Me Some Bad Voodoo

I had some really bad mojo going on today. With a commute that's turning out to be only about 30 minutes regardless of how close to rush hour I'm driving and my alarm set for 7:30, I rolled into the brewery at just shy of 10:30. Evan's returned to at least one wake up call a night lately due to teething so getting up wasn't easy, and with me and him the only ones out of bed, it was up to me to get his breakfast ready. Combine that with the slightest hint of traffic and my morning routine just doubled.

To add to the happy happy joy joy, the first thing I did after stepping into the brew room was knock over Crawford's (the brewer's) coffee. Luckily he's a decaf drinker and didn't go all psycho on me or even show any irritation. After that I proceded to knock over hoses, galoshes, and brew session notes all morning.

Of course to be fair to me, the brew room is barely big enough for one guy to work in between fermenters and kettles and I'm all of 6'3" and 240 lbs. Still, I'd like to finish the week without requiring 5 Seasons to put in for major affairs.

To top things off, when we started bottling for the day about half of the corks refused to go into the bottle, resulting in shards of cork on the brewhouse tile and the twisted and disfigured nubs of cork projecting from half of the bottles. By the time we gave up we'd ended up with about two cases of good bottles and two cases of bottles unpresentable to the public. The really bad part of this is that I was the one running the corker for most of the session. I was starting to doubt whether I belonged in the brewery today when Crawford took over. To my horror, his first two bottles went through perfectly. Great, I thought, I truly am incompetent today.

Then Ninkasi* smiled down upon me and the next three stoppers crumbled under the descending plunger of the corker. Turns out this part had nothing to do with me except maybe as a side effect of the day's hatred of me rubbing off on the poor brewer who had been so kind to me in letting me work for him for free. Later in the afternoon Crawford came down with a bag of narrower corks. Perhaps that had been the problem, but to be on the safe side the project was postponed to a later date.

The brew session was also postponed. Crawford said we just ran out of time, but I suspect he sensed my infectious strain of bad luck and feared massive boil overs leading to third degree burns, falls leading to hospital stays and inefected beer that was too hoppy to label as "lambic style" and sell anyway. (Not that he would label bad beer as lambic just to cut losses. It was a joke.) So of instead of working late to get the beer started today we'll come in a little earlier to get started in the morning.

Also, you'll note that I've worked two straight days at a brewery and haven't seen the mash tun or kettle used yet. It's not that I'm not trusted, it's just that so much of brewing involves cleaning and prep work. The actual brew session is a very small part of the process.

I'll check back in tomorrow to see if my luck improved.

* Ninkasi was the Sumerian goddess of beer and is typically the deity invoked when tongue-in-cheek references to beer gods are made by the beer geek elite.