Monthly Archives: October 2011

Mead in Bottles and Dubbel in the Carboy

Beer, Mead, , ,

We bottled our first batch of mead this weekend, after being in secondary fermentation for about 5 weeks.  The advice I found online about how long to leave it fermenting was all over the place, but mostly ranged up to 6 months to a year.  But we’re impatient and didn’t want to wait 6 months to see if it came out or not.

It was nicely clear, and apart from smelling strongly of yeast, was very nice.  The final gravity was down to 1.006, for a final ABV of 8%.  We used the same honey we brewed with for priming sugar (thanks again, Uncle John!).  We’ll let the bottles carbonate a couple weeks, and probably have the first bottle at Thanksgiving.

As long as we had the all the gear out and sterilized, we also pulled the Dubbel into the carboy for second fermentation.  It looked and smelled fantastic, so we’ve got high hopes.

Belgian “Research” Project: Second Round

Beer,

I continue to make progress on my project to sample a wide variety of Belgian beers.  Here’s another set of notes:

Orval Trappist Ale

Interesting Trappist beer in cute glass bottles with dolphin heraldry. Very luxurious head, took a while to pour a small bottle (11.2oz) into a pint glass. Very light and sour, with a bit of resin in the finish, from dry hopping.

Chimay Grande Réserve (Blue)

Probably the first Belgian beer I ever had was some Chimay Tripel a friend brought to a party many years ago — I found it very strange and unpleasant.  My tastes have changed over the years, and I knew that I’d like the Chimay Blue much better than their tripel.  I was not disappointed: this beer if very sweet and smooth, with a hint of dryness and mild earthy hops.

Girardin Gueuze 1882 (Black Label)

Intensely sour, with a little fruitiness and funkiness.  More like Champagne than an average ale, both because of the effervescence and because of the rich layering of flavor and aroma.  Definitely confirming my intention to find more gueuze to try.

St. Bernardus Wit

Delicious — a perfect hefeweizen. Just a little touch of honey adding sweetness but not overpowering.  I want to see if I can find any of the other St. Bernardus beers around town.

Delirium Tremens

I avoided trying this beer for a long time — I didn’t take it seriously because of the silly pink elephants on the label.  What lager should be: sweet and light, with a little sour reediness that almost reminds me of a pilsner.  The overall effect is closer to a cream ale than your typical tripel.

Delirium Nocturnum

If you’re going to have one beer with pink elephants on the label, you may as well have another…  This is the sister beer to Delirium Tremens — this time a dark, strong ale. Very fruity, with a strong similarity to DT (same pilsner/cream ale taste, which is a little incongruous in a darker ale). But sweet and malty, too.

Recipe: Beer Bread

Beer, ,

This is my favorite bread recipe at the moment: it doesn’t get any easier or faster, and it makes a nice dense rustic bread that everybody in the family likes.  And if by some chance you have a batch of homebrew that didn’t turn out perfectly or just some spare beer you’d rather eat than drink, this is a great way to put it to good use and free up the bottles for the next batch.

Ingredients:

3½ cups flour
3 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1½ tsp. salt
12 oz. beer

Directions

  1. Mix dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl.  Add beer and mix until just combined.
  2. Knead in the bowl.  For a smoother consistency, turn out onto a floured board and knead.
  3. Form into loaf and turn out into bread pan, or onto a baking sheet.  For a crisper crust, brush with an egg beaten with 1 Tbsp. of water.
  4. Bake for 50 minutes at 375°F.

Source: Slightly adapted from USA Weekend “Recipe: Homemade bread in under an hour“.  The original recipe says to bake “about 45 minutes”, but every time I’ve sliced a loaf after 45 minutes, it has had a pocket of uncooked dough in the middle.

First All-Grain Brew (Belgian Dubbel)

Beer, ,

We had one of the first cool days of Fall yesterday, cool enough to justify real shoes — with socks!  It probably won’t last, but we’ve been pining for cooler weather and the darker, heavier beers that go with them.  Beers that could plausibly go with shepherd’s pie.  So we took advantage of the nice weather and spent the whole day inside slaving over a hot stove, brewing a batch of abbey ale, using a recipe based on Westmalle Dubbel.

We had (almost) all of our equipment ready, and took the plunge and did our first all-grain batch.  This was also our first liquid yeast, and between those two things, it went about as well as could be expected:

  • Apparently, liquid yeast needs to come out of the fridge 3-6 hours before you can pitch it.  Luckily, I remembered to check just in time.
  • 5 gallons of sparge water took a long time to bring up to temp — roughly an hour.  And I thought I was being clever when I remembered to start heating it 20 minutes before the mash was supposed to be done…
  • It took roughly 8½ hours from starting to heat the water for the mash, to getting the fermenter tucked away in the pantry.  Mashing, collecting wort and the boil combined took 4½ hours, so the other 4 hours was spent waiting for water to heat up (or cool down), filtering wort into the fermenter, etc.
  • Our fancy new kitchen faucets don’t have a standard tap that the wort chiller can screw into.  So I ran a garden hose into the kitchen and hooked it up.  Of course, the hose had a leak and sprayed water everywhere.  Even with copious duct-taping, it still leaked a trickle.  Eventually, I had the hose angled down into a dish pan, collecting the runoff.  But that took a surprisingly long time to get right.

Unlike some previous batches, I actually remembered to take gravity readings at several points.  With the help of a handy little tool for temperature-correcting gravity readings, we got exactly the gravity called for in the recipe.  So we’ve got high hopes.

Resume spinning

Spinning,

After a brief, frustration-related hiatus, I have returned to spinning. Everything was going so well with my beginner roving, but when I tried to pretend I could really spin it all fell apart. (Literally.) Luckily, my friend and fellow spinning novice could see what the problem was: I was trying to spin roving that was too thick. Turns out beginner roving is already thin enough to spin, but grown-up roving is meant for people who know enough to pull apart the roving into thinner strips. People who were not me, but now are me, because now I know to do this!

And the magical process by which stringy fluff becomes yarn can continue…

So, I’m now figuring out how to spin steadily, instead of parking the spindle to twist the fiber. While it is more of a juggling act (and so I’m sure much more entertaining to watch), the quality of the yarn is surprisingly better – my width is a lot more consistent and I over-spin much less.

Also, my friend now has a spinning wheel. As I told Redbeard about this, I made to sure to reassure him that I’m not ready for a wheel yet. He replied that he has already “resigned” himself to making room for one. So…. does that mean I can have one now? Because I think I really am ready.

 

Just Tapped A Keg of Big Nose IPA

Beer

We knew our last keg was going to kick soon, so I called our local beer store to see what kegs they had in stock.  They were out of our first choice, so I found myself talking my wife into getting a keg of Big Nose IPA.

Now, saying that I’m not an IPA fan is a bit of an understatement.  I generally compare IPAs to sandpaper, bleach, or some kind of tongue-stripping assault.  But for whatever reason, I really like Big Nose.  It’s not really pale (more of an amber, in fact), so maybe there’s enough malt in it that I don’t mind the hops so much.  And I think, as the name suggests, that they’ve focused on the aromatic hops, not so much the tongue-violence-bittering hops.

Anyway, in goes the new keg, and the hissing sound I normally expect when tapping a new keg doesn’t stop — it just tapers off to a steady hiss.  So I turned everything off, pulled the release valve on the keg, and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  I’d loosened the CO2 line on the keg coupler, so I retightened that, retapped the keg and turned the gas back on — still hissing.  It was dinnertime by now, so I let it sit, rechecked everything and turned the CO2 back on — still hissing.

By now, I was getting pretty frustrated and starting to worry that my regulator was broken.  So I ran my fingers around all the seals in the regulator, and found the problem: the regulator wasn’t screwed in to the CO2 cylinder securely (maybe it got bumped?).  So I tightened that and the hissing stopped.  So, score one for the check-everything-twice school of troubleshooting.

I know what a LOT of people are getting for Christmas this year…

knitting, , , ,

I am trying my best to show a little restraint when it comes to this hat pattern a friend gave me. But, oh sweet knitting gods, it is hard.

This hat is so cute and knits up insanely fast because you knit flat and then sew it into shape. What’s not to love?

Oh, that’s right, here is what is not love:

Way down at the bottom of the pattern, looking innocent, is the instruction to “mattress” stitch the ends together. I’m not sure why it’s called mattress stitching, though my current theory is because it makes you want to go lie down after you try it. Good thing this first hat (because oh yes there will be more, bed-related stitching or not) is for my daughter, who is not yet discerning enough to care about what a complete hash her mother has made of the mattress stitching on her new hat.

Of course, it doesn’t help that this first attempt is on a diagonal (the tutorials only show horizontal and vertical… how dare they not envision every possible orientation?). I’m making my son one next… it will give me another chance to see if I can work out how to join these things together.

Quick side-scarf

knitting, ,

I have so much love for thick yarns. I had a sudden, birthday-related need for a scarf. Fast forward roughly 4 knitting-hours, and I’ve got a warm, wooly scarf.

The color on this picture is way, way off. It has a lot more red in it than is shown here, but otherwise I think this nicely shows off the seed stitch that I used. I just sort of winged this scarf, and decided on the fly to do something a little more fancy that a garter stitch.

Even though this was an easy project, I still learned something (2 things, in fact – how embarrassing!):

(1) This scarf is 21 stitches across, size 13 needles with “super bulky” yarn. I should never, ever make a scarf this wide again. I ended up having to run out and buy another skein because it would’ve been way too stubby with just the one I had. If I had had the time, I would’ve started over with maybe 15 stitches.

(2) In my head, here is the pattern I decided to make:

CO 21
Rows 1-4: K21
Rows 5-??: K3, [k1, p1]* repeat until three stitches left, k3
Knit last 4 rows then BO

Okay, so in my head, this would give me a 3-stitch garter border. In reality, this gave me a 4-stitch border because, duh, K3 then k1… yes, that is K4. Plus, because I correctly figured out that I needed an odd number of stitches, the seed [k1, p1] actually ends with just a k1, so… yep: K4 at the end of the row. To be fair, I got what I really wanted, which is being able to knit the same exact pattern every row and still get a seed stitch with a border. The border is just a little bigger than I planned.

A lovely side-effect of this project (because I can’t learn three things from a silly scarf that took a few hours) – I can know really tell the difference between how a single knit stitch and a single purl stitch looks. I am ridiculously proud of this.