I miss brewing beer.

Like really bad.


I'll let you know how the rum goes once I freeze crystallize it in the next couple of days.

Curry Peanut Rice Pudding

Since I figure I will be eating a lot of rice in Australia I figured I'd experiment with a recipe I just made up:

1 bag of brown rice
3 tbs of curry
3/4 jar of natural peanut butter
1 c of honey
salt to taste
1 c of the juice from canned pineapple

and the product is:

I cooked the rice for about 8 hours in a crock pot on high heat with a lot of water. at the end it should be very mushy. Add the curry first and then the rest of the ingredients in no particular order, while stirring vigorously

Enjoy!

Snow Day?

NOT. It didn't snow enough to cancel classes.

Christmas!

Surprise!

My Room

In the tank I have a king snake and a garter snake. The plants are basil, coffee and 4 pumpkin plants. Thanks to April for the fan and the rug. thanks to Aubrey for the map and defaced-nun calender.

Collection of beer labels I've been rapidly accumulating since I started brewing and cleaning my own bottles.

Oh and thanks to the rents for the camera

20+ gallons of 7 different brews

Autumn Butternut Ale and Hard Cider

My batches #'s 5 and 6 I brewed and put in their primary fermenters just this week.

#5 I did on Monday, it's a cranberry apple cider. I found it one of the easiest things to make, I bought 4 gallons of cider, and then some cranberries. The cider was added to the primary fermenter, in the mean time I halved the cranberries and put them in some boiling water, just to expose some of the delicious sugars. I added it and pitched the yeast from a previous batch. Unfortunately the yeast didn't catch, so I tried some fresh yeast...didn't work. I just tried pitching some bread yeast (of which the recipe calls for)...same result. no fermentation.

While I'm dealing with that, I decided to get another batch of beer going. This one was truly experimental, and yet I suspect it will turn out to be one of my best. First, I started by dicing up 3-4 Ibs of butternut squash, then I roasted them. Next I put it all in a boiling pot of water and vigorously boiled it for about an hour, and the end result was a sugary butternut squash concentrate/extract. I put it in a jar with a whole stick of cinnamon and a nutmeg.

Last night around 10:30 I figured it was a primary time to get brewing, as I didn't have any finals the next day.

I designed the recipe as follows:

-1 Ib of 40L crystal malt barley

-1 Ib of Honey malt barley

-4 oz of a mixture of coriander seeds, ginger, cinnamon, orange peel and roasted squash seeds

-3.3 Ib of Amber malt extract

-1 Oz. of Fuggle hops (4.8% alpha acid)
-1 Oz. of Challenger hops (5.6% alpha acid)

Boiled it all down for about an hour, while me and a couple of guys chilled playing ratchet and clank (best game ever) and drinking #3's batch.

All said and done, the apartment smelled phenomenal! and I finished around 12:30.

As of this morning the butternut ale is ferociously bubbling,

though the cider sits in silence...

Brewing

So I don't think I've mentioned this yet on here. I've started brewing beer since the summer!

I figured I needed a new hobby aside from running to define me, so since I'm close to turning 21, I figured WHY NOT GET A HEAD START?!?

Well since then I have had some great success with it. I've brewed a delicious IPA as well as a chocolate stout. Currently I'm in the process of brewing a batch of Amber Ale, and more uniquely, a pumpkin acorn oatmeal ale....

All of this entails cooking it in a giant pot and transferring it (once cooled) to a giant fermentation vessel, in my case, an Ice Mountain water cooler jug.

So currently I have around 7 gallons brewing as I write this. 2 gallons are the acorn Ale, of which I ran out of room for fermentation so I resorted to placing the remainder in 4 old Costco mixed nut containers. Though borderline risking the chance of ruining it by a potential bacteria outbreak, I think it will be fine.

Also lately I've resorted to going to parties and collecting as many bottles as I can so I can boil the labels off, sanitize them and re-use them. I do this because it is the worst thing to be bottling and run out of bottles and have to dump the rest of the beer because you don't know where to put it...yeah I've done that with the last 2 batches. So I'm taking no chances.

I'm doing some extra brewing this term to prepare for the winter where I assume I will have a lot of time as I am only taking 2 classes. woot!

Right now I'm unsure, but I will potentially be brewing a keg for the xc formal...though that has yet to be decided as I need to figure out how to get a cheap empty keg..

That's it for right now, I just wanted to get a quick post out there about this!

21

Well my birthday is right around the corner, and it marks the day that every 18 yr old dreams of would come tomorrow. I know I did. Anyways Since I'm already into the brewing business, of which I'm pretty good at (as someone payed me 8$ for on of my beers last night...). Unfortunately I will be staying at school during my fall break of which falls on my birthday. But anyways I figured that since the majority of my family visits this site, I'd post a brief birthday list:

-Money (for Australia)
-Cologne
-a Quality Camera (for Australia)
-Manthropology (to read on the plane to Australia)
-Bike...

Yeah, pretty much everything except the bike I will probably in one way or another need for my internship there. That's all.

More Shrooms

As a continuation, I brought my mushroom interests a step further. A couple weeks ago on a run I came across a large mushroom. I plucked it and brought it to my teacher. In turn he gave me a huge mushroom classification book to aid in the classification of it (because I totally wanted to eat it!) So therefore I'm attempting to pick up a new hobby of mushroom collecting!

Today in fact, I discovered a large table top mushroom at the top of the slough. I had to pluck one (there was a cluster of 3 covering a 2 sq/ft area. Turns out it is the Polyporus Squamosus, an edible, yet tough Basidiomycota. I fried it up with some swiss chard, onions curry and pepper... amazing!

plus it was around a 2 Ibs mushroom!

Pickling

This past weekend I attended the Local food initiative charter summit in Rock Island. It was truly a revitalizing experience about the potential and what's to come of the food industry in the next ten years. I've found myself more and more supporting a communitarian ethic, with a central focus on localization. Interestingly enough, I discovered that when it comes to buying local from farmers, there is the dilemma of storage a preservation. With large institutionalize corporations, this problem has been fixed by extensive processing, preservatives, and energy in transportation. A particularly interesting point came across when it came to preserving local foods. Pickling is apparently a "lost art" being revived by the sudden, yet ancient partake in local produce.

So I decided to give it a try, as I had also coincidentally seen an episode of Good Eats, with Alton brown on the process of pickling. So I gave it a try with some extra beets I had in the fridge. I used some vinegar, water, salt, garlic, red pepper, chili pepper, and a couple of other things. I snuck a taste tonight and they are well on their way to being quite exquisite.

More to come on that.

Also, my plans for this next weekend are to brew 5 gallons of an oatmeal acorn beer and 5 more gallons of a light Oktoberfest lager. Trust me I'll let you all know how that goes.

An Amish Cheetah

I really liked this paragraph I wrote, which comes out of my Environmental Ethics class, midterm. It's about how Frito-lays (Cheetos) is attempting to conserve the Namibia cheetah population through institutionalized intervention + support. and in response, we are Mennonite missionaries replying:

"The argument is that modern agriculture is the root of the problem, for it allowed the populations to explode, creating a surplus of food, further fueling the desire to continue to expand. As this expansion progressed more and more species had the doors shut in their faces. The Mennonites kept things simple. They farmed what they needed, for whom they needed it for. Their “groups” remained small revolving around the family and local community. Technology only complicated things. No longer were resources used at the capacity for the individual or group, but at the capacity of the technology itself. Inevitably, the overall human population who “Formally…had been a part of nature; [was] now was the exploiter of nature.” (White 1205) Nevertheless, the Mennonites saw the minimalistic approach to technology as a means of allowing the two separate entities to support each other. External influences are unnecessary, such as Frito-Lays bringing in money and eco-tourism for the sole benefit of maximizing profit, while keeping their spokes “person” off the endangered list."