Brewmasters are we

Believe it or not, but it was 68 and rainy today. All day. Wonderfully gloomy. I even made chicken wild rice soup. It's as close to November weather as I'm going to get, so I seized the opportunity to make a stick-to-your-bones cream-based soup. I'm sure tomorrow it will be back to summer, so I have to enjoy these days as I can.

Since the great outdoors was out of the question due to the sogginess, Zac and I went back to the Diamond Head Winery to bottle our beer. At the beginning of November, Zac and I went to a local winery to mix up some beer and some wine. Our wine won't be ready until the end of December, but our beer was ready for bottling today. Jeff showed us how to use the machine and we bottled up about thirty 20 oz bottles of a Belgian style ale. The Winery makes the process really easy, so we are by no means experts of any kind right now, but we're feeling pretty proud of ourselves.

Here's Zac, The Mighty Bottler, standing next to the machine that takes the beer from the carboy (big bottle in the background) and puts it into the smaller bottles.

Here's me, using that super-human upper-body strength I have, using the contraption that crimps the bottle caps onto the bottles. (Okay, parts of that statement might be a lie. And I'm pretty sure it's not the part about the contraption.)

This is me pretending to sample the wares. Pretending, people. The beer still has about two months to go before it's ready for consumption. Flat, not-yet-fully-fermented beer doesn't sound appealing to me. Although, at the end of the day, it IS beer. And if this were a simpler time, say the 1500s or so, I would probably be throwing the alcoholic sludge back delighting in it's glory. But then again, if this was the 1500s, I'd probably be the mother of 14 kids and close to death due to some disease. I might need beer if that was the case.

Here we are with our boxes of bottled beer. You can see by the size of the bottle in my hand that these are not the usual 12 oz bottles people drink. We're eager to try the beer in about six weeks to see what it's like. Hopefully it's decent, because we've got a boatload of it. We'll probably end up making labels for the bottles. Zac would like to call it Goat Piss ale. The beer is his baby, so I may have to have to acquiesce to that. (Goats are a symbol of Navy Chiefs.) We'll let you know how it turns out. Maybe I'll scrap the whole "law" thing and just become a brewer.

Cheers!