Gardening and Brewing Beer

Submitted by Candie on Sun, 05/15/2011 - 13:43

The weeks have just flown by but now and my wait for spring to arrive is finally over. Our nights have finally warmed up to at least 50 F at night and that combined with some decent day time temperatures will finally warm the soil for planting. I am thankful for that because I have plants and seeds waiting for this years garden. My purple asparagus has finally starting coming up and after a couple 60 F nights it was putting on 5-6 inches of growth a day. I will definitely be posting some asparagus recipes this week as I try to not let it go to waste. Yesterday was suppose to be stormy all day but I was able to find some dry hours in the morning and I was able to plant a line of marigolds between my asparagus and my tomato plants. The marigolds are suppose to be good at repelling bugs like tomato worms and asparagus beetles. I will let you know if I notice a difference this year but I have to admit last year I did not find a single tomato worm. The only thing I did differently last year was I put newspaper down all around my tomatoes to try to keep soil blight at bay but it did not really help with the blight. I was also able to put in my eggplants, onions, carrots, Chinese cabbage, peas and salad lettuce mixes. My corn and beans were put in about two weeks ago and are just now starting to come up. Over the last two weeks we put in 3 blueberry plants and 3 grape plants and immediately fenced them in to protect them from the hoard of rabbits that like to destroy everything I put in the ground. It seems only my flower and herb bed is safe from them because they are right next to the house. I was planning to finish putting in all my plants and various seeds today but it is currently 47 degrees and rainy. So instead I sit here with an extra strong cup of White Chocolate Spiced Chai writing this blog post.

My husband has been busy this week as he starts on a new hobby that he has been researching for quite some time, home beer brewing. We have become beer snobs over that last few years as we and several friends have endeavoured to find better and better quality beers. We have several liquor stores in the area that are willing to cater to our beer interests so we have been sampling limited edition beers and some very high quality crafted beers. We are also extremely lucky to be within driving distance of one of the premier craft brewing companies in the US which is Three Floyd's brewing company in Munster Indiana. They are the the makers of Dark Lord which is a Russian style Imperial stout and is rated in the top 5 best crafted beers. They have a tiny brew pub attached to their brewery and we have made the trip twice now to sample their outstanding brew list. I must say that the beers they brew are head and shoulders better than any other beers I have tasted. Unfortunately tasting so many outstanding beers has made us realize how low quality most beers are and have driven us to want to try our hand at brewing some of our own. Years ago I had bought a Mr Beer kit and made a couple decent beers but this time we decided we had to take it more seriously and try to create some truly great beers. So this week we took a trip to a local brewing supply company and we spent a bit more than we intended but we walked out with a full brewing kit and home kegging kit with an extra keg so that each of us can have a beer on tap as we don’t always see eye to eye when it comes to our tastes in beer. Since beer is mostly science and math I will be leaving most of the brewing to my husband who is a software engineer by trade but I will be helping him document the recipes, variations and the final tasting notes on the brews.
Friday he started his first batch which is an Indian Pale Ale (his current favorite) and had quite and enjoyable time brewing it. His first beer now sits happily fermenting and hopefully in a few weeks I will have a good report as it goes into its second fermentation and then finally into the keg. When his brew leaves the fermentation bucket we will be starting my first beer choice which is a cloned recipe of an imperial stout that goes by the name of Dragon’s Milk. I like very complex beers and this is one that I have greatly enjoyed.

Pictured above was his Kit that he purchased it had all his ingredients and even bottle caps which we won't be using as we have kegs with CO2 to use instead.

Ignore the jumble of spice and herb containers in the this picture of his wort making setup. He borrowed my big pressure canner and my oven thermometer to help with the process.

Here he is steeping his grains which are in that sack hanging from his stirring spoon. The aroma at this point was fabulous.

This picture is after he had added the hops and he was ready to cool it and get it ready for the fermentation bucket. Again I needed smell-o-vision to let you enjoy the aroma.