Bottling

Last Sunday was the big day where we “opened our present”. We went to our fermentation bucket which contained the wort that had been patiently waiting for two weeks while the yeast digested the sugar, while increasing the alcohol content. This is a good thing! During this process, carbon dioxide is expelled inside the sealed bucket, and escapes through an air release at the top of the bucket. You know when the beer is ready to bottle when there is a lack of carbon dioxide produced.

When we determined that it was time to bottle, we raised the fermentation bucket onto the countertop, where we would siphon the beer to a bottling bucket which was placed on the ground. This was a tricky process! During the siphoning, the undesirable material of the wort (spent yeast, hops, barley, etc) is filtered out. Without this step, you probably wouldn’t enjoy your beer as much!

We did sample the beer, and it was GREAT! We were quite happy with our sample, although there was an absence of carbonation, as well as a need for priming sugar to add a bit more sweet flavor. All in all, we were excited!

When the beer was in the bottling bucket, we place it on the countertop. The bottling bucket has a spicket located near the bottom of the bucket on the outside, where you can open the spicket and fill the bottles you are using to store your beer. Our bottles were a collection of 12 oz, 22 oz, and even 30 oz bottles. We purchased the 30 oz bottles from Home Goods for about $2.50 each. These bottles are great because they feature the old style swing-top cap, which makes the beer Grolsch easily identifiable.

 

These bottles also help make sure that the caps don’t pop off when carbonation occasionally increases.  It also eliminates the step of having to “cap” each bottle, and allows you to pour out a portion of the beer, yet put the cap back on with an airtight seal.

Our next step depends on our wonderful wives, as they will be creating and printing the labels for our beer, which by the way, is in the process of being named! Any suggestions!?

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Wall Mural

My first big project inside our new house was to bring more interest to our great room. It was a sea of flat color:

I considered painting it a fun color, but I couldn't come up with a color that would complement our furnishings and have the impact I was wanting without being overwhelming. Then I came across an article on wall murals in This Old House magazine that I picked up at Home Depot. Here are the steps to create your own wall mural:

1. Sketch out your design to scale on grid paper. {Download my template here}

2. Snap chalk lines on the wall that match the grid on your sketch. Mine were every 22 inches. Hint: Cover your floors prior to snapping the chalk lines, as the chalk has the potential to be VERY messy!

3. Sketch your design on the wall with sidewalk chalk. Work one block at a time from your pattern.

4. Paint the lines over your chalk sketch using a small round artist's brush.

5. Fill in your design with a second color. Use a roller on the larger areas and a 2-3" angled brush for the smaller areas.

Touch up any spots that need it, and you're finished!

 

We're absolutely thrilled with how our wall mural turned out, it adds a wonderful touch of whimsy and surprise to our great room. It's such a unique focal point and has really set the tone for the rest of our house. For less than $80 and about 15 hours of time, it certainly makes a huge impact!

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Brew Time!

Here's the follow-up to our eventful night of our first attempt at brewing our own beer!

Again, this first batch is a recipe for a beer that is identical to Newcastle Brown Ale. We began by opening up our boxed kit that contained all needed items for brewing this specialty batch. The contents weren’t all that complicated, and they were clearly labeled.

The hardest part of the entire process was getting a glass smooth top range to boil three gallons of water. About 40 minutes later, we were ready to boil in order to get our precious wort!

The wort is basically the beer just before it is ready to be stored while it ferments for two weeks. The entire process of preparing the wort, including boiling, adding the ingredients, and placing the wort into location for fermentation took about three hours.

Not too bad for three guys in the kitchen!

We estimate that after you learn the process, this could be reduced to about an hour and a half.

Once the wort was prepped for fermentation, we placed it in the utility sink in the laundry room, where it will stay for 8-14 days. The completion of fermentation is monitored by an air release at the top of the fermentation bucket. When there aren’t any more bubbles, the beer is ready to be bottled. This process will be our next posting!

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Bountiful Baskets

Anyone who tries to eat healthy knows the frustration of having to pay more for fresh, good-for-you food. Therefore, I'm always super excited when I find ways to cut costs and still eat healthy. Enter Bountiful Baskets. Phil and I joined the co-op last fall and have been loving it ever since. Here's how it works:

1. Go to BountifulBaskets.org between noon on Tuesday and 10PM on Wednesday.

2. Create and account, return to the homepage, and select your state (currently serving Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Utah, Washington and Wyoming).

3. Select your pick-up location. These are usually in public parks.

4. Add a basket to your cart for $15.00. Each basket contains about 50% fruit and 50% vegetables. You won't know what you're getting till you pick it up, so you have to be pretty open. But all produce is high quality, fresh, in-season, and typically from local farmers.

5. Select any additional items you would like to add to your basket. These vary every week, but can include case fruit, bread, Italian pack, Mexican pack, tortillas, olive oil, granola, cookies, etc. All fresh with no preservatives. Prices vary, typically between $6 and $10.

6. Check out and pay for your basket by credit or debit card. $1.50 service charge will be added to each order. $3.00 will be added to your first order to join the co-op.

7. Pick up your basket at your selected location on Saturday morning. Be sure to check your specific pick-up time and arrive within 20 minutes of that time. All produce not picked up within the 20 minute window is donated to a local firehouse. Bring a laundry basket or bags to carry your produce home, as no containers are provided.

Here is sample of what we received in our basket the first week:

My friend Steph priced out all items at the grocery store last week and determined our $15 basket contained $35 of produce! Depending on each weeks offerings, I would estimate the baskets to be worth anywhere from $30 to $50. Now that's some real savings for eating healthy!

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Sneek Peak

Sorry for the lack of blog posts this week. We've been busy with our latest project. Here's a little sneak peek...

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Brew Shopping

After discussing with Greg, we have our three man team ready to start the hobby of home brewing! We had done some preliminary homework, reviewing various blogs and instructional website, but it was no had substitute for someone showing us what we needed, and more importantly, what amount of investment were where looking at having to spend.

Fortunately, Evan stated that he obtained this exact education from a vibrant gentleman, Norm, who was a retired Methodist Pastor. It was safe to say that we felt Norm would be our guy too! We contacted Evan, who happened to have the business card for What Ale’s Ya, one of the few home brewing supply shops in the Valley. This is where he obtained his own starter kit.

Before we spent a good amount of time going to hear a detailed presentation form Norm, we did enough research to find an estimation of what our new hobby might cost. Evan had explained that each “batch” of beer made about 50 beers. He stated that outside of the costs to buy the equipment, each “batch” costs about $40. Simple math told us that each beer was under a buck!

So what about the materials needed to make even one batch?  We discovered that a simple starter kit, one that contains all needed materials for brew making, retails for about $150. Not too bad when split between three guys! And that included enough for a first batch of brewing.

We determined that a batch is usually about 5 gallons. Mathematically worked out, that is 128 oz per gallon, so about 640 total ounces. Divided by 12 ounces per beer, that’s 53 beers.

We set out to meet with Norm on a Saturday morning. Upon arrival, we met a passionate silver haired man who had a personality larger than his smile. Norm’s love for people no doubt comes from years of pastoral service. He was immediate in qualifying how and what we needed, and jumped into a detailed description of home brewing, lacking no humor in delivering his information. His passion for home brewing was absolutely fantastic.

Following Norm’s details, ranging from the equipment involved all the way to the difference between Ale’s and Lager’s (which, by the way, ALL beers fall into ONLY one of these two categories), we were finally led to the beer starter kit with a deeper understanding of the steps involved in the process of brewing beer at home.

We have made an appointment to attempt our first batch this Friday. As a group, we choose “English Brown Ale”, which is simply a knock of Newcastle. You’ll see the kit was about $35 dollars. The label marks an “O.G.” rating of 1.045 – 1.049. “O.G.” is actually Original Gravity. To better understand O.G. and it’s importance, go here: http://recipes.howstuffworks.com/question532.htm 

Basically, the O.G. relates to the overall alcohol content when the beer is brewed. The English Brown Ale will be about 4% alcohol when brewed. The kits that we were able to choose from were all made by www.brewersbestkits.com, and they seem to be the popular option for home brewing, each averaging between $30 – 40 dollars and producing 5 gallons of beer each.

So, I will leave you until my next post, where we will review our attempts at completing the first steps of the brewing process! CHEERS!

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Sky High Energy

Another website I designed went live last week. This time for Sky High Energy, specializing in solar electric power systems for residential, commercial and community applications, with offices in Arizona and New Jersey. Check it out here.

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Stuffed Peppers

A few weeks ago, Phil and I cooked dinner with some of our good friends. We decided to make stuffed peppers. If you've ever been to our house for dinner, you know that we put peppers in pretty much EVERY dish we make, but I surprisingly had never had a stuffed pepper. Luckily, our friend Karen had a great recipe she shared with us. We have made them a few times since then and have altered the original recipe a bit to our liking.  I have a feeling this is going to become a popular dish at the Ellerbroek household!

 

First, a little pepper education: All peppers grow on the same vine. The longer they're on the vine, the sweeter they are, which is also what gives them their different colors.  The green ones are most bitter, yellow is mild in flavor, orange is in the middle and red is very sweet.

4 Peppers

1 lb. Ground Turkey (or Ground Beef or Bison)

Breakfast Sausage (optional)

Onion

Garlic

Carrots

Mushrooms

Additional Pepper of Different Color

Seasoning - Salt, Pepper, Oregano, Garlic Salt, etc.

1 cup Brown Rice

8 oz. Tomato Sauce

1 Egg

1 cup Ricotta Cheese

1/2 cup Cottage Cheese

Mozzarella Cheese

 

Preheat oven to 350.

 

Brown the ground turkey. If you choose to, brown two breakfast sausage rounds and mix in with the meat.  

Chop the tops off of the peppers and gut them. Rinse out so the seeds and membrane are gone. Replace tops. Wrap peppers in aluminum foil and place in a baking pan. Place in oven for 15 minutes. Set aside.

 

In a skillet saute onions, garlic, diced carrots, mushrooms, and pepper in butter. Add meat mixture. Season with salt/pepper/oregeno/garlic salt.  

Cook brown rice.

Once the rice is done, mix in a bowl with tomato sauce, egg, ricotta cheese and cottage cheese. Add cooked meat to this mixture and stir up.

 

Stuff peppers with your meat mixture and replace tops. Wrap in aluminum foil and place in baking pan standing up. Bake for 15 minutes.

 

Remove from oven. If you desire, remove pepper top, add a slice of fresh mozzarella cheese on top of the meat mixture. Place in oven with pepper tops and broil for 5 minutes.

 

Remove from oven and top the peppers with the pepper tops to make them look pretty :)

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What’s Brewing?

In attempts to contribute to my wonderful wife Laura’s blog, I wanted to find something to write about that nearly every guy would be interested in reading. And so, you can understand why I chose beer.

But not just writing about beer, but rather the process of home brewing beer. The concept came about during a dinner party we were attending. Midway through the party, with the wine wearing thin, our host Evan invited a few of the guys to try his home brewed creamy dark Stout beer. As has passed around the brown bottles, we all commented on how cool the custom bottle labels and caps looked.

We were almost hooked…..

“How does it taste?” I asked. That question was quickly answered as Evan popped the top of a 22 oz bottle. The smooth pour of the beer was an invitation in and of itself. Lifting the glass for a drink, I inhaled the smell of the natural, homemade beer. I made a mental note of how distinguished the aroma was, which surprised me. The taste did not disappoint.

Evan smiled and offered to show us his inexpensive home brewing starter kit which has was sharing with his friend. He shared with us that the average cost of each beer was less than a dollar. Ok, so maybe now we were hooked.

My tasting wingman, Alan, was more excited than when he talks about sports, so I knew he was digging this relatively unknown concept of home brewing. He had a large grin on his face, and kept saying “This is REALLY good!!!!”. When he ended then night suggesting that we try our own hand at making beer, I thought to myself that it would be a fun thing to do. Alan suggested that a mutual friend, Greg, would also be interested, and that we might be able to share the costs between the three of us.

And here I write today! I will be looking to make additional posts as we step into this new hobby. I hope you will read!

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Pieces

After reading this article about Lee's new condo in Atlanta, I checked out her home décor bo­­utique, Pieces Inc. I am in LOVE! She has some absolutely gorgeous vintage furniture and chic accessories. Here are some of my favorites:

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