Rock! Death! America!

Littering our noise on the Earth

Archive for September, 2009

2009 Hop Harvest

September 30, 2009 at 2:12 pm · Filed under Beer, Family, Home, Kids

This year we planted cascade hops to grow up and over our trellis, and we recently had a a little harvest party with the kids.

D and I left the hops on the trellis and decided to pick and choose from the largest of the crop, thinking we’d let some of the smaller ones get bigger and have a second harvest day.

We had to contend with Sophie the hop monster.

We realized the futility and difficulty of our method pretty quick, so down they all came.

At that point we hired some help.

Picking hops is very serious business.

Many modes of transportation were employed.

We ended up with 10.4 ounces of hops. I failed to capture probably the most amusing photo ops: the drying of the hops. We first had them sandwiched between several heater filters and attached to a box fan (which we burned out) with bungee cords (also known as the Alton Brown method). We finished drying them by laying them on an old fireplace screen in the attic.

In the end we had 2.75 ounces of dried hops. D immediately used some to dry hop the rye IPA he just brewed (for non-brewers, basically they were placed in a cheesecloth-like bag and stuffed into the keg with the finished beer, where they will steep and impart delicious hop aromas).

We shrank up the rest with the food saver and stuck them in the freezer for a future brew session. Next year the plants should yield many more hops, as long as I don’t kill them over the winter.

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Spray Ground

September 11, 2009 at 2:05 pm · Filed under Family, Kids

I meant to post this before school started. We went to Blue Lake Park in Fairview a few weeks ago and played in the “spray ground”. They have a really cool fountain play feature, with different spray zones for kids big and small.

The kids had fun, though they got cold rather quickly. I was so happy to find the spray ground surrounded by shade!

They had a couple of water cannons to spray at each other, and the neat thing I noticed is that if you turned them too far to the right or left they shut down, so you could only spray the other cannon operator and not torment the kids in the rest of the area.

I hadn’t been to Blue Lake Park for a few years, and I forgot how nice it is. You do have to pay a $5 entry fee, but there are several large playgrounds, tons of trees and grassy spaces and picnic tables, boats to rent, and a place to swim in the lake (though you have to be five years and older to do so - I know they have some problems with algae and stuff in the lake, but I’m not sure if the under-fives enhance the problems, or are harmed by them). Next time I’m bringing a lunch so we can stay longer.