Captain Video's Mountain Retreat

Finally gettin'round'ta bottling up our (hard) cider!

First step: Blend!  In the background of the photo above, the gallon bottle on the left is fermented-out, bone-dry, apple wine from the apples in our yard - picked, pressed, and fermented in the fall of 2008 (seriously, we picked all the slugs out, I promise!).  On the right is a jug of regular (sweet) cider.  The apple-wine has absolutely no sugar left in it -- not super pleasant on it's own, but it's warm, clean, and has a nice aroma.

So  GF and I mixed up different blends, seeing what tastes good (3 parts hard to 1 part sweet is what we've picked -- I'd estimate that as coming in at about 7.5% ABV at that rate -- just a guess), and bottling up a sample to see if it gets overcarbonated or explodes during bottle conditioning.  If it does, I'll kill off the viable yeast in the hard cider, blend, and then bottle with a primer instead.

First impressions:  Surprisingly good.  The blend we picked has a nice sharpness to it.  I'm totally not minding drinking this sans carbonation.  At this point the retro-taste is where you get the most apple flavor, drawing air through it brings out the alcohol, and the tartness lingers in the aftertaste.  This will be nice if  it carbonates well -- even if it dries out a bit more in the bottle.

Also brewing up an ESB (English style English Special Bitter, not Northwestern style Redhook ESB).  The garage smells awesome :)



I kegged up an previous batch of the same earlier -- which means I got the first taste that's indicative of where this will end up.  I love the hopping on this, and it's hitting the mark with the Maris Otter rather than American 2-row (those are types of barley, for my non-brewer friends).

The novelty of this batch?  I had to leave for an appointment mid-day today, so I had to interrupt the brew.  I sparged the wort to the brew kettle, pasteurized it, and then turned off the heat and left it covered for a few hours.  This created some early sedimentation of some kind in the brew kettle -- I had large flakey things floating around all through the boil -- the beer looked clearer than normal too, so we'll see what happens.  The one I kegged today was pretty cloudy (I don't mind cloudy beers - Manny's, Mac & Jacks, etc.), but it's the same formula, so we'll see if there's any difference.

mmmmm..... beer.

PS -- BREWER QUESTION:  I can sparge quickly without getting stuck, the beer is good, and the numbers are saying my efficiency is in the 75% range (simple infusion mash) -- I could slow the sparge down to be more 'in-spec' with the recipes out there, but do I need to? And if I don't, what am I potentially messing up chemically?  feel free to answer here or catch me on twitter @cptvideo -- thanks

It rains here in the Northwest, and when it rains you get mushrooms. I'm not a mushroom hunter and while I'd like to learn more about mycology and mushroom info, I'm a total noob. I found these in the backyard about a month ago -- there was probably a hundred different species of mush out there, and I just grabbed a few of the really big ones to see if I could figure out what they were.

This one's the first I found, right outside the door -- a ton of them. I wasn't able to figure out what it was, so I'm not even going to guess here.

The big umbrella shaped mushroom and the spherical topped one are the same type -- just different ages. This was big, about the size of my hand. It was a gilled mushroom that dropped a huge amount of white spores.

This second one is a Bolete of some kind -- I'm guessing it might be a Zeller's Bolete?

I had no idea what a "Bolete" was, and didn't even know that mushroom's can have pores instead of gills. This thing was really heavy and solid feeling and I'm thinking I'd like to get some help to confirm an ID for it -- in case it's a good edible. I did take a spore print from it and the spores were a dark olive green/brown color.

It's not as slimy as it looks in the photo - it was raining out when I picked it. The color darkened and took on a more matte finish as it dried off.

This was another Bolete -- I think it falls into a group that's pretty widely knows as a "Slippery Jack."

I grabbed it because it was so freakish. This one is way more slimy than it looks in the photo. The slime was really viscus and reminded me of using methylcellulose to do stuff like alien drool.

I didn't take a lot of notes -- I took a lot of pictures -- but I was working out of an old, and pretty difficult to use mushroom book, so I was just messing around. I've gotten newer (and way better) books on the topic, and I've found a local mycological club, so I'm hoping I can start to grok some of this strange stuff that grows so profusely here.

When I lived in Minnesota I picked up a lot of local knowledge about wild edibles -- not really much about mushrooms other than puffballs -- but definitely a lot of different plant types. Things like, where and when to find them, how to prepare them, etc. The Pacific Northwest seems completely different, and the micro-climates here seem to really complicate the "knowing where and when to find things" issue.

So, a question... If you grow up here, did your older siblings make you eat a slug?