Well, a post-work Monday brew session is finally complete.......and a black lager is born. Got a 4 pint starter going on Saturday with White Labs German Lager yeast and ended up pitching tonight around 10:00PM. It was a minimash type thang and I beat SG by a few at 1.054. one of the lager-compromises made was to only chill the wort down to about 63F (about as cold as i can get it with tap and a 30' immersion chiller) before I pitched. The yeast wants the 50-55F range, so I'm hoping for the fridge to pull her down towards the ideal range before much fermentation occurs. ....Spent the extra wort-chiller time reading a section of Papazian II about beer planets. (I think it is insane passages like this one that make me re-read so much of his stuff. Brewing beer in a futuristing, utopian, space-traveling, gravity-less beer chamber full of tiny, living beer-planet droplets. This guy is nuts, and I like 'em.)
Regardless, she's in the fridge now, with the blowoff twisting around in as awkward a position it could be and not crimp. I did some measurements wrong with this new(old) fridge and a fermentation lock ain't fittin. But that's a problem for tomorrow. Then, and only then, I'll worry about low-profile airlock design. Tonight, well.....sometime you eat the bar and, well, sometimes the bar it eats you.
("Is that Eastern or something, man??" ...Faaar from it Dude)