Saturday morning dawned sunny and beautiful. Bob announced "This is the day!" and we headed to Lakewood to the Beer Essentials to load up on beer-making paraphernalia such as grain, yeast, and the ever popular hops flowers.
The view of Mt. Rainier Saturday was outstanding. Almost made me wish I was there and not a beer-making store...Almost.
Bob set up his beer-making operations and get the grain boiling. As you can see, this stage of beer making is not a very stimulating activity.
After an hour of boiling, he ends up with boiled grain left-overs or "spent grain". 
After Bob strained the spent grain out of his pan, he added the spices and hops and boiled it all over again. Then the "wort" needs to be cooled down very quickly. Enter Bob's homemade wort cooler. This involves a hose running into the garage window, through the wort cooler, and out the back door taking the heat from the hot wort with it.
Meanwhile, Bob has the wort cooled from boiling temperature to 70 degrees. Since I had so much success with the spent grain, I tried to see what I could make with the spent hops for Chris' birthday dinner. I found that you can feed spent hops to pigs (in moderation), use it in your compost (in moderation), and it kills dogs. Well, that's good to know. No serving hops for dinner and no composting either. I did not want Bear nosing through the compost and eating spent hops the day Chris was coming home. That would put a real damper on the day. You can see the hops leaves clinging onto the cooling coils.
Meanwhile, my bread is in the oven and ready for it's second rising.
While my bread is rising, Bob moved his wort into the "fermentation tank" where it will bubble, and hopefully not overflow (I speak from experience here) under the bar for the next week or so. I taped a plastic cup over it to try to keep the Nitro and Bear Show from simple destruction of the fermenting valve. Nothing will stop the destruction if they really get going.
My spent-grain bread is done as well. Check it out. Now THIS is whole-grain bread. The grain was not shelled and included the husks and all.
Apparently I can document beer-making and bread-making in full detail, but did not take any pictures of Chris' big homecoming and birthday dinner. I think Chris was glad to be home, see his dawg and have a home-cooked meal then head for home to get settled in again.
Yes, Welcome Home and Happy Birthday! The bread was yummy as was the roast and cupcakes. Thanks for the wonderful day!
ReplyDeleteWe are very into the homebrewing now too. Jeff has been doing it for about 5 years (according to him, we brewed and kegged 21ish gallons this year - and both kegs are currently empty - not sure what that says about us). He just finished constructing his own 50' copper wort cooler for his birthday. We have a very similar burner too... But Santa's bringing him a BIG dual burner deal this year. We also make the spent grain bread (glad I'm not the only one who bakes our grain - We've found it goes great with chili). Check out Northern Brewer - they have a ton of cool stuff, including an amazing iPad ap that Jeff is loving these days. If Bob ever wants to talk homebrewing, Jeff's his guy!
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