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Blood Orange Wheat Beer

nobody@vox.com(Mollie) — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:21:21 -0400

I had plans to brew two summer beers. Now here it is mid-August and I've only gotten one of them brewed. Luckily the other is a stout, and though it was touted as a good summer stout, I'm sure it will make a fine autumn beer as well. Regardless, this beer is a Wheat Beer flavored with Blood Orange marmalade. I started with the American Wheat Extract Kit from More Beer.

IMG_3849

Brewing with this kit was an interesting experience for me as the kit didn't have any steeping grains and was 100% powdered malt extract. Of course I couldn't leave well enough alone and brew just a straight wheat beer. I had to mess with it a little bit. Several months back when listening to an episode of Basic Brewing Radio about brewing fruit beers, they mentioned a technique suggested in Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher where the fruit flavor is added by using marmalade. This got me thinking about flavoring a beer using my absolute favorite marmalade ever, Sarabeth's Blood Orange Marmalade.

IMG_3847

The issue with brewing with marmalade is that the pectin will make the beer a little cloudy, so they recommend using it for beers that are supposed to be cloudy, like Wit beers and such. Fortunately, I don't get too worked up over the clarity of my beer, so it didn't bother me use it in the wheat beer. Since I don't actually own the Randy Mosher book and couldn't find it at any of the libraries around here, I had to go with what I was able to read on the internet about the fruit beer using marmalade instructions. I threw about 4 tablespoons of the marmalade into the pot at the end of the boil. Here are the other stats on the beer:

# of gallons in the boil: 6
original gravity: somewhere around 1.040 - 1.044
# of gallons in the fermenter: just slightly less than 5
yeast pitching temp: somewhere around 73 - 75 degrees F
fermentation temp: varied around 65 - 70 degrees F
days in fermenter: 15
final gravity: around 1.010

As you can see I have gotten a little lax with the exactness of the measurements that I'm taking. I think this might be my favorite beer that I've brewed so far. It's a close race between this and the honey oatmeal stout that I did last fall. It's just a nice, easy to drink summer beer with a hint of orange flavor. I only wish that I would have gotten it brewed earlier in the summer as I had planned. Once the temperatures start dropping, my attention will turn to darker beers, so I have to get to drinking this one while it's still warm outside.

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Ante Up!

nobody@vox.com(Anil) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:36:43 -0400

Bert & Ernie tries Gangsta-Rap

M.O.P.'s "Ante Up" has long been one of my favorite songs, thus I couldn't resist this video. Oddly, it's also one of the few tracks in the world where the edited version might be even more entertaining than the uncensored one.

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blsh

nobody@vox.com(Lint) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 03:29:12 -0400

I guess this has been available for awhile. I just accidentally stumbled across it by hitting tilde (~).

bloglines console

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Jamie Caliri

nobody@vox.com(Lint) — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 22:03:27 -0400

United Airlines - Dragon
United.com: Commercials
Dragon [quicktime] (6.1 MB)
The Making of Dragon [quicktime] (31.2 MB)

United Airlines - Heart

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I love MT Pro :)

nobody@vox.com(Anil) — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:26:02 -0400

Movable Type Pro for Social Networks

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Hat Mania!

nobody@vox.com(Mollie) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:14:35 -0400

I've been on a hat knitting jag lately. It started with a skein of Araucania Nature Cotten that a friend of mine gave to me. I wasn't sure what to do with a single skein of it until I saw on Ravelry that someone had made a Foliage hat with one skein of Arucania Nature Cotton. The texture of the yarn and the color of this particular skein seemed just right for a rustic Foliage hat.

Foliage Hat

Unfortunately I had some sort of block against this pattern and kept messing it up. It should have been very simple, but I swear I spent more time tinking this one than I did knitting it. I finally finished it and then was informed by two independent sources that it wasn't my color, so I'm not sure what I'll do with it.

Foliage Hat Modeled

I then moved on to the Odessa, which I knitted for M. It started with the yellow Debbie Bliss Cashmerino DK that she found on sale at our local yarn store. She wanted me to teach her how to knit a hat with it, but I was worried that trying to learn to knit a hat using DK yarn would be an exercise in frustration for her, so I convinced her to let me knit her a hat with the yarn that she loved and promised that I would teach her to knit a hat with some chunky yarn that I have in my stash. I even promised that she wouldn't have to wear the chunky yarn hat when she finished it.

Odessa 3

The pattern called for beads to be strung along the spirals, but I skipped that part of it. This was a very simple pattern once I got it started. I did mess up the crown shaping a bit, but I don't think it's too noticable.

Odessa 2

Since M. and I had new hats, I figured it was time to move on to D. D has a hard time finding hats because his head is a little larger than average size, so I had bought some lamb's pride bulky wool earlier this year to make him a hat that would fit. I sort of improvised the pattern using several different hat pattens that I had seen on-line. It's a vey simple stockinette stitch hat. D would not want anything very fancy. I saw these colors in a tie that some guy was wearing one time and thought they would be good colors for D. He's not a big fan of this picture but here it is.

Dave's Hat 2

I then decided to knit the hat that I planned on knitting for my dad for Christmas. My dad has always liked bright and garish colors and what colors are more bright and garish than hokie colors, so I knitted him a hokie hat. I again improvised a very simple stockinette stitch pattern and knitted it with lamb's pride bulky yarn. I really like the thick and thin stripes on this one. I was a bit concerned that since the hat fitted me, it would be too small for my dad, but my mother assured me that my father doesn't have a very large head, so it should be fine.

Hokie Stripes Hat

Finally, I wrapped up hat mania with a So You Think You Can Hat. I guess someone appearing on So You Think You Can Dance wore a hat similar to this. Some industrius folks on the So You Think You Can Dance Ravelry group liked it so much that they charted out a pattern for it. I was looking for something to do with the one and a half skeins of brown sheep cotton fleece that I had left over from my Rusted Root sweater and thought this hat would be the perfect project. Of course the hat only used up the half skein, so I still have one skein left. The hat looks tiny, tiny, but it's very stretchy and does actually fit on my head. I especially like the crown shaping on this one. And I know that this is my color, so I'll be wearing this hat come winter

So You Think You Can Hat - Back

I'm a little sick of hats now, so I'm going to take a break from them. I need to get back to the Central Park Hoodie knit-a-long that I started last month and I think I'm finally ready to face the 1x1 rib of the striped Noro scarf.

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Olympics 2008 Monkey Movie

nobody@vox.com(Lint) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:42:17 -0400

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My Drive Thru

nobody@vox.com(Lint) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:36:39 -0400

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My So Called Scarf

nobody@vox.com(Mollie) — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:31:37 -0400

My So-Called Scarf 2

The name of this pattern is actually My So Called Scarf, which I have never really gotten. I tried to connect it back to that old tv show My So Called Life, but it has nothing to do with the scarf pattern name. There is a story behind the pattern that I think is supposed to be the origin of the name, but it still didn't make a lot of sense to me. Regardless, this is another project marked off of my Christmas knitting list. I made this scarf with Manos Del Uruguay in colorway #118.

My So-Called Scarf 1

Manos is a very popular yarn for this scarf because the varying thick and thin texture of the yarn and the varigated colorways really show off the stitch pattern. Purple is not really my color, but I do really like this colorway. I like the contrast between the so dark that it's almost black dark purple and the light tan. This is knitted on size 11 needles and once you get the hang of the stitch pattern you can pretty much knit on auto pilot, so it really flies off the needles. I also limited myself to two skeins of yarn for this scarf, so it is a much more reasonable length than my last two scarves. I have two skeins of the yarn left that were going to be a hat, but neither of the hat patterns that I was going to make panned out the way I thought they would, so I'm not sure what I'm going to do with that yarn now.

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Knitting in Secret

nobody@vox.com(Mollie) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:28:00 -0400

Wristwarmers for S. - 1

My friend S. who taught me how to knit and who has been coming over on a weekly basis since January to knit and watch British television with me is about to finish up her degree and has taken a job at a university in Indiana, so she'll be moving this week. I decided to knit her a pair of Rose Tyler Wristwarmers in one of the school colors of her new university for a going away gift. Of course the problem with knitting something as a gift for S. is that she reads my blog and looks at my Ravelery account, so I've had to be very careful about keeping any mention of these off of the internet until I gave them to her. I started these back in February, but because I had to be so secretive about them and because I was pretty burnt out on the pattern after finishing the pair that I made for myself , the knitting was pretty slow going and I just finished them up last week.

These were basically done exactly the same as the pair I made for myself. I knitted them on size 4 double points and used two skeins of Debbie Bliss Cahmerino dk in colorway #18004. I love the Debbie Bliss Cahmerino for these wristwarmers, and it has the added benefit of being S.'s favorite yarn. The only thing that I did differently for these was instead of making a rib on the palm side between the thumb and fingers like I did on mine, I continued on in stockinette stitch. I think I like the stockinette stitch better. It looks a little more polished I guess and the gloves have enough structure that it doesn't curl like I feared it might.

Wristwarmers for S. - 2

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