She's Daddy's Little Girl

A couple of Friday's back, we were getting ready to bottle my first attempt at brewing my own beer. Somebody asked Andi if she was going to help, and she responded with an emphatic yes. She then proceeded to tell us how to do it...

"First you get the beer" she said, "then you get the bottle, you put the beer in the bottle, and then you put the cap on!"

Below is the beer making process for our first attempt. I'm using this blog since Andi played such a big role in this process!

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After an initial capital investment of about $175 for the equipment, I was ready to try a recipe kit for my first attempt (about $30). Recipe kits come with a large package of malt extract, saving you several hours of extracting the sugars from the malt yourself (usually 1 hour each at different temperatures to extract different sugars from the malt). I will probably do 1 or 2 more kits before I attempt to do the full mash myself.

This was a brown ale. I'm doing an IPA next...

The kit:


Poland Spring water and the grain bags:


The partial mash method, required for this kit, takes about a half hour. It involves steeping a pound of grains with 2 gallons of water in the brewpot at 140-150 degrees for a half hour:




This was essentially a giant pot of beer flavored tea.

Next step was to remove the grain bags and add the malt extract and the remaining water and bring to a boil for an hour:


With 15 minutes left in the boil, I added some flavoring hops and a clarifying tablet (vegan)

With 2 minutes left I added some finishing hops.

At the end of the boil, I needed to cool it off to 80 degrees as quickly as possible. Since I don't have a wort cooler, I opted for a sink filled with icewater:


This took forever and a ton of ice and water replacement. I even stole all of the ice out of Brain and Bree's freezer.

After the temp reached 80 degrees, I carried the huge, heavy pot down to our basement and transferred it to the primary fermenting bucket:


I took a specific gravity reading and recorded it in my notebook (this allows to me calculate the alcohol content later):


I added the yeast and sealed the bucket up. Since the first few days have some really active fermentation (a lot of CO2), I opted to use a hose into a bucket of water instead of the CO2 seal to keep the whole thing from exploding in case of foam clogging the CO2 seal.:


After 3 days, primary fermentation was nearly complete (about 1 bubble of CO2 coming out of the hose every 30 seconds), so I transferred the beer to the secondary fermenter:




Two weeks later, the beer was ready to bottle!

I added the priming sugar (to give the bottles natural carbonation since there is still some active yeast in the beer but no more sugar for them to eat) and siphoned the beer into the bottling bucket (it has a spiggot on the bottom):


And took another specific gravity reading (my calculations showed that this brew had an alcohol content of 4.5% by volume):


I carried the big, heavy bucket up stairs and tripped over the baby gate and fell hard onto my knee and elbow. I only lost about half a bottle's worth of beer, mostly onto my face (notice half broken baby gate in the background?):


We then started bottling. I had help:







After 1.5 weeks of additional settling and fermenting for carbonation, the beer was ready to be chilled and consumed:



It smelled good:


It tassted GREAT!


Everybody agreed, it was a success!






I LOVE MY NEW HOBBY!

A pony

I love letting Andi title her blog entries...

The other day, I was giving Andi a bath and decided to try and test her mind with the age old "unanswerable" riddle: "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"

She looked at me with her classic "I-wasn't-paying-attention-I-hope-I'm-not-in-trouble-for-not-listening-please-ask-me-again-now-that-you-have-my-attention" look. I asked her again, "what is the sound of one hand clapping?"

She looked at me, put her hand under the water, waved it back and forth making a lot of splash and sloshing noise and said "THIS!"

I'll tell my story, I'LL TELL IT!

I keep forgetting that I set up this account for Andi-isms.

I called home Thursday morning right at 9am, trying my best to catch Dana and the kids before they headed out the door to dance class. Andi ansered the phone, which is always a pleasure, and gave me her usual answer when I asked how she was doing, "I'm watching _____."

I heard Dana in the background trying to get Paul dressed I talked with Andi for another few seconds and then asked her if her mother was around. She paused for a moment, and then said:

"She's invisible."

After I recovered from laughing hysterically, Andi said, "oh, there she is...". Apparently Dana had stepped out of the room to get Paul some socks, but to a little 4 1/2 year-old, she became invisible.

I like my scary tattoo, do you like your tattoo?

I've recently decided to get myself into some sort of shape other than round. Working out at a club is not an option for both monetary and available time reasons, so I do what I can at home. Dana suggested I teach her martial arts, and we can both get a bit of a workout and she can finally learn it. We were able to start a couple of weeks ago when we were upstate visiting her parents, and she's taking to it very well. Andi has expressed a serious desire to learn as well. This probably comes from wanting to mimic us, but I can't deny her anything, so I decided to give it a try.

During Andi's first lesson, she stood in front of me very intently and learned a few of the stances needed in order to start the training. We learned how to make a proper fist. We learned front position and how to bow to each other as a sign of respect. Then we learned how to stand in a "horse stance" (which is used extensively in training for both balance and leg strengthening). I explained how we squat down a bit "like you're sitting on a horse". Andi mimicked the position beautifully, then galloped out of the room making horsie sounds. I think it's a little too soon for her.

Okay, so I'm not an avid blogger. Not many people would read what I have to say. Well, that's not true, but I guess the point I'm making is that it's not in my nature to be a blogger. But, since I went through the trouble of creating this blogspot, I might as well put it to good use...

I shall, from time to time, put the wisdom of my 3 year, 11 month old daughter and my 1.5 year old son up for your enjoyment.

Andi loves the game red light, green light. For those of you not in the know, that is the game where you yell out red light to make people stop, and green light to make them go. It works in many situations, but walking through the grocery store seems to be her favorite. I'm sure she'll be calling me up at work and yelling "red light" at me any day now, then hanging up and leaving me sitting at my desk doing nothing for hours...wait, I do that anyway. But back to the point at hand. Andi and I were playing red light green light running around the house and she started getting creative with the colors. I was trying to come up what each color meant. Some were easy, yellow was slow, purple ended up being go backwards, etc. We ended the game and I asked her to go sit on the potty. She's still getting the hang of potty training and went out to use the little plastic one that tends to float around the living room (that sounded bad). I came out to see how she was doing and smelled the dook. She looked up and said "brown light".