Often, when I am wandering around in a city that I’m unfamiliar with I wish I was more familiar with the neighborhoods. Is this street totally empty because people haven’t gotten home from work yet? Is it because this is normally a business district and people have left for the day? Or am I about to get shot?

I’ll never know. Except that I haven’t been shot, yet.

I am procrastinating by writing what should be an incredibly short blog post, due to the fact that our Big Test is tomorrow. It also helps that the wireless in this hostel is really pretty terrible and I just can’t get online right now. So I’m really procrastinating and writing this in notepad.

Good times.

Today we started our post-fermentation education. Filtration, maturation, carbonation, etc. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little disappointed. The course up to this point has been flat out awesome. This morning we started off with the brewer from Siebel’s experimental station who seems to know more about filtration than is healthy for most people. He was a wizard. What followed was… well… I don’t want to say terrible. He’s not terrible. But lackluster probably isn’t far from the truth. He’s a fill-in. He’s got to be. He’s not listed on the Siebel faculty, he doesn’t really seem all that comfortable with teaching, he’s not familiar with the slides or their content, and he doesn’t present the material well, or even, indeed, at all, sometimes.

Tomorrow’s going to be a long day. 5 hours of listening to him lecture on things that we’re going to get tested on (along with many, many, many other things) in the afternoon. It doesn’t seem very fair.

You win some, you lose some, I guess.

This afternoon we also did the nastiest off-flavor tasting ever, just to put a cap on the day. We smelled/tasted:

Lactic acid (sour)
Butynic acid (vomit, rotting grain)
“Earthy” (mold, dirt, unclean – I was so sensitive of this that I actually smelled it when I pour the beer, much less brought it anywhere near my face. I could taste it for hours afterward.)
Indole (plastic, medicinal, diaper, death – there were only a handful of people in the class that could actually smell this and I was one of the “lucky” ones that could. As Keith said, “It tastes like a baby took a shit in your head.”)
Caprylic acid (waxy, candles, crayons)
Oxidization (paper, wet cardboard)
Bready/Heat Stress (lightly papery, a little sweet, flat, and lifeless)
“Infection”: a heady cocktail of lactic acid and diacetyl blended to simulate a lactobacillus infection. (rancid butter, sour cream)

All in all good times. I was forced to go to the Hopleaf to drive all of the flavors out of my face. And now, I must to study, for reals. More update tomorrow, post-test.

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