Highlight #2: trip to Colorado in January

It seems like this was so long ago that it couldn't have possibly been this year, but it was. I had so much fun being in CO for a week in January. It was a trip full of family, friends, and delicious Colorado beer - how could we go wrong? I got to help Lea pick out wedding dresses, have a holiday celebration with both my family and Chris's, shop with my mom, meet up with friends - it was such a great trip!

Highlights of the year

In this top ten post, I'll start what I think are the easiest posts - the top ten highlights of my year! Since there were so many great things this year, I couldn't even start to narrow it down to ten events, so I'll have to go with categories. Of course, once again, this is in no particular order. I'll also mention some of the things that I'm looking forward to in 2009. We'll be gone about 10 days in Peru, so hopefully there will be one each day! Unfortunately, due to some technical difficulties, no photos available for the next couple weeks. Don't worry, I will post more soon! (Disclaimer: I'm not entirely sure how to post into the future but I think I can make it work - if not, there will be a whole boatload of posts showing up around January 10.) Without further ado, here are my top ten highlights of 2008:

Trip to Peru
Since most of this trip will take place in 2009, I'm sure I'll write about it again next year, but this is a much anticipated vacation! We booked our tickets back in August, and have been dreaming about Incan ruins and Amazon jungles ever since. Obviously no photos yet, but many to come!

Engagement photos

Or e-pics, for those hip to the lingo. Chris and I got engagement photos taken, which I always thought was something a little cheesey that I would never do. But I did it. We had an engagement shoot that came with our wedding photo package, and I didn't even think we would have time to get them taken. But it happened to work out and we had our photos taken a few weeks ago. We LOVE the results and are so glad we did it. Now someday our kids can look back and see them and say "What happened to my parents? They looked okay when they were younger..."



Anyway enough about us, let me tell you about our photographer. Her name is Traci Turchin and she is AWESOME. She is the best wedding/portrait photographer in all of Colorado if not the world (although I have to be honest, I haven't looked much past Colorado so far). She and her husband shoot weddings together, and they do such an amazing job. She also does engagement, family, maternity, baby, senior, bridal, and any other kind of portrait you could dream up. Just look at her blog.



Just one thing - I highly recommend you book her SOON for all your portrait needs. She has only been working independently for about a year, and it seems her summer weekends are all already full. I guarantee you that her prices are going to continue to go up and up as she gets even more business throughout the state of Colorado and beyond.



You can email Traci through her website. Just do it - she'll make you look better than any skinny mirror can. Trust me.

Merry christmas!

Today I am at work. :( Oh well, it happens. I am just over 12 hours away from vacation, so I can't complain too much! I just wanted to post about what a wonderful christmas I've had so far! Chris and I opened presents last night, since I'm working today and tomorrow we are heading up to Connecticut to spend Boxing Day with Victoria and her wonderful parents. We can't wait! We are bringing beer and cookies so hopefully we will be welcomed. One of my favorite gifts was the camera strap that I wanted! Thank you Chris! It goes around my neck and shoulder, and instead of the camera swinging loose from around my neck and knocking into things like walls and tables (or, more often, into Lilly's head) when I lean over, this one attaches to the camera and then the camera slides along the strap. Kind of hard to explain but Traci talked about it in her blog post with gift ideas for photographers. I want it all!

We also had big boxes of presents from Walt and Ellie and from Bob and Fran. Thank you guys so much! Everything is so thoughtful. Lots of handy dried mixes for us to make soups in our slow cooker - that is ideal. And lotion, poop bags, chocolate oranges, night light, treats - all is much appreciated! Thank you so much to our wonderful families who have made a Christmas away from home really pleasant for us.

I almost forgot to mention that I got a beer kit from Will! I can't wait to brew the american pale ale, a Sunshine Wheat clone. Jaz and Will had such a good time at the homebrew store picking everything out, now they are thinking about brewing themselves! I hope they do! I can't wait to make this beer. I think it will be the first one we do when we get home from vacation.

Ah yes, vacation! We are headed to Peru next week! I am super excited. I can't wait to do some travelling and see some new things. We are going to macchu piccu, the amazon jungle, and I'm not sure what other wonderful things we'll see. I don't know how often I'll be able to blog but I may store up a couple to post while we're gone. And definitely expect some big long posts when we get back!

We also got some treats last week in the mail, from Lea. There were homemade chocolate pretzels (luckily Chris saved me a few!) and some delicious bread. Leah gave us a recipe for doggie treats along with some treats from Hawaii! At least the box is Hawaiian - her favorite place. Lilly loves them. Thank you so much!!

Well, so sorry not to have pictures to post right now, but I don't have the computer in front of me. Yet another reason why I need a macbook air. Maybe next year.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Happy New Year!

Top 10 lists

I thought I'd finish out the year with some top 10 lists. I didn't know where to start, or what categories to list my top 10 of! NPR was asking for listeners' top 10 albums of the year. I thought - I listen to music all the time and I don't even think I bought 10 albums this year. I could name maybe my top 3 albums of the year. I definitely didn't read any books this year. I might have read 10 magazines. They were all equal in my eyes though. I guess I brewed about 10 beers... all of my beers are in the top 10, then.

I guess I'll start the year with the lowlights... I could only think of 3. Everything else was pretty sweet this year, I have to say.
In no particular order, the top (or bottom) yucky events of the year:

-Moving into a 4th floor walkup apartment at 2am after an overnight flight back from denver to burlington the night before and driving all day from burlington to new york via jersey city and then starting orientation the next morning without any sleep.



-Having my car frozen in the ice in front of the house for 2 weeks. Despite tons of hot water, hacking with a shovel, salt, cardboard and other methods of friction improvement... the only remedy was the good old sunlight, something we didn't get much of in Vermont.



-Cutting my thumb on a knife in the dishwasher on thanksgiving.



Stay tuned for more 2008 lists.

Brooklyn brewery

We went out to Brooklyn Brewery the other night, one of the coolest places to spend a Friday night. They are a working brewery and their beer is pretty widely distributed, and on Friday nights only they open up for a happy hour. It is a fun place because it has a warehouse feel to it, there are picnic tables that you sit on, and people bring games and stuff to play. The worst part is that it usually gets very crowded and noisy there. They open at 6 and we only like to go if we can be there right at 6 because that is the only way to snag a table. Then we like to order pizza, they don't serve food but you can get stuff delivered and they have menus on the tables for you. And they have good beer that is reasonably priced! (For New York.) What's not to like?! We went with Victoria, and had a really good time. Victoria's friend Christina joined us for a little while. All in all it was a very fun evening.

Did I mention I'm getting married??

Coming soon to a mailbox near you:



Or hopefully already arrived! We finally got our save the dates done, just in time to send them out with the Christmas cards! We had a lot of fun with them, thank you to Katie for the wonderful photography. She didn't even charge us. Just click here to check out our wedding site, skillfully designed by none other than Chris Duke, the superstar web designer.

Long time, no brew!

Believe it or not, we haven't brewed for two weeks! I mentioned the bottle shortage (which my dad offered to help me out with, although the logistics were a little murky...) and even though we are still behind, we did have enough to brew a batch today. We brewed the Honey Weizen, which was a pretty simple brew. We used the full boil technique, and what a full boil it was! We only have a 5 gallon pot, and it was about 4 1/2 gallons full. The other thing we've implemented (several brews ago) was that we started buying oxygen absorbing caps from Northern Brewer. They only cost a bit more, and oxygen is supposed to be bad for the beer so we figured it is a little thing we can do that might improve the flavor of the beer!

We now have 3 new kits that we can't wait to make. One of them is an Imperial Stout, which is a stronger beer and needs to ferment longer. But we don't want to sacrifice our containers for that long fermentation! The way we are set up now, every container is in use at all times. So next week, while we're in Connecticut for Boxing Day, we're hoping to find a homebrew store and make a few purchases: new 5 gallon carboy and a couple dozen bottles. It will also be fun to just wander around a brew store and look at stuff! It is handy to shop online but it is also nice to see things in real life!

We bottled The Inn Keeper:



An english style ale: Thirty six major awards. Four-time Brewers International Champion. Four-time CAMRA Beer of the Year. Simply put, the muse for this kit has won more awards than any other English beer, period. From very simple ingredients comes a wonderfully well- balanced dram. Spicy, herbal, and English biscuits. Flashes of clean citrus and chewy minerals blend into a complex finish that is refreshingly bitter and remarkably dry. The way a pint was meant to taste. Truly spot on!

Chris did the brilliant design on this label. I guess he's done the last few... I better get to work on the next one!

Tasting: We tasted Rudolph's Tasty Treat last week. It was so good! Very spicy. It will be a nice warmer for the winter. I think this was the first one we tried the full boil on, but I can't remember for sure. Anyway it seemed to work.

Victoria is in town! She lives in Southern California, getting her PhD at UC Irvine, and I am so glad to get to spend some time with her while she's home for a couple weeks. Anyway, this post reminded me that we need to get some brews into the fridge so we can have a tasting with her! She has only tried Hopalilly, and that was before it was aged enough - it keeps getting better. Hopalilly was our first attempt with fresh hops but I kind of messed up the yeast by putting it in the water while the water was too hot.

Presentation

I mentioned the other day that I was working on a presentation. I gave it at M&M conference last night. Don't think this is a conference where we all eat the delicious candy that melts in your mouth (not in your hand). This is a far more ominous M&M - Morbidity and Mortality, or illness and death. In the world of medicine, most departments have these conferences at regular intervals - ours are once a week - and discuss bad outcomes. Sometimes no one is to blame, and we are trying to figure out what went wrong. Sometimes someone is obviously to blame, but in our department people are pretty good (for the most part) about not pointing fingers. The whole point is to learn from either mistakes or accidental mishaps and hope that prevents them from happening next time.

Well, my case did not really involve either M, thank goodness. What happened was that a surgery got delayed because of a less than thorough pre-operative evaluation by yours truly. It wasn't really very significant except an administrative hassle, no harm was done to the patient, but I am glad to accept blame. Anyway I did learn from it, and I also did the presentation on Sickle Cell Anemia in anesthesia and hopefully everyone watching learned a little bit from it. Chris was in the audience to support me which was wonderful! He learned more than he ever wanted to know about Sickle Cell. I think it went well, it wasn't as nerve racking as I had feared. I glanced out at my audience (approximately 20 residents and 5-10 attendings) a couple of times, and less than a quarter of them were sleeping, which is a huge compliment from this crowd. And the best part is that I won't have to present again for months, or at least I hope so...

Trying to get into the christmas spirit

I've been working hard all day on a presentation that I have to give tomorrow night.



I got off work this morning, after being on call overnight, and came home with the idea that I would work on it and then take a nap. That lasted a very short time, and I went back to bed. I woke up about noon and spent the next 6 hours sitting in this very spot. I finished my presentation for the most part, just a few little things that I hope to get done tomorrow early morning. Then I practiced for Chris, who gave it two thumbs up. He may be a little biased though - I'll have to give you another update after I give the presentation tomorrow.

While I was working, the fed ex man brought us a wonderful big box that helped us get into the christmas spirit. The box was full of surprises from Chris's parents! There were lots of presents in there, so we put them under our tree (which is about 8 inches tall). They joined the presents Chris has bought but I have been so busy that I have barely bought any gifts so far. There were some decorations in there.



The snack of hot chocolate and an orange, courtesy of Ellie, were the only things I ate so far today. Thank you, Ellie, for helping sustain me in my long day of work!

After the presentation tomorrow, I'll be able to get more done! Goals for the week: A batch of homebrew (I can't believe I haven't posted about homebrew in DAYS), Christmas shopping, finish up those last few christmas cards, and get a few blog posts online!

An ethical dilemma

I have had a busy week! I did a presentation on Friday, and I have another one on Tuesday. I have been working on putting those together. The other thing I've been working on this week is getting Christmas cards out. (As my mom and future mother-in-law are well aware, having received dozens of calls and emails requesting various family and friends' addresses as well as spelling of names.) After two trips to Staples for printer ink, three trips to two different post offices, two trips to the photo processing lab, waiting two weeks for the cards we ordered online to arrive, and three separate unsuccessful attempts at ordering photos online, I am happy to say that the cards (and their enclosures!) are IN THE MAIL. If I spelled your name wrong, or got anything else wrong, I'm sorry!! Please tell me so I can get it right next time! Anyway, this is a huge relief for me. There are still about 5 people whose addresses I'm waiting on, but those will hopefully go out soon.

On to the ethical dilemma. When we bought stamps at the post office this week, we bought 8 books of very cute stamps with big hearts on them. I asked for 8 books, and she had to go to a couple of different registers to get enough. I paid for 8. But when we got home and counted them, we had 9! I didn't know what to do. To be honest, I'm not that worried about the post office and their financial stability after giving me eight dollars worth of free stamps. But I really didn't want to get the cashier in trouble. It was really cold out that day, and we had other stuff we were working on. So we didn't take them back. By the next day, I thought it might be too late. Does anybody know if she would get in trouble for missing one book of stamps? When she got them from the other cashiers, they didn't seem to make any notation of it, from what I can remember. Anyway I guess I am past going back to give them back. I guess I'm just trying to figure out how guilty I should feel and what my karmic retribution will be.

If you feel guilty when you receive your card - don't worry, I didn't use all the stamps. I still have two full books and one of those is definitely the "extra" one, so all the cards I've sent out so far have stamps I paid for.

epidurals

I guess I haven't talked about work yet. I do spend more waking hours there than anywhere else so it is only fair to mention it. In anesthesiology, just like in all other residencies and med school, you spend a few weeks at a time working in different departments within the specialty.

For Anes., most of our time is spent in the operating room, but we might be assigned to different types of surgeries for the rotation, for example, neurosurgery, pediatric, heart surgery, etc. We also spend time in the ICU.

Right now, I'm assigned to the Pain service. I spend some time in the clinic seeing patients with chronic pain. Sometimes we change their medications around to optimize their pain control, and sometimes we do injections in their joint (mainly in their back) to help with their pain. And some days on the pain service we are assigned to the inpatients at the hospital that have epidurals, and we are in charge of the epidurals. We can increase the medication if they aren't getting adequate pain relief, decrease the medication if they are too numb, or add another medication if they are having itching or other side effects.

Everyone thinks of epidurals as being for pain relief during labor and delivery, and that is one very important use. If a woman has a c section, they stay in for two days, otherwise they are taken out right after the baby is born. It is fun to see the patients who have had c sections and they are all happy to have their baby. Sometimes i'll see the baby when I'm in their room. That's the neat part. I like saying "Congratulations" to all the new moms.

One thing that I didn't really know before working on this service was how many different types of surgeries use epidurals. They are often put in in the OR before the surgery, and then people sometimes have general anesthesia but sometimes we can use mainly the epidural and they are partially awake throughout the surgery. Then they are left in afterward, and it is very helpful for pain relief. It allows people to get pain medication but not be too groggy, and they are still able to get up and walk around. So in addition to C-sections, they are used for many abdominal surgeries, hip and knee surgeries, and surgeries in the chest like cutting out part of the lung. One of my favorite things about the job is seeing patients that are sitting up, walking around, and chatting happily with their families, even one or two days after a very invasive surgery, and they are very appreciative to the pain service, the epidural, and anesthesiology in general.

Pretty cool!

One thing I like to do is show the catheter tip to the patients when I pull it out. It is just a tiny tiny tube that sits in the back. Actually you can use them in other areas too, to block other nerves to help with post operative pain, but thats a topic for another post! The people are usually surprised about how it is so small.



Now, any of you ladies who are pregnant or wish to become pregnant may not want to see the next picture - it is the needle! It is a lot bigger than the needles we use for IVs and drawing blood.



I had a request for bloody hospital photos, but don't worry, I won't do it. :) I will try to come up with something interesting to write about work sometime soon.

Special thank you to Mabel for bringing me the epidural kit when I was dressed up for pain clinic and couldn't go in the OR area (because I wasn't wearing scrubs).

I love children's books

Look at all these books!



I love children's books. I had so much fun shopping for some wonderful children in our lives today. Between working in a public library and spending much of my working life babysitting (or working as a nanny, which I like to say because it sounds much fancier) I have spent a decent amount of time with children's books. I definitely have many favorites. I love to give books as gifts to kids, and I love reading books with kids! The hard part is that I always figure that the books I love are the same ones everyone loves so the kids probably already have them, but that's why they make gift receipts, so that parents can pick out their own favorites. (Or the latest Martha Stewart magazine, which I would also approve of.) I guess I am just a big nerd (I've always loved to read, just ask my dad, who took me to the bookstore almost every week when I was growing up!) but I can't help it. :) If there is one thing I am looking forward to most about having kids, even more than changing diapers, talking about how precious my kids are, or having somebody to bring me a beer, it is reading to them!

Some of my favorites:

What a booger

For everyone who thinks Lilly is so wonderful... Ok, so she is still wonderful, but she was a little naughty last week. We were keeping her milk bone dog treats in their box near the ground, and there was a sealed plastic box that sat on top of the treat box.



The other day, the top box got knocked off but we didn't really do anything about it. Later that day, we went out for something. (I can't remember what.) When we came home, Chris pointed out that the Milk Bone box was folded open and there was a little cone shaped indentation in the pile of treats inside - almost like a doggie snout shape! We realized that she must have snacked on a bunch of treats while we were gone! Who can blame her - but we were still a bit upset, and definitely started keeping the box of milk bone treats inside another box.

The next day, I happened to be done early with work and the three of us spent the day (from early afternoon on) hanging out in the living room, with Chris working on the computer, me studying on the couch, and Lilly snoozing on the ground. I don't want to go into great detail here, but let me just say that there were some amazingly disgusting smells (with an occasional accompanying sound) emanating from Lilly's area of the room. Later that night, we took her to the dog park, where she played as usual for about a half hour but as we were heading out the gate, she started throwing up. She only did it a few times, in the dog park (it was almost closed, so there were only a couple other people there) and then walked home very slowly. She looked so uncomfortable - but it was hard to feel TOO sorry for her!

Chris spent some time looking up possible toxicity of Milk Bone on the web, but didn't find much. The next day, according to Chris, she left a very large pile on the sidewalk for him to pick up. She has been totally normal ever since. I wonder if she recognizes that she got sick because of the treats? Or maybe she is convinced that she got sick because she couldn't reach the rest of the treats and therefore wasn't able to finish the whole box.

But of course, she is still our baby, and has managed to earn herself a couple of treats since the incident.

Playgrounds did not look like this when I was a kid

Big Lens

I love the telephoto lens. To be honest, I haven't had much opportunity yet but I am enjoying experimenting with it. Here is a pic of Chris I took from across the street (six lanes of traffic!):



What is that rope next to our window?? Is someone trying to scale the wall?

Here's one from the sidewalk downstairs:



I'm still bummed about not being able to use it at the Broncos game.

Christmas card

We got our first Christmas card in the mail today! Leah is so on top of it. (I knew it was coming because my mom told me yesterday that she got her first Christmas card - from Leah.) Mrs. Bowman, you have yourself a merry little christmas too.

Ours are coming soon, I promise!

Wal-Mart

I watched a movie the other night called "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price". It was interesting, it just talked about the many ways that walmart saves money. I have heard about most of it before, but it was depressing to watch. I have never been a big walmart shopper, and now i'm glad not to be.

Some of the highlights:
-walmart states that most of their workers are full time, however, 28 hours is considered full time
-walmart spends hundreds of thousands of dollars to fight organization among their workers, and ostracizes anyone who associates with a person who starts talking about organizing
-they seem to discourage managers from promoting women
-stores are intentionally understaffed
-workers are routinely asked to work overtime without being paid at all for this time (former managers talked about logging onto the payroll computer and adjusting hours so employees were at 40)
This one was news to me:
-some walmarts have security cameras in their parking lots, although they aren't monitored or only rarely. There have been hundreds of crimes that have taken place in walmart parking lots, even during store hours. They found through research that having one guy driving a golf cart around the parking lot reduced crime a LOT (i believe by over 90% but can't remember for sure) but they didn't implement that at their stores. In one instance they did have camera footage of a girl that was kidnapped, later she was killed, and the reason they had that footage was because cameras had been installed in the parking lot as part of the anti-union monitoring campaign at that store.

-wages are very low, often minimum wage, and they do have health insurance available but the employees pay a large portion of it. Many of those on the movie ended up just cancelling it for their children because it was too expensive.

That last one - i don't think it is necessarily unique to walmart, among discount stores. It was really sad to watch the movie, though, and i am definitely much less likely to shop at walmart now. The thing is, i wonder which stores are better? Is Target better? Kmart? Macys? I like shopping at target because it is clean and they have things i like at reasonable prices, but maybe they are just as bad as walmart. I didn't even talk about the poor conditions at the factories that produce items for walmart, and the institutional suppression of the reports of these conditions. Not to mention the environmentally destructive activities. There are other parts that i've forgotten about too. It was just one disgusting tidbit after another. All this was compared to family stores, which are closing all over the country when a walmart opens. I just feel awful about the small businesses that are destroyed by walmart and the other big boxes too. The nice part at the end was about successful campaigns to prevent walmart from opening. I'm sure they have done something like that around here because there is no walmart anywhere near us in manhattan, and i bet they would love to get access to this market. So anyway, to continue my ramblings, i want to make responsible choices about shopping but it is difficult. I prefer shopping at smaller, locally owned businesses, but they seem to be getting harder and harder to find. And i wish i knew which chains had better records with respect to treatment of their employees, responsible membership in their communities, and environmental stewardship. Yes, walmart has good prices, but to me (and i think to many other people) there are a lot of things that are more important than saving a few dollars here and there.

brew session

We brewed again this week! Yesterday, we started the Double Brown. New name is still pending. We also bottled what we thought was the Barack Obama Presidenti-ale. I mentioned before that we thought we may have mixed up the secondary containers, and what we labelled as Tongue Splitta might actually be BOP. Now we have even more reason to believe that we did mix them up, even though we remember putting them in the right place. One thing you can do with brewing is to add hops to the secondary fermentation, and this is called dry hopping. We did this with the tongue splitta, adding hops pellets to the secondary fermentation. When we bottled the beer yesterday, there was stuff floating on the top that looked like dry hop pellets. So it is possible that we dry hopped the wrong beer although at the time when we put the hops in, the presidenti-ale was probably still in primary fermentation. So now I am feeling like we have mis-labelled the beers but hopefully still followed the right instructions, except that the BOP was in secondary for a shorter time than we usually leave it.

if that all makes sense.

We had a blast as always.

Christmas tree wars

There are two christmas tree salesmen right across the street from each other on the corner near our apartment.



I don't know if they sit there and give each other dirty looks, or try to undercut each other - but it seems like it could get a little awkward. We'll buy our tree from one of them, but how do we decide? The trees all look the same - like christmas trees. Maybe we should let lilly sniff out the best one. Where do people possibly put full size christmas trees in their manhattan apartment, anyway? We are getting a small one and put it on one of the end tables, but most of their trees are big, so they must sell a lot of them...

It reminds me of a funny story that chris, curt and katie told me about their trip to ellis island. They waited in a really long line for the ferry that took them to the island. There was a guy who had set up a cart selling pretzels and ice cream (or some sort of snacks) right next to the line. Another guy came and set up his cart right next to the first guy, on the side that was closer to the end of the line, so people would get to his cart first. The first guy yelled at him and moved his cart to the other side of the second guy's cart. Then the second guy moved his cart again so he was further down the line. They just kept yelling at each other. And when a woman went to buy something from one of them, they were so busy yelling at each other that she wasn't able to. So i wonder if we should have a backup plan for buying the christmas tree, in case those guys are too busy yelling at each other across the street... luckily there is another tree "lot" on the next block!

brewing

Did I say weekly homebrew update? I could do it daily. I almost started a whole separate blog about homebrewing. But I'll just keep writing about it here.

I am hoping to write about each and every brew we've done, but I don't know if I would get to them all. I do have to mention my favorite so far, though - Barkin Bourbon Porter.



It is hard to describe the look I was going for on the label - Chris didn't quite get it. I was thinking along the lines of Jack Daniels, like old south. So these were supposed to be photos of the mutts, in old fashioned frames, with what I envision as old school style wallpaper. I don't know how successful it was but I like it.

We bought the Bourbon Barrel Porter kit from Northern Homebrew. The kit included oak cubes that you add to secondary fermentation, to add that oak barrel flavor. It also called for bourbon, and recommended maker's mark, which we used. The result has been delicious. I have to say that so far, I think the darker beers we've brewed have been tastier than the lighter ones. I guess I could say that the beers are like my babies and I love them all equally, but I would totally be lying because the bourbon porter is amazing and definitely my favorite.

One of the hardest things about brewing is being patient while you wait for the beer to be ready. What you're REALLY supposed to do is to check the brew daily while its in fermentation and the specific gravity will tell you when its ready for the next step, whether that's secondary fermentation or bottling. That involves taking some of your brew out every day and testing it. We don't do that. What we do is leave it in primary for approximately a week, secondary for approx. 2 weeks, and then in bottles for at least 3 weeks before tasting it. I have recently learned that this is the 1-2-3 method, who knew that it had such a fancy name. Anyway it has worked for us so far. Some of the instructions say that you can taste a beer as soon as 1-2 weeks after bottling but we've found that the longer we wait, the better it is, so we resist as long as we can.

We did taste the Not From a Cow Cream Ale last week. It was tasty but it does need some more time. It had been bottled for just over 3 weeks. The next one to be ready will be Rudolph's Tasty Treat (label still pending!)

This Blog

Chris has requested that I make an effort to capitalize those words which merit capitalization. So I'll make an attempt to do that.

I am also trying to use keywords, but most of the posts don't seem to fall into any category except maybe random thoughts. Suggestions?

If you want to post a comment, you just need to have a google/gmail account. They are easy to set up. If you need help, just ask your kids. :)

homebrew update

We have started doing one new technique, the full boil. This is a little more in depth than most people would want to hear about, but instead of starting with boiling about 2-3 gallons for the malt/grains, and then adding water after the boil to reach the full 5 gallons, we started a brew with about 4 1/2 gallons (as close as we could get to 5 without spilling over the top of our 5 gallon pot). I've been reading on the brewing forums (yes, I even read the homebrew forums!) that the results with this are far better than with a partial boil. We'll keep you updated! The first attempt was with the coffee brew.

On a sad note - we may not be able to start a new batch for a little while as we are low on bottles. We have all of our big containers full and in order to start the next batch, we'd have to bottle the oldest one so that we can move everything else along. The options for getting bottles are to either clean bottles from commercial brew (not screw top, only the other kind) or to buy them. Northern Brewer sells them for a reasonable price but the cost doubles when you take into account shipping. So we'll try to pick some up next time we are driving somewhere and can stop by a homebrew store. We have obtained most of the bottles we have by cleaning commercial bottles, but we like to take the labels off so that they are clean and we can put on our own labels, which is a PAIN with most bottles. So for the time being, we'll just have to wait until we drink enough of the homebrew that we can reuse those bottles. I think we're about 15 bottles short right now. I have my work cut out for me!