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In addition to being pretty busy in my daily life, I've been pretty busy with brewing as well. I bought a turkey fryer kit with 30 qt aluminum pot, 5 gallon rubbermaid cooler (upgrading from my 2-gal mash tun), corona-style grain mill, refractometer, two more 5-gallon kegs, and three better bottle carboys, among other things. I've now got one all-grain batch under my belt (Haus Pale Ale by EdWort on the HomeBrewTalk.com forums), and also in fermenters in my apartment are an amber ale, my girlfriend's strawberry blonde, and a nut brown ale belonging to a friend of mine. Currently in progress is a yeast starter cultured straight from the dregs of a bottle of Aventinus, which worried me for about 48 hours by showing no signs of life but at the last minute before I gave up on it, sprang up some krausen and finally dropped below 11 Brix (1.043 SG) where it's been hanging steady until now. Perhaps starting such a small amount of probably barely-alive yeast in a 1 quart starter wasn't the best plan, but we'll see. Also, I haven't forgotten about the whole electronics/microcontroller side of the site - quite the opposite. I've been hard at work on my latest PIC project, a datalogger/temperature controller device, primarily built for use with my fermentation cabinet but also intended to be general-purpose enough for lots of other uses as well. I've got quite a lot of the coding done and working, and I'm in the process of shifting everything over to the prototype PCB I recently etched, so stay tuned!
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