Solstice Observed Brew Day

Back to work!  I think we called this Brewathon 2.1.  You can always check on Brewathon.com.  Shane made 55 or 60 gallons, it got a little fuzzy during some of the more chaotic times.  I made 10: a Biere de Garde, and a coffee stout that I will discuss in another post.  Dan assisted on all fronts, eventually settling into being the hotwaterkeeper.

Hopefully, we have learned some things about mashing double batches.  Mostly that if you are going to put 25+ lbs of grain and 8.5 gallons of water in a 10-gallon cooler, you're gonna need to put in half the water, then all the grain, then mix and add the rest of the water.  Note the dark overflow on the sparging Rebel Rye below:

At the end of the day, it was resounding success.  We had a couple bad kitties towards the end of the day, and a carboy went down, but that'll happen.  If we get much more efficient, it won't be homebrewing anymore, it'll just be brewing.

Oh, and by the way...

I won the beer trivia. 

Kim-Kim-Ka-Chi, Kim-Kim-Ka-Chi

Good luck will rub off when you shake hands with me.

But right after I've been making this stuff there will be a lot of garlic, ginger, and hot sauce that rubs off with that good luck.  Maybe that's what good luck is...

This was the thickest batch of kimchi sauce I've made yet.  I've been adding more rice every time (which is twice) and it seemed to get better, so under the doctrine of "you don't know how much is enough until you know how much is too much," there's a lot of rice in this batch, which made it really thick.  

I added cucumber to this batch, which was a suggestion from a coworker who said he had cuke's in kimchi once, and couldn't find them anywhere.  We'll see how it goes.  Also, I put a burdock root into this batch.  When we were at the Food Hole picking up ingredients, I said "Ooo, burdock root, I'll put some of that in it."  Ma femme asked what it tasted like, and I said "I have no idea."  Fresh, it tastes like a really sweet delicious carrot with none of whatever it is that makes carrots taste like carrot.  Funny that I always considered burdock to be a weed.  Maybe if I had known they were so delicious, I would have thought different.  The sheep always loved them; you'd turn them into a new pasture, and the really experienced ones would head right out into the open areas and eat the burdock first.  We would pick big leaves and take them into the barn as a treat, and they would devour them.  I tried to eat the leaves, and they were really awfull, so I never understood what the sheep saw in them.  I suppose some would say the same about the kimchi I'm making; there's no accounting for taste.  

Fermentation exchange

Part of the Fermentation Revival/Revolution is the building up of community around the things we ferment.  In this case, I've traded kimchi for pickles.  This fall, my coworker Susan gave me some Napa cabbage from her garden, which I turned into delicious kimchi.  I gave a jar of it to her, and she gave me a jar of these Chinese pickles which she made.  They have a brown sweetness that I can't quite put my finger on, other than that they are "Asian."

I'm beginning to wonder if I like traditional pickles any more.  There are a few brands I still love, particularly Bubbies from San Francisco, but something tells me I just don't like the texture of fermented cucumbers.  This is reinforced by how much I love the texture and taste of fermented cabbage.  I am excited to try some fermented kale and collards out of my own garden this summer.

Finished products in use.

Tasty, tasty homemade vinegar blended into vinaigrette on greens with sausage and cheese.  The sausage is venison summer sausage courtesy of Shane.

  

Ma femme in the background using her Christmax present.

Southern Tier

This week I found myself at Sugar Maple where they had Southern Tier's Pumking on Firkin.  I am a big lover and proponent of cask-conditioned beer.  It was so good.  I have said before, if you told me 5 years ago that I would be drooling over flat, room temperature beer, I would have said you were crazy, but it's really the best.

I think it is more difficult to get right, and less tolerant of aging effects and mediocre beer.  It's the kind of thing that's better when it's better and worse when it's not.  It doesn't scale up well, since the casks have to settle in, and yet it requires a certain level of consumption, as the clock starts ticking once you tap it.  It's the kind of dichotomy that I love, any faster or slower, any more or less technology, and it only gets worse.

I have been meaning to compile a list of bars in Milwaukee with an engine, perhaps that's a good idea for a separate page of links and ratings/reviews...

Ginger Beer Starter

I was reading the Sour Tonic Beverage chapter in The Art of Fermentation on the plane to DC and one of the things that stuck out in my mind was something he called "Ginger Beer with Ginger Bug."   The Ginger Beer is the resulting beverage, and the Ginger Bug is the starter, or probably more accurately the unique combination of yeast and bacteria that populate the surface of ginger roots; which you feed and propagate into the starter; which you feed and propagate into the Ginger Beer.

I went to an Asian grocery that I have driven past many times but never visited to acquire the ginger.  While perusing the isles, I came upon palm sugar which I decided to get as the fermentable portion of this concoction.  It has a roast-y caramel-y taste, which combined with the smooth but grainy texture reminds me of some of my past attempts to make caramel corn topping that crystallized.  It is formed into little half-rounds that must be the shape of some cooling tray it was poured into during processing.  Perhaps it no longer needs to be made that way, but hey, that's how palm sugar comes...

I also bought several pounds of ginger, and I have my fingers crossed, since Katz mentions his suspicions that much of the ginger that comes into the US is irradiated (therefore sterile) and that you need organic to make the starter (once it's going you can use anything for the bulk of it.)  I grated a couple medium-sized nodules and crushed up half a chunk of palm sugar, covered it with water to make a slurry, cheeseclothed it, and into the cupboard it goes.

I also fell victim to the siren song of the roasted pork belly under heat lamps behind the counter at Rhino Foods.  I asked for "one half pound" and walked out with one AND a half pounds.  Luckily it is delicious, and the whole experience is worth it for a taste of the chili-onion-hot-pepper-fish-sauce it came with.

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.