Man Crafts: The Art of Beer Making

As promised, Kim gets his own post. Of course, he refuses to write it, but we'll go ahead and pretend it is his post anyway. At the Planet Bowling microbrewery, we are working on our third alcoholic beer at the moment. This weekend, we completed our second batch of root beer, bottling over two cases. The same day I made a double batch of jam (again) to replace those lost in the great vacation power failure of 2010. It's little house on the prairie over here, I tell you.

Let's walk through the beer making process, shall we?

Boiling the Wort

The first step in beer making is to do a ridiculous amount of sterilization of all sorts of beer making implements. Kim uses this dreadful smelling iodine stuff to get the job done right. He follows directions just like an engineer in the kitchen. Of course, he really isn't not following directions if he doesn't read them everywhere else, right?

So after locating the biggest pot we own and dragging out the crawfish boil propane stand thing for the back yard, he gets to work boiling the wort. This is a mix of water, malt extract, the tea made from steeped grains, and hops. It takes over an hour of careful consideration and sampling of previous beers for reflection and inspiration to complete this step. At various predefined times, he then adds different kinds of hops for bittering, flavor, and fragrance. This massive pot is then flash cooled in the sink by surrounding the pot with water and ice until it is below 98 degrees. Then yeast is added to encourage fermenation.

Since Kim started brewing in the summer, it never ceases to amaze me how many people come out of the woodwork to hang out while he boils the wort. A few weekends ago, we ended up with three families and an impromtu party going on in 100 degree heat while we all hung out around the propane fire and boiling wort. I suspect it may have something to do with the sampling going on among the men of all the previous batches...

Once it cools and the yeast is added, the whole mixture is poured into a massive glass carboy and put in a dark, coolish place for a week to ferment. Currently, that is in our bathtub with a cardboard box over it.

After a week, we rack the beer to seperate the yeast bed from the beer. This starts the clarifying process.

Kim uses a cool siphon to move the infant beer from one carboy to another while leaving the yeast bed/yucky gunk in the first carboy to be dumped out. Again, this requires a ton of sterilization because even clean items have ambient yeast which will muck up the fermentation process and make the outcome unpredictable. Which it kind of already is, but in a better way.

St. Kimbo's Girl?



99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall...

Once the beer has clarified, about two weeks from the start of the process, we bottle. Once again, the beer is separated from the sediment by transferring between carboys. Then a priming sugar is added to promote carbonation. Without that, it would just be a lot of effort to create tasty but flat beer.

The Assembly Line

At this point, we have roughly five gallons of beer to get into bottles. Thankfully, beer bottles can be sterilized in the dishwasher and the whole family gets involved. Kim fills the bottles with his siphon beer filling contraption, I crimp on the caps, and Alastair fills the boxes. Emery crawls around the kitchen and cheers us on to victory. It is enjoyable to have a project all of us enjoy completing, even if only one of us drinks the product. Alastair enjoys the root beer and I'm waiting on the hard cider I'm promised this fall. Cheers!

10 Months

Emery will be one year old in two months. Simple math, I know, but somehow it just doesn't seem to add up for me. We just brought her home: such a tiny little thing. As tiny as a chunky nine pound baby can be, of course. More staggering is that big kid behind her is going to be four next week. That just knocks the wind out of me entirely. Four! I remember walking through the door from the hospital with him like it was yesterday. Back when our big concern was helping Boudreaux adjust to having a sibling. And now we've helped that four year old adjust to being a sibling himself. Wow.

Emery is the sunshine in our house. She wakes up happy and radiates joy and love all day long. Except when Alastair steals her toys, but hey, a woman has got to be able to defend herself and when you're only 10 months old, crying is about the only defense. She even knows to look for me when Alastair comes over to play. Such a smart little cookie she is, making sure I'm going to witness whatever is about to transpire.

Em's up to eight full teeth now and she's earned her own little pink toothbrush. In the last month, she has learned to clap and is starting to wave at Kim when I am holding her. She has communicated "more" in sign language twice this week at dinner and although it looked more like a clap, "more" was clearly the intention. And in crawling news, Emery is now both a "belly off the ground crawler" (Alastair's term) and a "belly on the ground crawler." Whenever she is on a hard surface or in the tub, she crawls on her knees, but for speed she prefers to drop to her elbows and knees/toes. Slithering like a snake across the floor, she is surprisingly fast. One has to be in order to grab something before a vigilant sibling can intercept.

Emery's favorite toys are stacking cups which she still loves to clack together. She also enjoys rolling cars back and forth and the occasional dump truck, if she can get her hands on it. I hear heads shaking all over the blogsphere at our poor daughter who only plays with boy toys. For the moment though, all she wants is whatever Alastair has. The Cozy Coupe is still a big hit and our new (again) toy is the playhouse/doorway that Alastair got when he turned one. She loves to put a block or car in the mailbox, close the door, then take it out. Great fun.

To placate those that think she will turn out to be a total tomboy herself (and what would be so wrong with that?) I give you this. Pigtails. Even Alastair was excited about the "piggy tails" and none of us could stop giggling as long as she left them in, which was considerably longer than bows. As for the latter, she will now crawl over to other babies to pull bows out of their hair. Emery: bow rights activist.

Pigtails!

Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

Our trip to Maine this year was a whirlwind week of activity and fun. The weather was really very nice: seventies and up to the low 80's on one day, which made both hiking and water play comfortable. After last year's constant drizzle and high's in the low 60's, it was quite welcome.

This was Emery's first trip by plane and she did great. Alastair, by this point, is a seasoned pro and he was quite proud to carry his own backpack with his entertainment through the airport. The trip out was tough: we left the house by 4 am and arrived at our cabin around 9:30pm, but the kids did great. The trip back was easier with the four hour drive on the front end, but our homecoming was a disappointment, as the air conditioner was on the fritz (house at 93 degrees!) and both freezers in our garage had lost power and thawed.

My brother was at camp at the same time for the first time in many years and it was really cool to hang out. Alastair adores his uncle and as it turns out, Emery was a big fan too.

One day when the weather wasn't great we went down country to shop in North Conway, NH. The drive is beautiful and the tax free outlet shopping is too. On the way back, we visited the train museum in Gorham. The museum is a tiny old train station and a long line of trains that you can climb up and explore.

We took the opportunity to take some pictures, and although Alastair was feeling spectacularly uninterested in the effort, I got a few decent ones anyway.

My next trick was telling Alastair that I wanted a picture of Emery by herself later in the week. I hope this approach will work for awhile because he seemed happy just to be included. Child psychology!

Rangeley Lake.

Rather that include 75 activity pictures in the body of this post, I am attaching a slide show with all the daily details of our trip. It was a really nice break and is tough being back in Houston with a full year between us and our next Maine trip.