Thursday, September 15, 2011

Home Brewing


Since we bought our house, besides getting really handy, Nate has gotten really into home brewing. This has required buying lots of big expensive equipment, turning our garage fridge into a kegorator and hours of sleep lost worrying about his yeast.



I don't really understand the whole process that well. It involves lots of boiling and draining and waiting.


But, I don't really mind all the time and money it is costing, because I do love me some beer and supposedly it will end up being cost effective in the long run.


Besides drinking the beer, my favorite part is getting to help name and design the logos for the beers. For the first beer he made, back at the old house, I got to make labels for the bottles.


Now since he has the kegorator, he is just kegging the beer and not bottling it, so there is no need for labels. I discovered that you can just write on the fridge with a dry erase marker and it wipes off with a wet paper towel. That seemed like the perfect place to list the names of the beers and also draw logos for them.

Coming soon is a hopefully hoppy and tasty IPA that the pictures above were of Nate brewing. I named it Hoppiness is a Cool IPA, a take on the Charles Schulz book, Happiness is a Warm Puppy.


Right now we have Ongenaet Belgian Wit, named after Belgian and former Syracuse forward Kristof Ongenaet. Nate thinks it is appropriate that the beer turned out considerably weaker than it was supposed to, since I guess Ongenaet was overly hyped and turned out to be not super great of a player for Syracuse.


The logo of course is Otto the Orange and it is best drunk out of a Darwin's glass. Darwin's was a bar next to campus in Syracuse that has gone out of business since Nate stole the glass.


Friday, September 2, 2011

Lemon Cucumbers

Lemon Cucumbers by krakencrafts
Lemon Cucumbers, a photo by krakencrafts on Flickr.

Lemon cucumbers sounded like a cool idea when I saw the plant at the nursery, but they have a really thick spiky skin and are hard to peel because of their shape. I think next year I will grow normal cucumbers.

I ordered a bunch of seeds for fall vegetables from seed savers exchange. Hopefully they will come soon so I can start planting.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Our Wedding Blogged on Ketuv.com


For some reason after our wedding, I really wanted to try to get it or aspects of it featured on some of the wedding blogs that I read leading up to the wedding. It was confusing though with the rights to our pictures. I couldn't just submit the pictures without watermarks to blogs, blogs didn't want pictures with watermarks and our photographers seemed unenthusiastic about submitting pictures for me. So I kind of just gave up.


So I was very happy when the folks at ketuv.com wanted to use some pictures on their blog (taken by our guests and myself) of our huppah and ketubah/quaker wedding certificate. They coined the name quaker ketubah and I think I'm going to steal that term.