Long Time No Taco

When am I not  brewing beer or cider, right? The last two months, though, I focused on brewing, and in particular, brewing other  things, with plenty of new "firsts", I am excited to share with you, here: Kombucha: IT'S ALIVE! If you have never heard of kombucha, taking a trip to Whole Foods might only confuse you. There are so many radical, juice-spiked concoctions, carrying the trendy probiotic drink's name; some of which taste downright terrible. Traditional kombucha is a lightly fermented black tea, so I focused on making that, without the extra flavors. The off-white pads you see floating in these jars are called "SCOBY", an abbreviation for "symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast". I think that alone would gross out a majority of people from trying it, but obviously not this guy! For my first go, I ended up using some cheap, bottled, unsweetened black tea and adding the recommended amount of sugar to feed the scoby, but long-term, t...

More accurately: I Need to Start Using a Mash Tun.  Warning: The following contains more beer brewing jargon than the average person will care to learn. That said, you can replace most terms with "beer-thingy" in your head, and be just fine. I became passionate about home brewing after receiving a 1-gallon starter kit from Brooklyn Brew Shop  as a birthday present, a few years ago. This year, I finally made the jump to brewing 5-gallon batches. Left: One-gallon Black IPA, Right: Five-gallon brew-in-a-bag Galaxy hop IPA, Taken 8/23/15 Every home brewer has a different history and approach. My kit being for all-grain brewing, it wasn't until this year that I even saw what an extract looked like. Eventually, I would use both dry and liquid extracts to make a Rye Saison, and a clone of President Obama's White House Honey Porter, but it turns out, most home brewers enter the hobby exclusively using these extracts. Many never make all-grain batches, even after y...