Bottling beer

I would definitely enjoy making beer more if there was no sanitizing. It took over an hour today to sanitize the bottling bucket, tubes, hydrometer, caps and beer bottles (and this doesn't count the hour I spent last night peeling off all the beer labels). All this cleaning and scrubbing was just prep work for bottling. The actually bottling part was fun - kind of mindless - but enjoyable since this is the second to last step before waiting 2 weeks to drink. In total, I spent about 4 hours from getting everything ready to putting the filled bottles away to carbonate.

In summary, for $45 + x gallons of water used for the beer and even more for sanitizing + approximately 7 man hours, I made:

• 28 x 12-oz bottles of beer +
• 12 x 22-oz bottles of beer

Would I do it again? Probably, but not until this beer supply goes down and I accumulate enough bottles again.

Screenprinting T-shirts

For an upcoming girls' weekend in Milwaukee, I decided to screen my own t-shirts. I had done this once before on white t-shirts, but never on colored t-shirts, so I wasn't sure how it was going to come out. It took 3 shirts to finally get the hang of screenprinting a lighter color paint on a dark shirt. The first 2 prints came out too light (pushed paint through too much) and the third print was too thick that some of the paint stuck to the screen and not the shirt (didn't push enough paint through). The happy medium was doing a few heavy strokes of paint followed by a lighter stroke of paint. I still had to go back through all the shirts and do touch ups, but the fourth and fifth shirt touch ups were much easier than the other three.

The screen itself was made from 1" x 2" wood, cut and brad nailed into a picture frame. The I used a screen cloth found at a fabric store and tightly canvased the frame with it. After tracing on the design, I painted on Mod Podge glue to cover the areas that shouldn't get paint.

A finished product below:

Strawberry Buttercream

I made this cake for a friend's birthday bbq yesterday. The cake was yellow box cake mix with homemade strawberry buttercream. The buttercream consisted of butter, shortening, powdered sugar, macerated strawberry puree, and vanilla.

At first, I had only used the strawberry juice that developed after macerating fresh, diced strawberries in sugar, but the pureed mixture had a more intense flavor. I thought I could create a super strawberry filling by adding a little basic buttercream to the puree, but this turned disastrous as the ratio caused the buttercream to separate and suspend in the puree; adding in more buttercream and salvaged the filling.

Brewing Beer

I happened to find myself near a homebrew supply store and decided to pick up a $45 kit to brew a Belgian Farmhouse style ale. I already owned a basic beer making kit ($30 off craigslist) and had been meaning to brew some beer for a while. The kit came with malt, hops, barley, yeast, and flavorings such as paradise seeds, coriander, and dried orange peel.

Reading through the directions, I figured it would take 3 hours to brew the beer. So if I started at 6:30 PM on a work night, I would be able to finish around 9:30 PM. The brewing part was easy, boil, simmer, 20 minutes, 50 minutes, and never once did it come close to boiling over (something I was really concerned about when brewing in the kitchen). I sterilized everything with the powder that came in the beer making kit and dumped my wort into a 5-gallon bucket with water. Then, I was suppose to wait until mixture cooled to 70 - 75 degrees.

10:30 PM - 88 degrees
11:00 PM - 86 degrees (add ice packs around the cooler, including bags of frozen peas that I had)
12:00 AM - 84 degrees (put bucket in ice water bath in the sink)
1:00 AM - 80 degrees
1:30 AM - 78 degrees (screw it, adding yeast and going to sleep)

I had no idea that it would take so long to cool the wort. Next time, I'll do this on a Saturday.

3 days later... After lots of bubbles being released in the air-lock, the bubble activity has started to slow down. The mixture is transferred to a secondary fermentor.

7 days later... The mixture doesn't look like it has bubbled lately. I'm not sure if this is normal, or a sign that I have done something wrong. I tried to sanitized everything as much as possible, but I'm a bit worried that something may have gone in.

Reflection: If this is successful, I would have brewed 5 gallons of beer for $45 (plus cost of time). That is equivalent to about 6 microbrew pints at a pub I regularly go to. If this is not successful, I'll be super bummed.