Work Day at the Pasture

Saturday was the second work day at the pasture.  It was a bit cool
when we started but ended up to be a beautiful day.

A big THANK YOU to everyone that helped.

HAPPY EASTER!

Happy Easter from Austin! It was a pretty uneventful day although our weather was absolutely beautiful. James and I stopped for kolaches on our way to church, enjoyed a church service full of beautiful music, and spent most of the afternoon doing laundry :-). I couldn't help but reminisce about our traditional Easter celebrations with Grandma and Grandpa. Wish we could have been there!

Last time we posted five close-up pictures of things in our new apartment. Now we have the answers!


Picture one was a lamp James' sister gave us for our wedding.

















Picture two was blinds. And since I just completed my family photo collage, I thought you might enjoy seeing it above the fire place in our living room.









Picture three was a pile of place mats that are no longer in the same place :-).

Picture four was one of James' wedding presents to me - a box made of mother of pearl, a fossilized shell, and other pretty glass. It is sitting on our bed with throw pillows behind it.









Picture five was a small portion of our shower curtain.

















May everyone have a blessed week full of reasons to laugh and smile. Thank you all for so many wonderful memories of Easters past.

Take Care.

Love, Hannah and James

Brewing Up a Storm

As Mary and I have covered at several points in our recent posts and conversations we have started a new hobby. We have been brewing beer, so for this post I have decided to walk you guys through the brewing process.

First like all good recipes we gather all of our ingredients and tools. The recipe today is a Black India Pale Ale or IPA. This is a darker, stronger and more bitter version of most IPAs. What makes it blacker is the use of chocolate malted grains as a substitute for caramel grains (the chocolate and caramel refer to the coloration the grains take on as they are roasted for preservation and flavoring.) The malt extract I will be using is a dark malt extract. (Think of Malt extract as a syrupy version of vegi-mite only edible). The hops are pelleted version of the hops flower which at one point in history was used to preserve beer for casking or bottling, this was before people what sanitation was and that germs not spirits caused outbreaks of disease. The yeast pictured on the left is a liquid ale yeast strain from Wyeast labs. The ingredients for this kit were purchased at a local brewing shop that we frequent called Bitter and Esters.

The equipment pictured is a brew kettle, wort chiller, stirring spoon, funnel w/ screen and plastic carboy. (Not Pictured: Thermometer and hydrometer)

After I have gathered everything together I pour two and a half gallons of water into the brew pot(a giant stock pot roughly 8 gallons). Then we bring the water up to 170 degrees and begin to steep the grains for twenty minutes. This pulls all of the sugars out of the grain and into the water. This is what gives beer both its color and some of its flavor.

Once I have steeped the grains, I turn up the heat and bring the water to a boil then I add the liquid malt extract and hops to the water. Once the these two ingredients are added the water is then called wort. It is now the primary base of beer. It has all the digestible sugars and flavorings it'll need to become beer but lacks alcohol. From here the process is basically a waiting game. The wort needs to boil for another sixty minutes. During this time more hops are added for flavoring, bittering and aroma. The timing and amount of hops added during the boil is dependent upon the type of beer being made. In the case of this Black IPA I am adding four ounces of hops during the boil(flavoring), one ounce of hops post boil(bitttering) and one more ounce (aroma) when I transfer the beer from the primary fermenter into a secondary(I'll explain in a minute).

After boil I need to bring the temperature of the wort down to a manageable level. From here on out I need to be careful with all equipment making sure that I sanitize everything in order to avoid contaminating the beer and causing it to have an off flavor (it would be real hard to ruin a batch of beer and make it undrinkable not impossible but real hard). Now in order to bring the temperature down we use a immersion wort chiller. This thing kind of looks like a still but instead of hot liquid coursing through it we will send cold water through the copper tubing to cool the wort down to 70 degrees. If the wort is over 70 degrees when you add the yeast you will kill the yeast before it has a chance to digest the sugars in the wort and convert them to alcohol. To low and the yeast strains will not activate properly causing fermentation to take to long.

The next step is to transfer the wort to a carboy, straining out the particles(Trub) before it goes in for fermentation. After that we top off the water content up to the five gallon mark. Next shake the mixture. This serves to both mix the wort and to aerate the mixture. The oxygen provided by the aeration is essential for the yeast to do its job.

Next I take a reading with a hydrometer, this measures the specific gravity of a liquid and tells you how dense the liquid is compared to water. Since alcohol is laced with sugars and therefore denser than water it causes the the hydrometer float and give you a reading of the gravity of the of the liquid as well as a percent alcohol measurement. In the Case of the Black IPA the specific gravity reading was 1.080 or roughly 9.8% alcohol. As the sugars are eaten the gravity decreases as does the percent alcohol. Once I have taken a gravity reading we then add the yeast, cap the carboy with a specialized airlock filled with sanitizer solution. This allows the beer to breath out gases caused by the yeast digestion without letting harmful bacteria into the beer and making it run a foul.

After this we do what Kurtis does best...wait. In 7-10 days time. I will transfer the beer(it has all the ingredients and is beginning to form alcohol so it is now called beer) to a secondary fermentor straining out more particulates left by the yeast At this time I will add another ounce of hops (aroma) to the mix. Then I will seal it with another airlock and wait another two weeks. After that I'll once again strain the beer before I bottle the beer adding a bit of sugar into the mix to help form carbonation. Then its back into a box where the beer waits for another three weeks.

And this my friends is how I brew beer. Now I sit back and enjoy a home brew while I patiently wait for the Black IPA to be ready for my belly.