Beer Making Part 2

Sorry it has been so long since I posted. The beer was bottled back on the 10th and we tasted it on the 17th. It is really good! I think we are making another one on Saturday.

So first we had to clean all the bottles, if I remember correctly we had to clean 23 bottles and we managed to fill 22. We also sanitize the bucket, hose and the bottles.

 The bottle tree.

Sanitizing the bucket and hose.








Once everything is clean we add sugar and half a cup of hot water to the bucket. Then we siphon the beer from the carboy to bucket.

Siphoning the beer.








Now it's time to bottle! We attach a smaller hose to the main hose and then start. It takes about 20min with two people. I put the beer into the bottle and Marc caps them.

 Bottling.

 More Bottling.

The beer!









So that's the process we go through to make our beer.

Beer Making

About two weeks ago we began our winter beer making. We can't really make beer in the summer in our apartment because of the heat so we save it for winter and stock pile it. This year we started off with a special edition beer: Cranberry Holiday Ale. We look forward to it :)

The beer.

 Yeast.

The Cranberry.








Once the beer mix has had time to warm up a bit we stick it in a large pot with 3 liters of water. We cook until it boils and then let it simmer for 5 minutes. Once it has simmered we pour it into our primary fermenter (plastic bucket with lid) with 10 liters of cold water. We then continue to pour cold water into the bucket until we reach 23 liters. We then have to let it cool before we put the yeast in. Has to be below 30 degrees. Once it is cool enough we pour the yeast in, put the lid on and let it sit for about a week or until the yeast has fallen. This beer was ready to be transferred in about 5 days.

 The beer mix before water.

Cooking the beer mix.








After the yeast has fallen we then siphon the beer into carboy and it has to stay there for 2 weeks. Once the 2 weeks have passed we can move on to the bottling stage. I will do a second post on the bottling stage next weekend.

Beer being siphoned.

The carboy.

Cat bellies and Indiana Jones

Today is Canada Day. What does that involve at my place? Relaxing, BBQing and beer. Maybe some wine, but mostly beer.

I have my youngest brother up for a few days. We took him to the Indiana Jones exhibit at the Montreal Science Centre, and it was amazing! I totally geeked out. I loved seeing the actual props and some actual archaeological finds. The only thing that bugged me was that we were not allowed to take pictures :(, and there were a lot of kids :P. But I would soooo go back, just because! They even had Indy hats for sale, I would have gotten one (and yes I would have worn it) but they were too small. The adult sizes were kids sizes. Or maybe I have some kind of freak giant head.......hmmmmmm. I did get a book though :)

Besides all that I got a hair cut. My hair is now really short, at least the shortest it has ever been on me. I'm still getting used to it, styling it is a little harder but I think in a few more days I will be more at ease with it.

I saw my mom on Wednesday and she has a task for me....I have to paint some things for her. I hate painting. I haven't painted in years. I remember my mom sending me to classes and I quit after a few weeks. She was not pleased. So I guess I will be hitting up google to look for instructions on how to paint flowers :P

So here are some pictures of my hairs, my book (teehee) and some shots of my cats bellies....cause they are so damn cute:

My Roger.......

My Annabelle......

Sexy Man

Moi

The long weekend

Today is the last day of the long weekend, and it has been a very good weekend! Saturday morning I picked up my brother and we headed to moms. Marc and I spent the night, it was great to see my mom and brothers :). Then we headed to see Marcs family on Sunday, because our niece was up!! It was so good to see her, I could hold her and play with her all day. She is absolutely adorable!

We were worried we wouldn't really get a chance to see her and spend some one on one time with her as some family members were coming over but we left my moms early and we had a couple of hours with her. Marc was able to read to her and give her a toy he got her to go with the book (paper bag princess). I am sad we are not able to see more of her for awhile but the few hours we had was really nice. Also seeing that she recognized us from Skype was a nice surprise :) Marc had a lot of fun with her, he even fed her some little tomato pieces. We both look forward to seeing her again!

Today (Monday) we are spending the day being lazy, we are BBQing our first steaks of the summer and watching some Boston Legal.

Nothing else has really happened the last few weeks, it has been quiet (I like it that way). It has been getting hot and humid though. I did give the dehumidifer a test today: Last summer I would do my hair (either curl it or straighten it) and not 5 minutes later it would be a ball of frizz because of the humidity, so I figured today I would see if I could straighten my hair and not sweat and have it frizz. Well, it stayed straight! It was hot in the room, the dehumidifer puts heat out but I can handle that. So we will see when it gets really humid to give it a good test but I think it will work. I miss having an air conditioner but I am not willing to pay for a portable one and we can't have one hanging out the window over cars (totally makes sense, and one of those cars is ours).

This week I will be heading out with a folder of my resumes looking for that summer job. I am not going to be too picky about where I work, it's just to get a little extra cash. I will also go shopping, yes that makes sense!! My mom gave me some spending money and there is a maxi dress I want to try out. Thanks mommy!!

The Beer Post

So today, after much stress from working on my school paper and not finishing it, we bottled our beer. It is quite the process, not hard but a lot of work. Doing it alone would be even more work and just...boring. You can click on each picture to see the bigger version.
What we do first is clean the bottles. We have a cleaning solution and we put the bottles on a tree to dry. We then sanitize the beer.
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After the bottles are clean we add sugar to 1/2 cup of boiling water in the primary fermenter (big plastic bin) and stir it up. We then start syphoning the beer from the secondary primary fermenter or carboy into the primary fermenter. As the beer flows we stir the sugar around to make sure it mixes well. To make sure we get every drop we can we stick a book under the carboy to make the beer flow to the edge. I don't know where this book came from but it has now become our beer book and we only use it to prop up the carboy. After all the beer is out of the carboy there is leftover beer gunk, ugly stuff that.
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Once the beer and sugar is all stirred up we can start bottling! We add a smaller tube to the syphon so it can fit in the bottles and then we fill each bottle to about an inch or so from the top. We use plastic and glass for bottles. I control the flow of the beer into the bottles while Marc does the capping. It goes pretty fast with two people.
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So that is about it. We can bottle about 24 bottles in less than an hour (cleaning included). We let the beer sit for a few days and then we try one, then we let the beer sit longer and in about 2 weeks the beer is ready to drink!

Finally making homemade beer again

It has been to long...to...to long. I miss making our own beer. It's like making a baby, you have to work together to get it right, you have to nurture it and keep an eye on it. Except once it is done you can drink it and be merry lol. We like making beer, it's fun to watch the molasses and yeast turn into a yummy beer. This time we are trying a new beer: West Island IPA. The smell is different but then again we just started it a few hours ago....so it's still yeasty. We look forward to the finished product and if it tastes good we plan on buying more. They are only carrying this IPA until the end of December.
Tonight I am making a simple meal, Bruschetta.
I get a small container of cherry tomatoes
A couple of garlic cloves (If you like garlic like me I add a lot of cloves...add to your taste)
A bunch of fresh basil
Some pepper and salt
Half a cup of sun-dried tomatoes
About a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar (I eye ball it)
1/4 cup of olive oil
One baguette
Lots of mozz!
I cut of the baguette (whatever shape you want) put it in the oven on broil for 2 min then i add the rest of the ingredients (which have been all mixed up in a bowl), i add the cheese and put it back in the oven on broil for 5 min (little more or less depending on how crisp you like it). Then serve!
Very yummy!