Backyard Brewing

Q finally got his post up on his recent brewing escapades. Apparently, the bottle he tested tonight was inspirational.

In current affairs, I've got 10 pounds of pie cherries and 12 pounds of sweet cherries in the fridge for tomorrow's pie filling, drying, and jam escapades. All our wet weather has caused the cherries to split but they are plentiful. Hentze's Farm, a few minutes north of us, has a lovely sweet cherry u-pick orchard. They are also the only people in town who have pie cherries, which is again really making me want to plant our own.

At Chez Chicken, Lacey has laid her second egg, maybe slightly larger than the first, and it appears that both of the big girls have simultaneously started to molt - no proper sized eggs for us for 2 days now! Don't know what we're going to do!

The tallest corn is thigh high. The yellow crookneck plants are developing a terrifying number of fruit. Cucumbers and zucchini have tons of blossoms. I need to do garden pics again in a couple of days.

Lester the Fox has his body all knit and is ready to be stuffed and sewn together. Then I get to start knitting the clothes! How could I resist the project when I already had everything I needed in my stash? Nobody would have that kind of self control, I mean, he's wearing shoes, for crying out loud!

Finally, these are some of my new favorite people. I really hope they make their goal - on principle and for selfish reasons, I want to watch the completed videos!

Bottling on Father's Day

While I was at the coast on a Craftacular Getaway, Q spent Saturday brewing a batch of beer from grain with a friend. He's hopefully going to post about that soon - I'll add a link when he does. It did inspire us to take care of old brewing business to make space in the pantry for the newly full 5 gal carboy.

The apple cider has been sitting for quite a while. After it first reached 1.000 specific gravity, we tried to kill the yeast and then added more sugar but we failed and the yeast just gobbled up the additional sugar. We let it sit again until all that sugar was definitely eaten up and then finally got around to bottling it on Sunday. We added 2c water that had been heated with 1/2c sugar then cooled to the 5 gallon carboy to prime it so it will be slightly carbonated. It is quite dry but has a great apple aroma and my sip suggested that it's a pretty decent batch. (Just watch out for the approximate 12% alcohol content!) Here's to 22 bottles of cider I can't drink! ;p

We started the cherry wine on July 12 last year and, after several rackings and several months of procrastination, we got corks and a corking tool from the brew store yesterday. The sip I had suggested the wine is definitely drinkable. It will be interesting to see what a few months in the bottles will do for building character. We're calling it "Christmas wine".

Here's Q with the cats on his first Father's Day.

Racking Day

Today we racked the cherry wine (started 7/12, 1 gal) and the apple cider (started 7/1, 5 gal). They both had used up all their sugar and were down to a specific gravity of 1.000.

We racked the wine and left it as is. We're supposed to rack it again in a couple of weeks and then every couple of months until no sediment settles at the bottom. It started at 1.090, which means it has an alcohol content of about 12%. We tasted a sip. Right now that's a very young wine but it has potential. It is very fruity.

The cider got racked and then we added 4 cups of sugar to bring the specific gravity back up to 1.020 and added 1/2 t potassium metabisulfite to kill the yeast so they don't ferment the new sugar. That batch started at 1.060, so it's about 7.5% alcohol. We'll bottle in a few days and let it age a few weeks before we have cider again.

We also went to Bite of Eugene today - a very good thing. Tomorrow, I've got a lead on some peaches and pie cherries. Nums!

I'm an Infuser

I have now joined the ranks of people who have jars full of oil and herbs in their pantry. I ended up with about a cup of dried calendula petals and poured oil over them up the the one cup mark on the pint jar. I'm supposed to leave them in the pantry for a month before straining the oil and making cream with it using some of our beeswax.

We also went cherry picking yesterday and got about 19 pounds. We juiced 8 lbs. and got 8 cups of juice. We topped it off with water and added lots of honey and a little sugar until the specific gravity got up to 1.090. We're going to make wine. Funny to think that we'll know if it's an experiment worth repeating just before cherry season next year. Wine making takes a lot more patience than cider.

The pint jar to the left is full of "cherry bounce". We took the recipe from our brewing book for the concept and then didn't really measure. Q pitted cherries and put as many into the pint jar as he could fit, drizzling in honey every so often. He then poured vodka in until everything was submerged. It's not as romantic sounding as using the traditional cognac or brandy but vodka's what we had. I'll be interested to see how that experiment works out, although I can't foresee any way it wouldn't turn out yummy. :)

Memoranda

I've discovered I've got to put things here. I lose scraps of paper. My memory isn't that good. My housekeeping book is invariably in another location from where I am when I need the information (often in another state).

Salad Rolls

The recipe for this really good dressing/marinade is here. I marinated the tofu strips for a few hours then pan-fried them in a little olive oil. Lettuce, carrots, avocado, cucumber and tofu on a rice wrapper. (Yes, I do feel guilty with how many things here aren't local. The lettuce is from the front yard though.)

Laundry Powder

1 c. borax, 1 c. washing soda, 1 bar Ivory soap, slightly less than 1 oz. Fels Naptha laundry soap
Add food processor.
Mix about 1 T with water then pour into the washing machine detergent slot.
So far so good.

New Cider Batch

5 gallons of sweet cider from Detering's ($5/gal)
Beginning specific gravity 1.060
Down to the last 2 bottles from the last batch! This is an emergency!

Saturday's Highlights

We got the bees transferred to the new hive, pictures coming soon. I didn't get pics when we were done today because I was too busy nursing my stings. I irritated them a bit and wasn't wearing a net so I got stung on my upper lip and on my eyebrow. They're still swollen and super tender to the touch but it could be worse. Q was the one wearing a net and gloves so he escaped unscathed. They had five frames in the original box and we were amazed how much progress they've already made in building comb on them. They've already almost completely filled one of the frames. We're choosing a biodynamic beekeeping route and, rather than giving them foundation we're just giving empty frames and letting them build their own comb. So far, they're doing a great job. We'll have to keep a close eye on them during this major blossom time so they don't run out of room.

We went up to Portland this afternoon to the peerless Portland Nursery to get our grapes. We already missed bare root season and I didn't want them to run out of the potted varieties that we wanted. We got a Concord (for juice and jelly), a Niagara (white table grape), a Muller Thurgau, and a Muscat Ottenel. The last two are wine grapes whose juices apparently work well on their own or blended with each other. We also got a raspberry. It's going to be anticlimactic when the finished product is at first just posts with wire strung between them and sticks planted between them but I'm looking forward to watching them develop. We also picked up a raspberry for the final section of that area, farthest from the street.

They have some great looking apple trees that are grafted M27 rootstock, which only becomes about 4' trees. I think that we'll use the bed at the far side of the driveway and put in a half-dozen to help feed our cider making in the future. We'll have to figure out how we could get them home...

Speaking of cider, we bottled 20 bottles tonight. This batch is the clearest we've made yet and, judging by taste we got from the tail end of the bottle, it's going to mature into our best tasting batch to date.

Pear Cider

Update, Thursday night: Okay, no pictures but we it ended up making 10 full bottles of cider plus a little bit. We'll see how it tastes in a couple of days.

The pear cider is almost bottled, pictures going up tomorrow but I wanted to get the nitty gritty details down tonight. It started at a 1.073 before fermentation. It was down to a 1.000 after. I added 2 c. of sugar to the must to bring it to 1.021 tonight, which suited our tastebuds. After crushing two campden tablets and dissolving them in a little juice we added them to the mixture and are letting it sit overnight before bottling. Better to have flat cider than the potentially explosive (even refrigerated) product from last time. The flavor seems good. Bottling will be a fun activity tomorrow morning while the turkey bakes.

The Driveway is Empty

Yes, it really took over 4 months to finally disperse the last of the soil pile. It's weird having a whole driveway again.

Where it went...

• A large amount got moved in below the front window (visible below) for next year's asparagus bed, which requires deep soil. There's so much fill rock there that it was way way easier to just build up a bed.
• To the left of the driveway, there has been a challenging weed patch on a thin layer of soil over rock, so hopefully the cardboard/dirt combo will take care of that.
• The irises on the right of the driveway have been way overgrown for a very long time (since even before we moved here 5 years ago). I knew grass had invaded them, lurking there. The grass used this stronghold to mount an attack on the new corn/bean/squash bed this summer, which means it was time to fight back. All the dead iris got pulled but there was such a mass of root that I couldn't even begin to weed out the grass from it. Scorched earth became the new tactic. If the iris survives this harsh treatment, good for it. If not, too bad, new things will be planted there. That soil should get moved over in bits this spring to the other end of that bed, where we're putting in a potato box.

In a true me-like moment, the reason the dirt getting moved made top priority is because I'm hoping to get the City to deliver 7 cubic yards (the only size available) of dead leaves on our driveway. Grass and weeds are in several places where they have no business being and hopefully sitting under a foot and a half of leaves all winter will kill them dead dead dead. Anything that hasn't disintegrated into nothingness by the end of the winter gets thrown into the compost bin and it's a win from every angle.

Due to the time sensitive nature of this endeavor and the relative lightness of leaves, I'm anticipating that the leaf pile will get much more quickly dealt with. After that, I'm considering pressure-washing the driveway to discourage any more hare-brained schemes for a while.

Once the leaf mulch gets put down the garden will officially be put to bed for the season and I'll just keep occasionally checking my three winter beds, ready to throw protection over them if a serious frost is expected.

(Sidenote - don't the new windows look nice? I'm in love with them.)

Finally, the fate of the banana pink jumbo squash. I baked this half for about 25 minutes, cut side down, then turned it over, filled it with bread stuffing and baked it, covered with foil, for 35 minutes more. I should have used more butter in the stuffing and should have baked the whole thing probably about 15 minutes longer to get the squash really mushy. It was delicious anyway and served as our primary food source for most of the weekend. The other half got baked later (only one half fit in the oven at a time!), cubed, and frozen.

On Halloween Day, I pulled out the last of the vines and brought in my last 6 pumpkins. (I'd harvested 3 before.)
One was ripe - stuffed pumpkin or pumpkin soup in its own shell for dinner later this week? One was irrevocably green. I found recipes online that suggested paring it, slicing it thin and baking it like you would apple pie. I will report that experiment's results when it is completed.
Four were not quite ripe. The handy internet suggested placing them in a bag with apples. Apparently, the apples release ethylene gas, which will ripen the pumpkins to orange. It warns about less flavorful pumpkin but that's what nutmeg and ginger are for, right? Another experiment that I will report on when I learn the results. Pumpkins are currently locked in a box surrounded by Jonagold and Golden Delicious apples from Thistledown.

We siphoned the pear cider off into the other carboy on Saturday. It seems like it's going to end up tasty. A little weird right now but the apple was also not as fantastic when it was totally fresh. We're letting it sit a bit longer to clarify and then we'll probably add more sugar to get it nice and sweet like I like it, used Campden tablets to kill the yeast, then bottle it.
The last bottle of the apple cider was drunk on Halloween night. It was very bubbly and very alcoholic. Fermentation had continued quite nicely, even in the fridge. I know it's desirable to have it a bit bubbly but I'd like a product that can age for a few weeks at room temperature in its bottles this time, even if that sacrifices sparkle.

Cider's done!

We bottled the cider yesterday and ended up with twenty-five 22 ounce bottles. Twenty four went into boxes to sit for a bit to hopefully get a tiny bit bubbly. The twenty-fifth went into our tummies. It was good. Q got us a bottle filler and a capper from the brew store on his way home on Friday and these tool are so cool. I really like using the capper. We're talking about picking the blackberries for our wine next week now that we have two empty carboys. After the cider, wine will feel like it takes forever, and we won't get to use the capper but... mmmmm, blackberry wine.
Our largest tomato harvest yet this year, including the monster beefmaster that was finally ready. It weighed in at 1 lb. 5 oz.! We had it as slices on hamburgers last night. A single slice exactly covered the bun.
Since we had five romas and we were at Thistledown Farm anyway (buying lots of corn on the cob for Q), I bought a box of tomatoes, some garlic, and onions, and have been reducing them down to marinara for the last couple of days. I think I'm going to try pressure canning again, although my results were so partially successful last year.
When we stopped at the grocery, the red tape banana man was just finishing. I don't know if others find this a mark of a red letter day but I was so excited I exclaimed with delight. Q resignedly said, "I'll go get a basket". We came home with over 16 lbs. of bananas, most of the them organic, and I've got about a 35 smoothies worth of bananas peeled and frozen now. Yay!

Biggest Juicebox Ever

....okay, okay, we were actually just stirring with PVC, but don't you just want to suck on it like a straw?!

We tested the cider and found that it had 0% potential alcohol by volume and a specific gravity of 1.000. Needless to say, it was very dry. Q and I played with adding 1/2t. sugar at a time to the sample until we liked it. There was a lot of sampling - and it was very, very yummy. Finally, we got to a sample we liked. (I like a fairly sweet hard cider.) We figured out how much sugar we had to add to the whole 5 gallons and put that into the second carboy. We then siphoned the cider from the first carboy to the second and stirred to dissolve the sugar. The airlock was replaced but there doesn't seem to be any more fermentation going on. Looks like the alcohol content is high enough to kill the yeast. The dregs from the first carboy still seemed like we would be wasting a lot, so we poured most of them into a pitcher and have been letting it sit to resettle before siphoning it into the new carboy as well. Figure we'll give it a few days to make sure fermentation has really stopped and then bottle her up and set it aside to age a few weeks.

Cidermaking Day 2

Yesterday, I was keeping an eye on the bubbling cider and it was getting all nice and foamy and the airlock was bobbing away so I quit worrying about it. In the afternoon, however, I noticed it had jumped the bounds. The airlock was full of cider and the picture to the left is what it looked like after I took the airlock off. I put a towel over the top of the jug overnight and put the airlock on again this morning and it's behaving properly now. My pantry smells like a brewery though; good thing I don't consider that a bad thing. Yay yeast!

Our First Attempt at Making Hard Cider

Q got us free Gravenstein apples so we spent Sunday turning 40 lbs. of them into juice. We also juiced an additional 30 lbs. of Red Delicious that we bought. We only used about 20 lbs. of the Red in the cider recipe and have an additional 3 qts. of juice in the freezer.

So, to document our process, we ended up with 3 gallons of Gravenstein + 2 gallons of Red Delicious.
We sterilized our carboy and other equipment with sodium metabisulfite on Monday before we placed the juice, which had 5 Campden tablets dissolved in it, into the carboy. We added the airlock and waited for 36 hours for the yeast killing effects of the Campden tablets to run their course.

This morning (Wednesday), I added 5 t. of yeast nutrient, 2 1/2 t. of acid blend, and 1 pkg of Pasteur Champagne Yeast (softened according to package directions) to the must.


According to the hydrometer, the specific gravity before fermentation is 1.053, with a potential alcohol by volume of 7%. We'll see. I put the airlock on but some people suggest that at the beginning of fermentation it should just be loosely covered so it doesn't explode. I'll check on it later today and see if it seems bubbly.

Supposedly, fermentation will end in 2-3 weeks. It sounds like using 750 ml champagne bottles and adding 1 1/2 t. of sugar before stopping and covering with a wire cap will allow for carbonation. Yum. Here's hoping for the best