Long Time No Taco

Against the Grain's "Massage a Mystic", Wood variety My days of drinking until I puke ended when my passion for craft beer began. I still get drunk occasionally, but now it happens after drinking a few different, usually new, beers with higher alcohol content than what your sports bar has on tap. Honestly, I cannot remember the last time I drank more than two of the same thing. Ten years ago, as my college days of binge drinking were getting started, a new phenomena was also born: Binge-watching television shows! I am just as guilty of this today, and Karl Marx could never have predicted, Netflix, Amazon, and the rest of the great pushers of this new opiate of the people. Currently I caught up to the still-airing CW series "The Flash", and I am pacing myself to try and make Netflix' "Jessica Jones" last a little longer, but I only have two episodes left. As much as I loath marketing, I must also confess how much I love this clever commercial...

Here is an update on my hard-cider brewing! If you read about my trip to Dutchess County , you may recall I mentioned doing some weird measurement taking. That was using a hydrometer to take the apple-pear cider's "Original Gravity" - indicating how much sugar (and other "dissolved solids") are in my cider to be fermented. That number was 1.047. That number, on its own tells me very little, except that the maximum potential  alcohol content is almost 6.2%.  Two weeks have passed, and yesterday I bottled that cider. I'll describe that step in a second, but wrapping up the heavy, gravity talk (hey, you should know by now: I love my puns), I took another reading to find the new specific gravity was 1.002, meaning almost all of the dissolved solids had been turned to alcohol. This tells me two things: My apple-pear cider will have a 5.88% ABV, and with almost no sugars left unfermented, it will taste extremely dry! As I type this, I am drinking a "...

Cider Update and Halloween two-fer! I love Halloween. Not just the "dressing up and going to parties" part, but pumpkin carving, decorating, cooking, and the general spirit (*salutes Gen. Spirit*). This Halloween day, I did something I've never done in my the previous thirty!  My roommate Chris came to my room as I slowly awoke, and reminded me I had asked for his help juicing apples from the orchard I went to last week . He brought down the juicer that lay dormant atop our fridge for months, and showed me how it works. Then, we washed, cut, and juiced the apples. collecting the pulp and running it through once more to really get all the juicy goodness. Chris cross-cutting Matsu apples. (See what I did there?) Pink Ladies OH YEAH! We ate some dried pulp, but we should have made a pie... The finished product had some interesting stratification All told, the experience took less than an hour, but it had a very distinct, fall, Hallowe...