Brewing, Baking, and OCD

Saturday Brewing

The Amber After Midnight batch, once ready to drink, was a knock-out hit. We agreed that the Chinook flavor wasn't necessarily the best profile, though I got some serious lovers of the profile it built. After some consideration of what our Local Homebrew Store had in stock as far as hops go, we settled on a Sterling for bittering and Fuggle to get an earthy, nutty, and lightly flowery profile. While it's extremely basic, it's also hitting the core hops to get a good grasp on our groundings so we can build up. Plus, they didn't list the rotational hops on their site and it was around 11pm when we were doing this.

With some guidance from my fellow brewers Jason and Ben, we've also been getting a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of using a malt extract. Instead of using an LME Amber, we shifted to doubling the LME Light and the Crystal 40°L both.

I'm thrilled with the outcome of our recipe, not to mention how easy the brew day itself is starting to get. The steps are feeling more routine, less scramble to check what's next and more overall comfort in the brew itself.

On the other hand, we did prove once and for all that I need to stop indoor brewing - the hops aroma filling the house gave me a wicked migraine that knocked me out for about 5 hours solid. Fortunately, sleep cures most migraines, so I was able to bounce back pretty well.

This does, however, mean that I'll be investing in a turkey fryer and propane setup soon, with the hopes of shiftig to a full boil while I'm at it. (Thus far it's been a partial boil, which I worry has been hurting us on the efficiency of our sugar retention.) I've not yet started shopping for it, but I suspect it's going to be a goodly investment, which means it won't be happening this week, at least.

Baking with the Leftovers

After finishing a brew day, one thing has always bothered me: tons of left over grain. It's called "spent grain," mind you, and it turns out you can use it in baking. I knew this from our first brew, so when we did the Irish Red (years ago and out of a kit! gasp!), a friend and I spent the extra half hour to make up a few batches of bread using the spent grain. But you have to use flour, too, and so it feels awfully wasteful only rescuing about a cup of the spent grain for every loaf of bread made.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon a fantastic site called Brooklyn Brew Shop. Specifically, the Spent Grain Chef section is what got my attention; instead of using the wet grain, the author has actually dried and ground the grain into flour and used it as the basis for recipes! I've been excited to give this a try, so today my oven was filled with cookie sheets covered in the spent grain, spread out and running at 170°F for hours on end. It took a few tries to get it mixed up and quit sticking to my utensils, but I think it's finally dried out and ready to be milled down into a flour.

If you'd like to see how it's done, check out the recipe for Spent Grain Flour. I'm particularly looking forward to making the Spent Grain Peanut Butter Cookies.

OCD Exposed

Anyone who knows me can tell you I have a few ticks. Among them is the need to be orderly in certain things (though sadly not my house as a whole!). At the prompting of a few friends, I rediscovered Perler Beads, those little beads we put on pegboards and ironed as kids for no good reason but got a world of joy from.

My friends have purchased and sorted out several buckets of the beads, and in helping them sort, I was suddenly in OCD heaven. After we subsequently made a few 8-bit video game characters for coasters, I was sold; I had to have my own set. So I hit up my favorite place to buy things online and promptly ordered a bin of 11,000 pieces - and as of today, they've been sorted into two boxes, 30 colors in all.

What's awful is that now they're all assembled, I'm finding myself at a loss of what to make. The boards for them are particularly huge, so 30x30 beads comes out to something like 6"x6". While that may seem like a lot, imagine a 30x30 pixel image. Our 8-bit adventures led us to make a relatively small Pokeball and Mudkip (a Pokemon for those of you unfamiliar), but even those are large for coasters.

My original plan was to mock up the eventual design for my bottle cap collection, getting a nice prototype done. In addition, I'd make some beer-themed coasters. Unfortunately, each of these are larger than my 6"x6" pegboard - meaning that while I can do the prototype, I don't think either of them will be functional as designs for coasters. Perhaps I can go the route of wall decorations or something 3D instead?