Bottling Barleywine and Cider

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We bottled our barleywine and cider this weekend.  Since it was Obama’s second inauguration day, we used a couple of kitschy tea towels we picked up at his first inauguration to dry out bottle caps and equipment after sanitizing.

The gravity of the barleywine had not changed since I moved it to secondary, so we probably could have just bottled it after two weeks.  Many of the comments about the yeast mentioned how fast it ferments, and I guess they were right.  Barleywine is traditionally aged for ridiculous amounts of time, so we’ve tucked the bottles in the back of a closet, keeping only a handful of small bottles in the pantry to test whether it’s ready.

We tasted samples of the four batches of cider/cyser.  The first batch (plain juice) was nice and dry, lots of good apple character without being juicy at all.  The second batch (juice plus concentrate) was fine when I had a sip of the sample I used to check the gravity, but was decidedly off when we tasted a sample from the end of bottling.  So we’re not sure if it’s just a problem with the dregs or if the whole batch might be off.  The third batch (juice plus honey) was a very interesting cider/mead combination, with a lot of the cider character of the first batch, but also the floral and reedy/bready notes of mead.  But the last batch (juice plus twice as much honey) was the most promising — it was a little sweeter, much more pronounced mead flavor, with the cider tartness really fading to the background.

Baby blanket

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IMG_2669New discovery: Baby yarn is unspeakably sweet and soft. If only there were some way to keep it from growing up into rebellious and moody teenager yarn.

I didn’t use a pattern for this, just bought two skeins and knit until it looked big enough (well, and really, really needed to give it to the recipient). A nice, easy knit 3- purl 3 checkerboard pattern with a knit 3 garter stitch border. I like how the texture came out quite a bit, and because I tend to knit tightly, I sized up a needle. This gave the blanket a really nice drape!

Two kids’ knitting projects, old and new

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I did two projects recently for the children of the family whose house we stayed in in the Netherlands. The daughter is 6 and the son is (I think) 4.

For the daughter, I made this pink and orange headband (modeled by my son on the promise that I was not taking a IMG_2677picture of HIM, just the headband. He didn’t ask why I wanted a picture of just a headband. What a strange age we live in.) I did have a pattern, though mostly ended up winging it once I realized that the pattern wasn’t working for me. This was knitted flat and then sewn together. In hindsight, I think I should’ve knit it in the round instead. You can’t see it in the picture, and hopefully it will be covered by hair during normal use, but the sewn join is not so great. I’m just not good at sewing yarn. I am good, or at least getting better, at sewing felt, though – which is how I made the flower accent. The pattern called for crocheting the flower (knitting and crocheting in a single pattern, surely the first sign of the apocalypse), but I haven’t found time to learn how to crochet yet.

Speaking of yarn, though, I love the yarn I used, and want to go out and buy a bunch more in colorways that are more my own style. (It’s Natural Ewe in “Tiger Lily”.)

For the son, I decided to play it safe and knit another alligator scarf. My own son loves his, and it is certainly an appropriate reminder of their stay here in Florida. For this I used Berroco’s Comfort yarn, which I like well enough, though I find it is a little slippery to work with.

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Knights of the Barleywine

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Our local brewery held their second annual Knights of the Barleywine event today — they made a high-gravity barleywine mash and a couple dozen or homebrewers setup propane burners in the parking lot to brew.  My normal inclination, when presented with an all-pale ale mash clocking in at 1.100 SG, would be to use a Belgian yeast and make a quad.  But we just kegged one of those, so we wound up deciding on a more traditional English ale yeast, and East Kent Goldings for flavor and aroma hops (though still considerably less than what many people use for barleywine).

This was my first time brewing outdoors on a propane burner.  After a slow start, I was comfortable cranking up the gas and getting a quick and steady boil.  It was a lot of fun hanging out and chatting with the other brewers.  And pretty much everybody brought some homebrew to sample, so I tasted a few barleywines from last year, plus pale ale, cream ale, Scotch ale and even a Raspberry saison.  We speculated that we collectively brewed about 100 gallons (3 barrels).  There was several pallets of spent grain like this one.

Winter birds

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I had a lot of fun making these little guys – and discovered that you can, indeed, rubber stamp on felt. I had some craft ink pads lying around from back when I had enough time to actually do crafts on a regular basis (which explains the expedition I needed to take through the closet to find it. I swear I was *this* close to Narnia).

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The basic idea comes from the current (Dec) issue of Cloth, Paper, Scissors. I did my first bird just by eye-balling the pictures of their birds, then laughed when I turned the page and found that they’d actually provided a PATTERN, with INSTRUCTIONS and everything. Luxury.

Anyway, these little guys are super fun to do, and go very, very quickly. I’m already thinking I will have to do an updated version this spring. Blues and yellows, perhaps?

A very nearly Christmas ruffle scarf

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My daughter has been wanting a ruffle scarf since the very first one I made. Yet, for some reason I kept knitting her other scarves. In hindsight, I think we are both somewhat mystified by this perverse reaction on my part. I have no defense.

So, in keeping with the fine tradition of my forefathers. Er, foremothers. Er, mother. Where was I? Oh, yes – in keeping with the fine Christmas tradition of giving a half-completed knitting project as a gift, I made my daughter a ruffle scarf. At last. And the important part is that it was finished before the end of Christmas Day, Eastern Standard Time. Actually, the important part is that my daughter appears to LOVE it. Score one for mom, only a year and a half late.

RuffleScarfBlue

Christmas beer

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bottlesIn addition to the cider we just made, we also finally bottled (and kegged) our quad. Just in time for Christmas! Redbeard had made an additional mini-batch by adding some Bruxellensis to a gallon of our quad (Prometheus #11). So, we bottled that, and a few more bottles of the regular quad, and kegged the rest.

Now just waiting for it to be get bubbly enough to drink…

Merry Christmas, everyone!

 

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Cider Four Ways

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We’ve been drinking a lot of cider recently, and decided to make our own.  I had a hard time finding any decent cider recipes online (well, beyond “any old juice and any old yeast and it’ll be fine!” type recipes).  But got a good recommendation of a recipe that had worked for a co-worker of mine.  Though he switched the yeast and used Safeale US-05, so we went with that too.

Since this is our first cider, we decided to repeat our Saison experiement and make five different 1 gallon batches in growlers instead of a single large batch.  The plan was to make one gallon of plain juice, one gallon juice with apple juice concentrate, one gallon juice with candi sugar, one gallon juice with honey, and one gallon of water with honey.  But our small candi sugar batch was too shallow and wound up a caramelized, crystallized lump.  So we went with plain juice, juice with concentrate, juice with honey, and juice with even more honey.  We found unfiltered, no-preservative (not even Vitamin C) apple juice at our grocery store.  And we used a 1 lb. jar of Tupelo honey from Cross Creek Honey.

One thing that was surprising was the gravity of our apple juice.  I’d seen estimates online ranging from 1.035 up to 1.050.  But our juice was actually 1.059.  So we did some experimentation and found 12 oz. of apple juice concentrate added to a gallon of juice brought the gravity up to around 1.070.  We matched that with honey (about 5 Tbsp.) in one batch, and used the rest of our honey (about 10 Tbsp.) in the last batch.  We’re particularly interested in comparing the difference between honey and concentrate at the same gravity — how different will they be?

Another question was whether to heat or boil the honey.  In typical fashion, I saw opinions online ranging from “you have to boil honey or you’ll get botulism” to “probably good to heat to 170° to pasteurize” all the way to “don’t heat at all and don’t bother filtering out honeycomb and wings — they’ll settle out eventually”.  So we sterilized everything but didn’t heat our juice or honey at all.  Luckily there were no wings or honeycomb bits to filter out.

It’s Westy Day, But I’m Not Buying…

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So today is the big day: the first (and maybe only) official commercial release of Westvleteren beer in the United States.  When I heard about the release earlier this year, I expected to find myself at the head of the line today.  But that’s not the way it turned out.

As someone who has driven across two countries to buy Westvleteren beer, driving 90 minutes to the closest beer shop to get any Westy 12 didn’t seem like a big problem.  But a couple of factors conspired to make it just not worth it.  First of all, we’ve had Westy 12 before.  In fact, we’ve still have a couple bottles that we brought home with us from the Netherlands.  Second, it’s a great beer (and worth the $15/bottle you pay on the gray market), but that’s what they are selling it for retail, so I’m not sure why I should go to so much trouble to pay extortionate prices.  Third, Wind has this pesky thing called work that won’t let her drop everything and spend the day buying beer three counties away.  If I go by myself, I only get to buy one six-pack.  I did the math, and when I drove to Belgium to buy two cases, I was driving about 8 miles per bottle (which is totally reasonable, right? Right?).  But driving 85 miles (each way) to buy a six-pack comes out to more than 28 miles per bottle.  And that’s completely ridiculous…

So what am I doing instead?  Brewing my own, of course.  I’ll be stopping by the homebrew shop pick up some supplies for bottling the Westy 12 clone we’ve got in tertiary fermentation, and to make some cider and mead.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat…

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It was about a year ago that our first belgian brew was suffering from a stuck fermentation.  And now here we are again with a quad that’s made a lot of progress towards the final gravity target, but still has a little bit left to go and hasn’t made any progress in the last week.  So we’re trying the same trick again, and have moved the carboy (and growler for the Bruxellensis version) to the warmest room in our house (our home office) to try to get fermentation unstuck.

With any luck, this will get the fermentation completed and the results will turn out as good as that dubbel.