Last night we bottled our first batch of OA beer. It was pretty awesome to see our experiment limping idly towards success. The beer turned out to be much lighter than it appeared while fermenting in the carboy, but it was pretty remarkable how much like beer this strange concoction actually looked.

We siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket where we had 2/3 cups dextrose dissolved in a pint of water. Adding our bottling tube we opened the spigot and proceeded to… for the love of Christ… crouch down on the floor for the next 45 freaking minutes to fill our bombers with beer. This sucked. Totally friggin’ terrible this crouching bullshit was. I didn’t threaten Jesus to make sure I was born white in America so that I could spend my time away from work bending over and actually straining for something. That was never part of the deal, thank you very much.

No, never again will I labor like that for my delicious godly brew. Bump that.

Fortunately, there is a better way, a less strenuous path towards homebrew inebriation. For our next batch I will be kegging the beer and not bothering with the bottling and capping nonsense that was the bane of my existence yesterday. Next time, I’m just going to dump the beer into a keg, close it up and throw that delicious nectar into my kegerator and be done with it.

The only problem I foresee now is getting my Sanke coupler to adapt to a Cornelius keg. Well, apparently the nice folks at kegconnection.com have managed to come up with a solution for this, allowing your liquid and gas lines to switch easily between Sanke and Cornelius. Check out the video below for all the wonderful details.

I just noticed this sale on kegerators. You can get a single faucet tower kegerator with CO2 tank included for $425! Shipping puts you up to just about $500 for the whole thing.

This is a very competitive price. The only thing I don’t know about is the quality of the product, both the fridge and the couplers. I use all Micro-Matic components, I wonder how this kegs accessories compare?

As I mentioned in a previous post, I cleaned my kegerator lines last night and, inadvertantly, my entire keg fridge. It’s odd how, as you grow more rings around your trunk, you come to truly relish and enjoy the simpler things in life. I love the time I get to spend with my kegerator, disassembling and cleaning, tuning and upgrading. It brings me closer to my beer and makes my degenerative alcoholism seem far more productive than it otherwise would.

As I was letting the BLCsit in my lines last night, I decided it was time to change out my tap handles. Baseball season is over (for the Cubs) so it’s time to take down my baseball tap handle and I feel I’ve given my Obama tap handle (sorry these are sold out) more than ample time on it’s premiere stage. I’m holding out for health care reform to pass before giving him the auspicious throne atop my kegerator again (although, HEY! Congrats on the Nobel Peace Prize Barry!).

So, to replace at least one of my two tap handles I made purchase of the She-Devil tap handle from kegworks (Apparently, I got their last one as it now shows that it is out of stock, I’ve posted a link to another site that carries it, although it is a few dollars more expensive). I have had my eye on this vicious little demon tramp for quite some time now and thought “what better time than the Halloween season to collect this novelty beer tap handle.” I love Halloween novelties and treats, especially when they help me drink.

One thing I did notice while combing the internet for a novelty tap handle that suited my fairly specific profile of classy-yet-kitschy-without-being-cliched is that there really aren’t too many great novelty beer tap handles available out there. I think I’m going to put our metal-smithing friends over at the League of Troubled Souls to work making some sweetly evil tap handles to fill this achey breaky void.

If you know of any great novelty tap handles or have some suggestions for the LTS custom jobs post them in the comments.

I’m sitting here drinking a delicious Metropolitan Flywheel while I clean my kegerator. I decided to post that with a link to instructions on how to clean beer lines on Twitter. While tweeting, it dawned on me that Twitter is the ideal spot for a new birth of the Haiku amongst the mainstream malaise.

So, I started by example. Here’s my tweet:

“Enjoying Flywheel Lager,
Cleaning My Keg Fridge,
All Is In Accord For Now.
http://bit.ly/dzlmr“

From now on anytime Outsider’s Almanac tweets it will be in Haiku. Until we decide to no longer do that.

Follow our tiny little army bringing ancient, Japanese poetry back to the degenerates of the world at @OutsidersAl.

Interesting video here explaining the process of using enzymes from human saliva as a way to create the sugars for the new Dogfish Head beer, Chica.

Chicha beer is Peruvian in origin and typically uses purple maize, but can have many other ingredients like yucca or strawberries in Dogfish Head’s case.

I’m a big fan of the work Dogfish Head does, in fact their 60 minute is presently 50% of my kegerators supply right now (Great Lake’s Dortmunder Gold being the other 50%).

Here’s what the NYT had to say about Dogfish Head’s next experiment.