this is how we bottle it

Our homebrew finished its fermentation process earlier this week! It was really close to being ready to drink--all we had to do was bottle it. Bottling is actually a lot more difficult of a process than it seems. Everything that may touch the beer at one point has to be cleaned and sanitized: the tubes used for syphoning the beer from the fermentation vessel, the bottles, and even the caps.

The beer also needed a little bit of priming sugar. The yeast in the beer eats the extra sugar and farts out CO2 in the bottles, and that's what gives the beer its carbonation. After priming, we filled the bottles one by one and used a capper to cap (duh) the bottles. They have to sit for another couple weeks, then the beer will be nice and full of yeast farts, so it'll be ready to drink.

Nell and Molly helped us with the bottling process. The capper is the red thing on the left, and our fermentation vessel is a big plastic bucket.

stay away from this road

My street in Atlanta must be one of the only unpaved streets in the city, and all the rain in the past six months have carved a canyon right through the middle of the road. That might be a little bit of an exaggeration, but it's finally gotten to the point where one of my roommates who drives a lowered Mercedes has no way of getting past that part of the road. Lately we've been hanging out on the porch and watching drivers slam on the brakes when they see the canyon, and some of them actually put it in reverse and find a different way to get to where they want to go.

We've called the city of Atlanta and they have been really unresponsive. One day someone's car is actually going to fall into the canyon, then the city will have to do something about it. Here are some pictures

Yep. Dan is ankle deep in the canyon.

our newest park

Atlanta is a city that has always been lacking in greenspace..it's consistently ranked as one of the worst cities in the country in terms of greenspace per person. But all of that is changing now, thanks to the Atlanta Beltline! Everyone in the city nowadays is talking about the Beltline, which started as a GT city planning student's thesis in 1999. It's finally turning into a kind of space that the city has never seen before--a ring of trails and open space around the city that can be accessed by anyone.

One thing most people don't realize about the Beltline is that the plan also calls for parks to be built near the trail. Historic Fourth Ward park is the newest beltline park to be created, and it just opened to the public at the end of February! I biked over there the first week that it opened to check it out. The most striking part is the pond that is the centerpiece of the park. Atlanta has a combined stormwater/sewage system, and it was having problems with overflow in that area during large storms. Now that the park has been created, water will drain into the pond instead of overflowing the sewers and covering the streets of Atlanta with poop.