Beet Pickle

Sugar & Vinegar pickles with garden & farmers market beets.  I'm most excited for the Mennonite beet pickled eggs that I can make after we finish most of the beets! 

Yog 2

Bulgarian Yogourt Starter. Our last batch was a little runny, so decided to try real starter. It's supposed to be thick and tangy.

After heating the milk, it must be cooled before adding starter.  That's our dinner in the back,  EE is making corn chowder!

ACTION SHOT: preparing the starter, it's mixed so that is get distributed evenly in the pot.

Thicker and a little tangier then we were expecting... Might need to mix in some jam to sweeten it.

New Book!

We enjoyed making the mozzarella so much we bought a new book: Home Cheese Making by Ricki Caroll. Maybe we'll have home made brie soon... First I need to read it. 

Mozzarella

1 Gallon of heated milk, plus citric acid and liquid rennet

Curds and whey!  Strain curds then start kneading.

Reheat the cheese as you knead, should be shiny and stretchy when finished.

Homemade mozzarella!

Yogurt

yes, we have a yogurt maker

adding the starter

Might as well make some homemade yogurt to go with the homemade granola!  Yogurt is really easy to do if you have a yogurt maker.  It is just heated milk with a yogurt starter (they sell packaged yogurt starters, or you can just use a tablespoon of commercial or homemade plain yogurt).  You mix the milk and starter, pour into cups, and then turn on the machine to keep it at the right temperature for 10-20 hours (depending on the consistency you want).  This batch ran for about 20 hours but was still rather runny, we're going to play with the starter next time- our Trader Joe's low fat greek yogurt didn't seem to get the culture going very strongly this time.

American IPA

I just harvested the hops from the garden, so we decided to make an IPA to see how they taste.

Our malt in the lauter tun: 10 lbs American 2-row, 1/2 lb Munich, 1/2 lb Crystal 20L. 

Here, after an hour lautering I'm recirculating the wart to clarify. 

Into the mash tun for the hour boil.

Checking the gravity, if it's too low we the beer will be weak (so we would need to add some malt extract at this point in the process) turned out perfect (1.055). 

Since I didn't have enough fresh hops to bitter the beer, we added 1 oz of Magnum hops (12%) at the beginning of the 60 minute boil.  Since these hops were dry 1 oz will go a long way.

These are the hops I harvested (~10 oz). Since they are fresh and whole  they are much weaker by weight and volume (lots of water weight). This whole gallon sized bag and the single ounce of the magnum ought to be roughly equal in bitterness.

Adding half the fresh hops with 20 minutes left in the boil, the rest were added with 5 minutes left.

After the boil we fill the primary fermentor - in our case a small 5 gallon keg (replacing the 5 gal carboy that was broken last week) - with cooled wart. 

Last, we oxygenate and pitch the yeast. 

The primary ferment is done in 2 weeks...

New Batch - California Common Lager (Steam-esque)

Our success with the porter made up ambitious, and we tried a steam type beer last weekend. This time I know the recipe we used, it is a slight modification of the recipe in the palmer book and goes as follows:

Malts:

8.5 lbs 2-row American base malt

0.8 lbs Crystal 40L

0.25 lbs Maltodextrin Powder

Hops:

Bittering 1 oz Northern Brewer (9.8%)

Finishing 1oz Northern Brewer (9.8%)

Yeast:

Liquid California Pilsner

As you can see in the photo attached we decided to attach a heating pad to the carboy, it's been kind of cold her lately and the yeast took a while to get going. Thankfully it seems like it is going strong now.

2 weeks til bottling. I'll try to post again with then.

UPDATE: Peter posted this, you can see it bubbling.

First 5 Gallon Results

The first batch with the new equipment came out surprisingly well, we made it from some malt extract I had laying around the house and a combination of the brown ale and porter recipes from the Palmer book. Despite being completely from the seat of our pants, the end result came out really nicely (dark and carmelly, with a light carbonation), makes me regret not taking more careful notes on what went into it. I'll try to remember to take photos of the next bottle we open.

5 gallon beer

This weekend we bottled our first (of hopefully many) 5 gallon batches of beer with Peter and Claudia. It should be something close to a chocolate maple brown ale. The bottles are now carbonating at Peter's house- it looks to be a success and we'll know for sure in 2 weeks.

This time around we had a bottle capper- we made about 50 bottles.

Sauerkraut = Fail

Chestnut Brown Ale Bottling

Bottled my latest batch of beer today, Brooklyn Brew Shop's Chestnut Brown Ale. Just two more weeks to carbonate in the bottles and then its time to drink.