We went with a composite of multiple pictures for this year’s Christmas card and included our four favorite children (including our Subarus, of course).
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas 2016!
Merry Christmas!
Again, haven’t posted much recently. I’m still on Break for another two weeks, but much of that has been taken up with various projects around the house (which I still need to take pictures of and post…) and various travels around the state for Christmas.
That, and I’m still fighting with access to this blog from within my own network at the house, as our router isn’t very happy about that…for some reason…
Anyway, Christmas has been pretty fun this year. Meg has been pretty hyper all week, so my patience has been strained recently, but we’re in Hannibal now completing our week-long Christmas celebrations, so that should subside soon. Calvin still doesn’t quite understand the concept of opening presents yet, but he certainly enjoys the new toys he’s been getting.
Regardless, this is mostly a “Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year” post. I’m still working on getting everything working properly with the system at home, so once that’s done, I expect to post quite a bit more often. There’s much to catch up on!
Merry Christmas!
Homemade Presents for Christmas-Updated!
Now that we’re a full month out from Christmas, I thought I’d share our “homemade” Christmas gifts with you. Our house was a mess from the time we moved in in late October until… ummm, actually, there are still boxes that need to be unpacked. But, we managed to give some pretty cool and personalized gifts. In the end, I don’t think we saved very much money, but the gifts we gave were definitely worth far more than anything we would have been able to purchase for the same amount. I thrifted/repurposed/cleared out my stash for most of these projects, so not only did we end up with a fairly inexpensive gift list, but also with a very “green” holiday! Helped to offset our vapid consumerism the rest of the year, I suppose! We probably won’t go to this extreme in the future, but will definitely add homemade touches and do a few things here and there!
The list:
- Handkerchiefs, both two sided with flannel and unhemmed hand dyed knit
- Pocket squares
- Shaving cream
- Wool cooler cups/koozies (I learned how to do a blanket stitch for those!)
- Apple cider mustard
- Alcohol: black pepper vodka, ginger-orange rum, creamsicle rum, cranberry vodka, cherry bounce
- Vanilla extract
- Hot cocoa mix
- Pajama pants
- Spiced nuts
- About a million vanilla-peppermint soy candles
- Vanilla-peppermint lip balm
- Frosted votive candle holders
- Scarves, scarves, more scarves, and flower pins
- “Cream of everything” soup mix
- Star crayons for Meg’s school friends
- Cloth napkins
- Framed handprints
- Granola
- Coffee Beans (ok, not made by us, but by people we know!!)
For full-size version of these images, click on over to our Picasa album.
Trying Out A New Toy
For mid-January, yesterday ended up being a pretty gorgeous day for brewing. The sun was shining (occasionally) and the temperature held in the mid-40s for most of the afternoon. Thus, with Brooke and Meg out of the house, I opted to make the Chinook IPA Mom and Dad got me for Christmas.
This time, however, I also got to try out one of our new immersion wort chillers, so I figured I’d take the time to explain what this thing does and how to use it. Generally, you boil your wort (i.e. unfermented beer) for about an hour, and you add hops and other components during that period. However, you can’t add the yeast until the beer has cooled to below 100 F, though preferably closer to 80 F. You need to cool it down as rapidly as possible, so you can hopefully get it into your sealed fermentation vessel as soon as possible, including yeast.
For previous batches, we’ve always just put that big 5 gal. pot in an ice bath, though we’d have to add additional ice and cold water throughout, frequently taking well over an hour to cool down. Here’s where a wort chiller comes in: you run cold water through its copper tubing to act as a heat exchanger, removing heat from the wort quickly as cold water takes it away.
As this was my first time using said device, I had to do a few things first, namely, clean it.
In the process of manufacturing, the copper tubing tends to have coatings of various oils and oxidized gunk that you don’t really want in your beer. Reading from John Palmer’s “How To Brew,” I found that before you use the chiller for the first time, you need to clean it with some kind of industrial copper cleaner, or alternatively, just use distilled white vinegar. The oils and oxidation products tend to come off the tubing in acidic solutions, and as beer is slightly acidic, all that stuff would end up in the beer. Thus, bathing the chiller in diluted vinegar (the stuff from the store is 5% acetic acid) shines it up nicely.
After soaking for maybe 20 min in vinegar, I rinsed it off well and let it air dry while the beer was boiling. When there’s about 10 min left in the boil, I then put the chiller in the brew pot, so the act of boiling would help sanitize the chiller. Though I’d just cleaned it in vinegar, there could still be some “bugs” on the outside of the tubing, so the boiling should take care of it.
Once I’d reached the end of the boil, I carried the pot and chiller down to the basement and hooked it up to a sink using an old washing machine hose.
Cold water going in and through the tube, then coming out the other end. I didn’t have a hose that fit that end of the tubing, so I just make sure to only keep the water pressure at something manageable, so it would stay within the sink.
The wort cooled down in about 20 min. Good deal!
Now that the chiller’s been cleaned before, I shouldn’t have to soak it in vinegar again, though forum posts on the interwebs will tell you that some people insist on cleaning it every time. In theory, all you should have to do is rinse it with water, then put it in the wort for 10 min while it’s boiling, then rinse it once you’re done.
All in all, it was remarkably easy and cut down on some of the total time spent brewing. Now, we’ll just have to wait another month or so to see how the beer turned out!