better? J is home from hospital, complete with his appendix and no plans to have it removed. Whilst I'm not familiar with this concept of appendicitis 'getting better', Mum has reminded me that doctors used to talk about people having a 'grumbling appendix', so maybe we'll call it that. Everybody repeat after me, in your best 'Dr. Nick' voice: "Feengers crossed, everrybodee!"
B is also for beer! J and I started brewing our first batch of beer that isn't made from a kit, a few weeks ago. It's a Belgian Wit (wheat) beer, flavoured with orange and coriander seed, and uses real, actual hops and torrified wheat, as well as the more familiar malt extract. It's a step towards doing full mash, or all grain, brewing, which feels so much more 'real' to me than using tinned extracts. It also means that, once you know what you are doing, you get far more control over the final flavours in your brew.
It also means you have to boil the ingredients for about an hour, depending on the recipe. We have a special mash tun and boiling vessel, which is a plastic tub with a very serious heating element in the base, and a thermostat. You can use this to do the vigorous boil, or the gentler, more refined heating that is required to get the sugars out of the malted barley (or the wheat, in this case). When you add the hops, they float on top of everything else:
But by the time the boil is done, they're significantly less buoyant.
This is really a spring/summer drink, so here's hoping it keeps well! It's almost finished fermenting now; we should be bottling in a week or so...
Maybe they're not sure? A friend of mine had her appendix removed and then they discovered it was actually diverticulitis... Whatever it was, I hope it isn't any more :)
Posted by: Cally | November 04, 2009 at 10:02 PM