Choring

[degringolade]

 

Saturday. 

Brewing beer and charging batteries with a baby solar panel.

Beer first:  

One of the fabulous parts about living in Riotville is they still have great breweries here that try to do different things.  I am getting oddly partial to fruited sour beers.  Today will be my first attempt.

Start out with 2.7 pounds of extra light malt extract.  This will be QS'ed into about 2 gallons and brought to a boil.  I also threw in about half a cup of pureed maraschino cherries at this point (I was cleaning out the fridge).  I always use a low setting for the burner medium low on a electric range is dandy.  Then about 2 cups of orange juice concentrate and a quart of raspberry puree.  Brought it up to a boil and then added about an ounce of dark crystal malt and 10 grams of cascade hops.

Boil for an hour.  Take off burner and cool overnight.

Sunday morning: 

Yesterday was a scorcher.  102 anywhere is on the hot side.  I sweat like a pig but my knees fell pretty good.  So it is a wash.  Managed to sleep reasonably well last night.  When I woke up this morning, the first thing that I did was to throw open all the windows and start blowing in cool air (at 7:32 the outside temp is 67) with my two fans.  I will blow cool air in as long as the outside temp is less than the inside temp.  When outside/inside equilibrium is hit around 09:00, windows get shut and drapes closed to keep the cool inside.  Works OK and electricity use is pretty dang low.  

Food costs more in hot weather.  Last night was carry out, this morning will be breakfast at the corner greasy spoon.  When the laundry is done, I'll head down there for some chow. great fruity sour beer 

While the laundry is in the dryer, that will give me an hour to transfer the wort into the fermenter for the "fruity sour beer experiment"