A little bit of this and that

Blogger is being a booger and so I'm giving up on posting a whole mess of pictures all at once...instead you'll get them one at a time, and you'll like it Goddamn it. So this is a "crowd scene" from inside the tent at the Brew Fest. Look at all those happy drinkers. Notice the attractive "no smoking" sign in the center, and Dixie and his UP girlfriend (that's upper penninsula you Trolls) making out in the lower left corner....ain't they cuuuUUUuutte.

I had a nice little post written about beermaking on Saturday, but reading back over it it seemed like too much of a “and this is how you make beer!” public access channel sort of thing. If you want to know how to make beer, email me and I’ll write you a step by step description, but it seems like that’s not interesting enough to bother with here. Instead I’ll just say that Jiggy and I spent a long day grinding grain, and pulling big pots of water on and off of flaming burners that were hot enough to melt the snow and turn her backyard into a mud pit. The highlights:

The amazing self heating mash that continued to heat up after we’d taken it off the boil.

The sparge that went so smoothly that we could have been fuckin’ Martha Stewart doing a “see, isn’t this easy” demo.

The hose becoming disconnected from the wort chiller and spraying ice cold water all over Jiggy and her backyard.

And the fact that Ragnar cooked the yeast (although I still say that yeast was bunk to begin with, bunk I say!) by adding wort that was too hot. (pansy ass yeast anyway, can’t take the heat then get out of the fire I say)

The really interesting part of the story comes a couple of days later when Jiggy added fresh yeast and the ferment took off like a rocket…literally, the airlocks blew off and sprayed her dining room with partially fermented porter, but I’ll let her tell that story, because I wasn’t there.

Beer and knitting as I think I’ve mentioned before don’t go that well together (but not for lack of practice I’m gonna master drunken knitting if it kills me, or rather my liver). Kitting and home brewing however go great together since there are long periods of time while brewing that you have nothing to do…except knit! So while the wort that will be porter was bubbling merrily away I finished (finished!) “we call them pirates” and got a good start on the “pink and skull” scarf.

Speaking of “we call them pirates” which turned out to be just the right size to fit an 8 year old, and “pink and skull” which was always intended for an 8 year old, the fink is back in the fold! By which I mean of course that Rat Girl is back from her mother’s house. The first thing she started babbling about when she got in the door was her gecko “v-head." This girl is going to turn out to be some sort of scientist or mathematician or something. She has got the most literal mind of anyone I’ve ever met. “this gecko has a v on his head, we shall name him….v-head!” I can imagine her staring through a telescope discovering galaxies and saying to herself “Here is a galaxy shaped like a fork…let it be known as the fork galaxy.”

Here’s a Rat Girl pirate joke: Why was the pirate in a canoe? Because his ship sank. Muhhahhahaha.

Anyway, some genius at her school decided that since March is reading month that they are going to have a contest, and that the people who read the most in class will get a prize. Competition has always been a primary motivating factor for my little pirate lass, and so she’s been logging as much reading as possible…five minutes between morning teeth brushing and when we have to leave for school, five minutes in the car on the way to dinner. When I tucked her in last night she was fast asleep on top of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with her camping head lamp on. Yeah. I love reading month.