Rack that beer

With great satisfaction, we racked the English Bitter we made last week to secondary fermentation with dry hopping to increase the aroma. Great satisfaction, because it's our first full mash (i.e. "real-from-grain") beer, and it's not crap. You can sort of see the bag of hops in the lower carboy:

The beer is extremely clear and pretty (thanks to the highly flocculent yeast we used), I vote we make more. And so we will. Tomorrow.

Mash this...

Mort went judging an even bigger homebrew competition last weekend, this one came equipped with a swap-meet and raffle, which scored us some glasses, a shirt and other sundries. Here's Patrick, Mr. Bill and Bill (classic) - probably up to something dodgy. We'll be house/cat-sitting for Patrick & Elena for a chunk of June.

As a result of the swap-meet, Mort was able to (cheaply) pick up equipment that we needed to do a full-mash... So this weekend we put it into action - the top level is hot water, the middle has the grain that has been mashed (in this case, held in water at 68°C for a little over an hour to let the enzymes convert starch into fermentable sugars), the bottom level is the kettle collecting the sweet runoff. This'll be an English bitter.

I also managed to finish the socks I started on the pub-crawl, and have mostly knitted while brewing.

Today is the last day of a 3-day weekend, also my first weekend on emergency duty. The phone hasn't rung at all, which should mean nothing came in for necropsy. But seriously? A long weekend and not a single animal died or was euthanised where someone wanted to find out what happened? I'm going in this afternoon just to check there's not a chiller full of horse waiting for me.

Old news

Apart from work, beer, work, knitting and work, not too much has been going on... The day after the pub crawl (previous post), Mort had his first taste of beer judging, which looked a bit like this:



And also like this, since the competition was at Oregon Garden:


In the meantime, I finished another sleeveless top with that brown tencel (wood pulp cellulose) yarn, please excuse the decapitated torso:



I also used up the leftovers from the chair cover I crocheted a while ago to make a bath mat. Using up the scraps in the order of leftover quantity, it wasn't until the very last round that I noticed I have in fact made a giant, bloodshot eye: