ZOMG! Really? A couple of “random day-of-the-week” posts in the last few months, and that’s it? Wow, no wonder I only have 4 readers left (3 of which are local and with whom I email on a daily basis)!
I am lame.
HowEVER, I think I’m not entirely ready to give up the blog yet . . . I seriously thought about it, and decided I’m going to give it a while longer and see if I can’t get my blogging mojo back.
So.
With that, I’m going to try and catch up on some of the stuff I’ve been doing, a little bit at a time (thus stretching it out into several blog entries). Call it blog resurrection strategy. Or something.
Also, it won’t necessarily be in chronological order, either forward or reverse. And I can’t make any guarantees about my grammar or spelling. I just gotta get it out there, I think!
Tonight . . . it’s about beer.
I don’t know how exactly we got all interested in this, but about a day before B got laid off, we bought a beer-making kit. I know, this sounds all fancy, but really it’s a spigoted bucket and some tubing and a plastic carboy . . . nothing really exotic. With the kit we got a can of hopped malt extract (sort of an “instant beer mix”), so on Valentine’s Day, we started a batch of homebrew. Romantic, no?
And yeah, I was only a half-bad blogger, and took a couple of not-great pictures.
First off, we had to boil the malt extract in some water with some corn sugar. At this point it is called “wort”.
Exciting, no? No, not really.
I could not resist tasting a bit of the malt extract . . . it was sweet and bitter and kind of yucky, but not entirely disgusting. And kind of compelling in the same way that vegemite is horrible the first time you taste it but then with time you kind of think it isn’t so bad.
While the wort was boiling, we filled our spigoted bucket with sanitizer (very important to sanitize the equipment!). At which point we discovered that the spigot leaked. B ran out to try and buy another bucket, but was unable to find one that was 6.5 gallon capacity. 5 gallon buckets are apparently very easy to find. 6.5 gallon ones, not so much.
So, we made the executive decision to skip the bucket portion and brew directly in the carboy. Now, this seems to be a controversial subject in some circles (mainly among homebrewers . . .). The guy at the store who sold us the kit seemed kind of insistent that we ferment for one week in the bucket, then rack the beer (”rack” is a fancy word for “siphon into another container) into the carboy for a second fermentation. However, our brewing book says that it can be fermented totally in the carboy, so we trust the book, whose mantra is “Relax, don’t worry!”.
So, we cool our wort, pour it into the carboy, and add enough bottled water to make it 5 gallons total. Yeast (from our “beer batch in a can” thing) is rehydrated and “pitched” (another fancy brewing word for pouring it into the wort), and we slap a lid with a bubbling airlock on (this lets air out of the carboy without letting air in from outside).
Then we (”we” meaning B, because I’m not strong enough to lift a full carboy) moved it to the bottom corner of the pantry, where it bubbled away for a few days and then got all quiet while we waited for bottling day, which was last Sunday.
At this point I fell down on the blogging job, and took no pictures of the actual process. Maybe because I was busy fiddling with bottles and siphons and stuff, and don’t have the extra set of arms needed to do that. In any case, it involved racking the beer (which upon tasting was pretty good, just flat) into the spigoted bucket (we exchanged the faulty one for a functional one), adding some sugar solution — the yeast break it down and make the beer carbonated — and dispensing into sanitized bottles, which are then capped. Fun!
I did, however, take a picture of our happy full capped bottles at the end! We ended up with 47 (one beer shy of two cases)
We re-used some clean bottles (you can do that as long as they aren’t screwcap); my coworker Greg who also brews beer and stuff was nice enough to give us 2 cases worth of bottles to add to our own growing collection.
Now we wait again (a lot of brewing beer is spent waiting, apparently), and next weekend we get to sample the fruits of our labor! Woo!
OH! I almost forgot!! I haven’t been able to access my chris@skittermagoo.com email address for some time now, so if you’ve been trying to email me there and haven’t gotten an answer, I am not snubbing you. I don’t know what the deal is, but if you leave me a comment, it will be sent to my other email addy, which I CAN access. Phew!
