Kombucha Project update, chickens doing hot laps...

I believe the Kombucha Project is a failure. All at the same time, this saddens me and relieves me. It saddens me because I had hoped to stumble across something new and interesting to use in creating beer, unique beers.. but I think what I've created is completely disgusting. I just poured a 1/4 glass sample of it. Since it's been on tap in the fridge for two weeks, it's had plenty of time to carbonate. For one, it won't hold a single bubble of foam. Two, it smells like malt vinegar (yes, there's a reason for that..), but doesn't taste quite as good. See, I *like* malt vinegar.. but this is more like malt vinegar with a big fresh dose of garlic, Lawries salt, and a pinch of nasty all thrown in the mix. It is not pleasant to drink. It does not remind me of a sour beer.. it reminds me of something gone wrong in a glass of beer that you forgot, which got left behind from last new years eve's party and you just happened to stumble upon now while doing a deep cleaning. Something fuzzy grew in that glass and you don't wanna delve deeper.

It also relieves me, because the thought of the research and future brewing experiments needed to be done to pin this thing down totally made my head spin. I'm just relieved that I'm so put off by this thing right off the bat that I don't have to do those experiments! Don't get me wrong.. I still like Kombucha. Actually, I like it quite a bit.. but the Kombucha tea and the Kombucha infused beer project are two *completely* different animals. Completely.

With all that said, anyone reading this that wants a keg of gross, or a growler or two for fun, please speak up. I'm going to take it off line maybe tomorrow, and set up the Brett. Pale Ale in it's place. I'll put this keg off to the side for a while, but eventually I'm going to flush it. Tis will be beer #2 that I will consider a total failure. Not through mishandling, just through bad recipe development. Not bad in an 8 year span of home-brewing.. but man, this keg has got to go!

In chicken news, the birds have taken to doing laps around the yard the passt few days. I've let them out of the coop late morning, and they mosey down the southern edge of the property, travel up the eastern edge through the woods at the base of the hill in the back yard, come across the north edge through the thick section of woods through our neighbor pals section of scrub, and then just walk across the front lawn like they own the joint to get back up to their coop. It's funny to see them marching around the property like this, all in a row.. talking and clucking and scratching up dirt the whole way. It's a slow march and takes a couple hours, but it's still funny to watch.

Another loaf, beer update..

Made another loaf of sourdough, and didn't really even get a chance to eat it. Here's it's only photo, before it was killed:

It's a good looking loaf, but circumstances conspired against it. Those circumstances being, me and the Boss and Kids went to NYC for a ballet show/Museum trip and, while there, we hit up Amy's Bread in Chelsea Market. Wow! That was impressive stuff. Big windows to look through at the processes inside, and really neat things to see. I ended up choosing a 1lb loaf of Country Sourdough to bring home, and, after carrying it around all day (literally), finally got a chance to eat a slice when I got home at 2100 hours that evening. It was awesome! Zingy taste from the sour, on a way different scale then my stuff has.. more of a tangy sour, than what mine develops. Mine is more 'funky' than lactic sour-y. This loaf had a crust that was so crisp and tasty, but not in the slightest chewy, that it was a pleasure to bite into. And the crumb was so soft, it was as if it wasn't there at all.. but the flavor from the grain really shined through. It didn't fare well here at the house, since it was so good, even The Boss ripped into it hard core and almost killed the loaf single handedly.

In other news, the 100% Brett beer I brewed up a few day ago really churned along well and seems to have finished it's ferment. It took two days to start seeing activity in there, just like most of the yeast guys said it would, and then it kicked off. It churned along really steadily with a very low (1/2") krausen during the entire main ferment until about yesterday, when it started to die off and fall back in. There is an odor to the ferment that I can't put my finger on, but I dare say you probably couldn't tell that it was a Brett beer at this point, from smell alone. It just doesn't smell funky at all at this stage of the game. Supposedly, we'll perhaps get a pelllicle out of this thing and go a little further in some other direction or another, but we'll have to wait and see what happens there.

Speaking of funky beers, the kombucha brew is still hangin' out, and I might keg that up soon... I've been drinking up the Oro de Maggie the past week or so, cause it's about time to get a new one in there I think. Problem is, I've got all sour beers in the pipeline now, and only one dedicated sour beer line. Is it time to open that up, ya' think, to two sour beer taps? Hmm..

Movie Review: Well, not really.. but I just saw The Blind Side, and I'm giving it huge props. Go see it!

Got a new book from the library, my first Reinhart book, and I'm getting some interesting info from it for sourdough recipes. He's using huge amounts of starter in some of these recipes (sometimes over half the weight of the total flour!).. and I'm thinking about trying this idea out. Probably this weekend, I think..

I can't think of what else to write about.. hm..so, that's it. Go click my Google ad, you cheapskates. Do it now, before you leave the site! Now, scram..

Keg down! No post in a while...

Been in training for the past week, so haven't really been home much and able to access the computer to do any blogging.. I should mention though, that this tragedy occurred:

Oh no! The IPA is killed! Drats.. I've got no pale ales downstairs, not counting the Oro de Maggie sour. The Kombucha beer, the not so aptly named Hanssens "All-Purpose" sour ale, is still kicking it too.. the pellicle on this thing now is huge and ugly as sin! It's developing some brett. character that I can definitely detect, and hopefully a bit of sour too. I'll be checking it out again at the three month mark, I think, to see how it's progressing.

Other than that.. I ain't got much. Supposed to be heading down to Will's place this coming Saturday for a saison tasting for an upcoming article. I can dig it.

Hanssen's Kombucha beer, chicken eggs, whole wheat berries..

Yo.

Some good news! The chickens are still laying very well. I've heard through various sources that this isn't unusual after all for first year chickens.. things might change next winter, including molt and requiring that supplemental light source after all. But in the meantime, this is still going on:

There were two more yesterday when that was taken, as well.. but just beautiful eggs they are. I've been eating them fried lately, and just amazed at the texture of the whites now.. really fantastic stuff.

I bought a few lbs of whole wheat berries at this organic food place in Litchfield a couple days ago. This is what I got:

I plan to grind them in my Corona mill and incorporate them into a bread recipe.. I wanna get some whole wheat in there for some texture, flavor, nutrients..  but I'm not sure if my mill is gonna be suitable for doing ore than 5-10% of wheat.. It doesn't really grind a nice flour, cause it's kind of a rude mill, but a few percent of wheat in the mix mix make things sorta interesting. I'll give it a whirl and report back.

In beer news, I racked the very slow fermenting Red beer I did with Timmay into a keg. I had a small sample of it in a glass just before I capped it up, warm and flat, and it had a really curious, interesting flavor. I have good feelings about this one coming out quite well. While I was down there, I whipped out a thief and took a quick snag of a few oz's of the Hanssens "All-Purpose" sour ale (now fortified with Kombucha bacteria!) and put that into a glass. I'm thinking the Hanssens should be renamed, cause that bottle of dregs did *nothing* for over a month. It wasn't until I put the kombucha culture in there did anything happen, and boy, did it happen. Dig this ugliness:

The pic is poor, cause there's so much condensation inside the neck of the carboy, but you can see the amount of pellicle *ugly* going on in there. It's only been two months.. but I got nervous and wanted to see if I was growing a disaster or something promising. End result, from my small tasting got me some notes on the project as it is right now.. this is what I wrote:

C: cloudy gold color
A: slight smoke? Brett smell.. Funky up the wazoo.. old fruits or some sort, apples turing sour...
F: Bret! No sour. F'ing Awesome brett, in fact. WTF? Wheaty.. funkyness. complex flavor, hard to pin down. awesome. Let's let it go a bit...



So. If you can picture *that* in a beer.. ;) I was very surprised at the *lack* of acetic or any sour notes in here at all. The kombucha is nothing if not sour. I mean, very vinegar sour. This beer is not. It's meaty, complex, Brett tasty good. If I kegged this right now, you'd love it if you like Brett beers. That wasn't what I was going for, however, so I'm going to let it ride for another month and re evaluate the situation. but, man.. is that thing ugly. 

Where did I leave off?

Seems like forever since I've typed here. And, I'm hungry.  Just so you know..

I'm not sure I have any pictures for this one.. just wanted to note that I brewed yesterday with Timmay, makin' up what is going to be a fine batch of an American Amber (Red) beer. 50/50 Munich and Pale Ale malt, and a touch of Carafa I in there for color. Used Northern Brewer and Willamette for hops. It's gonna be a mid size brew at 6.5-ish %abv.. and should be fairly tasty. I'm fermenting this one in the dining room where it's fairly cold right now.. 63-ish, to try and keep down the Apple esters that I've been battling with the high temp ferments that my basements 73 degree temps brought to my latest beers.

On the Kombucha front, I've been drinking these fairly regularly now, and I'm on my fourth batch now..  The last one, the one fermenting now, uses 75% of the sugar the other ones did, as, in discussing this with my sister-in-law, we thought this stuff tasted pretty darned sweet... sweeter than the other ones we've both had in the past, from commercial places. So, I figured I'd just knock down the original sugar amount and see what happened. Well, what happened is it got *really* pungent down there, near the fermenting bench! The acetic aroma of this newest batch is easily way more powerful than any of the past efforts And, it smells fantastic, to boot!

Speaking of sour.. my batch of Hanssens "All-Purpose" sour ale has been less than amazing. It's just not souring from my infusion of the Hanssens dregs. I suspect those bugs perhaps weren't viable? So, doing what I've wanted to do since creating this above-mentioned Kombucha creature, I ripped off a chunk (or two.. nothing like excess!)  of the culture and threw it in the Hanssen's carboy. Where last week there was no pellicle or souring activity at all, this week there is plenty. There is now a mad, fat, angry looking *thing* growing on the surface of this beer. And I love it. Whether it tastes any good or not is another story for a different day.

Spent the New Years Eve with Will and Michelle.. drank a bunch of Saranac beers, like the Black Lager, IPA, Pale Ale, Belgian thingy.. had Stone's Leviathan, Affligem's Noel, and rang in the new year with Delerium Tremen's! Good times!

Chickens are all still producing well and don't seem to mind the cold at all.. except, they do have nabbed a touch of frostbite on their combs, for two out of three of the Red chicks.. the Barred Rocks are all excellent, however.  I've read where you can either cut off, disinfect and bandage up the combs that are affected, or.. well.. leave 'em alone. They seem to heal themselves up just fine, according to my resources, and they just carry on. Seems weird.. but, I'm no surgeon. Sad about that..

Also sad is my ability with sourdough. Still failing. Got a nice, viable sourdough culture from some friends in Maine, though, and I'll be trying that stuff out today. Working on it now, in fact.. also doing something with a tinned bread called the "prefermented straight dough" method, which uses commercial yeast, that you let ferment out to completion for like, 5 hours.. and then mix that in with some more flour and water and it supposedly develops these "complex organic acids", similar to sourdough, just without the sour part. Supposed to be a much more complex, better tasting bread. We'll see. It's easy enough to do, at least..

Ok, like I said, I'm hungry.. catch you later.

Successful sourdough boule, Ploughman's lunch..

Well, here's a long overdue post.. and about nothing other than food. I haven't had much stuff to say since Christmas came to town. But, I've been fighting mightily with my sourdough cultures, and have finally found success. My starter can now easily double, if not nearly triple,  in 9 hours or less. It was an uphill battle, but I finally beat it. Or, rather, came to terms with it.. I'm not sure I've completely won.

..that's a pic of what I consider to be my first sourdough loaf success. It's not perfect. Far from it. the sour is not really there, the crumb is not dense, but not open, either. It's not really tall, but neither is it a discuss like the last one either. It's perfectly edible, but I *did* forget to install the salt. I still wonder what the difference would have been had I put that in there.. I also failed to get a good slash formed on top, so it never really opened up.. but that's fairly minor compared to forgetting to put in a standard component part, I figure.

What that said, this is what I had for lunch:

That is *my* cheese, *my* beer, *my* bread and .. err.. well, Jody's sausage.  But hey, other than a little foreign sausage, that meal was not just prepared, but entirely formed/created/fermented/crafted by my hand. It was a neat though as I stuffed myself on these bits for lunch today.. And I'll say, the stars of the show were the sausage and the cheese. I haven't had this cheese in months, since it was new.. and man, what a difference a bit of age can make on a cheddar cheese. Awesome! The sausage was just plain awesome all by itself. The beer wasn't awesome, but it seemed to pair well with the spicy meat and cheese parts.. so, overall, the meal was really good. And now that I've finished my lunch, and the beer glass is empty, I may just go crack open that new bottle of Kombucha I put in the fridge last night for a taste test.. which, incidentally, I also made myself.

New Kombucha, injured hen repaired..

Just moved my Kombucha mother culture into a new jar with new tea and sugar mix. I'm just tasting the smoked Kombucha now for the first time, uncarbed, straight from the jar. The smoke is fairly evident on the nose when you first approach it, but it's not really coming through in the flavor. The sour attack is so prevalent, I think it washes out any smokiness that might be there. After you swallow that sip, however, the smoke comes back, and is faint, but is definately there in the finish. Quite balanced, all things considered! Here's a pic of me swapping the mother culture over:

Sick, isn't it? ;-D

I think this tea has a slightly too sweet taste to it too, much like the last one.. which surprises me, cause I thought for sure this bigger, stronger culture would overpower more of the sugars. I just did some rough and dirty calculations with QBrew, which tells me that if I mix 100 grams of white sugar into 1 liter of water, I'll get a 1.050-ish solution. When I measured this new Kombucha out of the jar, it was like 1.042 on the dial, so I don't think this stuff is very alcohol tolerant. If this new tea is this sweet, the Kombucha must be running into a wall somewhere along the way. I think maybe next time (It's too late for the new batch..) I'll dial it back to 75 grams and see how the stuff tastes there. Should dry it out a bit, I think. I've also just started pondering a 5 gallon batch of the stuff, and putting it on gas in the beer fridge. Heheheh.. wouldn't that be sick?

So, here's the big hen that got injured the other day..

In this photo, I had jsut finished building the temporary pen for her in the garage out of a cardboard box and some netting. The very top of her comb you might be able to see is almost black.. that's a result of putting the hydrogen peroxide on there. I have no idea why it did that, but it did. She was bleeding pretty good prior to that, but that stuff and some gentle pressure put that to a stop. She spent the night in this Taj Mahal (with a suspended heat lamp that you can't see in the pic..)..

And was fairly happy about it, really. Heck, it was *9* degrees F outside, and a sweet 50-ish in this box. With that said, the other chicks were bright and chipper the next morning.. 9 degrees is the lowest we've had so far this year, and I was somewhat concerned about them, but everything I've read said they'd be fine. And, so, they were. I got 4 eggs today, which is normal, and then I let the beauties out for a run, where they promptly began rolling in the dirt again. The injured chick was returned to the flock outside the coop where she immediately asserted her dominance over the first challenger to approach, and then things were back to normal. She's out there now with the rest, perched on the post for the night.

I also scored a small plastic walled pet carrier from the dump this afternoon for $5. Way better than a cardboard box, and will allow any future injured chicken to be much more secure when in segregation.

Speaking of eggs..

That's the Balsamic vinegar pickled eggs I made up last week.. this is the first one I had, after 7 days in the jar. I hear you can age 'em in there for up to a month with better and better results, so, since I did 6 eggs, I'll try one a week or so to see the progression. Ugly though, eh?

Kombucha revealed, busted loaf, & pickled eggs..

Ha! Fixed that damn snowblower today. Sorta. Parts of it, anyway. The drive chain is still busted, but the thing starts and runs now. Jerk!

Here's the latest flat sourdough that I hurled into space (well, the back yard anyway.. ) this morning:

Darn things keep coming out flat. Just not rising enough. Talking with some folks on The Fresh Loaf website and they think I'm on the right track.. but still doing some trouble shooting on this.

Here's a shot of the Kombucha project.. the first one, not the second. This one is all bubbly in the bottle now, and tastes just FINE. *Really* fine, in fact.

The second version of the Kombucha monster is still churning in the jar downstairs, but really probably is done by now. Interested to see how that tastes, since I used Lapsang Souchong tea as the base.. heh.

Here's a pic of the jar of pickled eggs I made up a couple days ago, too.

Here's the recipe:

• 1 cup white vinegar
• 1/4 cup balsamic red vinegar
• 3/4 cup water
• 2 rings of onion (small onion)
• 1 clove of garlic
• tsp of crushed red peppers
• dash of all-spice/lawries stuff
• 3 glubs of hot sause

All but the all-spice and hot sause brought to a boil then cooled. Add to 6 hard boiled eggs after. Easy as that. Only reason I used balsamic vinegar is I just didn't have *quite* enough white vinegar to do the job.. and now the whole project is a deep red color. Curious. We'll see how that works out, as I've never pickled eggs before and have no idea if I even will like them.

Speaking of eggs, this is becoming a pretty typical sight for a morning:

Four large eggs, ranging from 52 to 57 grams per egg. This is the girls' collecting bucket.. they like it, and keep them from breaking the eggs in their hands while trying to open the doors to bring the eggs inside. Kids are funny like that.

Couple of reviews, Kombucha repitch, etc.

So, just out of curiosity, is there anyone reading this right now that isn't subscribed and seeing themselves in a little box to the right hand side of this message listed as a Follower? It'd be great to have you sign in if you are, just so's I know who I'm writing at, if not just myself. ;) Plus, you dogs out there who have nothing but gray outlines for their profile pic, shame on you! Fix that immediately!

Just came in from the coop after giving the chickens some leftover cereal and milk from the kids breakfasts.. they snapped that right up, quick. There's two egs in the box right now, and the kids pulled in three large ones this morning already. That makes my second 5 egg day. 100% chicken efficiency! 

The Kombucha project seems to be functioning well, too. Geoff came over last night for a beer session and Kombucha initial tasting. I washed up good and then just reached into the jar with the Kombucha in it and just picked up the whole floating jellyfish thing that had formed. It came right out with no problem in one piece, and I put it down on a small plate with a little of the liquid over the top to keep it hydrated. I mixed up a new batch of the sweet tea, which I neglected to post a recipe for last time.. and then sunk the new mother culture pancake thingy back into the jar with the new tea mixture in it. Easy as cake! The recipe I used for this tea is half and half black tea and green tea, at a ratio of 3.5 grams per 250 mL, which is how I make my regular tea, strength wise. I swirled into the tea 100 grams of white table sugar per 1,000 mL of water for the Kombucha to feed on. Pretty simple stuff. This morning, I went to take a look at how the new culture is doing, and it's already formed a abit of a funk across the top of the tea.. much, much faster than the first pitch.. which was way underpitched, really.

Me and Geoff had a small taste of the Kombucha tea itself as well, and both of us easily detected some sourness and acidic twang to the mix, but also noted it was still fairly sweet. Seems like the culture hadn't had quite enough time to do it's job.. so, since it's bottled in a swing top jar, I'll have to let the pressure off the top every day or so to keep the bottle from exploding. Sorry, no pictures of this thing.. I totally forgot in the excitement of a new "thing".. I'll get some pics of it on the next batch.

While Geoff was here, we had a few commercial beers.. this one included;

That's Captain Lawrence's Imperial Pale Ale. It's pretty good, but seemed to me to taste a bit too much like a pine tree. Like, seriously like a pine tree. I failed to take notes on this and it was one of the last beers we had of the night, so my memory is lacking other than that one major sticking point.

The other beer was this one:

That's Harpoon's Ginger Wheat, from the 100 barrel series. We had this one first, and took some notes on it. We noted a very clear beer, straw in color. Didn't hold much head for any length of time.. but had a fairy serious lemon aroma and flavor, and a more subtle ginger note that got kicked around a bit by the powerful lemony-ness of this thing. It's a 7%abv brew, but drinks like a much smaller beer. At first, it's a bit much to take, but after a few sips, the taste grows on you and it becomes very enjoyable. We figured we'd reccomend it to someone if we thought they were a wheat beer fan. It was good.

And lastly, I picked up an external hard drive from Staples from their Cyber Monday deal, ust before Christmas. It's something me and The Boss have been kicking around for a while now, getting a backup program in place, and since OS X makes implementing that so easy, with the plugging in of another hard drive, we jumped on this one. It's a 2 TB Seagate something or other, and it clocked in at $139. Cheap! It's 4 times the size of our built in drive, so with incremental backups, it should be usable for a good long time before it starts kicking out the old backups.

I'm tired! See ya's..

Sourdough bread success, krappy Kaisers and a Kombucha update..

Some success! After a few defeats in the ring with sourdough breads, I went back to the drawing board. I was just not getting any luck with conventional recipes for sours and just not getting any rising action out of these things. I know my starter has the power to rise well in excess of twice it's original size.. so I was sort of at a loss as to what was going on. I came across a site with a different approach, this one Bakesourdough.com, which gave it's recipe for damn near anything you wanted to throw in it.. based on percentages. It was so different from the others, I gave it a try.. figured I had nothing to lose! Besides, they were advocating a *huge* increase in size of the starter percentage in the recipe than all the rest (typically 20-25% of the recipe, comared to the 66% of this site) that I figured it might even work.

So, I mmixed the stuff all together, shooting for a 500 gram (about one pound..) end result of dough. With that number, I used 250 grams of flour, and worked the percentages of the salt, starter and water from there, so my total was 500 grams, and let it be for a while. This was just a few hours before I had to leave for work at 1400 hours, so I wasn't sure how this timing was going to work out, but since The Boss was gonna be home for the day, I knew there'd be at least someone home to keep an eye on the thing in case of disaster.

I ended up with my numbers just about perfect, and after mixing the flour, starter and water, I let it rest. This is what they call the hydration rest.. I can't tell you how important this part is. Do it. It changes the flours and starches in ways so fantastic in only 20 minutes of hands off time, it makes the dough much more manageable. I thought this dough was a bit stiff, so I ended up adding a TOUCH of water, and left it at that. I proofed it in a bowl downstairs in the warm room for a bit, and after I ran out of time to wait, brought it upstairs to form the loaf. It didn't look all that risen for it's first rise, but when I squooze it on the table top, it surely did have co2 bubbles all through it. I gave it a bit of a knead, formed my loaf and put the thing in a greased pan to hang for the day. I was going to be gone for 10 hours at least, so I warned The Boss to watch out for it. When I called her later in the day, around 1900 hours, she said it hadn't done much.. but when I got home, it was pushing up against the plastic wrap I had sealed it with. I couldn't take a chance that it would deflate overnight, so I warmed up the oven at just prior to midnight and began to bake the thing. I also threw in the Kaiser rolls I had made the previous day that just didn't want to rise , just because they were in the way and they were gonna get tossed in the garbage if I didn't bake them. Well, when I opened the door, the "oven spring", as they call it, really did a great job on the breads and the loaf was just about an inch over the top of the pan! Awesome!

In this photo above, you can see both breads I'm describing.. me and The Boss cut the loaf up right then and there and had a few pieces. She said it was noticably different and better than a commercial yeast bread. Wile I thought it was quite good, I wasn't sure it was *that* much better. It's the longer storage times and less reliance on commercial yeasts that interest me in this project.

However, the real star of the show was the Kaisers. Tho they didn't turn out as planned, I learned something interesting. Without going into too much detail on the original recipe, it called for malt syrup, which I didn't have.. a Google search told me that malt syrup was.. well, syrup made from the malting process of grains. essentially, it's the beer brewing worlds liquid malt extract, with no hops added. That's common enough at a brewing store.. but I do all grain beer, so this didn't apply to me. I just don't use the stuff. A Google search for malt syrup replacements told me that you could take whole grains, steep them in water, begin the sprouting process and then grind the grains to a powder and add those for the flavor the recipe was calling for, in a pinch. While this sounds complicated for the normal household baker.. a lightbulb went off in my head. I didn't have to do a thing. I had many, many pounds of this stuff in my basement in the form of pale ale malt, chocolate malts, crystal malts etc. Now the gears were turning! A quick trip downstairs for 18 grams of crystal 40L, ground to a powder in the coffee mill, and I had my replacement. The color you see in the photo's above is a direct result of the crystal 40L addition.

The taste of this stuff, of those Kaiser rolls, is unbelievable! I've never had its equal in bread. It's so sweet, so powerful a flavor, and so pungent.. but let's the bread really shine. Oh, and The Boss won't go near it. Weird. This is a groundbreaking event for me, right here. This means I can color breads however I like, while still retainng the original flavor with certains grain additions, I can take lighter Lovibond malts and crystals and do fabulous things to a loafs flavor and not change the color at all. There's a whole lot of potential here for brewers/bakers that I think needs exploration. When I feel more comfortable in the area f sourdoughs, I'll definitely be experimenting with this. I'd encourage you to do the same. A zillion different grains are all as close as your nearest homebrew shop, conveniently packaged in nice, one pound bags. Do it!

This post is way too long.. but I should also mention that the Kombucha experiment is still under way and moving along slowly, still. There seems to be a thick film of goop on the top of the whole container now, but I can't get a really good picture at the moment.. gotta let it grow a bit more, still. This is day #10 for that thing.. we're still on track.

Smoked Wheat down, Orval taste test, and my chickens first 5 egg day...

Sad day, indeed. The Apple Smoked Wheat beer I brewed with Jody has been annihilated. That was a truly good beer. It has since been replaced with the IPA I made with Frank a few weeks ago. And yeah, I'm gonna call it an IPA.. I was thinking about demoting it to Pale Ale, cause it finished a bit high when I measured it last, but when I plugged it into the kegger, the thing had apparently dropped a few more points, carbed itself, and upped it's abv% just enough to properly squeak into IPA territory. Besides, it's got that Dogfish 90 Minute viscosity where it just doesn't feel like a Pale Ale anymore. It's quite good, and it's hopped entirely with Northern Brewer, so if you wanna know what that particular hop tastes like, this is a pretty good way to get that done.

I also tasted a bottle of this over the weekend:

..and it was good. The rumors are true, this is fermented with quite a bit of Brett in it, and it shows clearly. This was a hugely carbonated beer, and was pretty darned good.. if you like Brettanomyces. If not, I'd pass. If I wasn't going for just a straight sour beer in that fermenter downstairs, I'd have pitched these dregs right into it.. just because it's a fine strain and seemed like a good idea. But, my sour side won out, and I refrained. Hopefully, that thing sours right up..

Also, two days ago, our chickens had their first 5 eggs layed day. Evey chicken I have fired one out. Heck, I didn't even know they were all capable, let alone able to synchronize the operation! And here I thought I still had two lame-o's in the flock. Yesterday, we had 4 and we would have had four again today, but one broke in the nest box.. one of the new girls is still in the early 'soft shell' stages of gearing up.. too bad.

Otherwise, Turkey Day came and went yesterday as well, and that was a fine time.. my sourdough project was miserable and inedible, but I'm learning still. I'm trying to fire up some sourdough Kaiser rolls right now, but I'm not that optimistic. The dough just doesn't feel right for this..

The kombucha project is still going downstairs, but it's slow going.. we'll have some status updates on that when it get's more interesting. There's a little film on the surface, but not enough to take a picture of.

That's it for me.. carry on.

A big post of small projects.. check it! Kombucha, Sourdough, etc.

Did a couple funny things yesterday.. went out and scored a bottle of Kobucha ($3.99 a bottle? Really? How do people afford this stuff on a regular habit?) with live cultures in it to grab on to. If you're not that familiar, go Google some Kombucha stuff or check it on the Wiki somewhere.. but essentially, it's a fermented tea product. You make tea, either black or green, in a mosty ordinary way.. then add some sugar for the bugs to grab onto and ferment, and you're done. It's served cold, and either flat or sparkling.
The cool part is, the Kombucha cultures are a mixture of weird bugs, like Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus and wild yeasts from foreign lands. Good stuff in the beer world (well, for me, anyway..), and apparently good stuff in the tea world, too. The first time I tried this stuff, I found it sorta gross.. I wasn't accustomed to this sort of flavor at the time. But now that I'm a sour beer fan, I'm finding this stuff is pretty tasty. It's a lot of the same bugs and wild vermin that's working on both products, so it all makes sense I guess.

Anyway, here's a pic of me jamming the tea down a funnel into the jar I'm going to ferment it in.

That was pretty exciting, eh? Then, I took the bottle of GTs Synergy Strawberry Kombucha, brought it up to room temp and pitched half the bottle (with the junk on the bottom) into the cooled jar of tea. Check it:

It's got a paper towel over the top held on by a rubber band.. the acetic acid monsters that dwell within need the oxygen in order to produce the vinegar compounds.. unlike beer, oxygen is good, up to a point, with this stuff.

Speaking of beer, part of this thing was inspired by that product a well. I got side tracked with trying to figure if I could somehow get this wacky culture to help ferment a beer into a sort of pseudo-Lambic (pLambic) beer. I'm not sure at this juncture if a full on, 100% Kombucha ferment is best, a secondary infusion of the beasts to finish off any residual sugars, or a simultaneous mix at initial pitching to make the magic work. I'll get to that in time and fill ya'll in on the progress as we/if we go.

Also, had this the other day:

Yuengling "Premium" lager. What's Premium mean? Dunno. It's a fairly standard Yuengling taste.. tastes just like the regular one I had a while back (a long while back..) so I'm not sure what the difference is. It's pretty good, though not a real standout in the crowd. Thankfully, it doesn't have that kick in the face corn flavor that most crappy lagers have, so that's cool. Great color and a fantastic head of foam stays on the top.  Sorry for the lame-o review, but I can't find much to single out for this one. It's good, but not stellar.

You ready for more? Good! Check this goopy mess!

 That's nothing but a glass jar with half a cup of water and half a cup of flour (a quarter cup each of Oat Flour and regular Red Wheat bread flour). It's left in that jar for somewhere over a week, with a loose fitting lid, and supposedly it's gonna pick up some wild yeasts in the air and turn sour. You're on to me now! Sourdough! I finally took the plunge.. I'm gonna give it a whirl. This should take some time to get the starter going (regular, daily feedings of the beast in the jar for a while, etc..) so I'll have to report back in some time with results. In fact, it's time to go do that feeding now. Later!

Now, go click my Google link, you cheapos!