Notes - Sat, May 3, 2014

Early in the morning, I shopped at The Andersons on Talmadge.

After shopping, I assembled a pizza dough. My pizza threads:

• Making Pizza
• Homemade Neapolitan-style pizza

I incorporated spelt flour into the dough recipe by milling spelt berries in our Vitamix. I bought the spelt berries at the Phoenix Earth Food Co-op, which is one of my favorite local stores. The addition of the spelt flour adds great flavor to the crust.

From my Field Notes notebook:

11:50 a.m. Nice weather today. Mostly Cloudy to cloudy, breezy, temps 55 to 60 degrees. Perfect for me. May has always been my favorite weather month for running, cycling, fishing, birdwatching, and storm watching.

DD and I spent the morning house cleaning and readying our beer brewing equipment, including another cleaning of empty bottles.

Today we bottled our first home brew beer, which we brewed on Sun, Mar 30. So we bottled one day before a five-week fermentation. We could have bottled after four weeks.

Local home brewing guru JP came to our house around 12:30 - 1:00 p.m. to help us bottle. I baked the pizza during our afternoon bottling process.

DD filled the bottles, and I capped them.

JP left after 4:00 p.m. He brought a handy gadget that quickly allowed for me to sanitize the bottles.

After JP left and since we had the equipment out, we bottled our first one-gallon batch of beer, which was the recipe included in the one-gallon hardware brewing kit that we purchased from NorthernBrewer.com.

The beer was an Irish Red Ale that we brewed on Mon evening, Apr 21, 2014. It required a two-week