I hung out with Shana all day on Sunday.
I hope a post will follow.
For now a preview in the form of a couple of portraits that, whether she intended to or not, Shana took of the two of us.

I'm a bit of a hoarder. Not like the little old ladies that end up with only a narrow path in their houses to walk in between the floor-to-ceiling stacks of newspapers and magazines. But I do like to have extras of everything. That extends to my mead as well. I don't think I've ever opened the last bottle of any batch I've ever made. A very few of you will remember a batch that I brought "camping" several years ago that was actually sparkling like champagne. I'm pretty sure that despite how amazing it was I still have one more 12 oz bottle of that around here somewhere.

Anyway, I've decided that if I'm going to keep making this stuff for fun I'm going to have to start drinking some of it (and/or giving some of it away). This week I opened and drank two small (12oz) bottles.

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The first one was from my very first effort at cranberry. I started two 1-gallon batches on January 14th, 2001. The color seems to fade form the melomels over time so this one doesn't look red anymore.

It did however, have amazing clarity. It should. It had been in the bottle since April 29, 2001; almost seven and a half years. It was not as sweet as the things I have been making lately and it reminded me that I need to try again to make something with less sweetness and more complexity. The fruit and the tannin I added had made it taste more like a red wine with a much greater depth of character than I have had of late.
Lesley didn't love it as much as I did. Fine. More for me.
(There should be a few more small bottles in the closet.)

---

Tonight I opened a bottle that was older still.
When I first tried making mead I started two batches at the same time. One was a chemical recipe to which I added some malic acid and tartaric acid (my standard method now) and the other got the zest of a lemon and a tablespoon of brewed tea. This "natural" batch tasted HORRIBLE. It was harsh like gasoline with no sweetness, no fruitiness, in fact nothing to endear it to one's taste buds. I kept it anyway since the expert say that the natural recipe will need time to age and mature. The batch was started September 17, 2000. It was bottled December 18, 2000, 7 and 2/3 years ago.

As you can see it gets full marks for color and clarity. Since my early batches had only 2.5 lbs of honey per gallon this had little to no sweetness at all. The Cranberry batch (R II) mentioned above had the same amount of starting honey, but it also had the sugars extracted from one pound of cranberries.

This bottle (N4) no longer had the harshness of gasoline and ended up being pretty drinkable; by me. Lesley wasn't interested at all. Maybe I only liked it because I made it myself, but seriously, the 7 years of aging made a HUGE difference.

( One more picture of my dinner tonight and a sweet reminder )

So in my last post about this batch of mead I mentioned that I didn't know what to do about all of the strawberry solids in it. There's nothing to be done about those that sink to the bottom, but there were a couple of inches of solids that had floated to the top of my 5 Gal glass carboy. They looked very dry and if you've ever made strawberry smoothies in the blender you can probably guess what I'm talking about. I got one suggestion about trying to use something like a straw to suck them out. Interestingly enough I had already tried that a little, but 1) it would have been REALLY time consuming, and 2) the fermentation was already well underweigh so I was inhaling alcohol which is difficult and makes people cough.

So instead I thought about trying to use something narrow like a fork to scoop them out. I decided to add ~ 1/2 gallon of bottled spring water to bring the solids nearer the top. This worked somewhat and I scooped out a bit and then waited for the solids to condense again so that I could have another go with the fork. (The solids were a bit pasty and very yummy, btw.) When I woke up the next morning however I saw that I had made an error in judgement. THe additional water caused the fermentation to really take off again and... well, just look:



Yes, the escaping air pushed enough of the solids into the air-lock to clog it up. Then the pressure built up faster than it could escape and it first blew the airlock off and then blurped out big globs of the solids as the CO2 bubbled up from below. It was quite a mess but not the worst one ever, and, hey, at least it cleaned a lot of the solids out.
:^)
I also think that the fermentation was vigorous enough that it probably kept any oxygen and bacteria from getting in. (At least I hope so.)

( A new batch, new recipe, new mistakes )

• 15 lbs previously frozen strawberries (Dole). - Run them through the blender and put in the carboy.
• 15 lbs of Virginia clover honey. - heat the honey with about 1.75 gal of water to dissolve it. Add the following:
  • 5tsp (1tbs + 2 tsp) Yeast Nutrient
  • 2 tbs Malic acid
  • 2 tbs tartaric acid
  • 1 tbs acid blend
• Rack the liquid out of the huge stock pot into the carboy with the mushed berries. (I was trying to keep from pouring the must and re-aerating it, but it was so hot that I ruined (melted) my racking cane, so I'll need another one of those in a few weeks.)
• Add in the rest of the second gallon of water
• Let it cool overnight
• After about 24 hours, add in one packet of champagne yeast rehydrated in about 1/2 cup of filtered tap water
• Finally added 25 drops of very old pectic enzyme.

There are a lot of solids in this carboy. I'll have to watch it. If the yeast lives (isn't killed off by the preservatives), any very active fermentation could force the frothy redness out through the air-lock.
Updates to follow

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****** EDIT!!! ******
First Update: It as bubbling this morning. So NOT more work for me to try and force fermentation and NOT a complete waste of money (the aforementioned 15 lbs of honey and 15 lbs of strawberries).
Instead my concern will be how to get all of that light, airy, frothy berry-stuff off the top. The neck of the carboy is too narrow for a normal spoon, maybe I can improvise something

I finally got the last batch of Cranberry mead all bottled up. I was highly disappointed in the prospects. If you'll recall, when I racked it back in April, the stuff was delicious and light and clear as a bell. Even then though I was worried that I had left it exposed to the air for too long. As it turns
out I did.
This method of trying to salvage as much liquid as possible actually had the effect of mixing in a lot of oxygen (and probably a little bacteria).

Very quickly the gorgeous red mead got cloudy. I let it sit and sit in case it was just a matter of being stirred up. It never settled so, when I tried to bottle it, about half f what I have isn't as good as it had been in April. It's also cloudy no matter what you do.
I bottled half of it just in case my effort to fix it made it worse.

Effort to fix it: I crushed up a couple of Campden Tablets to try to kill anything that shouldn't be living in there. Wait. Wait. It still wasn't completely clear but I wanted to get it out of the kitchen so I bottled it. It was yummier than I thought I remembered. Plus it clears up in the bottle as the solids settle out.

Having opened a bottle from each bottling, I can say that I believe the clearer, later-bottled stuff is a little better. Not as amazing as I'd hoped, but still pretty ok. I'll be happy to hand out bottles to see how they are and then let my tasters reserve the right to praise me later for the strawberry batch that is next.

Thursday I took the day to go to Firehouse Expo in Baltimore. This was a work trip where I was on the clock but paying for my own trip. Ehhh, it was fine since I did me-stuff and Dunn Loring-stuff while I was there.
Round trip: 120 miles.

( what a great day of motorcycling and such )

just to quickly get a post up and to get some of these pictures off of my computer...

( Dinner )

As mentioned in my previous post, I am an idiot.

Between last Wednesday and yesterday (Tuesday) I put in about 55 hours of fire department time. That included a session of bingo (fundraising), two training sessions (engine pumping & a confined spaces drill in the trailer maze), two short ambulance shifts for outdoor concerts (The Indigo Girls and then Mark Knopfler), and two engine shifts.




For my Monday engine shift I actually dressed in my class-B uniform for part of it. We went to the county Board of Supervisors meeting in the morning for an awards ceremony. The guy in the middle of this picture is the Fairfax County Volunteer Officer of the year, Tom Warnock from station 14, Burke Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department. The guy in the light blue is Jeff Snow, FFC Co Vol. Rookie of the year. Tom thought that since we were taking time off of work for the ceremony anyway we should just staff his engine all day long.

( trying to keep the size down at least a little. )
I've been to this ceremony once before actually. Like back then I feel like it must just be a matter of being my turn. Though, I suppose I will have 1000+ hours for this fiscal year. Lesley has been trying to convince me that I should accept it and stop being so dismissive. I suppose it is kind of cool. Though with people now seeing me as the FFotY, it just means that I use it as an excuse to work harder.
( Well, not harder than last week. That might kill me. )

Seriously, how do you add to this.

There's a guy I volunteer with that was doing some low-grade whining about what we have planned Sunday morning that will be earlier than he wanted to get up. I do the same thing sometimes, but this time it caused me to think about what I had recently done to my week.

• Wednesday Night
  • General fire department training on pumping and driving to work toward getting me signed off as an engine driver
• Thursday night
  • Supervising a training driver and a training aid on an ambulance going to an Indigo Girls concert at Wolf Trap
• Friday night
  • Lowkey fire department social event that will end up being a meeting to spec out the fire engine we're in the process of purchasing
• Saturday morning
  • Riding on a fire engine (as a fire fighter) and doing more driver training
• Saturday night
  • Bingo (fundraising)
• Sunday morning
  • Fire fighter training on confined spaces (helping out someone who is headed to fire school in a couple of weeks, plus it'll be good for me) then helping another member prepare for his EMT test
• Monday morning
  • Fire engine - again. (Actually taking the day off of work to fire engine all day.)
• Tuesday night
  • After heading back to work from my "long weekend" I'll be staffing another ambulance headed to Wolf Trap, this time for a Mark Knopfler show

This in addition to being expected to get some work done at my regular job all week long. I'm an idiot.
Stop agreeing.

This was a much shorter motorcycle trip that was remarkable nevertheless.



( These things always end up too long to leave out in the open... )

Note to self - Need more pictures of motorcycle, including pictures of self on bike and pictures of bike to use as LJ icons.

And while we're on the topic of photo booths, I'll go ahead and talk about a wedding that Lesley and I went to last night (even though the post isn't outdated yet).

( Cutting out the story and most of the pics... )

But, the important part is that there was a photo booth. The idea was that you have some pictures taken there at the wedding and then an attendant cuts one of them off and pasts it onto a scrapbook page where you can leave a message for the happy couple. You then have the rest of the pictures for a souvenir.
We took a second turn at the end of the night. I've decided that people look silly when they're kissing for a camera. But I REALLY like most of these. I also really like the idea of the wedding photo booth.

So, it may have come up that I was in Colorado a couple of weeks ago...
(I think this should be the last post that starts like that for a good while.)




While Lesley and I were out walking around and tasting water that just runs up out of the ground, we found an old photo booth. It said $2 for the 4 pictures and she had 8 quarters in her purse. It was a tight fit, so she sat on my lap to put the quarters in.

1. After the seventh one, a light came on. As Lesley was putting in the eighth, I was thinking "Hey I wonder why that light's on", an inquisitive expression you can see on my face.
2. Luckily one of them turned out to be a really pretty picture of Lesley,
3. and despite whatever I was trying to say in the middle of the next image,
4. we were also lucky enough to end up with a picture that Lesley liked as well.

When I left Colorado I headed to TN. Not because I had any great reason to be there. I had planned to come down and have a cookout for my brother's birthday. He ended up not being able to make it. but I had already bought my plane tickets. Since I couldn't stay in CO for the second weekend I followed through with the trip.
When I got there the milage on my bike read 1091 and the trip odometer said I'd been 545 miles. So, yeah, I doubled the miles on my bike that day.

( oops, I forgot to LJ Cut for Sandy. )

So there's a very sweet hispanic woman that runs the cash register in the cafeteria of the building where I work. I see her twice a day most days: for breakfast and lunch (you can't eat breakfast on your way to work when you ride a motorcycle).

I picked up on this issue about two weeks ago but had forgotten the date. Today she asked me and Lesley, "Do you live in Virginia?"
Yes.
"Who's the Governor of VIrginia?"

Me: (*drops head and sighs*)
Lesley: Tim Kaine
*Low grade laughing and teasing ensues*
Me: So, when's your test?

She's taking the day off from work tomorrow in order to take her citizenship exam. I didn't realize it was this soon.
I have no good way to explain why this makes me happy. It just does

( This is a long one, but very important to me. ).

So, as I mentioned in my last post, Last Sunday I spent with Lesley in Manitou Springs, Colorado. I mentioned the great restaurant-bordering-on-dive-bar "The Keg" where we had delicious beer (Fat Tire , I think [which will soon be carried by the Mellow Mushroom pizza joint.]) and buffalo burgers.

I didn't mention that at one point a tune came on the jukebox that I hadn't heard in nearly 20 years. Still, I started chuckling after only the first few notes. It's not the sort of thing you ever forget once you've heard it.

If That Ain't Country... (I'll kiss your ass)
David Allen Coe

( The Lyrics )

Important lesson:
When it's 95 degrees outside it doesn't matter how much "windchill" you're expecting. Don't get me wrong if your sitting still with the motor putting out all that heat, it's damn hot. But if you're going 80 mph, the wind is still 95 degrees.

However, when you are that hot nothing else feels as good as pumping 5 - 6 gal (35 - 40 lbs) of 55 degree gasoline into the tank right between your legs.

I'm in Colorado again.
Colorado Springs.


( LJ Cut so you don't bitch about it. ;^) )

I love teh internets.

I bought a new toy today.

So I Googled "what is this piece of plastic that came with my ipod?". The first hit?
What is this little piece of white plastic that came with my iPod ...



Turns out it's an adapter so that the iPod Nanos work in the standard dock, which I don't have anyway. So, it's actually garbage.


teh internets is indeed a wondrous font-of-knowledge