galactagogue oatmeal milk stout

Way back on Father's Day in June, Eric brewed this oatmeal milk stout and infused it with herbs that promote lactation - fennel, anise, coriander, fenugreek. Honestly, there are hardly enough herbs in it to counteract the anti-lactation properties of the alcohol. Wah-wah sorry mamas! It makes for a good beer name though, right? Plus it's super tasty!

homebrew #7: sleepytime wit

We started a batch of wit beer that features honey and chamomile!!  I'm pretty excited about its potential!  Check out our recipe over on Hopville.

For my own purposes of record keeping, here's what kinds of beers we've made thus far:
#7 Sleepytime Wit
#6 Barn Owl Saison
#5 Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Stout
#4 Ginger Snap Brown Ale
#3 Walter Cronkite IPA
#2 Christmas Dinner Cranberry Porter
#1 Lost Wisdom Pale Ale

chiles rellenos (beer battered collard fusion) with salsa fresca

 
Oh hello, here are some stuffed poblano peppers aka chiles rellenos. I followed the nice instructions at Macheesmo. I filled them with soft white cheese and (liquid) smoky collard greens, battered them with an Oktoberfest beer, egg and flour batter, and topped them with a tomato, avocado, and cilantro salsa fresca. What a great time of year!

If the skins on the peppers are thin enough, don't worry about getting them all off. Also don't worry about the peppers breaking while stuffing; they are pretty forgiving once you batter them. Seam side down!

oatmeal raisin cookie stout - bottled and ready

 
We've started to enjoy our Oatmeal Raisin Cookie Stout, the making of which was documented in the homebrew video we posted a couple months ago. Just in time for stout-weather, right? Actually it makes very delicious beer ice cream floats, especially with ginger ice cream!

bottled the ginger brown

We bottled our ginger brown ale that we started back in November. The recipe is on hopville, a nice calculator tool and way to keep track of recipes.

We now have a big enough collection of flip-top bottles to fit a 5-gallon batch of beer, without needing to use wine bottles (too big) or crown-top bottles (requires borrowing the capping tool). Conveniently, all of the bottles fit (just barely) in our dishwasher for sanitizing.

For a little experiment, we used three different priming sugar recipes (priming sugar is added just before bottling to create carbonation). One gallon was primed with blackstrap molasses, one gallon was primed with cane sugar boiled with 1 oz. ginger root for extra ginger flavor, and the remaining three gallons got half molasses half cane sugar for priming.

make something day: ginger brown ale

The day after Thanksgiving is Black Friday, a day in which stores hype up the x-mas shopping season and crazy shoppers wake up super early to stand in long lines and catch some "deals". Eric and I do not participate. In fact, we are so good at breaking traditions that it is nice to sometimes create new traditions. Established alternatives to Black Friday include Buy Nothing Day and Make Something Day so we decided to make something!

For our first annual beer brewing extravaganza on Make Something Day, we made a ginger brown ale which includes cinnamon, cloves and orange peel. Mmmmm... Looking forward to this one!

bike trip to fort collins

Over Labor Day weekend we went on a bike vacation to Fort Collins (50 miles each way). We rode Saturday morning, stayed overnight Saturday and Sunday nights, and rode again on Monday morning.

On our way there, as we got closer and closer to downtown Fort Collins, we encountered more and more costumed people on bikes. It turned out that Tour de Fat was going on that very day. We caught the tail end of things but at least we got to see a giant puppet of Tony Danza give the crowd a hug!

In addition to New Belgium Brewing, Fort Collins has Odell Brewing Co and Fort Collins Brewery. After checking out Tour de Fat we headed over to Odell's to sample 12 of their beers. Aww yeah!

It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that we ate tempeh for every meal. Avogadro's Number makes their own tempeh which they serve in their restaurant and distribute across town (picture from the Fort Collins Food Co-op).

We ate at many veg friendly restaurants. One of the restaurants we ate at was Tasty Harmony. We were excited by their raw menu items so we got the raw vegan cheeseburger with onion triangles and sprouted chickpea hummus followed by a slice of raw coconut cream pie. We decided it would be fun to start preparing more raw foods so you might be seeing more of that kind of thing around here.

Other than eating and drinking in Fort Collins, we mostly just relaxed and meandered. We happened upon a bike show in an art gallery and a film at Lyric Cinema - an independent movie theater. Maybe someday Boulder will have an independent movie theater...

On our ride home, we slowly approached what at first was a funny little cloud behind a mountain. Later the cloud consumed the entire horizon. It was from the wild fire in the mountains just west of Boulder. So spectacular and solemn!

ipa yeastcake bread

We transferred our IPA to a secondary fermenter and I decided to try using the leftover yeast cake to make some bread. I just added some flour and water to the yeastcake to make it into a sponge (I added some bread yeast too), which I fermented until I felt like making bread. It doesn't have much of a hop aroma because this was before dry-hopping, but it is sooo bitter! ...and tasty, especially with marg and honey.

I also saved the hops for future experiments. Got any good recipes for reusing homebrew hops?

homebrew #3 - india pale ale

We started brewing our third homebrew on Friday--an IPA (Dogfish Head 60 min. IPA clone)--perfect for summer! Conveniently, we can use our 16 quart pressure canner pot (aluminum) to boil the wort.

Interesting comparison of stainless steel and aluminum pots: here.

Update: we're calling it the Walter Cronkite IPA.

"christmas dinner" cranberry porter

We started this beer around Thanksgiving. It's in bottles now and should be ready in time for Christmas! It's a cranberry porter roughly based on a recipe we found online. You may have already heard mention of this porter in Eric's spent grain bread and pancakes posts. I thought I would give it a formal introduction.

We came up with its name "Christmas Dinner" while boiling the wort. Here is the back story: do you remember in the Muppets/Sesame Street Christmas special when the Swedish Chef shows up to prepare Christmas dinner and mistakes Big Bird for the Christmas turkey? Swedish Chef tried to cook Big Bird! Luckily Big Bird won over the Swedish Chef with his charm and a gift of chocolate covered bird seed. They end up eating a vegetarian meal of shredded wheat and cranberry sauce.

So, yes, that's how our beer got its name. Who needs meat for Christmas dinner when you can have beer?

"lost wisdom" pale ale

This was is our first attempt at making beer. We followed this recipe, but dry-hopped with some chinook hops too. I think it turned out pretty good. It has a little bit of a banana ester thing going on. Half the fun of brewing beer is coming up with a name (and label if you are more ambitious) for your beer. We decided to call our beer and mead making endeavors "Cute Owl Friend" after a drawing I made once. We named this beer "Lost Wisdom" because after watching a friend make the same recipe, we forgot the directions when it came time for us to make it. Also, here are some other things named "Lost Wisdom": link, link and link.