it in a brewing pail, just like real beer. The processes are each a little different. The big difference between the two is fermentation time. The small bottles ferment over the course of a few days until the pressure in the bottle kills off the yeast. The bigger batches ferment until all of the sugar is consumed, and is thus more alcoholic. So, if you make it in a big pail following the little batch instructions you get foul tasting, flat garbage, like I did. You see, the reason beer is fizzy is due to the “charging” of the bottles with sugar before you fill it up with your wort. Then the yeast makes more CO2, pressurizes the bottle and kills the yeast.
Of course, I didn’t charge the bottles, because I didn’t want the stuff to keep fermenting after bottled, because I wasn’t making beer. Little did I know, that I had, in fact, made beer due to my extra fermentation time. What I ended up with was something very yeasty with a profound taste of wintergreen and old bread. That was flat. And Lots of it. Four gallons, in fact. Our house has stank of that crap for the last week and a half.

On the bright side, I didn’t use the wrong yeast and then bottle in small batches, thus causing the bottles to rupture covering my kitchen with half fermented sugar and wintergreen. I suppose that would have been a true catastrophic failure.

Now, I’m not the sad individual that would get depressed over jacked up soda. (Okay, maybe I am.) However, I am an educator and my summer vacation is rapidly coming to an end, and I realized that I haven’t prepared for this coming fall, nor have I completed most of the projects I had in mind for my summer. Nothing like the weight of sloth to hold you down. I really like the cyclical processes that keep our lives in stagnation. I have loads of great ideas, but there is always something stupid in the way, usually the stupid thing is me. The other problem is how scattered my interests are, in case you couldn’t tell by the nature of Drunken Pumpkin, both Jeff and I suffer from an excess of things that draw our attention.

Ah well, enough of that nonsense, tune in next time, when I really will talk about junior crop circles. And sometime in the next week, images from our first foray into Bartitsu.