Travelling Light

This is less about fermenting things then it is about the madness that is real life, and the boring adventures of air travel.  I am writing and posting this from a Boeing 717 on my way to Washington DC to visit my sister for Thanksgiving, which is the day that it is today.

I got up, finished packing, and got in the car with ma femme, and on the way, i pulled out my phone to discover it had bricked.  We had just finished a conversation about whether I had remembered everything for my trip; I'm so used to having a list, planning and packing everything you could ever need for any contingency, that I always feel like I'm forgetting something.  Now, heck, if you have a smartphone and a credit card, you can pretty much just walk out of your house with the clothes on your back and you'll be fine (even that second thing is increasingly being integrated with the first.)  I'm actually embarrased about how much it's freaking me out not to have it.

Anyway, I got to the airport, pulled out my laptop, and signed up for the introductory trial of airport wifi, which turns out to also work on the plane!  W00t!  So I thought I would write something here just because I could.

I love a window seat, but it's hard to get one that's not just looking at the wing.  I got a pretty good one, behind the wing, but ahead of the engines.  On a 717 the engines are on the side of the fuselage, so the seats in the back (normally a pretty decent view on a 737) are blocked.  I can actually look into the engine, which is pretty cool, and especially awesome today because I can see the first row of stator blades *through* the first row of rotor blades!  That's pretty cool.

I also brought Katz's The Art of Fermentation with me, and I'm reading about ginger beer and kvass, which I definitely want to try.  The ginger beer absolutely sounds like something I'll try, probably sweetened with honey or a honey/sugar mix, fermented to dryness, primed, and bottled.  He bottles his sweet and refrigerates.  The kvass is something I want to try, but will probably be a once-off.

Seat belt light just came on.  See you on the ground.

Updates in Jars

First, the preserved lemons.  I'm not calling these pickled lemons for some reason, I think because they are so salty; but then what's pickling?  There's definitely some bacterial activity going on, because it's building pressure and releasing gas when I loosen the lid.  I did not put it in the refrigerator, as recommended by the recipe, it's been in a cabinet under the counter, in the dark, relatively cool.  I opened it once or twice, and the lemons are definitely softer and somehow "greasier" if that's possible.  Also, now, after a week, they are yellower, too; more "lemon-colored."  The jar is usually pressurized a little when I look at it, and I always open the lid *just* until it vents some gas.  it always heaves a sigh of relief and bubbles a little bit.  Sometimes I think it's just air slowly escaping from the pulp of the rind, but the pressure buildup tells me there's definitely lactic acid bacteria afoot.  I want to rush out and fill another dozen jars with lemons, but not until I cook something that calls for preserved lemons.

Next, Vinegars.  There seem to be conflicting reports out there about exactly how long and under what conditions vinegar is made.  The instructor and several people I talked to in Reedsburg said it took weeks or less.  Some of my vinegars have been going for nearly two months.  Admittedly, they are in my basement which is in the low 60s, but I've got them above my furnace, which is the warmest spot.  I'm just now starting to see what looks like a thin film of mother starting to form on a couple of them.

Other sources indicate that it takes much longer to make vinegar.  The Cooks Illustrated DIY book mentions 3 months in a crock, and talking about it with my mom on the phone over the weekend, she said her grandparents used to make vinegar, and it took all winter in the basement.  She also said they guarded the mother with their lives, I assume until they could get another batch going.  The Kentucky Housewife Cookbook (from 18-who-knows-when) lists a recipe for vinegar something along the lines of: "in the fall, throw all your apple cores into an open topped barrel.  Set it under a tree, out of the sun, but where it fill with rainwater.  By the middle of the next summer, it will be vinegar."  For real.

I think my results are more in line with the second set.  I made some salad dressing with the Concord grape vinegar I got from my Fermentation Fest friend, and it was darn good.  I really hope my batches take off and I can get some real production going.  I have a couple cases of questionable beer bottled that I would *love* to turn into vinegar, and I think I would make a quart of vinegar out of every batch of wine I make.  Come on, acetobacter.

To Port, Mr. Sherry

The Port is in bottles:

It is a syrupy delicious mess.  The original label file had January 2013 on them, so I've thinking about bottling this for at least 11 months.  I tasted it once before when we transferred it and added the oak spiral, and it's even better.  Maybe I would say it's a little sweet, but hey: it's Port.  I don't get much of the oak, but it definitely tastes well aged, and I think it will just get better.  The thing I am most impressed with is the color.  In the glass it's nice and burgundy purple, but when it you tip it or get down to the last bits, it has a gorgeous brown tone.

Moving on, the Belgian looks wonderful in primary: 

with a golden honey color and a kreusen like a cloud.  About 12 hours after this picture, it had pushed a bunch of foam up and out of the blowoff hose and had started to settle back down.  So I added a pound of sugar.

A Brew Day

The time has come to brew my Belgian Tripel again. This was my first beer, and that batch is *still* the best beer I've ever made.  Part of me wants to believe that's true, but it can't have been that good.  I mean, c'mon... really?  The story: I brewed it on Dan's electric RIMS system (possibly the 2nd beer ever made on that system?) I bottled it, and started drinking it a week later.  3 *months* later I tried some and it was epic, but I was down to a 6-pack.  So it's a classic story of beginner's luck / rookie mistakes / Murphy's law.  Now it's Jam-Cake Syndrome: now matter how good you make it, it will never be as good as grandma's was in your memory.

It's lovely to see a good boil.  I'm confident that this batch will be awesome.  (I shall post the recipe in a future post.  ...shh, it's a stock Northern Brewer recipe...)

While we were at it, we transferred a cider from The Bucket of Truth.  It's been in primary for more than a year.  It's delicious.  Now it's on oak.

The curious thing is that something so subtlely good can come from a vessel that looks so wrong.  We expected failure, but it tasted so good that we almost just put the Tripel into the bucket.  

To finish off the day we went to Sean's and bottled 10 gallons of gluten-free beer.  It went really fast with 4 people, and it tastes pretty good.

Then we played boardgames, drank meticulously prepared Chemex pour-over coffee, and ate soy chorizo tacos from Corazon.  

Oh, and Dan's going to brew another batch of the Belgian tomorrow to put into The Bucket of Truth.  The Truth will set us all free.

No Dearth of Beer

The shelves are well stocked.  A little too well.  I like going down to pick out a beer that suits my mood or meal, but geez-loiuse, things have gotten out of hand.  For about 50% of my beers, this is not actually an issue, because the gravity is high enough that they will just keep getting better for years.  I do have some low-gravity lagers and other things that just aren't going to be awesome forever, so I try to drink them first; it keeps me out of the good stuff.  Also, I should stop buying beer.  And making beer.  And wine.

After setting another case and a half out on the shelves, I set the carboy of Malbec pictured here up for transfer.  I don't remember if I've oaked it yet or not.  I'm going to bottle my Port soon (soon...) and when I do, I'll transfer this wine, taste it, and if it needs oak, then oak it shall have.   Otherwise, it will be degassed, and bottled shortly thereafter.  Or I'll leave it indefinitely...  house rules.

If my wine shelf project goes well, then I will need to purchase some wood soon for more shelving over there, and I'll probably get some more shelving for this side as well.  The set on the right is in need of an additional upright and to have the outermost ones moved in a little bit.  It's a little precarious.  I try to make it a little cleaner every time I go down there, but that does not always happen.  When I do clean up and get rid of some junk I've been hoarding, it starts to look really nice.

Vinegar

I have about half dozen mini-batches of vinegar in my basement.  I'm not sure if they are "working."  I met a guy at the Reedsburg Fermentation Fest (not the last time you will hear about that...) and we exchanged some wine of mine for a double vacuum-sealed bag of concord grape vinegar with a big old chunk of mother in it.  

I put the mother in a gallon glass jug, tore off some chunks with a fork and put them into some old beer and wine to see what happens.  The picture above is some Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Porter that turned out with an ashy taste from too much black malt.  I poured 2 bottles into a glass jar and added some mother.  The first one got moldy, and I had to toss it.  With this one, I made sure to thoroughly degas the beer with repeated shaking.  The production of acetic acid is aerobic, so I figure you need to get all the CO2 out and some oxygen in.  I also gave it about 2 Tablespoons of sugar, assuming the bacteria need something to eat.

It's bubbling just a little, and the mother is floating.  I've been shaking it periodically to try and aerate it, I think that's a good idea, anyone know?  The mother keeps coming back to the top.  Vinegar is one of those things that the people who do it all the time talk about how easy it is, and I'm just not getting obvious, quick results.  I think it just takes time...

Wine Shelves

So last night I worked on my wine shelf project.  I've got a little nook of the basement that's set back about a foot in the block wall and just a hair over 48" wide.  I've got adjustable shelving rails anchored to the wall, and last night I started making pieces for shelves.  I'm going to do two 48" rails with 3/4" slats on 3" spacing.  I should be able to get 16 wine bottles/shelf; not sure yet how many shelves I can get, until I make at least two and measure the vertical spacing.

I had to stop because my table saw was making a lot of smoke for some reason.  I think it was some thicker poplar that I was ripping down, or maybe the fence is not well aligned.  I'll give it a shot again tonight or tomorrow and see if it still does it on the thinner pine boards I have.

This has been one of those projects that I get stuck on, and everything else kind of gets hung up because of it.  It feels good to get started, and hopefully it will go much faster now that I am started.  At 16 bottles per shelf, I already need like 5 shelves before I am caught up with what I have bottled, not to mention the Malbec and Port waiting to be bottled...

Preserved Lemons

Lemons, salt.  So far that's it.  I'll let the salt suck as much juice as it can out of the lemons overnight, and then I'll top it off with water.  Then the recipe says 6 weeks in the fridge.  I doubt there will be much bacterial action in this case, especially if I chill it the whole time.  If it does ferment, it shouldn't produce much gas, since it's already so acidic and the brine will be nearly saturated.

I'm thinking about putting it in the basement instead (~60 F instead of <40) but I've deviated from the recipe enough already; it called for more lemons to be juiced in and WAY more salt.  It also recommended to keep the lemons just barely whole, cut into wedges but not quite all the way through.  I was never going to get 5 lemons in a quart jar like that.  Maybe if I was making 2 dozen in a bucket for market in Casablanca.

This is not going to be a snack, I think it's meant to be more of a flavoring for a baked meat dish.  But in that context it's going to be amazing.  Also the brine is going to be a trip.  Super-salty 6-month-old lemon juice?  Yes, please.

Roast the Most

Guess what: you can roast coffee with a popcorn popper.  So that's a thing.  I went to Collectivo, bought some green coffee beans (Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, my favorite) and set about to roast.

Of course, the question is: how's the coffee?  It's pretty good, but I don't quite have the pallet for coffee yet.  I'm still in the "I know whether I like it" phase. 

In any case, it's pretty quick and easy; I can roast about three days coffee in 20 to 30 minutes, and I'm looking forward to  comparing my roasts to the professionally roasted stuff with the same beans.  

So many things

Alright!  I've got information that needs an outlet.  I'm doing things and if I'm the only one watching, I don't make notes.  This blog is going to center around beer brewing and other forms of fermentation: pickling, cheesemaking, vinegar, that kind of thing.  But more broadly, it will be about trying something new, making something you didn't know you could make, and the unlimited variety available at every step along the way.

I've tried a lot of new things in the past few months, and I'm just not taking enough pictures and writing enough down about what I did.  So ultimately, this blog is going to be a little bit self-serving and self-indulgent, but I think if things are done with enthusiasm and sincerity, that comes through.  I tend to teach when I have the chance, or at least that's what it sounds like in my head, so I plan for many of these posts to be informative for those who may want to try something, and my #1 piece of advice is to just try it.  So much of this stuff is *so easy* once you've done it or seen it done in person.

Also, somewhere out there is a website called Brewathon.com.  It's down right now, and I don't know enough about the backend to get it up on my own.  I'm tired of waiting, but if it comes back up, I'll probably be moving there.  For now: au travail.