The Rocky Mountain Ale

So, I want to get a record of my most recent concoction: The Rocky Mountain Ale/Porter. It is based off of the "Goat Scrotum Ale" in The Complete Joy of Homebrewing. Here is what I used:

5 lbs plain dark malt extract (I think 3 lbs were builk, 2 lbs Breiss)
1 lb crystal malt
.25 lb black patent malt
.25 lb roasted barley
2 oz Cluster hops (60 minutes)
.5 American Fuggle (finishing - 5 or 10 minutes)
1 c. Brown Sugar
1 c. Molasses
2 tsp Gypsum
0 Corn Sugar (the recipe called for 1 lb - I thought it would be alcoholic enough)
3 oz fresh, grated ginger
2 oz dry ginger
2 oz licorice root (dry)
3 large red peppers
1 oz dried juniper berries, crushed
3 oz unsweetened Baker's chocolate
Whitelabs 012 London Ale Yeast

O.G. 1.066
F.G. 1.017
Estimated ABV: 6.43%

The DPA is a very good beer, but so far this one is my favorite. When it's cold it doesn't taste any different from a normal porter. When it warms up a little though, the red pepper and the ginger come through really well. There's a slight tang of dark fruit, with a combination of spice, ginger, and juniper numbness. I like it quite a bit.

Beer Update

Hello everybody! I know that neither of us have updated the blog recently, because we've both been super busy, but I figured I would write something quick while Anna was on the phone.

I'm getting back into the homebrew swing of things, so I figured I would update people with what I've been doing. Also, so I can remember.

1: Elbro Nerkte "My Way" Brown Ale. I have already posted about this one. The flavor has evolved, as I noted previously. Started mild, then the hop character shone through. We're pretty much out, but the remaining ones have lost much of their hop character and now the unfiltered water taste (I was lazy first time through) overpowers the good stuff. Overall, this batch was a success.

2. Walter Williams Patriot Porter. Recipe's on here. It's super heavy/malty, with a prune-ish flavor. I didn't like this at first - too heavy - but other people have responded positively to it, and I think it's improving with age.

3. Maple Syrup Amber. Recipe posted here, I think. It's not a bad beer, but I have to label this one a failure. The overcarbonation ruins things for me: It's a lot like drinking a fizzy soda.

4. Scottish Enlightenment. I don't know what happened to this one. I think what I did was boil and add the priming sugar to the top of the bottling bucket, then bottle from the bottom. A few have been carbonated, but most of them are flat. The upside is that the two failed beers here go well together - the Amber is over, the Scottish is under, and together they make a normal (okay-tasting) beer.

5. North Berlinner-Weiss. I briefly posted about this one: It's a sour beer with around 2.5-3% ABV. I let it sit in the primary for about seven months; I just couldn't get myself to bottle it. That changed when Daniel was here, and a division of labor made things go much quicker. It's carbonating well, but I'm still skeptical about the taste. These have been traditionally mixed with fruit syrup, so we need to get some.

6. Dark IPA (I wrote "DPA" because I couldn't decide between Deschutes Pale Ale and Dark Pale Ale. I have since realized that "Double Penetration Ale" also fits this acronym, so we've been calling it that.) This was a Northern Brewer Kit that I didn't alter at all (their Dark IPA kit...). It is maltier and much less hoppy (and boozier) than I expected (it sits around 7.0% ABV). Lots of corn sugar in there, as well...

I'll update soon with the Goat Scrotum, the recently bottled fun porter...

Domesticity X-ing

Well, it's happened.  I have become domestic. Kinda. I'm on the path anyway. Boredom+tons of free time=a clean home and cooking!

I have now spent untold hours scouring Martha Stewart's and Pioneer Woman's websites looking for recipes to try. And some for this week and some to keep in mind for the future.  In the vein of Big posting homebrew recipes I will start posting the occasional recipe or new found tip here as well!

Last week involved Ellen's (ma new mama-in-law) Blue Cheese Alfredo recipe (delish!!), devils on horseback (dates stuffed with blue cheese and wrapped in bacon) (soso) and chocolate/butterscotch chip cookies (the last batch was perfect!)

This was what my first bunch looked like. SAD!

I cannot eat chocolate chip cookies that look like this. They are just too pitiful looking.  My fix was to add more flour, put the batter in the fridge while a batch was cooking, form them to be as tall as possible with the dough being used, and add a few extra chocolate chips to the top before sticking the pan into the oven.  Now I don't have any pictures of the last/tastiest because I ATE THEM ALL (okay, Big helped too). This picture is from a better but not best middle batch:

The plans for this week include Pioneer Woman's Beef Stew with Beer and Paprika and her Baked Fudge! Mmmm.

Invitations and Dresses and Pictures, Oh My

Well, the timing is a little off, but I have pictures and they need to be posted!  So here are pics from the wedding invitation stuffing party-like fun times with Erin and Lindsay and lots of red wine!

 

 The other pre-wedding picture-taking extravagana was the somewhat epic, mostly really long and exhausting wedding dress hunt. The search for "the dress" consisted of hours and hours of online searching, somewhere between 5 and 7 store visits, lots of help from my mom and friends and an eventual happy ending that didn't include "the feeling" but did include satisfaction and good feelings. 

Here's a ridiculous amount of pictures to give you a feeling of how it all went down, and also to show off many of the dresses I didn't get.

There were SO. MANY. DRESSES.

Dress shopping was intense and this was pretty much how it felt.

This was almost the dress.

Could've been. Did have doo dad's afterall.

The skirt was so poofy!

 

Trying on dresses starts as fun and ends in yawns.
Sadly, this was only about halfway through the first  trip.

We tried to keep our spirits up though!

My Mommy found a pretty dress too!

We whipped out our hipster poses.

The matchy matchyness was totally coincidental and lead to adding another color to the navy and silver scheme.

This was the first dress I tried on. I totally fell in love with it at the time, but in the end it wasn't the one.

At my mom's request I tried on this SUPER poofy dress AND the crazy long cathedral veil. She cried.

I was also very close to getting this one at one point.

It was decided that this was the most flattering and also least me-like dress tried on.

I also this one on like 4 times and almost got it.

In the end, this is the one I went with. Maybe not the best picture of the dress, but I still rather like it  ;)

Honeymoon Highlights!

First blog post of married life! Woohoo! After a whirlwind of family shindigs, friend gatherings, moving mayhem and wedding celebrations Big and I were more than ready for some honeymoon r&r. The main part of our trip was CRUISIN in the western Caribbean but we also spent a couple of days before hand in SoBe (South Beach) Miami.  

Much to Big's dismay, we spent a couple hours of his birthday evening (also the day after the wedding) looking for our Miami hotel.  We crammed in as much research as possible into a short amount of time and decided to go with a hotel that had a great price, very mixed reviews and seemed like a great location - The Hotel Shelley . 

We were relieved and excited when the hotel's location was indeed amazing and the hotel itself was charming and our room (which they upgraded for free!) was perfect.

Our hotel was super close to the shopping district as well as the beach. They were experiencing horribly "cold" weather there - 60-65 degrees. It may have been cold to them, but it felt downright balmy to us.  

This shirt was EVERYWHERE and fairly hilarious I thought.

It was Art Deco Weekend, so there were neat booths and street performers all along Ocean Drive.  We watched Kate and her Amazingly Dangerous and Amazing Show.  She was pretty talented and very funny.

After a couple of days in SoBe we were ready and excited for our cruise.  It was fun, relaxing and an overall recommended experience.  We went on Carnival and had as much fun on the ship as off. Vegas-like shows, comedy acts at the Punchliner Comedy Club, a casino, live music everywhere, a giant outdoor movie screen, a romantic balcony, 24hr room service and food food, food, food. One fun little touch, was that they left towel animals in our room every night along with the FunTimes listing of everything going on the next day.

We had a truly wonderful time and went on very neat excursions. We saw the Mayan ruins at Tulum, checked out the port area on Grand Cayman and walked up the Dunns River Falls 600' waterfall in Ocho Rios, Jamaica.  Ryan documented quite a bit of our adventure on our new Flip video camera with the intention of sharing it here.  We'll try to post it soon!

keys

Today was a hard day. It was my last day at a job I've been at and loved for 5 years. The day came and went rather uneventfully. I helped a few people, tied up loose ends, finished deleting old files, cleared off my shelves. My going away party was a month ago, and it kind of felt like any other day, or maybe like the day before you go on vacation. I teared up once when I said goodbye to one of my sweetest coworkers but other than that, I was pretty emotionally detached. Nothing really hit me until later when I looked at my key chain and realized it was almost empty. No more keys for work. No more keys to my apartment. My life here in Boise is being slowly erased...

The upside to the day, was that my G-ma came into town! We had dinner with her, my parents and my brother. It was so nice.

Everything these days is bittersweet.

Sharing is Hard

This year marked our first set of shared holidays. For Thanksgiving, we did an early meal with Ryan's family and a late meal with mine. Aside from being ridiculously full, I think it turned out really well. The inconvenience for our families was relatively low and we each got to share and partake in the each other's family traditions. Christmas was a little more difficult.

Both of our families do a Christmas Eve get together but consider Christmas Day to be the Big Deal. This year, we spent Christmas Eve with Big's fam and Christmas Day with mine. Lesson learned: sharing is hard. Neither of our families were fully happy with this arrangement and neither were Big and I. Christmas is such an important holiday in both of our families, and there are so many traditions and expectations surrounding it that the change was kinda hard to take.  Ryan and his family made the big sacrifice this year by being the first to forgo spending the Day together. Our intention is to swap next year, and do Christmas Eve with my family and Christmas day with his. I'm hoping this will be a little easier next year, but I have my doubts. It makes me wonder what it will be like when Ryan and I start making our own traditions.

Any tips or advice on how to navigate these choppy waters? Do you or have you ever had to deal with sharing holidays? How did/do you handle it?