The Homebrewing Experiment: Part 1

First, a little background: this year, Official Blog Fiancé has made it a goal to try a bunch of craft beers. Over the last several months, it's become a fun hobby! Whenever we're in a new place, we'll try to pick up a few individual bottles and then we stash them away until it's time to break one out with dinner (or something). This new-found interest made it easy to figure out a birthday gift for Official Blog Fiancé this year!

Northern Brewer Homebrew Supply makes some really nice quality homebrewing kits. There were three difference options for kits, so I picked the middle one. Having never tried it before, the deluxe homebrew kit seemed a little intense, but the beginner one seemed a little too simple. So the intermediate one was the answer. The best thing about it was that it came with a recipe kit including all the ingredients, so I chose the one that I thought Official Blog Fiancé would like best and put it in my shopping cart.

When it arrived, the boxes were HUGE. I had tried to tell UPS to let me pick it up from their warehouse/store, but it turns out they only got it right for one of the packages. The other got delivered to my apartment, which really meant it got delivered to my landlords. Oops. The lovely elderly people downstairs had to move a large box with Northern Brewer advertisements boldly emblazoned all over the sides to the foot of my stairwell. I swear, landlords...it wasn't even for me!

Intro complete. On to the interesting stuff.

We made the beer this weekend! Actually, we really just started it, since it has to ferment before it's actually beer. First, we watched a fun/corny/educational video that described all the steps. Then we dumped a lot of purified water into a large pot and steeped some grains like you would steep tea.

 

Eventually we figured out that we didn't need to hold the grain sack there the whole time. The pot had some pretty helpful handles.

 

We steeped until the water temperature made it to 170 degrees. After that, we removed the grains, boiled the water/beer tea, and then added some malt.

 

I wish I had gotten some pictures of the malt, but it was a two-person job. The malt was a quart of liquid that weighed a full six pounds, and the pot needed to be stirred constantly while it was added. Ergo... no hands to spare.

 

After the malt, the stuff boiled for an hour, and we added some hops at regular intervals. While it boiled, we sanitized the next equipment.

 

The sanitization process looks simple, but picture this: a 7-gallon bucket needed to be filled with purified water from a Brita filter. Official Blog Fiancé worked on the sanitization process while I was cutting up potatoes and putting herbs on a large pork roast for dinner in the same area. Water is running, large pieces of brewing equipment are lying around the kitchen, raw meat is sitting on the counter in the corner, and the two of us are dancing around each other trying to both use the sink at the same time. In retrospect it was fun. At the time, it was amusingly stressful.

 

This picture was clearly taken after we took the beer tea - or wort, according to the directions - off the burner.

Once the wort had cooled down enough, it was time to pour it into a large bucket to start the fermentation process.

The entire house smelled like hops. The Catholics were having mass in the church right down the street, and you could smell the hops from outside the house. I'm pretty sure the scent wouldn't have reached the church, but in case it did... Catholics: my sincere apologies. It didn't smell great. The smell of dinner soon overtook the beer smell though, so it didn't last too long!

After pouring, we added more water and then sealed up the bucket. We stuck in the aerator, shook the bucket a little to get some extra oxygen in the mix, opened it back up, added some yeast, and the process was done...

FOR NOW!

This whole process took us a good four hours, so we're really hoping that our efforts pay off. I think we'd both be disappointed if all the work turned into bad beer. But if it's good, we'll invite you over to try it!

 

Vegetables

Earlier this week, Jenni challenged her readers to blog every day through the month of May.

Obviously, I failed on Day 1.

However, in an effort to make up for it, I'm just going to go ahead and post more than once!  Since it's already the 5th of May, I probably won't go so far as to post five full times, but I have to start somewhere, right?

I forgot that spring in Massachusetts is gorgeous.  There are flowers everywhere and the weather just makes you happy to be alive.  I don't know how I survived 18 springs in Vermont,where "spring" is just a euphemism for Mud Season.  It snows, then it rains and the ground gets absolutely mud-soaked, and then it's summer.  So while I will exhort the virtues of Vermont for 75% of the year, Mud Season counts for the 25% during which I would caution you to avoid it at all costs unless you really enjoy having broken axels on your car.

I digress.

All that to say, spring in MA is perfect.  So perfect, in fact, that I chose this year to finally plant a garden.  For the first time in my life, I was more than excited to trek to Home Depot.  I was probably too excited, because as I went through the checkout line the cashier remarked, "Wow, someone's going to be busy for awhile..."

She was right.  I turned soil, dumped topsoil, raked, added garden soil, weeded, and finally planted for a good three hours straight.  But it paid off!  

I planted green and red peppers, lettuce, carrots, broccoli, strawberries, and cantaloupe.  Mentioning that I planted cantaloupe led a friend to exclaim, "Cantaloupe comes from the ground??"

Who knew?

Hopefully by the end of the summer, our vegetable shish-kebabs will have been homegrown! 

In Which Will Be Found Dessert and Pumpkins

Sunday was full of adventures.  No Sunday would be complete without going to church, so that's where we headed first.  Except instead of going to our regular church, we went somewhere else for the sake of variety.  We went to a place where psalms are sung, descants are added to almost every hymn, and the service is almost two hours long.  It was great.

After church, we headed to have a cinnamon roll/pumpkin carving...festival? with some of our friends.   Since you can never have too many cinnamon rolls, we decided to make two different kinds.

Verdict: no two cinnamon roll recipes are the same.  However, both were fantastic and almost produced four sugar-induced comas.

To counteract the sugar, we moved on to pumpkin carving.

In order to carve the pumpkins, we needed to have pumpkins to begin with.  When you're a kid, picking out pumpkins to carve is great fun.  When you're a young adult, picking out pumpkins to carve should still be great fun.  When you're a young adult and the wind is blowing hard and the rain is falling steadily, picking out pumpkins becomes more of an adventurous chore rather than great fun.  I would have taken a picture of that particular event, but it was too blustery outside to attempt to break out the camera/phone.  Instead, I will leave you with a picture of our finished products:

(Obviously, the glowing letters are the feature of that picture.  Writing by trackpad is not my strong suit.)

And so we departed in peace, full of cinnamon, sugar, and butter and thoroughly covered in pumpkin.  Sunday well-spent.

Post Script: we briefly considered making this, but it seemed a little outside of the scope of both our abilities and our little carving tools:

Miscellaneous

Today was a great day...for my inner child.


I sat on a rock wall and read 80 pages in under an hour.

I wrote a 3-page letter.

I met a nice person.

I sang along with some classical music I didn't know.

I ate ice cream.

I laughed at unimportant things.

I skipped and ran across a field.

I hung out with a lovely friend.

I explored new places.

I walked on a guardrail.

I did two cartwheels.

I scaled a rocky cliff.


Who says I need to grow up? (Although I did apply for yet another job today. Yay.)

Hurrah for spontaneity and good friends.

What do YOU do on the weekend?

Have I ever mentioned how much I love construction paper? If not, here it is: I LOVE CONSTRUCTION PAPER AS MUCH AS I LOVE COOKIES.

[That's saying quite a lot. You have no idea.]

Do you still need an illustration? We'll assume you said yes.

Last Friday night, my friend Ali and I spent over three hours creating things out of it. After she left, I worked on my project for another two hours. Result? A chain of construction paper flowers. I was pretty proud of myself.

Fotobooth Fun

Hello world!

I am writing today in order to explain a photo collage which apparently grows larger upon the commencement of one clicking somewhere on the surface of it. This collage came to be in existence because my sister, the notorious and infamous Jillian Griffin, who i'm sure is known for her blog posts throughout the interwebs, opened photobooth on her computer... Apparently the fun does not end after this outrageous photo taking program is running. We spent nearly an hour creating funny and inexplainable facial expressions as well as body gestures to entertain ourselves in the evening.

One would think that you would use effects to have the most fun, but that is not the case. Simply have an excellent time on good old normal mode and off to the races one goes. You see, I have found that there is not so much ingenuity or perplexity involved in the making and observing of photos that rely simply on the effect to make them funny, like having two faces and four arms. All you really need is to have the soft susurration of your imagination prompt you, within three seconds, to plaster onto your features an indelible moment of creativity that is now saved to less than one kilobyte of space on your hard drive. Congrats you've made a photo!

Well over the course of that one hour, I had a most excellent and bodacious adventure. *Bill and Ted fans insert laugh here* I hope that everyone who reads this blog tries out their own version of photobooth or crystaleye or whatever type of program you have so that they all can have as much fun as my sister and I did. I dare you to try it :)

K, Later all

(Jillian's brother, not v v v)

Planting Parties!

Michelle and I were the first two back from spring break today. Ok, so I technically never left, but still. You get the point. Originally, we had no plans for epic adventures. I got back around 1:30 from church and lunch at American Flatbread (hot dang, that stuff is good!), and Michelle suggested that we go grocery shopping, so off we went. We got all our groceries, and as we were heading to the checkout, we found seeds, and an amazing afternoon was born. I got some flower seeds - Alyssum, to be specific - and Michelle got some basil, but we soon realized we had nowhere to plant them UNTIL we both discovered we were buying yogurt. EUREKA! Dump the yogurt into another container, and you have a plant pot. What excitement!


Upon our return to campus, we decided we needed to get some dirt, because you can't plant seeds without it. Problem: no shovel or spade. Solution: make a shovel/spade out of extra soda bottles!


We decided to get dirt from around campus, so we walked all the way around the quad until we reached the side of the library. It was fairly inconspicuous, and we figured GoPo wouldn't come by. We kept a lookout nevertheless.


We're so hardcore.

On our way back to the apartment, we decided to check out the recently-finished second floor of the science building, and we found a cool room there. I took a picture of my stroke-of-brilliance water draining system in there.


In our travels we also found a photo of our favorite ornithologist/environmental science teacher.


Make of it what you will.

Finally, we marched back up the hill, planted our seeds, and decorated the pots. Here's my finished product!


When (if?) the flowers and basil grow and bloom, I will put up of pictures of them too! I'd say that between our ingenuity, spontaneity, and pioneer-like adventuring spirit, we entertained ourselves in the best possible way.

It's all in the cards...

I've heard it said that the green cards one collects during a game of Apples to Apples are a literary depiction of one's personality. If this is true, I guess I have multiple personality disorder.


And yet, somehow I think that this representation of my character may be more true than I originally thought...


(I guess if I want to make my blog super legit, I'm going to have to stop posting random pictures of daily life and start talking about things that people actually want to read about. But where else am I going to put pictures like the ones in the last few posts?)

Super Bowl?

Normally, the highlight and perhaps only benefit of watching the Super Bowl every year (for me, at least) is watching the commercials. I liked this one in particular:




And I also thought this one was kinda funny, especially with the re-orchestration of the 1812 Overture:




But honestly, I would be remiss if I neglected the absolute BEST part of the Super Bowl this year:



That's right. Christina Aguilera sang the wrong words to the national anthem. I love American pop culture.

(Which is why we spent most of the Super Bowl time frame listening to recordings of church music, sorting sheet music, and singing the Te Deum. We're cool kids.)

City Excursions

This afternoon, Chris, Diana, Jon, and I ventured into Boston on a whim. We didn't have a plan of action for when we got there, so we wandered around until we found some statues. As is customary when traveling in the city and finding statues, we took pictures of them. It was good fun.






It reminded me of when we were in Washington DC over the summer and took pictures with statues there too.


Sadly, I don't have too many of those pictures, but I think it will become tradition from now on: if we find statues in our travels around the world, we should always, always take fun pictures with them.

Boston Day

It's been awhile since I've written anything new here.  I'm finally back at school, and just getting back into the swing of things.  My roommate and I have been trying a new experiment where we get up at 7:30ish even on the days we don't have to, so that we get tired early enough to go to bed on time.  Right now it's 11:51 pm, so I'd say that today we failed, especially because I have to leave for church at 7:30 tomorrow morning, which means getting up at 6:30.  That's right.  Less than 7 hours of sleep.  But I think for today, that's alright, because we spent an excellent day in Boston!  We skated on the Frog Pond in the morning, then went to Fire and Ice for lunch, followed by a quick stop at the Steinway store where we were politely but firmly told to only play one piano at a time... After that, we took a long T ride to where we thought the Garment District was, but it turned out that we had gone too far in the right direction.  We had to backtrack almost as far as we'd come.  In any case, while it was an interesting experience, I would have to caution against it if you are the sort of person who enjoys hygiene and cleanliness.  Once we left the store and had sufficiently Purell-ed our hands, we started the walk back to the T station.  On our way there we passed a Starbucks, and ended up spending a full hour and a half lingering over our respective cups of steaming hot Rooibos tea, London Fog, and Java Chip frappachinos.  Finally, we left Cambridge and headed back into the city.  We split up, one of us going to a BSO concert while the other two of us shopped around Quincy Market.  When everything started closing there, we hiked to the Prudential, where we found the Cheesecake Factory still open, and took some to go.  We ate it in front of yet another Starbucks, and, when the concert was finally over, we took the T back to the station where we parked and drove back to school.  Overall, we were in Boston for around 13 hours, which can be a little draining, but will be a memorable experience nonetheless.