Wednesday 26 January 2011

Bottles and Jars in the House of Fermentation

It's been snowing fantastic amounts lately. I absolutely love it. The fresh coating every few days refreshes the landscape and covers any sludge and slush, making the illusion of being in a snowglobe complete.

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It's a throwback winter from childhood. I've been getting out and walking in the deep drifts whenever I can. It's good exercise, and it somehow doesn't feel like a workout because it's so much fun.

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Plus, all my winter woolies are getting good use.

What to do when I'm sick of playing in the snow?

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We bottled our first batch of beer. It's not drinkable quite yet...it needs to cask condition. Once the yeast is done eating all the sugar and turning it into alcohol in the fermenter tank, you still need to deal with carbonation. Right before you bottle, you mix in some priming sugar to give the yeast something new to chew on, and that creates the carbonation. So right now we have very flat beer, but it's still drinkable (as in, it will get you drunk) and you just have to be patient for another couple weeks.

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The good news is that it tastes like beer- it's a British-style IPA with a good amount of hops. As soon as the fermenter tank was cleaned out, we started a new batch of wort on the stove and it's happily bubbling away once again.

I braved the bitter cold over the weekend to drink mimosas and to get out to the kimchi party that the Brooklyn Brainery was hosting. They are an independent collective that hosts all sorts of neat-o classes and seminars on an eclectic range of topics. The kimchi party was super crowded, but you brought your own jar and got to fill it with your own custom blend of kimchi.

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This is sitting on my bookshelf, fermenting away into spicy cabbagey awesomeness. Here's a picture I took of the basic recepie we used:

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I'm going to make a huge vat of kimchi stew with some fresh homemade tofu from the Korean deli down the street.

It's a great time of year to be hedonistic.

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