Saturday, October 2, 2010

The fruits of brewing

Our beer is done, bottled and on shelves. It went down well at the Septembeerfest, especially since it was a scorcher of a day.




The Weasel visited us for the week, which was extremely awesome and laden with food. We indulged rampant yarn fanaticism, and now I've made a sock machine (manually operated).


In completely unrelated news, here's some really bad viral pneumonia from a dog with distemper. Check out those massive syncytial cells & inclusion bodies! Phwoar!


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Sunday, August 29, 2010

Ninkasi brew day

The big day finally came a couple of weeks ago (yeah, I'm really slack about getting blog posts up). We headed down to Eugene to descend on the Ninkasi brewery.



They we well-prepared for us and had ordered in all the ingredients we needed to make our Hefeweizen. The first step was to load the phenomenal amount of grain into the hopper for milling, a sack at a time. After that, everything was moved about mechanically (thank goodness).



The guys at the brewery were great, extremely friendly and didn't seem to mind that we brought along about of dozen other members of the local homebrewers club.



We spent a lot of the day peering down at various stages of the process. Here, the mash is about to begin.



After mashing, sparging, boiling, whirlpooling and cooling, the beer ended up in this fermentation tank:


We made about 30 barrels that day, if things go well Ninkasi plans to make another 60 barrels. That's more than 10,000L of beer. Because "The Weasel Ate My Venison" was too long for the label, and another local brewery already has a German-style wheat beer called "The Weasel", we settled up on a made-up word for a name - "Weizelwizen". It should be released in a couple of weeks.
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Friday, July 9, 2010

Yay for visitors

We had Simon & Gillian staying with us for the past week, which was awesome fun and an excuse to do a few things we don't normally do, and some things we do all the time...

We visited Samson at OMSI, and go to see some really old bone pathology. Extremely impressive, and they even have a Thagomizer on display (with correct Gary Larsen reference).


Of course, we had to make some beer - here's Mort selecting malt:

We went to Newport and bought fresh Dungeness crabs from a guy on the dock:

And Gillian taught us how to make mozzarella, followed by ricotta with the whey.




We also made it to a couple of nice pubs for lunch and beer. When going to a new brewpub here (i.e. where they brew their own beer on site, and it's pretty much the only place you can get a particular beer), it's a good idea to get a "Taster" of a variety of beers:


We had a great time and got thoroughly homesick for the rest of the Kiwis, our cat and our stuff. Luckily, Mort's parents are shouting us a trip home for Christmas!
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Saturday, June 12, 2010

Virginia Beach

I'm currently staying at Virginia Beach for the AFIP courses in descriptive pathology and pathology of lab animals. It's toasty warm, although I'm inside most of the time. On the trip here I had a stopover in Philadelphia, so decided to be sporting and try an iconic local dish, the "Philly cheesesteak". There are two possible interpretations for this dish: a) It's a really bad idea to try iconic dishes with a bad head-cold; or b) Philly cheesesteak tastes like and has the texture of snot.

Anyway, here's the quietly regimented beach:



All the little shelters are courtesy of the myriad hotels on the oceanfront:


And there's Neptune, Guardian of the Bicycles (well, someone has to do it).


I'm staying in a little studio/motel thing, with the most compact kitchenette in the world - cupboards, stove, sink, draining board, oven, warmer and fridge/freezer.

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Sunday, May 16, 2010

We win at beer!

We did far better than expected in the homebrew competition... We ended up taking best of category for a Hefeweizen in the German Wheat and Rye group, best of category for a Brown Porter in the Porter group, and best of show for the Hefeweizen. Below are the ribbons to prove it:





So what this means is that the Ninkasi Brewing Company, with our input, will be making 60 barrels (about 6600L) of The Weasel Ate My Venison!, and some will be sold commercially as a seasonal brew in Oregon and Washington. It will also be the official beer of Septembeerfest this year, and it is possible that the Weasel herself will be able make it to the festival.

Sweet.
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Monday, April 12, 2010

Four-letter words

Sometimes a four-letter word is so offensive it has to be made into a five-letter word. This quality graffiti was added to my trip to work over the weekend:




More four-letter words are "knit" and "vest" - as in my new favourite item of clothing for the slightly warmer but still chilly Spring weather:



This is a pattern from the book Kate gave me for Christmas.


"Tim Tam" is not a four-letter word, but one of the local Aussies discovered them at the local supermarket. The packaging may have changed, but the bikkies are the same...

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Sunday, April 11, 2010

One sock pattern to rule them all

I'm finally getting around to posting my pet mega-geek sock pattern spreadsheet up on the webs - I call it "Obsession for socks", it can be downloaded here. I've been using this foundation pattern for a while now to construct toe-up socks on the fly without making a gauge swatch. I usually knit both socks at the same time so I don't have to make notes for the second sock.







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Monday, March 15, 2010

Random food

We had friends (probably soon to be flatmates) around for dinner last night. Among other things, we made paneer, which turned out to be stupidly easy.



Not so long ago, Mort also played with making spring rolls, extremely delicious and vegan to that Lindsey can eat them. My favourite thing, however, is the apron.


For me, there was a box of fun that's rapidly becoming other things:

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Sunday, February 7, 2010

My lobster-claws

In return for taking care of Johanna's cat, Minnie (and not taking her to "work" with me), Johanna bought me some awesome lobster-claw cycling gloves. They've got padding on the palm, reflective stripes on the back, and dozens of tiny bicycles to make sure everyone knows they're for people who want mittens but also want to be able to change gears, rather than for people who want to dress like a cow and freak out oncoming traffic. The gloves I had with separate fingers weren't stopping my hands swelling up and turning purple with the wind-chill I get cycling down the hill when it's below freezing.




Minnie, despite going into acute (and briefly anuric) renal failure right before Xmas, is now off fluids, off meds, concentrating urine and has a normal level of blood urea nitrogen = rock on, kitty!

In a completely unrelated area, I may just have figured out the fastest and laziest way of ripping out wool for recycling. Grandmum would have approved.



I finally finished the socks for Mort with a DNA-cable up the front - I'm pretty pleased with them.


And sometimes Mort has to disassemble the oven door. The upside is that the handle no longer wobbles.

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Monday, January 25, 2010

Three carboys full

Real Christmas trees are the done thing here, which makes sense since we're in one of the states that grows them for everyone else. On the first of January, however, they're hurled out onto the street to await pickup by the Christmas-tree Man:



We briefly extracted Steve from his exciting world trip for a hiatus in our little slice of Palmy, and forced him to make beer in the garage:



And now, smugly, we have three carboys full of beer that has pretty good prospects. Left to right, it's a Brown Ale (Steve's one), Dry Stout (like Guinness), and Brown Porter (yesterday's effort). No, not all of our finished homebrew is in shot.

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