Sunday, September 09, 2007

Smells Like A Brewery In Here...

Steph's here (I know she was just here a fortnight ago but she liked it so much she came back), so we've been busy as usual. Steph instructed Ed to make a shelf to store preserves and things, which he did (I'll show you pictures another time). We made five gallons of tea wine, five gallons of beer (from a kit, I don't know how to make beer from scratch yet but I'd love to learn). We sorted all the stored potatoes out and removed those which had become rotten. Let me tell you, rotten potatoes smell really foul. And we picked about ten pounds of mixed hedgerow fruit - damsons, elderberries, blackberries, sloes, haws and apples - to make 5 gallons of hedgerow wine.

We met our new neighbours, who told us to help ourselves to all the apples, pears, damsons and greengages we want from their garden. Another neighbour provided some empty beer and wine bottles from her recycling bin (we had to do some fancy footwork to explain why we were eyeing up her bin - she initially thought we were accusing her of crimes against recycling, or perhaps of having a drink problem). And we had a gorgeous lamb casserole with our own pink fir apple potatoes and roasted mystery summer squash, and drank lots of beer - well we'll need the bottles to bottle our own beer when it's ready!


Cartoon from climatecartoons.org. Click on the picture to enlarge.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

FRUIT BONANZA! Am just working out what to do with my own weight in scrumped apples...

Gid said...

Brewing beer from scratch is not that hard.. basically five stages.. mash, sparge, boil, chill, ferment.. you mash the grains with warm water, drain off the wort and then sparge the mash (i.e wash it through to get the rest of the goodness out).. boil the wort to break down the proteins (adding hops for flavour and bittering).. rapidly cool the wort (to stop the proteins from rebuilding.. ferment and then rack into barrels/bottles for conditioning..

Tim said...

http://www.howtobrew.com/ for first steps in beer brewing for newbies!

Tim
www.waark.com

Anonymous said...

I've fathered a trio of dipsomaniacs. I wouldn't mind but I hardly bother with the stuff myself.

Ally said...

There's a fab 'Simple Beer' recipe on the Self-Sufficientish recipe site that we've tried and tested a few times we great success.

Just checking in to say thank you for your good wishes :).

Melanie Rimmer said...

Yeah right, Dad! I did notice that as soon as I mentioned about the sloe gin, you suddenly asked whether you could come to us for Christmas.

Yellow said...

Bill (dad), I'm hoping Mel will find out how to make Absinthe as it's the traditional for us artists.