The Boil from Hell (not an allusion to Faulty Towers)

Quality time with a kettle.  I 

should have been a Trappist

monk.

When my wife first broached the possibility of a job offer in Toledo, I did some internet research to see what northwestern Ohio had to offer.  I grew enthusiastic about moving westward when I saw two things on the web:  evidence of a thriving home brewing culture and videos of people surfing on Lake Erie. Unfortunately, after checking out a few "beaches" upon arriving here, I became fairly certain that those videos were a hoax intended to lure naive surfers to Toledo.  Luckily it turned out that the home brewing scene in the Midwest is legit, so I decided to purchase the equipment necessary to brew 5 gallon batches and  finally found time to put that equipment to work.

My boiling equipment--note the

white can opener lodged below

the black propane burner.  

Safety first. . .

The steeping/boiling process took much longer than normal because the safety sensor that came with my Brinkman turkey fryer kept cutting off the gas supply.  Eventually a can opener enabled me to rig the valve to stay open.  I rationalized this risky decision by telling myself that the safety sensor was designed to prevent oil from catching fire and that nothing could possibly go wrong with propane as long as it was being used to make beer.

Brewing in daylight is preferable to brewing in the dark, but as a stay at home dad, I can't brew unless my wife is available to watch my baby daughter.  This essentially means that I need to wait until the weekend to brew in daylight.  But since we will not spend a weekend at home until the last weekend in October, I convinced myself of several falsehoods:  1)  if I did not brew tonight, I would never brew at all and all that equipment would go to waste  2)  daylight is an unnecessary and costly luxury to a man in my position;  in fact, viewed through the lens of economy of scale, it would be just as well if I were never to see daylight again   3) patience is effeminate and therefore inappropriate, not only to the brewing of beer, but also to the use of propane (or any highly flammable substance for that matter).

Needless to say, over the course of the evening there were errors in more than just the reasoning.  Twelve hours later, the yeast still had not activated.  Going to check if anything is happening yet--wish me luck.