Growing things

While the garden may be coming to an end, there are lots of growing things that can still be cultured in this world.

We decided to make beer for Christmas. This is a honey ale that Bill is working on. He is de-racking the first fermentation.






We live near a place that sells and rents beer, wine, and cheese making stuff. You can buy all the ingredients for various beers in a kit or pull it out of these really interesting smelling bins and kegs.

The first step - after sanatizing the equipment of course - is to boil up the barley on the stove and to boil up and some water in a large pot on a gas burner (the kind that Harold uses to cook his turkeys) outside. Then we add the honey, dextrin and dry malt extract; the barley tea, and bittering hops.

Then the wort (great names for this stuff) is chilled with a chiller thingy which is a coil of copper tubing that runs cold water through the tube inserted into the wort which does that physics thing and takes the heat off the wort quickly. Then we pour it into the gigantic bottle (called a carboy) and stick it in the corner of the living room for a week while the yeast has a minor riot with all the good sugars in the whole mess.

After a week, the goo is syphoned off into a second carboy for a quieter round of fermentation and settling. In another week or so we will syphon off the clear beer and bottle and let that store for a while. I'll let you know how it all turns out.

In the meantime I have started to get serious about making cheese - which was aided and abetted by the discovery of this local store and the tip that Trader Joe's sells pastorized (not ultra-pastorized - that won't form curd) goat milk. We had amazingly firm feta in time for Thanksgiving. I also used some goat milk for the yogurt I've been making for months and decided I like the sweeter taste. On the day we started the beer I was in the kitchen starting the feta, a couple of loafs of bread and a round of yogurt. I'll post pictures of cheese making sometime.

Dana and Audrey joined me for Thanksgiving this year. I took Audrey on a tour of all our growing things. She turned to me and said, "So... got some time on your hands now that you're not doing papers any more?"