Frugal brewing

Making things yourself saves you money - some of the time. To be honest, if you buy a pattern and good quality fabric to make a dress, it ends up being more expensive than something from a cheap shop. Better quality, and better value for money, but more expensive upfront.

When we started brewing our own beer, I thought it would be the same. A fun activity that gets us off the sofa, a new skill, and one that would over time save us money but would be more expensive for the first years.

Not so. We have just bottled our second batch of beer, and my boyfriend has kept rigorous records of everything we have bought - ingredients, equipment, bottles... Our beer currently works out at €2,25 per 33cl bottle. Which is already cheaper than craft beer in the stops. I am very pleasantly surprise to find that our homemade beer so, well, frugal.

We are finding more ways to make homebrewing more frugal. Re-using the bottles from beer we drink, rather than buying bottles. Did you know you can 'wash' yeast after a brew and re-use it for a total of up to ten batches? And now I find myself with a bowl full of hops - with the most delicious smell. I can't bear to just chuck them in the bin, they smell amazing. Reuses for hops, anyone? I'm thinking to try them out and make a sleep-inducing herb pillow or pot pourri for the bedroom.

Autumnal baking

I've been baking quite a bit in the last few weeks - partly inspired by the Great British Bake Off, partly in practice for the Brussels bake off in which I am participating, and partly to celebrate the tastes of autumn. There have been quite a few firsts...

First attempt at parkin - I had a hankering for something dark, rich and gingery. I think I added too much baking powder but it still tasted AWESOME! Recipe here.

First chocolate and beetroot cake. This looked fabulously pink while making it but came out beautifully. I wasn't sure how beetroot-y it would taste - the answer is not at all. The beetroot counteracts the 'sickliness' tendancy of chocolate cake, and made it beautifully moist. I took this into work - one colleague had three slices, and no one could taste the beetroot.

First chocolate ganache - I always thought this was a highly complex process but it's mind-numbingly simple and I will most definitely be repeating this. Yum!

I've also been baking some staples - chocolate cupcakes.

First adventures in brewing

So after drinking a lot of craft beer, attending a demonstration and generally thinking to ourselves 'this could be fun', we finally took the plunge and braved our first brew over the weekend.

There are many things that attract both of us to homebrewing. We both really enjoy good quality beer, and we like the people that we meet when seeking out craft beer bars and shops, visiting breweries and generally sharing this small pleasure. It's a very friendly, welcoming community - people want to share their love of brewing and drinking good beer, and encourage you to have a go. It very much fits in with our general philosophy of prioritising quantity over quality, and it supports our frugal living efforts because it's a fair bit cheaper to brew beer than buy it. Plus it of course appeals to me as another traditional craft to learn, a part of the traditional farmhouse's ordinary routine, and a very local activity and product.

I found a local supplier of homebrew kits and we went along to explore. To our delight we found the shopowner is a keen brewer, and spent a fair bit of time talking us through different options and advising us on where to start (which was essentially start with the simplest option and then add new steps gradually.) He also does demonstration days. It makes such a difference when starting out on a new challenge to know that we can call him up if we have any questions or if things go wrong.

We came home weighted down with some basic equipment and our first kit beer. There are three kinds of brewing - brewing from kits, brewing with malt extracts and brewing with whole grains. The most authentic and the most difficult is the last, in which you boil or 'mash' malted grains to extract the sugars and flavourings, then boil this with hops and other flavourings, then allow to ferment. Malt extract allows you to skip the mashing process - you get a powder or syrup which you dissolve in water, then you boil with hops and flavourings and ferment. We are starting with the simplest brewing method - kit brewing - in which you get a syrup containing all the sugars and flavourings which you dissolve in water and then ferment with yeast.

Sounds simple, but there's a lot of sterilising and temperature measuring involved already, so it is definitely worth starting simple to familiarise yourself with the equipment, and with things like reading the 'original gravity' (a measure of the sugar content before brewing which can be compared with a measure of sugar content after brewing to calculate alcohol content).

This has the potential to be a very frugal hobby. We have invested in some basic equipment, but we have calculated that (provided the beer comes out ok and drinkable) it would be substantially cheaper to brew our own beer than to buy it - about €0.70 per 33cl bottle for beer made with a kit, potentially much lower with grain brewing. Ideally - fingers crossed - we will soon be able to produce as much beer as we want to drink, with enough to offer guests and give as gifts. This will either get us invited to all the local parties - or none!

Just mulling things over

Can you believe I've never made mulled wine before? Even though it's one of my favourite Christmas traditions? Well, this year we're making mulled wine. Inspired by The Twelve Drinks of Christmas, we left the wine, fruit and cinnamon stick to gently macerate overnight before making this up later today. We're getting creative with additions of fresh cranberries and chopped almonds. It already smells divine...

To accompany the mulled wine, I present... my first ever attempt at mince pies. Incredible that I've never made these - normally we have shop-bought most of December, and my cousins' grandmother makes homemade over Christmas (which taste amazing). Mine definitely need some work, but I'm pleased with how well the homemade mincemeat lasted! Might have another go later today, although stollen is also on the agenda.

Christmas crafting (Update)

My first ever attempt at jewellery! Inspired by my friend Julia from work, who made a similar pair for secret Santa. They were really easy and not too expensive, and I think they look really nice. I'm trying to resist the temptation to keep them for myself rather than give them to their intended recipient...

A(nother) pair of yummy mummy wristwarmers in alpaca. So soft, and so fun to knit up, which is just as well because my sister has asked for a pair for her birthday. These will be a belated Christmas gift for a friend who likes doing outdoorsy things which require fingers, so I think these will come in handy.

More crafting to follow later! I've got plans for this afternoon...

[UPDATE] I hope my cousinlets have not discovered this blog, because I now reveal to you their Christmas presents...

I apologise for the lighting, it's a bit yellow here in the evenings. The local craftshop - a proper Aladdin's cave of crafting tools - had these blank notebooks with plain covers. I thought it might be a nice idea to cover and decorate them. I'm not entirely sure how solidly the glue will hold the buttons on, so I might add another layer before I wrap them.

Several new(ish) skills here, though - decoupage and watercolour painting are not crafts I've really turned my hand to before, but they work really well... I'm quite pleased with how these have turned out.

(Nearly) Free pumpkin seeds

So you know pumpkin seeds? Go for HUGE (well, more than most seeds) sums of money? They're yummy in many things including homemade cereal but also quite pricey.

We've been eating pumpkin a lot recently, and I was looking at the scooped-out flesh, full of seeds, thinking: pumpkin. Seeds in a pumpkin. You can see where I'm going with this, right?

So we've been washing and drying the seeds, then prising open the pod-type things to remove the seed inside. It's a bit of a pain, really - takes a while and you don't get many seeds at the end of it (or as my boyfriend said as we sat up removing seeds at 11 last night - "you can see why they cost so much!") but why throw away something as yummy as pumpkin seeds? When we already paid for them when we bought the pumpkin?

The method, so far as there is one, is wash mostly clean, dry on some paper towel on a rack, then when totally dry prise open with a sharp knife and remove the seed. There is a knack to getting them out whole, rather than in fragments, but I'm not entirely sure what it is. It's still a bit hit and miss, to be honest. Can I call this learning a new skill? I wonder if my grandmother knew how to depod pumpkin seeds?

Mincemeat and impatience

Yesterday evening I rushed home via the supermarket to make mincemeat and oh my god this stuff smelled AMAZING! Really Christmassy. I'm not sure I can really count it as preserving but it's certainly preparing, and now I can make entirely homemade mince pies all through December.

I also managed to salvage the candied citrus peel I made last year, which contains too much sugar and is pretty much inedible. I soaked it in hot water to dissolve some of the sugar and restore a more jelly-like consistency. Not sure how well this will work...

Having never made this before, I have no idea how long it will last, how it will taste, or how much I will use. Another first for me! It's strangely satisfying to see the jars and think of how hot mince pies will smell in the oven, and the warm crumbly taste...

However, I do wonder if my impatience to get started on this - rather than taking a slower, more tempered approach - might backfire. I feel like I ought to have spent a little more time searching online recipes, investigating how long mincemeat lasts, and sourcing a wider range of dried fruit. I did buy three kinds of raisins (in the absence of currants) but in the end two turned out to be the same kind, and I realised part-way through that we had run out of dried cranberries. Mixing this up while my boyfriend cooked and served supper also meant a rather interrupted process, extremely limited space in our small kitchen for both of us, and a larger than normal pile of washing up at the end of the evening. On reflection, this kind of task would make a better Sunday afternoon project, when I can relax into it more.

But this is all part of the experiment, no? I'm not sure how this recipe works, how the types of dried fruit interact, how switching brandy for whisky will work, how well it will keep, if the citrus peel will blend or still be a bit crunchy. For which reason I think next year I might try making two smaller but different batches so I can try out variations - dried fruit, citrus, booze, spices, potentially adding nuts? Ooh the possibilities!

Do you make mincemeat? Any tips or favourite variations?

My very first skeins

So it turns out I shouldn't have set the yarn before plying it. Anyone have any good projects involving singles yarn?

This is my very first spindle-full of yarn. It makes me hoppy-skippy-happy to look at my lovely skeins. I split the yarn in two, because there's a very clear point about halfway through the spindle-full of yarn when I suddenly 'get' the whole drafting thing, and you can see that the two skeins are very different in thickness, evenness and, shall we say, use-ability?

As this involved digging my spindle out of the Bottomless Pile of Craft Stuff, I couldn't resist starting on another yarn, this time to be plied before setting! It seems that whatever secret I suddenly discovered at that half way point has been lost because my new yarn is a bit slubby and the drop spindle keeps, well, dropping. I'm sure I can rediscover it, though! All the bloggers I read who spin say that it really comes down to practice.

Hubble bubble...

How's this for kitchen witchery?

Slow living cannot be rushed

There is nothing more tragic than having to throw away an entire unsliced loaf of fresh homemade bread.

Totally screwed up by rushing and/or being overambitious this week: one pair of net curtains, almost finished but now hours of unpicking and resewing away from completion; one loaf of homemade bread which was not given enough attention; one Saturday afternoon which should have been relaxing but wasn't.

A much-needed facelift

Visitors to my blog today may have noticed some... ahem... changes. I have changed the template and banner of the blog. It was about time - the previous layout was cluttered and I felt the colours were distracting from the photos I am increasingly using. Since I am trying to simplify things, I thought - why not simplify my blog as well? It looks much cleaner now, with the colours standing out more vividly. Plus sometimes it's good to change things around.

Bitten by the baking bug

So what is it about Great British Bake Off that has me dusting off my apron and tutting at the poor array of baking equipment in my cupboard? (Seriously. Can't even do a Victoria sponge.) 

I seem to have been bitten by the baking bug. In the last week, I have made: one loaf of white bread with linseeds (and who'd have thought that the humble linseed could so totally transform bread?); one batch of rotis, ginger and oat cookies, chocolate chip and walnut biscuits, and now I have a teeny tiny batch of meringues in the oven. I've never made meringues before, but I've been meaning to try for a while, and with an egg white left over from the biscuits, I thought - why not? The world's smallest batch of meringue ever made. Fingers crossed they come out well.

Addicted to folding

Squee! I have discovered this method of folding towels/sheets/blankets. It's so simple but it makes so much difference - not just visually, but they hold their shape so much better, and don't subside into a disordered pile, with some blankets escaping back behind the table and getting dusty.

Is it so sad that I'm actually really happy about this - it's a tiny little thing but it makes me smile...

Baking bread

I love baking bread. I love the feel of the dough in my fingers. It's much the same reason that, when I make a cake, I enjoy beating all the ingredients by hand - the world disappears for a few minutes, and I get to watch all the chemical changes in the batter.

New skill - winding yarn

While in Estonia last week, one of the few souvenirs I bought was about 250g of local wool. It was quite a bit cheaper than wool in shops here and looked like it might be handspun, but it wasn't clear, so I only bought one skein.