Spruce Trail

We tried a beer from the LCBO a while back that used spruce instead of hops! And it was meant to be drunk at room temperature. We really liked the taste and were very interested in the idea of brewing our own beer with spruce. We liked the idea of doing something a bit different and as an added bonus, hops are quite expensive and spruce is free since we have a HUGE spruce tree in front of our house.
We took some tips from the internet, especially this guy. You should only use the new tips in spring (luckily we decided to do this back in May, just in time to pick those tips) and you should use about half an ounce per gallon. And other than that, Kevin just made up his own recipe - very adventurous for such a newbie beer brewer. And we called our beer Spruce Trail.
So we made the beer and it seemed to work and we got to taste it last week. It is delicious. We tried it 3 ways: room temperature, cold, and in between. We both liked it best at room temperature just like the original. Kind of nice to have a beer you like to drink at room temperature, frees up some fridge space at least. But not such a great summer beer.
And with the spent grains this time I made chocolate chip cookies using this recipe. They turned out great, tasted like a healthier granola-y version of chocolate chip cookies.

Hop, Drop, and Roll

Kevin and I have been drinking our first beer that we have brewed without a kit. We did use malt extract as opposed to just buying the grains like one awesome homebrewer that we met does, but using the extract seems to be the norm for even very enthusiastic homebrewers.

This new adventure in brewing meant looking at recipes, sourcing ingredients, being at the stove for hours, and getting to be just a little bit creative. Actually I should scratch out the bit about looking at recipes, sourcing ingredients, and maybe even the creative bit because Kevin's cousin Brandon, of Lord Toffsbury fame, did all that for us. Thanks Brandon! He made a delicious version of the this recipe and of course we knew we wanted to do the same. The recipe is the Imperial Pale Ale from Sam Calagione's Extreme Brewing, a book that we have recently purchased and just love, it seems to be the book for homebrewing. Here is the beer bubbling like crazy, it was really fun to watch and hear!
It tastes delicious! We are extremely happy with it. And super hyped to do more brewing. I am also hoping that this ability to make our own delicious beer will curb some of our LCBO spending. Oh, this batch of beer is of course called Hop, Drop, and Roll. We love the hop puns that are so often used in naming extra hoppy beers.With the spent grains (we use malt extract plus a little bit of actual grains for improved taste), I made bread. I just kind of improvised a recipe that was half white and half whole wheat flour. It turned out well but had a bit too much taste to really go with any of the things that I usually like my bread with, will be experimenting with other spent grain recipes in the future.And, because I am all too aware that as interesting as I may think my life is most of my readers are much more interested in Henry's (they are his grandparents and aunts afterall), here are some pictures of him from yestereday.
PS - Happy Canada Day! We will start celebrating as soon as Kevin and Henry get out of bed.

Waste Not Want Not

Kevin and I started some parsnip wine the other night. It used 5 lbs of parsnips for one gallon! And barely used them. I thought we'd end up with a sloppy mess of parsnip mush that would go straight into the compost. But the recipe said boil until tender but not mushy and then remove the parsnips. So they were still very edible. ...So now we are up to our eyeballs in parsnip soup. Luckily we had a dinner guest last night to help us get through some. We have some more to eat this lunchtime but the rest has gone into the freezer. I am glad we were able to get maximum use of those parsnips.


The soup tasted really good. Very rich which is why it's usually served as a starter (but that's no way to get through it). I used this recipe as a guide and replaced the heavy cream with raw cashew cream a la Dana Shortt like I did here.

In other brewery news, we also started some wine made from Welch's grape juice, recipe here. And we are attempting to start some black currant wine using Ribena but the yeast just won't get started. We have also had a chance to taste mostly everything from our cellar. Everything has been very good. The clove wine was a hit over Christmas, a great liqueur type drink that I think should be a Christmas tradition. The pineapple wine was pretty good, quite pineapple-y and quite dry. Might make it again someday. And the dandelion wine was finally ready over Christmas and it was delicious, should definitely make that every Spring.


And here's a picture of the little piglet gobbling up his own little bowl of popcorn last night. He was so into eating it he didn't even flip the bowl over right away.

In the brewery: Clove Wine and Pineapple Wine

We did some bottling tonight. Bottled our clove wine and our pineapple orange juice wine that we started a few months ago. This meant we also got to taste them! The clove wine tasted like cloves but tasted better and not as weird as we had guessed. And the pineapple orange juice wine had a lot of pineapple taste but no orange taste. And it was weird because it wasn't sweet at all. Mostly though it really tasted like a white wine and it was pretty good. We just had a gallon of each and we did half of each sparkling and half flat. We will be drinking them soon.

Both of these are recipes from First Steps in Winemaking.

And Henry was keeping us company while we bottled and was being a bit moany. Until we put him in the bucket that is. He loved it in there and played happily for around 15 minutes.

Quince Wine

We started some quince wine yesterday. We decided to try this this year instead of quince jelly and luckily there was a recipe in our First Steps in Winemaking book. First we picked the quince from the bush in our backyard. Before we started we were planning on having enough for one gallon, hoping we might have enough for 2 gallons. It turned out we had enough for more than 10 gallons! That's over 200 quince! Luckily we decided to do 5 gallons because it was tough dealing with just that many. The rest are still in our garage, maybe we'll do something with them later. But after processing 100 quince, I am a bit sick of them right now.

Projects

I've been having a very productive week. Besides giving the whole house a good vacuum after finally buying a proper vacuum last week ($10 at Goodwill, spending time cleaning is bad enough don't also want to spend too much money) and restocking us with granola and zucchini bread, I got to work on these projects.

Tomatoes picked and mint dried (for tea)












Tomatoes drying












Cider to be made into hard cider, is currently bubbling away in the basement











Sauerkraut getting more sour












Soap hardening












And Henry has been very happy to sit and play on the kitchen floor. He is especially happy with his new toy the coathanger.

In the brewery...

Kevin and I have been doing lots more brewing. Right now on the go we have raspberry and red currant wine using fruits from the garden (just one bottle because it uses a lot of berries!), a wine from pineapple and orange juice, clove and ginger wine, and in the big 5 gallon jug a ginger champagne. Of course we have to wait and wait and wait to try them.

We are drinking the cocoa vanilla stout and it is good but we are still hoping it will get better in another month or so. And we have tried some flat cider that we made and it was very good. So far we are fans of home brewing. And it lets us make use of our humungous laundry room, nowo laundry room/brewery.

Cool Bean Stout

We bottled our Cool Bean Stout last night. We bought a stout kit from the grocery store and added a bottle of vanilla and some cocoa powder.

It was great after our experience last year bottling - this year the siphon actually worked, made it seem so easy in comparison. We didn't add sugar to the bottles (to referment) so it won't be fizzy and we decided that meant we could use wine bottles and the corks wouldn't pop out. But we also did some beer bottles for smaller portions to give away. Luckily I had found a capper at our thrift store last week.

It's not supposed to taste good for at least another week. But we tasted it last night. And it was alright. Definitely hoping it tastes better. Kev said he could taste the cocoa vanilla, don't think I could. Anyway it was fun and I am so happy to have a hobby that Kevin and I like to do together.

Dandelion Wine!

Kevin and I have made some dandelion wine. And yesterday we got to try it! We picked the dandelions - 3 L of them I think - at the very end of April when they first sprung up in our local park. We added lemon and orange juice, raisins, sugar, special wine yeast and let it bubble away for a few weeks. We only got 4 1/2 bottles. So we drank the 1/2 bottle right away last night. And it was really good!!

We have the other four bottles doing a little more bubbling with balloons over the necks (acts as a cheap fermentation lock) and when the balloons stop inflating for good we will have to borrow or buy a corker. Then we leave them for 6 months. It might taste even better in 6 months!!! We had fun doing it and love the feeling that we did it all ourselves and it turned out so good that we think we might even go ahead and buy a corker. Next on the agenda is parsnip wine.

Beer Bottling

We brewed some beer with a couple of Kevin's cousins over the past week. We used a kit from the grocery store and were able to borrow all the equipment. So it cost $21 for 23 litres of beer. All we had to do really was a lot of sterilizing and siphoning. Siphoning turned out to be a huge deal because we lost the suction almost after every bottle for some reason. But it was fun anyway and now we have another couple of weeks to wait and it will hopefully be good for drinking.