Horseradish..

Pulled up the horseradish yesterday.. this is what I got:

Sort of an ugly bugger. I thought it was gonna be more like carrots, with each root sorta more carrot shaped with a tuber going straight down.. but it's more hop rhizome like than that, with just a big tangled mass of roots all over the place. There's also going to be no problem with next years crop, because this thing pretty much infested the side herb garden area with little rootlets. Awesome. Now I just gotta go get some more llama manure and make that soil area more hospitable. It's really sandy and terrible stuff for growing, really.

Anyway, a little more hosing of off this tangled mass found this stuff underneath..

That's the biggest single chunk of root that I found in there. about the same size as that piece my dad brought me from his friend somewhere in America that time.. so I remembered how to process this stuff into the horseradish sauce that we all know and love (well, those of us with taste, I should say..). Easy stuff.. just dice it up into chunks about an inch long or so after you peel the outside layer of rough skin off the thing, and then zing it for a few seconds or so in your food processor until it's almost a paste. Then, give it the sniff test and keep an eye on it for about 30 seconds or less till the stuff has reached the level of pungency you want, and then douse it with vinegar and stir, to cancel the reaction and lock the flavor into place. The trick with vinegar is, once you dice and shred the root into small bits, the exposure to the air is what activates the enzymes inside to break down this stuff inside the root called 'sinigrin'. When this happens, the byproduct of the breakdown process is isothiocyanate, which is an harsh and mean as the name implies. The longer you leave the shredded bits exposed to the air, the more powerful the stuff becomes. By adding vinegar, a mild acid, you quench the process and stop it in it's tracks right where it is.. so, home made horseradish is very flexible stuff.. as it can be as mild or mean as you want it to be. Frickin' awesome!

When I was all done, speeded up in part to my horseradish processing associate Jody, we ended up with this:

Two jars of heaven. Again, awesome! Next year, I hope to have much more. There is really nothing on earth easier than horseradish, I think.. great stuff and easy to do. Just don't plant it anywhere near your regular garden.. it get's everywhere.

Chicken moltin'...

Got me a chicken that's a moltin'.. there's feathers all over the yard. One of the Barred Rocks, the bigger one, is sheddin' all over the place and she really looks like hell now. The kids think it's kinda funny though, and they're collectin' the big feathers from around the yard and keepin' them in a jar.. presumably to re-create the whole bird eventually? I can't imagine why else they'd do that. Check it out.. snapped a few pics this morning of the poor, fashion-less bird:

Yeah. Gonna get chilly, I suspect..

Big Brew at Don's Dad's house...

Just wanted to share a few pics of the Big Brew we had at Don's Dad's place, sponsored of course, by Don's Dad & Mom as well as Don himself. Great time was had by all. This event also marked the debut of two brand spankin' new brewing rigs, Don and Geoff's metallic monster and Jeremiah's half electric, half propane Frankenbrewery. Here's a few pics of the event and attendees to document the fact that the damn thing happened on Saturday, November 6th, 2010...

Jeremiah with his newest brewery creation.. eHLT!

Timmay and Eric, spargin'.. 

Geoff and Don's new single spine gravity tree..

Launch controler..

Mike Hill, doing something mysterious..

Will and Alex, goofing around.

Jody, rockin' the Top Tier. Classy..

The fruits of Jer's and my brew day.. 5 gallons each of Am. Amber. The newest revision..

Jer took home all of the brewer spent grain that day to feed to some local cows. Damn, we're green!

So, yeah. Resounding success. And I think we may have even inspired some other non-brewers to maybe look into the process. Seems everyone had a pretty good time..

Wicked HLT graphs!

Did something funny today and jury-rigged up my HLT.. no switch, no safety covers, just plugged it straight into the wall and let it rip. Talk about yer' reckless!

Did this with a mostly typical strike water sized volume of water.. 10 gallons. Actually, most strike water volumes for the beers I brew are more like 8.0 to 9.5 gallons for the initial batch of strike water.. and somewhere generally in that same ballpark for the sparge water after the mash. But I figured, let's go large, right? So, I filled it up with cold water from the outdoor faucet which leveled out at 10 gallons of 58 degree water. Then, I plugged in the element and started writing down numbers and times.. I started out doing 2 minute intervals, but I got bored of that pretty quick, and moved to three minutes.. then I missed one along the way and moved to four minutes. It seemed to be doing a pretty straight temp rise anyway, based on the rough numbers in my head that I was seeing, so, whatever.. I then whipped out a handy online graphing program and plotted the 21 data points I gathered and.. lo and behold! This is what I got:

Damn straight, that's a pretty straight line. What the chart is failing to show, for some reason, is the last two points on either end. It ended up boiling at the 74 minute mark, and that's off the chart up there. The main thing to look at, however, is that I never heat stone cold water. I always heat water from the hot water tap that comes out at like, 160 degrees or so.. by the time I get it into the cold HLT and all filled up, it settles in at around the 140 F range, and we heat from there. I can't recall ever measuring exactly how long it takes propane to heat water from 140 to a typical strike water temp like 162 or so, but I'd guess somewhere in the 25-40 minute range. We're usually milling grain and shooting the bull and drinking coffee at this stage of the game anyway, so it doesn't matter much.. but according to this chart, this element will heat from about 140 to around 162 in roughly 10-12 minutes. It's about a 10 degree rise in temp every 4 minutes or so, give or take.

Oh, snap! That's fast. And this is with a 3500w element. You can imagine how quick Jeremiah's is with a 5500w element. That thing is a monster. I think 3500 is enough for me, though. :)

Brewery mods for electricity..

Just got back from the welder shop where I picked up my newly modified kettle that now has the big stainless steel nut welded into the side for the electric element to attach on to. Check the pics for some detail.

Interior view of the element coming into the keg..

Nice welding job, done by Accurate Welding of Barkhamsted. 

The next step is to gather up the appropriate parts to make the connections from the 220v wall outlet to the element, which includes the switch, the box to hold all the parts, the wire holder thingy, and the plug itself. I've already got 16 feet or so of 14 gauge three strand wire, so it's just the little pieces I've got to gather up now. I think a trip down to Lowes should pretty much do the trick. I've been talking to my electrician friend Dave E. and my other ingenious pal Jeremiah to work out the details of all these connections and how to make it safe and workable, and I think I have a plan in mind. Stay tuned for that..

Amaryllis and Spinach..

Hmm.. a bit of a slow time recently. Got some SPinach growing slow but sure out in the hoop house. Check it:

Spinach

This was taken a couple days ago, so it's a bit bigger than this now, but still small. The Arugula is almost near the zone where I'd consider almost calling it 'Baby Arugula" and eating every last leaf of it in a baby Arugula salad.. but it would literally be entirely gone if I did that.

Did some bagels up yesterday. I've had better end results, but the process this time was really nice. Here's a step by step timeline..

A large dough round

Split up into smaller rounds..

shaped and risen..

Boiling the bagels..

The best of the bunch. 

Other than that, here's a snapshot of the Amaryllis I'm grown. Again, thanks Dad. This one is a trip!

She's geting' pretty big now, and you can see where the flower is gonna form eventually. Neat stuff..

The IPA I've got downstairs that I made with Timmay is just about done doing it's thing. Should be able to keg that in a day or two and get it ready to go online.. but I'm still really looking forward to the Dubbel I made with Jeremiah that's right ahead of it in the que. Speaking of brewing, I failed to get pictures of this, but last night I went out into the shop and bored a huge hole in the side of my HLT at about the 3 gallon mark. Then, today, I brought that kettle down to the welder guy next door with instructions for where to weld in the SS nut that I got from McMAster Carr to fit in the electric element. I'm still hashing out some details with my electrician friend Dave E. from down south CT, but we'll get it figured out sooner or later. It may or may not be ready for the next brew session I do here, but the next beer I do up will most certainly be the one on Nov. 6th with the Commandos at Don's Dad's place in T-Town. Stay tunes for a million pics of that event.

A bit of a frost..

So there was a bit of a frost last night. Took some pics of the bed with the hoops on it to show, and also an update on the Garlic planting that I did the other day. Check the garlic first:

Gonna be planted in the upper bed, in the four squares right next to the end-most ones..

Holes dug for garlic bulbs, and garlic jammed in..

Those three at the top are actually Organic Elephant Garlic from the store.. just for fun

And some mesh over the top to keep the damned dog out.

Otherwise, here's some pics of the interior of the hoop house I mentioned above after the frost last night. Clearly, the basil didn't like this frost idea at all, and it's totally expired now. But everything else looks OK. Check it out..

See? Everything else is OK.. 

So, the experiment continues, minus the basil. That basil was a bit more fragile that I had anticipated. I thought for sure that, under the hoops, it would get past a minor frost like this one.. I think we only just barely touched 32-ish.. not a deep freeze by any means. Live and learn. Maybe if I'd had some thicker plastic it would have done better, but too late to find out now. ;) Next year..