• Pizza
• Weather
• Bottling Beer

Notes - Sat, May 3, 2014

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

Pizza

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.

I baked the pizza during our afternoon beer bottling process. On the pizza, I used chevre goat cheese made by local farm Turkey Foot Creek that we bought at the co-op, crimini mushrooms also from the co-op, DD's pasta/pizza sauce made and canned last year, olive oil from the Toledo Meat Market, and coarse red Hawaiian sea salt that we received as a gift from DD's sister.

Weather

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.

Bottling Beer

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.

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.

During our bottling efforts, we sampled multiple beers that I bought in the morning from The Andersons. Curmudgeon Old Ale

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 fermentation, so we were a couple days shy of that, but it should be okay.

This one-gallon batch produced seven bottles of beer. When we brewed it, we should have added a bit more water to bring the amount up to the one-gallon mark.