You Grow Your Own Food? Harvest 7/31/11 and Pickles!

Yellow tom, grape toms, cherry toms, beans, cukes

14 jars of pickles: kosher dill, bread and butter, dilly garlic

You Brew Your Own Beer? Roggenbier – BIAB style

Today I did my Roggenbier. I pitched the wort onto the yeast cake from my Dampfbier. First I siphoned roughly half the cake into a clean bucket because I split the wort into 2-3 gallon volumes to provide the extra headspace WY3068 likes’

Beautifully colored mash, smelled great too

Nice brown wort

Split between 2 buckets for the WY3068 active fermentation. Just fit the buckets in my chamber.

The recipe:
Type: All Grain
Date: 7/31/2011
Batch Size: 6.00 gal
Brewer: Two If By Sea
Boil Size: 9.69 gal
Boil Time: 90 min
Equipment: BIAB
Brewhouse Efficiency: 80.00

Ingredients
Amount Item Type % or IBU
6.25 lb Rye Malt (4.7 SRM) Grain 45.03 %
3.50 lb Munich Malt (9.0 SRM) Grain 25.22 %
3.00 lb Pilsner (2 Row) Ger (2.0 SRM) Grain 21.61 %
1.00 lb Caramunich Malt (56.0 SRM) Grain 7.20 %
0.13 lb Carafa II (412.0 SRM) Grain 0.94 %
1.00 oz Tettnang [5.20 %] (60 min) Hops 16.6 IBU
0.33 oz Saaz [4.00 %] (15 min) Hops 2.1 IBU
1 Pkgs Weihenstephan Weizen (Wyeast Labs #3068) Yeast-Wheat

Beer Profile
Est Original Gravity: 1.061 SG
Measured Original Gravity: 1.060 SG
Est Final Gravity: 1.015 SG
Estimated Alcohol by Vol: 6.08 %
Bitterness: 18.7 IBU
Calories: 43 cal/pint
Est Color: 15.2 SRM

You Grow Your Own Food? 7/29/11 Harvest

8 ball zuke, romanesca zuke, beans, tomatoes, 4 pickle cukes, 1 yellow cuke, 3 slicer cukes (mom stole one)

You Grow Your Own Food? 7/26/11 Harvest

3 yellow cukes 1 pickle cuke 1 sunburst scallop squash 1 beet beans 1 tromboncino starting to rot at the end 1 unknown squash

7/24/11 Not everything we grow is food.

7/24/2011 Harvest – Day of yellow

1 Yellow sunburst squash, 1 yellow cuke, 3 pickle cukes...oddly yellow too

Midway Tastings

Took some samples of the fermenting liquids yesterday:
Dampfbier: malty, no banana ester, promising
AHS IPA:nice bitter, good flavor, the dry hopping should really round this out
Skeeter Pee: boozy, lemony, once it gets down to around 1.000 when I can finish the last steps and get a little age on this, it should be a great summer refresher. Will have to start it earlier next year.

Time to re-engineer

I got a Wyeast Smack Pack for the Dampfbier and had the worst time trying to get the inner bag to pop. Both myself and my assistant could not tell if it popped by the time it was pitching time came. It hadn’t popped. The baggie ended up in the fermenter too of course. Finally got it out today when I combined one of the two 1/2 worts together into the other vessel. Now I see the problem.

Nice bubble

They really should consider getting the packet fixed into the top of the pack by the seam so you could smack it as it is held in place. Then you’d invert the bag a few times and voila!

Well it all worked out anyways, the beer fermented just fine.

You Cook Your Own Food?: Thousand Island Pickles

Used Grammy Hurd’s Thousand Island Pickles recipe to process some pickles today.
The Recipe

Thousand Island Pickles
Ingredients:
4 quarts ripe cucumbers, peeled and hollowed out then cut in cubes
3 Cups vinegar
6 medium onions sliced
1 Tablesppon salt
2 Teaspoons tumeric powder
4 Teaspoons mustard seed
2 cups sugar

Procedure
Combine all, top up with water if not covered, cook for approximately an hour, until almost soft. Can as you normally would.

You Grow Your Own Food?-7/22/2011 Harvest

6 cukes, first beans, first tomato, 2 overgrown 8 ball zukes