Here you can see the inside of the basement fridge. I’ve posted some photos before, but those were before I adapted the rig for double-keg duty.

A close up of the kegs reveals numbered taps. This is critical to knowing what is dispensed from those taps at any given point in time.

On the wall in the kitchenette, to the right of the fridge, is the key to decoding the tap numbers.

One of these days I may even have real taps – possibly attached to the door of the fridge and definitely with my custom Hump’s logos…

I know it looks a dreadful mess of entangling hoses at the moment, but it really isn’t so bad. It is easy to pour a beer, and it is easy to keep the hoses out of the way while retrieving bottles. The only thing that isn’t easy is removing and replacing a keg. That requires moving everything around, typically bringing the CO₂ canister and regulator out of the fridge for a bit, and slowly dragging the thing out. When it’s empty, it’s no problem. Moving around a full keg, however, is a different story. They only hold five gallons, but their oblong shape makes them a pain to easily move around. Also, they are resting at the back of the fridge so that their weight doesn’t crack the glass floor. Moving them around while making sure they aren’t resting on an unsupported area of glass is part of the fun.

Earlier this week, while completely smitten with the idea of photographing beer, I captured a snifter in the office, full of Rogue’s Old Crustacean Barleywine. Snifters make such lovely glassware, don’t they?

While we are on the subject of photos of fancy glasses that are full of beer, I found these gems today. They are from a day in 2006 at the Brick Store Pub in Decatur. That pub happens to serve beer in proper glassware, so you should be able to guess exactly what two brews Malin and I were tasting.

And, yes, that goober in the last picture is none other than … (drumroll, please) … yours truly.

Several things went wrong, however. To purge the oxygen from the keg, I hook the CO₂ line to the liquid tube (which reaches to the bottom of the keg, thus filling the keg from the bottom with inert CO₂ and pushing the oxygen out of the bunghole at the top). Unfortunately, I installed the liquid post over the liquid tube. Under other circumstances I would be hooking up the tap to the liquid tube, so this would be the right thing to do. But when purging the keg, this is a bad idea. The gas coupling is meant to attach to the gas post, not to the liquid post. So when I tried to snap on the gas coupling (through which the carbon dioxide would flow, pushing the evil, beer-spoiling oxygen out) – voila! – it got stuck. It was a real nightmare to detach, too! I finally got it loose, but broke it in the process.

Thus I will have to go buy another gas coupling from the homebrew store this weekend before I can force carbonate the Berry Weizen. And if that weren’t bad enough, my 5 lb. CO₂ tank ran dry this morning, too. So I have to get that filled also. So it will likely be next Monday or Tuesday before the Berry Weizen is ready for consumption.

On a lighter note, I picked up a bottle of Rogue’s Imperial Pilsner (if you visit their website you’ll see that they totally stole my idea of the “brewdog”). The beer came in an awesome bottle that looks like ceramic (though I think it is just painted glass) and has “Morimoto” inscribed on it. The other two Rogue beers that bore Morimoto’s moniker weren’t that special. But this one was. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting from an Imperial Pilsner – in that the hops were not the Saaz variety. But they were nice and earthy – almost like an English variety (which I think indeed they were). This is the only Rogue beer I’ve seen that wasn’t fermented using Rogue’s Pac Man yeast. It was fermented, instead, using a Czech Pilsner yeast. You can read my full review at ratebeer.com. Suffice it to say that it was good enough for Miles to be jealous:

Will, my 2-year-old son, inspecting the system for leaks:

I took some of my first batch of draft brew into work this week. Only a few folks were able to take 20 minutes out of their busy day to come and try some, so I ended up having some to take back home. I discovered that taking a “growler” (or in this case a 2-liter plastic soda bottle) full of draft beer is difficult. Some CO₂ is released when you dispense the beer (hence the head you typically see on a glass of beer), and the remaining CO₂ quickly vacates the beer in favor of the head space at the top of the bottle. I have no way to pressurize the bottle (which would keep the beer properly carbonated). So what I took to the office was less than stellarly carbonated.