I thought this was a blog about beer, dude, why are you talking about all this other stuff?
This is a blog about brewing beer and everything that I connect with brewing beer. Given that I have house beers named after (among other things) a cold war cipher machine and a term in some of the equations used to plan deep space flight trajectories, you can expect it to run pretty far afield at times.
Wish I'd stick to the alpha acids and the mash temperatures? Fine, just skip the articles that don't interest you.
Why "The Boil Kettle"?
Are you a brewer? Either way, the boil kettle is where it all comes together - the sweet wort from the mash tun reduces down, the hop oils extract and isomerize - where we make the beer into something ready for its final journey to completion.
Besides, "The Mash Tun" was taken.
What's your brewing rig?
I stovetop brew - though I'm luck enough to have a pretty nice stovetop with a 30k BTU wok burner on it. I use a 5 gallon Igloo cooler for mashing, a no-name ten gallon pot for boiling, and 5 1/2 gallon pot as a hot liquor tank. I've modified the cooler with a ball valve and hose braid strainer but typically use it in combination with a jury rig involving a mesh bag and various bits of kitchen equipment to get a little more effective filtration. I'm planning on elaborating on this and other parts of my kit over time.
Do you really need to use all those parenthesis?
No, I don't, but I think and write with a lot of nested tangents. I've worked as a software developer, so that gives me license to use parenthesis, brackets, braces, or any other symbols denoting nested-ness. Provided I match them up, of course.
