Summer in a glass

It's still not quite local strawberry season in Overcast, but when the first strawberries of the season showed up a few weeks ago in the grocery store, I had to get some for eating and some for booze.  This is probably my favorite of the liqueurs we've done so far, both because it was easiest and because it's retained the flavor of the fruit best.  (We've done blueberry, orange, banana, and fig besides this).  I didn't really measure, just putting enough hulled and halfed strawberries to loosely fill a quart mason jar, with enough vodka to cover.  They sat for about two weeks, turning into the horrible pale alien fruit things you see above.

With just draining, the yield was only about 2 cups/12 ounces, but squeezing the strawberries in a cheesecloth bag brought the yield up by half again to about 3 cups.  Since it was still at this point basically pink vodka, we added a little more than a cup of 1-1 simple syrup and a little lemon to round out the taste and dilute it a little. Verdict:  It's basically a perfect little sip of summer.  I'm thinking there might be strawberry mint spritzer in my future.

Beer and Working from Home

Not a full beer post, but here's some pics from the bottling of our most recent beer.  Both me and J's families are full of medical professionals and engineers, so making beer is basically the only time we get to feel like scientists. The above photo is the post-fermentation measurement of the alcohol content: the floating thing is a hydrometer, which floats higher or lower depending on the density of the liquid.  The higher it floats, the denser the liquid, the higher the remaining sugar content.  Floating lower means more of the sugars have converted to alcohol. 

And here's our bottling set up.  The top jug is emptying into the bottom jug to mix the beer with the priming sugar (what gives the beer its carbonation after it's bottled) in a controlled way, but the priming sugar can be added straight to the first jug if you don't have a lot of glass jugs lying around.  (Which we do).  Mixing your beer with your priming sugar this way lets you get less of your dead yeast in your bottles. (See that pale layer in the jug on the chair?  That's about an inch of dead yeast sludge.  High in B vitamins, but gross tasting and looking).  

So why have I not been posting?  (The beer certainly hasn't needed any supervision).  I've made the transition to summer without making the transition to summer schedule.  This is the first summer in grad school that I haven't had a clear direction to point in: the first summer, I had a finite research project to work on, and the second summer I had exams to prep for.  This summer (and, let's be honest, basically since I finished my Master's exams) I've been at loose ends for a direction to go in.  Writing fellowship apps helped, because although I hated them, they were a direction to go.  This limbo (still haven't heard about where or when we're moving) certainly doesn't help, because I can't buy plane tickets for research trips six months from now if I don't know where we'll be 6 months from now.  That really shouldn't keep me from working on near-term goals, like going through photos from research trips I've already done, but that's so boring compared with planning trips to places I've never been.  

Which is all to say: working at home is hard, and snuggly cats don't help.  Pout.

Sewing and Beer

Not together, unfortunately, since the beer was last night and the sewing is this morning before class.  Although it's the last week of class, I'm sure the prof would mind if the TA showed up tipsy.

The RTW jacket is coming along, but I'm trying to be much more careful in the sewing than usual, which also means going much more slowly than usual.  There's basically a million pieces to this jacket, and almost all of them are interfaced and/or underlined, even the facings, so that part is taking me quite a while.  It's gotten warm enough to keep the windows open, so the cat is helping by keeping things weighted down and not blowing around.

Things for the pot

J and I pitched a British bitter last night, a brown ale type with a lot of floral hops but not too much bitterness. I was going to do a tutorial-type post, but we got rolling and I forgot to take pictures.  We ordered a kit from Northern Brewer, along with some new equipment, which made life much easier.  The kit was about USD45, and came with everything necessary except for steeping bags for the hops (that's the little pile of cheesecloth and kitchen twine on the far right).  This recipe had both dried malt extract (the big white bag), actual grain, and malt syrup (the jug on the right).  The two silver bags are the hops and the inflated blue/black bag in back is the yeast, which we activated in-bag by popping the nutrient capsule the morning before brewing.

Things which need sanitizing

Yes, we sanitize in the bathtub.  We use bleach because it's cheap and easy to get, and doesn't foam up like dish soap.  There are specialty sanitizers you can buy from brewing supply houses, but bleach is at the grocery store and hard to run out of.  

Despite having dried malt extract, malt syrup, and grain, the recipe was actually very easy.  If you can make soup or tea, you can make beer, because the grain steeped at one temperature for 20min, the extract and syrup were mixed in at a higher temp, and the whole thing with hops was boiled for an hour (mostly to pasteurize).  We bought a candy thermometer for this batch, which was much easier to use than the digital meat thermometer we've been trying to use before.  Made life much easier, and was two dollars instead of twenty for the digital thermometer.  Also wonderful: cheesecloth bags which keep the grain and the hops neatly contained and easy to get out.

After everything was boiled up, the pot was chilled down in the sink full of cold water, and then poured into the carboy (big glass jug).  More cold clean water was added to the carboy to bring it to room temperature, and after everything was aerated (sloshed around to bring in oxygen and mix the different density liquids) we siphoned out some liquid to test its density (there's a special, but cheap, tool for this called a hydrometer that makes you look like a scientist), poured in the yeast, and put the beer away to do its thing.  

Sounds easy because it is.  This one will be done fermenting May 14; look for a bottling update then, and it'll be ready to drink May 28.  For today, I'm off to work on the RTW jacket.

Mildly productive

Dinosaurs love homemade beer

My dreaded meeting with Dr. Asiago actually went great--he handed me my prospectus draft and said things looked great, except for the footnotes.  Which, being as my citations and notes are all crazzy, were not complete or very pretty.  So those will get cleaned up, a bibliography attached, and the thing will finally be done.  So the rest of the meeting was spent listening to Dr. Asiago rant about the many problems of the department.  Dr. Asiago, per his usual, complained at about the current first year grad students, the incoming students, the undergrads, other faculty, meetings, book reviews, cable TV about ghost hunting, and other faculty.
Which is not to say that there aren't many problems with the department; I just hope the departmental politics he's mad about won't shut me out of funding or something, since he's butting heads with people who control that kind of thing.  All the more reason to get done with the PhD as soon as possible.

I'm wondering also if I'm going to be Dr. Asiago's only advisee for a very long time.  I'm his first grad student, and it doesn't sound like he's going to take another student for the foreseeable future.  Partly, at least from his end, because of said departmental politics.  I don't know what that means for my networking or having a reputation when I go on the job market.  My other committee members have between a few and lots of students, so I'm not totally high and dry, but it just seems like an odd situation.

My office cleaning reward

The rest of the day was spent gleefully not writing a thing.  J and I went shopping at the used book store, a junk/antique shop, and a fabrics thrift store.  I found some beautiful vintage lace; not sure where the beaded one is going to end up, but there's four yards of it and it's so pretty.  Our beer is bottled and carbonating; we opened a bottle today just to check, and it's getting along pretty well.  There's not much carbonation yet or much head, but the flavor is maturing from what it was in the carboy.  The carbonation should build over the next month, but the lack of head is from a lack of protein and won't change.

I've been fussing over my digital and real life organizational systems since that archives notes workshop, and not getting very far.  I did, however, clean my office back to a useable state, which makes tackling my hard paper files easier to think about. I bought my first two drawer filing cabinet this summer, and I hate to even write this, but I think I need to buy another one.  Maybe a bigger one.  Everything goes in there, and even though it's all filed neatly, it's just about bursting because I've stuffed too much paper in it.

No progress on the digital refiling project.  I've fooled around with Zotero and can't get it to import citations from my library website, which makes it useless for me.  I might go back to RefWorks, or just despair at the thought of putting together a comprehensive bibliography.  One of the ideas presented at the notes workshop was to just keep one central word or spreadsheet file with citations and brief descriptions, and a note about where to find the file the document photo or PDF is in.

I'm playing with the idea of making an html document with local links to my research photos, so that I can search my citations and link to photos directly.  This appeals to me because it would be searchable and could show the photo or PDF with a single click, instead of hunting through files, but changing anything or even throwing it on an external drive would break all the links.  It also has the downside of all the citations would have to be entered by hand.  I have to think about it a little more.  Cleaning the physical office is a lot easier than trying to get my digital house in order.

Delicious booze

Remember these guys, my progress oranges?  They came out of their brandy soak and the verdict on homemade Cointreau is that it is delicious.  As J said when we were sampling rather liberally on Saturday night, it has all the taste of clementines without the weird artificial orange juice flavor that orange liqueurs sometimes have.

Beer!

The malt steeping

This is our first beer, and so far it's going great.  It should be ready to bottle up some time this week.  We did a brown ale with 6.5 lbs of amber malt extract and two lbs of a dark roast malt, and with that and hops and yeast, our total cost was 20 dollars for what will become 50-60 bottles of beer.  The carboys, thermometer, airlocks, hydrometer, bottles, caps, and bottle capper all increase the total cost, of course, but we already had everything and got it for cheap in the first place.  (Or, in the case of the bottles, we've been saving recappable bottles from beer we'd have bought anyway, so we're out nothing on those).

Liquor and Blueberries

J and I are making booze and getting ready to travel for a research trip. Lots and lots of blueberry booze. Left is the blueberry liquer steeping next to our creepy Canadian Mounty full of wild rice, which I keep on our kitchen window sill to remind me of Snowy City and of creepy novelty plastic. Unlike the clemantines in brandy, which are still visible, the blueberries in vodka are PITCH BLACK. There's a little edge of purple when the bottle is turned, but it's so dark you can't even see the berries. Both the blueberries and the clemantines will steep for two weeks, then get strained and decanted with some sugar syrup to cut the bite. And then they will be delicious.

We froze five pounds of blueberries last summer when we got them cheap, with the intention of making mead with them, and they finally lost the competition for freezer space this week. About a pound ended up in vodka. The other four pounds did make it into the mead.

Four pounds of blueberries went in with six pounds of honey and a whole lot of hot water and some yeast, and went into the secondary fermenter yesterday tasting ok but a little too bitter on the back end. The only brewshop in the little city of Overcast has a very limited selection of yeasts, so I used a champagne yeast for this and for the pear cider, and it has a definite champagne taste. I'm not a fan of champagne. (Crazy, I know!) The booming metropolis of Snowy City had one of the best homebrew shops in the country right down the street from my undergrad, and they carried a yeast recommended for ciders and meads. I might have to switch to mail ordering my yeasts; the brewshop here also has a very disappointing selection of malted grain and hops. We also pitched our first beer this week (yay! A post just on that later), and were pretty limited by the selection.

But between the pear cider, the blueberry mead, and the beer, we're going to run out of bottles pretty soon and have a lot of alcohol in the house, even if we give away a lot of it. The pear cider, which was only three gallons, bottled up to thirteen wine bottles. Six of those are going to friends tomorrow and one's already been drank. But still--that leaves six wine bottles. Need more friends. I spent all fall going crazy with all the boxes of beer and wine bottles stacking up in my office, but we might have to start up collection again. I'm contemplating giving a bottle to Dr. Asiago, but I don't know if that would be too awkward.

Progress

Of a sort. I finished Dr. Asiago's book, and I feel horrible saying this, but it was so boring. He does military/political/diplomatic history, and I'm much more interested in social/cultural/diplomatic history. We're interested in many of the same historiographic issues, and of course, the same groups and periods, but very different approaches to them. Not that I have issues with them as scholarly work--there are parts that I'll be re-reading because they say complex things very clearly, but the military/political angle puts me right to sleep.

Also got some writing done. J was off work Tuesday and Thursday (his days off are intermittant and a little random, since he's working retail) and he did some huswifery while I shut myself away in the office to write. Tuesday we got a lot done; we're starting to experiment with making liqueurs, so while J was rolling out forgotten Christmas cookie dough, I put some clemantines and cloves in brandy to sit. Hopefully in 2-3 weeks it'll turn out like homemade Cointreau. Also we drank beer while J made cookies and I wrote fellowship apps and my prospectus; a beer with lunch makes fellowship apps much easier to get to.

I feel like I spend the majority of my time applying for money to do research instead of doing research. They've definitely gotten easier to whip out once I get going, and doing the prospectus has given me some good canned answers to "why this topic? what the historiographic significance?" but they're still so time consuming. They all want slightly different things, and there's so much groundwork before the writing even starts. I just need time away from Overcast Town with no teaching to keep pulling me back here so I can get some research trips in. The library at Snooty U is good about ordering material and getting microfilm, but I hardly have time to keep up with the reading for the class I TA, let alone sit in the library basement for days on end and read microfilm. Especially if I keep getting assigned to teach 20th century courses I have no background or training in. Seriously, why assign an early Americanist to TA courses on 20th century music and politics? I know there's a value in teaching outside the comfort zone, but I barely had 20th century feminism in my comp fields for women's history, and there's not the remotest chance that I'll ever have to teach a 20th century survey.

But I've finally finished J's Christmas socks, so I'm starting a hat for me (pictures later). Yesterday we also finally got our pear cider bottled, after it sat in secondary fermentation for several months. We brewed it in October right after my exams, but never had time to bottle with the holidays, so the upside is that as soon as it's done carbonating, it'll be ready to drink immeadiately. It's definitely smoothed out quite a bit since it was racked. Tomorrow before J goes to work we're going to pitch a blueberry mead (honey wine) and put up a blueberry liqueur. We're just using frozen grocery store blueberries, but I'm excited, and it should be a pretty color.