# What do you guys do for fun?



## funetical (Oct 16, 2009)

I seem to be consumed with my diy/biking. Any body else do anything noteworthy?


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Oct 16, 2009)

I phone up people and breathe hard.


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## oldognewtrick (Oct 16, 2009)

Nestor_Kelebay said:


> I phone up people and breathe hard.



So your the guy that keeps calling my wife, she said she misses you and is waiting for you to call again.


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## funetical (Oct 18, 2009)

Nestor_Kelebay said:


> I phone up people and breathe hard.



I meant hobbies not what you do for a living.


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## Cork-Guy (Oct 18, 2009)

Fishing is my biggest hobby... Illinois trout opener today as a matter of fact!


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## funetical (Oct 18, 2009)

Good luck to you then.


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Oct 18, 2009)

I don't really have any "hobbies".

I get hammered a lot.

Would that count as a "hobby"?


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## Plumbing And Lighting (Oct 19, 2009)

^yes that counts


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## funetical (Oct 20, 2009)

Nestor_Kelebay said:


> I don't really have any "hobbies".
> 
> I get hammered a lot.
> 
> Would that count as a "hobby"?



Really? I wouldn't have thought that. Do you ever get tired of Molson? Do you drink alone? Are you perfecting the craft of getting hammered? Have you figured out how you make it home at the end of the night?


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Oct 20, 2009)

Funetical:

I've actually been making my own homemade wine and beer for the past 30 years.

I have a magic fridge that dispenses my home made beer on tap, and it converts home made wine into home made champagne.












But, I stopped making wine about 10 years ago and I stopped making beer about 3 months ago.  When I could make 5 gallons of wine for $40 and later 5 gallons of beer for $6, I'd make the beer in 10 gallon batches and I'd have plenty of it around all the time.

But, I found that it progressively started interfering with my sleep, so now I don't make it at all anymore.

But, 5 to 10 years ago, I'd have anywhere from 10 to 30 gallons of been in my apartment at any given time.  A gallon of beer is 12 bottles, so that's anywhere from 120 to 360 bottles.  And, I'd have put my home made beer up against that available from any commercial brewery in a taste test any day of the week, and I'd have won.

PS:
     The stainless steel cylinders in the fridge are empty.  I took those pictures tonight and I only put the cylinders in the fridge and connected them for the picture.  If you can see, the pressure gauge on the CO2 cast iron cylinder behind the stainless steel cylinders reads 0 psig cuz it's empty too.


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## FixIt4Me (Oct 21, 2009)

wow that is pretty awesome!  Makes my hobbies of running and reading sounds pretttyyyy booorrrinnggg haha


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## TxBuilder (Oct 21, 2009)

That is Awesome. I'd think it's a hobby then.


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## funetical (Oct 21, 2009)

Wow. just wow. Well I guess there's more. It's a hobby then. What do you Brew?


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Oct 22, 2009)

I don't want to give anyone in here the impression that I was some "master brewer" that made beer for national taste testing competitions.  I was always interested in chemistry in general and I came across a book called "The Lore of Still Building" which explained the process of malting wheat or rye or barley or whatever, then using the enzymes to produce sugar from starch, and then fermenting that sugar to produce ethyl alcohol.  And, that book also explained some of the ingenious designs that people have used in making stills.  I found all of that very interesting, and so I started making wine when I was 21, beer shortly afterward, but I never did build a still or make hard liquor.  I've always been interested in the role alcohol has played in human society and our history.

But, I should say right now that the one time I tried making beer from scratch, by malting barley and grinding up baked barley and hops, I can't say I got any better a beer than I did from a $12 beer kit.  I found it to be a lot of work, messy and the results were disappointing.  I got better results faster and easier from store bought beer kits than I got from going through the whole process from scratch.

It's not just my own opinion, as all of my friends at that time agreed, that the beer I was making from kits tasted better than those sold by brewerys.  The reason why is that it wasn't until you started drinking beers made from kits that you started to notice a "metallic" or "chemical" taste in the beers made by breweries.  I really don't know what causes that, but I suspect the difference is in the carbonation.  When yeast ferments sugar, the result is the formation of "sediment" at the bottom of the fermenter.  People buying beer don't want to see any sediment at the bottom of their bottle cuz they think "Yuck, what's that crap?" so breweries will use compressed Carbon Dioxide to carbonate their beer just the same way as soft drinks and "sparkling wines" are carbonated at the factory.  The amount of carbonation has a huge impact on the taste of any beverage, and you know if you've ever compared the taste of distilled water and soda water.

When you make your own beer, you carbonate it by dissolving more sugar in the beer immediately before bottling it.  The added sugar causes the fermentation process to start up again inside the bottle (which is exactly how champagne is carbonated), and the result is that the byproduct of yeast fermenting sugar is CO2 produced which is trapped inside the bottle.  As that "secondary fermentation" proceeds, you get more and more CO2 dissolved in the beer, and that's what causes both home made beer and store bought champagne to be under pressure when you first open the bottle.  You don't find hardly any pressure when you open a bottle of store bought beer, and I think they must add something to the beer that keeps the CO2 in solution rather than have it reach it's natural equilibrium with the pressure in the airspace above the liquid.

Anyhow, it's been my experience, that by adding sugar to the beer before bottling results in a natural carbonation, and I don't know if that natural carbonation results in a smoother, more agreeable taste, or that breweries add something to keep the CO2 dissolved in the beer that causes store bought beer to have a metallic or chemical taste to it.  (You get sediment in each bottle of champagne too, just like you do in home made beer, but they use a special process of turning the champagne bottles upside down and freezing the necks so that the champagne bottle can be opened and the frozen sediment removed so that you never find sediment in store bought champagne that you otherwise would find if they didn't remove it.)

So, I believe the difference in taste between home made beer and brewery beer is in the carbonation process, and I can assure you that well made beer (even if it's made from a kit) DOES taste better and is more pleasurable to drink than any beer made by a brewery that I've ever tasted.

Anyhow, I tried making "mead" once, which has been made in the northern latitudes of Europe for as long as wine has been made in the southern latitudes, but I can't say I really liked the stuff.  It basically tasted like watered down vodka, but it did have it's own characteristic taste that neither water nor vodka have.

Anyhow, I've always found it extremely interesting that the sugar (glucose) molecule is fundamental to the metabolism of all living things on this Good Earth because it was undoubtedly fundamental to the primordial algae in Earth's early oceans from which all life subsequently evolved.  A tree, for example, makes sugar molecules by combining water from the roots, CO2 from the air and energy from the Sun to produce glucose molecules.  That is the one and only thing that photosynthesis produces; glucose molecules.  But, there are two different molecular structures (or "isomers") of C6H12O6 and if you stack up one kind of glucose molecule like bricks in a wall, you get starch, which is what cereal grains, rice and potatoes are made mostly of.  If you stack up the other kind of glucose moleculel, you get cellulose, which is what cotton is made of and wood is mostly made of.  In fact, everything in every plant, including the itchy stuff in poison ivy, was somehow made from lowly sugar molecules.

Plants provide their seeds with a packet of "energy" to get them off to a good start when they start to grow.  That energy supply is in the form of a supply of starch.  Seeds contain a supply of starch and an enzyme called "Diastase".  When a seed starts to grow, the diastase enzyme in the seed starts converting the starch back into glucose to provide the energy needed for the plant to grow.

To make the sugar needed for alcohol, farmers in Europe and in America used to germinate seeds so that the seeds started to sprout, and the "root" of the seed would emerge from the seed husk.  Once the root was about the same length as the seed, then the amount of diastase in the seed had reached it's highest level and conversion of starch into sugar was at a maximum.  This process is called "malting" and Moonshiners would then stop the seed's germination by baking the germinated seeds, or at least Sun drying them.  They would then grind up the germinated seeds and grind up a much larger amount of ungerminated seeds (typically barley for some reason) and mix the two together in water to make a thick "mash".  The diastase enzyme from the germinated seeds would then mix with the starch from the ungerminated seeds in the mash to convert the starch into sugar (glucose) molecules.  Once that mixture was sweet to the taste, yeast would be added to ferment those sugar molecules into ethyl alchol molecules.  As that fermentation occured, the mash would taste less and less sweet, and would be converted to "sour mash".  It wouldn't have actually tasted sour, it just wouldn't be sweet anymore, and therefore would have been CALLED "sour" to identify it as having already been fermented.  It certainly could never have tasted any more sour than ethyl alcohol, or vodka, neither of which has a sour taste.  From there, it was just a matter of distilling that liquid to concentrate the alcohol in the vapours that boiled off.  There, now everyone reading this knows more than 99% of the people out there about how to make moonshine.  And, of course, everyone reading this also now understands why the myth that this process gone awry would produce methyl alcohol (which when consumed would cause people to go blind and die) is untrue.  The fact is that seeds contains starch.  Diastase converts starch to sugar.  Yeast converts sugar to ETHYL alcohol.  The misinformation that it could produce methyl alcohol instead was propogated by both the US and Canadian governments to discourage people from making, buying and consuming moonshine to ensure people bought (and paid the high taxes) on government approved spirits.  So far as I know, it's simply not possible for any still to produce methyl alcohol instead of ethyl alcohol, and so it's not possible to go blind or die from drinking moonshine.  It's just one more lie told to us by our respective governments in order to get us to do what they want.

(Incidentally, it was actually Louis Pasteur who discovered that there were different kinds of micro organisms that grew naturally on grape skins, and that the yeast that converted sugar into ethyl alcohol would occasionally lose the battle for dominance to other microorganisms that converted the sugar into acetic acid (vinegar).  Until Louis figured that out, then why "wine" would occasionally turn into vinegar was the greatest mystery of the middle ages.  Louis, with his microscope, and working on a commission from the government of France (cuz wine was so important to the French economy) found that the wine didn't turn into vinegar as had been thought.  He discovered that the grape juice usually turns into wine, but will occasionally turn into vinegar instead depending on which of the various micro-organisms growing on the grape skins is more successful in reproducing, and that depended on the conditions during the early stages of fermentation.  Modern winemakers add something called "Camden Tablets" to their grape juice to kill ALL the micro-organisms in the grape juice, so that when the yeast it added, it has no competition in converting the grape juice sugars into alcohol, thus insuring that you get wine instead of vinegar every time.)

And, it's interesting to me because the same ancient technology that produced wine and beer is where the future lies as modern day researchers try and figure out how to convert CELLULOSE back into sugar, and ferment that cellulostic sugar to make ethyl alcohol as a substitute for gasoline.


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## oldognewtrick (Oct 22, 2009)

Nestor, why are you not brewing your own bio-fuel?


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## TxBuilder (Oct 22, 2009)

That's not a hobby for you it's an obsession. There's a place for that.

HomeBrewTalk.com - Beer, Wine, Mead, & Cider Brewing Discussion Community.


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## funetical (Oct 22, 2009)

I think I found my scientist.


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Oct 22, 2009)

funetical said:


> I think I found my scientist.



Funetical:  Till now, I've been presuming that you were another guy, but that's not the kind of thing one guy would be likely to say to another.  So, now I'm presuming you're a girl, right?


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## funetical (Oct 23, 2009)

No I'm not a girl. Although with a house full of them I feel like one sometimes. That's funny but I was refering to  http://www.houserepairtalk.com/f112/bags-water-7787/
read the post it explains everything. Plus you found my post funny didn't you? That should be proof enough. Kidding ladies are funny too.


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## TxBuilder (Oct 23, 2009)

Dang Nestor. That's funny.


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Oct 23, 2009)

Oh, OK.

I'd have been fine with it either way, but I just thought I'd ask because I wasn't sure quite how to interpret what you'd said.

So far as the bags of water goes.  I expect the most obvious explanation would be that a fly would "think" (if bugs like flies have brains sufficient enough for an actual thought process), that everything hovering in the air is flying, and anything larger than it could potentially consider the fly a meal.  So, to the fly, the bags of water are potentially much larger flying insects that may want to eat it.

And, the way you'd test to see if that's what the flys are thinking is to see if you get exactly the same results using helium balloons instead.  If the flys stay as far away from helium balloons as they do from bags of water, that suggests that it's not the bag or the water, it's the fact that it's big and can also fly, and that makes it potentially dangerous in the fly's mind.

My guess is that you'd probably get even better results by putting gold fish in the bags of water to provide movement that would further put the Fear of God in the flies.


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## oldognewtrick (Oct 24, 2009)

Nestor_Kelebay said:


> My guess is that you'd probably get even better results by putting gold fish in the bags of water to provide movement that would further put the Fear of God in the flies.



Well, hanging a bag of gold fish around the deck won't work at my house. It would just be enough to give the misses grounds to have me committed, I'm on thin ice as it is. I don't think she would buy into the theory that gold fish in a bag are going to ward off those pesky fruit flies.


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## funetical (Oct 26, 2009)

I'm going to try it and if you don't hear from me in a few days that means the goldfish won. On a serious note though. I'm glad you guys know I'm not a lady. I will be setting up controls around my house now although it seems like a long way to go to prove my brother in  law who everybody knows is an idiot is in fact an idiot.


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Oct 26, 2009)

I expect that's the opinion my brother in law has of me!


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## funetical (Oct 27, 2009)

I doubt it. Are you constantly arguing about nothing just to get attention? Are you thirty and still living at home? Do you have a job but are always broke? Man I love my wife but her family is dumb in a way that's impressive considering evolution and survival of the fittest and all.


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## jyoti (Nov 20, 2009)

Listening Soft and old music is my hobby. and watching Family Drama Movies on t.v. like hum aapke hain kaun and hum saath saath hain.

Thanks


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## Nestor_Kelebay (Nov 20, 2009)

Hi Jyoti.

Reading your message gave me the comfort of knowing that the opposite side of the planet is still there.


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## oldognewtrick (Nov 20, 2009)

jyoti said:


> and watching Family Drama Movies on t.v. like hum aapke hain kaun and hum saath saath hain.
> 
> Thanks



Golly, some of my favorites also, small world. My wife and I also enjoy reruns of Seinfeld at dinner time.


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## TxBuilder (Nov 20, 2009)

Nestor_Kelebay said:


> Reading your message gave me the comfort of knowing that the opposite side of the planet is still there.



I've never seen it.


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