i did a halloween flashback

happy halloween!!!

i love this holiday more than words. so in lieu of a bunch of jibber jabber...here is a photo flashback of some of my favorite halloween moments (most recent to older). love everyone who ive celebrated with over the years xoxo

1

indy got a bone

we brewed our first batch of beer

beer: an ancient alcoholic beverage that is created by malting certain grains, extracting the sugars, bittering with hops, and fermenting with yeast. 

brewers.

brew masters. 

brewologists. 

whatever name you wanna call it. i'll take it! we are officially brewlicious. turns out, brewing beer is relatively easy. shane got our starter kit at salt city brew supply. its a bunch of tools and buckets that allow us to brew 5 gallon batches at a time. the hardest decision of all was choosing which beer to brew first....pilsner, amber, golden, ipa? the possibilities were endless! we ended up going with a hefeweizen since its just plain delicious...and i can stick fruit in it (orange anyone?). 

our good friends cam and jade came over for our inaugural brew to show us the ropes and provide moral support. while the boys assessed the supplies.....

.....i was reading the brewing directions. they were quite funny. my favorite parts had to be under the recommended equipment section, where it told me to have beer on hand to drink while brewing, and the beer brewing 101 section, where it told me to sanitize everything. if we weren't sure, sanitize it. if we drank too much and cant remember, sanitize it. i love that the directions are tailored for drunkards. 

i stopped reading when i heard this, "hey bayba! look at me with my big ole brewin jug!" i laughed. and then took this photo.

we started out by boiling water. then we added our wheat dry malt extract. i guess when you do this it turns into wort, which is pronounced "wert". lol wort? please tell me someone else associated that with the small scrawny kid from sword in the stone?.....

once it was boiling, we added some hops. holy hell. my house smelled SO GOOD! it was like bread...and beer. a beer bakery! lol. from here you have to boil for 30 more minutes and then add the rest of the hops. we were on boil-over alert, since cam said it happens a lot during this stage. i hate cleaning, especially cleaning up crusted up gunk on my stove, so we maintained constant vigilance! (well, as much vigilance as can be maintained while drinking beer and chatting and watching football....)

look at this and imagine a delicious smell

 once its done doing whatever beer does...you have to remove it from heat and cool it down. apparently fancy people buy a wort chiller and do it that way, but us less fancy people just put the pot in an icy sink bath. see?

once the beer temp reached 75 degrees we transferred it to the fermentor (sanitized, of course lol). and by we, i mean cam. 

once the beer is in the bucket, you have to add water to kick it up to 5 gallons. then once its all oxygenated and shit, you can take a hydrometer reading. yep. this is the part where hillbilly beer makin gets all science-y. the hydrometer is used to determine the alcohol percentage. badass right?

all thats left is to add some yeast, secure the lid, and put in the air lock. then comes the waiting part. you have to leave your beer alone to ferment. its like punishment. for you and for the beer. after a week of waiting (impatiently on my part), it was time to transfer the beer into the secondary fermentor. it sounds fancy, but really all it consists of is siphoning beer from the bucket to the glass jug (ha! jug is a funny word). 

i guess you transfer the beer to the jug to leave some of the nasty sediment behind. because well, nobody likes chunky beer. once this is done next step? anyone? anyone? yep. you guessed it. more waiting. bah! i like results quickly, and all this waiting was killing me! 

a week later it was time to bottle! (finally...) we sanitized bottles and transferred the beer to the bottling bucket. the bottling bucket came with a warning of child drowning on the side. honestly. how many kids drown during freak beer bottling accidents? im gonna guess zero. 

we added priming sugar to the bucket and then put the booze into bottles and capped em. yes, i made lots of puns about bustin caps. when in rome...

oh yeah, and then we waited for another week. all this waiting really makes you appreciate buying beer from the store. buy it. drink it. BAM! that simple. but the waiting made me all that more excited to try it. and the glorious moment happened last friday when we popped the first cap on our icy cold beer and.......

IT WAS DELICIOUS!!!!

we are now the proud parents of one beautiful baby hefeweizen :)

it was a hell of a process, but it is so much fun to drink something you made yourself. we are currently brewing a pumpkin spice pilsner and a pale ale. super excited for those, and we are in the works for starting a carmel infused amber ale. mmmm.....beer.