Real beer and using spent grain to make bread

I'm far too exited about my most recent discovery. Should anyone be this excited about 'spent grain'?

 

Grains and hops ready to be added to hot water

 

Having just brewed some beer from scratch  and finally got my head around sparging, mashing, boiling and so on I was overjoyed to discover that once I had completed the brewing beer bit I could then use the spent malt to make flour!

 

There's really not many times when you can really use a food stuff twice...the brewing process unlocks loads of sugar and other bits n bobs from the malt and although it does rob it of some of its goodness its still damn good stuff that can make a real chunky granary bread... (and a nice hot porridge for the hens for when it's really cold)

I'm very pleased about the brewing bit too as Ive only ever done 'proper' beer once (in other words not using malt extract) and I didn't give in to the the temptation of parting with serious money to buy a boiler with a thermostat. Ok so it would have been easier but two large jam pans did the trick , keeping them covered after the mix reached 150 F and giving them a quick boost every 15 or twenty minutes or so.

 

Hops and grain boiling

Managed to sparge (flush the sugars) out of the malt with very basic method of gently pouring the liquid (the wort) out of a jug and through a sieve from a height of about 1 foot above the suspended grain bag. It was quite an epic brewing day but in the end after taking into account the loaves of bread that will be made from the spent malt , the beer will come in at just 10p per pint! (Even without the reuse of grain it comes in at less than 40p per pint)

10p per pint and real beer too, that's amazing :)

Books I used to get to grips with all this were:

Brewing beers and stouts
C J.J. Berry

Brewing beers like those you buy
David Line

The big book of brewing
David Line

                                      Sparging the malt

 

          Large amounts of spent grain dried and ready for use

More raised beds....but no soil!

I think everyone has had a really tough year growing this year, what an awfull year it has been for cropping. Despite all this we did manage to get a decent amount of home grown food this year and the money we saved paid for our raised beds and other bits and pieces that we needed. As it was our first year growing here we wanted to see how things went before creating more growing areas and trying other growing ideas out, so now we know that even in a tough year we can manage it.

Just looking back at some of the problems this year I remember picking off 100-200 slugs each night and that was just from several 10 foot raised beds. In the end beer traps, picking, squashing, torching and Nemotodes (http://store.cat.org.uk/index.php?cPath=22_34_132 )seems to get them under control long enough for plants to actually do something. After the slug it was the turn of the birds and then the small mammals got involved and then not having sun and then endless rain.....oh yeah and the very cool temperature and of course the gale force winds!

Like many growers this year we lost many of our young seedlings and we literally had to re-sow more than 50% of our crops. Was very glad of the polytunnel but even in there it was tough, so cool and humid, many kilos of green Tomatoes....but this time we did manage to ripen them in boxes with apples and Bananas.

Anyway after all this it was a success and we are now working on several more raised beds, we should be able to grow more than double the food  in this space and if we improve the existing soil depth we could get to 3 times the food.

Our biggest problem is of course not having soil,,,quite limiting really when trying to grow things. The new beds are going to take many layers of 'Stuff' to make it possible, here's what's going in...

1) Wood ash
2) Chicken muck
3) Leaf mould
4) Nettles
5) Comfrey
6) Straw
7) Ditch dirt
8) Straw again
9) More Ditch dirt
10) Fresh leaves

Just need to throw anything we can at the new beds to create some kind of soil...last years we collected something like 30 trailers of leaves from along the track and I think we will need to do more than that this year as we don't have any muck. Have cleared out 150 feet of ditch and theres one more ditch that might give us another trailer s worth of rotted stuff...

Been looking at the excellent ' How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You can imagine' (John Jeavons) it really does look like the best system for us here and we are combining this with what we have been doing for several years with a 'no-dig' system....I really like not digging :)

Sherry and Cherry Brandy Liqueur

Yes it's that time of year again.....have tried out a sherry kit to make 30 bottles of 18% stuff. Had to try a kit as I missed my chance some months ago to make some from scratch. Well I can say that even with the sherry just finished its tasting pretty sherry-ish and it does pack a punch....I think we may have gone beyond what could be called 'testing' now. It should now improve if left for 4 or 5 weeks & we definately look forward to testing it again :)

The kit we used was made by 'Butlers' and cost about £25. Not bad for 30 bottles! I hope next year though to make some from scratch which would probably cost £5, will it be as good?

 

 

After making a whole bunch of cherry brandy liqueur for our wedding celebration we knew that this was wonderfull stuff! Mainly we realised that it was wonderfull because we hardly got a chance to drink any....it got swigged, swaggled and guzzled so quickly!

 

Of course we have had the tricky task of sampling this before its fully matured and its tasting mighty fine. Next up is some beer from scratch,  but that really needs a day when half of the house can be taken over...

Hens, straw and more birds?

With so much rain the hens area wasn't looking too chipper. Luckily along came an offer of 6 bales of straw in exchange for some home brew and jam. One bale of straw has covered their whole area, it went a long way as they were heavily compressed bales for building with (They came from someone building a round house).

Just gone past the 500 mark with eggs from new birds! Regular orders for the 4 boxes we sell each week. We still need another 1000 eggs to break even on the new fencing and feeder, when I first did my trainspotting-egg-sums, I thought 1500 eggs sounded rediculous!

After only 5 month we are at 500 and something eggs and the fencing and feeder should last way beyond 10 years. If all goes well I think we will get another four hens next spring, the hens would be warmer in the winter and that would give us an extra 1000 eggs or more to sell each year, fantastic :)

Fruit cage extension

Previously I have built a couple of polytunnels using water pipe and reclaimed wooden batterns, so decided to use the same method for extending an existing wooden fruit cage. The exisiting cage didn't allow you to get inbetween the fruit and we wanted to put a bunch more raspberry canes in as well

If you havn't come across this method before, it's fantastic and quick to make. I've used old tent pole pushed a few feet into the ground and the water pipe sides right over the top of the pole to ground leval. Its definately a good budget way of creating a polytinnel or cage, here's a link to an online resourse for making something silmilar:

http://www.overthegardengate.net/userpages/pp_view.asp?FName=polytunnel&Page=1

3 tonnes of wood pellets later...

Took delivery of 3 tonnes of wood pellets today....when I say delivery I mean that they drop them at the bottom of our very steep hill, about 1 1/2 miles from our boiler! Was a little warm for the job really...all ready for winter then!!! (It's cheaper to buy them now). 

It would be great to rely just on the raw logs for heat and all that but after our first winter here we can see we would need a huge barn to do this. Aready the wood shed is maybe 30 ft long or something like that and it does give us a lot of heat through the regular wood burner....the thing is once autumn comes and the solar water panels arent doing much your really glad of the wood pellets!

We did start up the pellet boiler quite early last autumn as we had only just arrived and were still acclimatising to the temperature up in the hills rather than down in the valley, will start it up later this year......hang on a minute whats all this talk of starting up boilers and the winter!!!! Right my next post will be about spring and all the fantastic things that are starting to grow in our new raised beds. :)

Solar dryer

Solar drying power! Have recently built this very simple solar dryer for drying herbs and things...may even manage sun dried tomatoes here in west wales! So far have dried wild garlic and mint very quick compared to usual hanging it around in brown bags etc

As usual made from reclaimed bits n bobs and is really just a box with an inlet hole at the bottom and one at the top to let real hot air out. (Could do with adding insect proof screening to these really.

Will look at drying stuff for adding to wine to give a country boost (for selling at market mainly) or for when its the dead of winter and not a berry around...

Forgive me Hilda!

Finally I have culled one of our hens for food. After chatting and thinking about this notion for years now at long last I have managed it. Not sure what I think at the minute, but I do know that it was very tasty and it was fantastic to eat meat raised a few feet from the house! 

I think using a whole bottle of red wine may have had something to do with the great taste, but it was an old bird so prob needed. Very impressed though, was more like red meat than Chicken. As the remaining two birds are quite old and have had a tough life, will be looking at culling those as well....but its really not a nice way to spend your morning.

Drinks for Christmas

I've been quite busy brewing alcohol for the Christmas period. We have a batch of beer, 20 litres of red wine and 5 litres of liquor. Ok so all of this is not just for Christmas, but it will be nice to have a range of drinks. We have six different flavours of liquor;


Cherry brandy, Mint, Chocolate, Irish cream, Orange  and coconut.


The liquor was all made from a kit which I would definately recommend, it's called 'absolutely pure spirit base kit' and it's made by 'Alcotec'. It makes 5 litres of  20% pure spirit base . I think it works out at about £1 for a litre or something like that and then you can buy flavourings to add or just have it as half proof vodka.


I buy my brewing supplies from 'Brewgenie' who have a great online shop and they have always delivered things very quickly with no problems.


* the other excellent kits for liquors that I have used before are called 'Prohibition' and they do an excellent Cherry brandy one.


** I havn't ever tried making liquors without a kit and I think it would be tough to create something that is 20% and very clear without distilling and making spirits proper???

Fencing the place

This post should have come earlier, never mind. This is one of those jobs that we very nearly paid someone to do, I'm so pleased that we didnt now. Everyone we spoke to about it would give us a look or we would hear a sharp intake of breath as they frowned about the idea of us doing the sheep fencing ourselves.

We knew i t had to be done or we couldnt really grow anything up here. The sheep have grazed this space now for hundreds of years, I don't know how long but I guess since at least when this place was built (about 270 years ago). In some ways I was quite sad to fence and interrupt the space that used to very naturally continue up into the higher hills, with sheep just roaming as they pleased.

The soil here, or lack of it does make jobs like this quite challenging, but after 3-4 hours I had all 33 posts in the ground and after another days work all 250 foot or so of the fencing was done. We now have an extra 200 feet or so of ground that could in theory grow soft fruit, if we can dump enough soil and muck there that is!

Horse muck for Christmas!

Well I'm sure lots of people wouldn't be very pleased to get a big fat pile of horse crap for Christmas! I am so so happy about it. I'm not sure Ruth is quite as pleased as me ....but she is pleased... and its her Dad that sorted it.

It's all about what the muck will grow aint it? Imagine what our Christmas present will turn into next year :) Have managed to move just a dozen barrows of muck so far and the muck is staring back at me ..."laughing"  well at least with a funny look on its very brown horrible face, as if to say...."Is that all you got?"

Have dug out some of our old raspberry canes from our old place in the valley and they look quite happy in the muck I must say. Oh yeah not sure if I blogged about fencing this place? That was quite a job but will now allow lots of stuff to be planted without the sheep munching the lot.

Shed rage

Shed rage, we've all had it...well maybe not ...but if you have had it I don't need to say anymore. Anyway we didnt have a shed. We needed a shed bad. Didn't want to buy one of these crappy skinny wood things, decided to make one from reclaimed bits n bobs. Got the base done, very strong and then then Wife Ruth found someone who had a shed that had no base that was going spare.

This is quite boring really isnt it? Sheds. Anyway to cut to the chase...got two half rotten sheds that needed lots of care and attention before they could go onto base.... the whole thing ended up taking about 6 days work, I now really really love those cheap crappy sheds, all nice,watertight and light and maybe not so crap....they do go up quickly those cheap things and they keep the rain out without patching and covering and sticking, and pathcing and sticking and covering and fixing and HITTING!!!!

We have a shed now.

The moving of the hens

Of course... how could I forget ...the moving of the hens...


Yes the trailer was too small...no no sorry I should say the hen house was too big. The hen house was too big despite the fact that I built it myself and measured it knowing that one day it would have to go in that small trailer..... I wasnt too pleased...why did I just measure straight across the trailer ignoring the fact that there are solid  metal strips running around the edge...????


Anyway the hens survived, the best moment was when the automatic opener started to open with them in the trailer!!! (the dark plastic bag wasnt covering the light sensor enough!!!)....


The hens are happy now and have lots more space and we have now extended their origional area into the area where the fruit trees are, so they are munching lots of slugs and pest and keeping things down around the fruit trees which is a bonus.  * Garlic and cider vineger once each month in their water seems to be keeping them well.

* did I mention the red mites??? Prob best to forget all that , they are fine now :)

First home brew here

Our first brewing up here: Damson wine x 10 litres / White wine x 30 bottles and ale x 30 bottles.
 I'm drinking the Ale as I write and its pretty good, especially considering it would be better to have left it for a few more weeks to improve. Heres the recipe for this easy to make ale:


Ale For All


900g Malt extract / 50g Golding hops / 350g Sugar / 8 litres water / Beer yeast / 50g Castor sugar (for priming)


Place all but a handfull of the hops in a large pan, add 1.2 litres of water and squeeze the hops in your hand until they are thoroughly wet. Place a cover on the pan and boil vigorously for 15 mins.


Meanwhile pour 575ml of warm water into a brewing bin and stir into it the malt extract and sugar. A trace of malt may be left in the jar and disolved in a cup of tepid water. The yeast should then be added t this thin malt solution to become activated. Cover and leave it until required.


strain the hop water into the brewing bin,. add another 1.2 litres of water to the hops and boil them for a further 15 minutes. Again, strain the liquid into the bin, add another 1.2 litres of water to the hops and boil again for a final 15 minues. Strain the liquid into the brewing bin and discard the hops.


Top up the bin with cold water to the 9 litre mark and when the temperature of the wort has fallen to 21 c pitch the activated yeast. Cover the bin for 24 hours then skim off the dirty froth. Stir the wort well, cover and leave for another 24 hours. Skim off the newfroth and add the handfull of hops saved from the outset. Wet them thoroughly in the wort, replace the cover and leave for three days, pressing the hops below the surface twice each day.


Siphen the clearing beer into a jar, fit an airlock and leave in a cool place for three days while the beer clears and throws a fairly heavy sediment.  Rack the now just hazy beer into a clean jar , stir in the castor sugar  and as soon as it is dissolved siphon the beer into sterilised bottles. Fill each one leaving a gap off 2" from the top and tightly crimp on new sterilised crown caps. Leave the bottles in a warm place for one week and then move them to a cooler place for a further two weeks. The beer is ready to drink. Serve cool and take care not to disturb sediment when pouring.




* I kept the hops and threw them onto one of our raised beds, its meant to be good as an improver
* Theres more recipes on my website: www.thegreenphoenix.co.uk (Self sufficiency page)

Well thats that then, I'm off to enjoy some more off this ale :)

P.s. only had a pic of wine, need to add one of the boiling hops really

Too busy to blog

Too busy doing the things the blog is about to actually blog. Have been at new place for three months and it's been hectic every day. Getting ready for Winter, spring and next Winter all in one go really!


Lots of firewood to get sorted, getting used to been off grid and trying to import enough muck and leaves and pretty much anything to make sure we have some soil to grow in next year.

Had a good crop off Damson tree, a fair few apples and other bits of fruit. The key this year to growing good Tomatoes and sweet corn seems to have been "neglect them lots". Hardly watered crops in Polytunnel or did anything to pamper them and had 15k+ of red toms plus about 15k of green! Sweet corn was good, a dozen or so very large cobs.

Setting up new vegetable plot (again)

For the third time in five years I'm setting up a new veg plot, its really is too much work to keep doing this! The first site out of these three was an allotment plot and hadnt been worked for over 10 years , we had to clear loads of glass, metal and junk in some places 2 feet deep in the ground. The Second plot where we are now had 0" of soil so we had to trailer in top soil and muck and start from scratch. Both I these sites we built up to been pretty productive and healthy and then we leave them!!!

I shouldt really complain but its very tiring...very excited about our new place, moving house in just four weeks and will be off-grid and with lots more space to grow, including a polytunnel. Our hens are going to be very happy too (I hope) loads more space and loads more to munch on....:)

It is a bit challenging at the new place though as its up in the hills rather than in the valley so a fair bit cooler and with some interesting weather up there.

Horse Muck and Newts

Got loads of fantastic horse muck off our next door neighbour today, really well rotted stuff... Found a nice little newt in the pile so had to return it. It was a Smooth newt if your interested. Too late now if you didnt want to know.Am going to sort through every last scrap of muck and remove every bit of root that I can see....it is well rotted though so its not like picking through a big old pile of crap....

Loads of Lettuce and sneaky nettles...

Our lettuce has been doing well but so have the nettles....the nettles are creeping as they do up through lots of our beds as the field next to us is full of them. Have started now to brushcut a strip along our boundary to try and keep the buggers back! Thats the trouble with bringing muck in as we did a couple of years ago...loads of unknown possible weeds :( 


I cant wear gloves for gardening especially weeding, it just doesnt work out, but man when youve pulled out the 50th nettle those hands start to tingle......that combined with the red ants...nice

Early Potato world

Harvested our early potatoes today, considering the strange growing season so far with lots of extremes I'm very pleased to have harvested 24 1/2 Kilos of nice clean spuds from one raised bed of 10 feet x 3feet :)

We don't have any second earlies this year so I hope our mains do as well as these earlies...

Chafer and Beans

Had a Garden Chafer or something similar eating my Broad beans today, after getting i.d. on the bug I returned it to the beans! Just thought I should let him/her have a little munch.....if I find theres 10 of the buggers tomorrow it might be a different story...:)

With this lot of Broad beans I'm testing out the idea of nipping out the tops of Bean plants early on to prevent Blackfly...I don't like extra jobs if they dont actually do anything but its difficult to tell which ones actually work and which don't unless you've tried doing it and not doing it loads of times....... Have nipped out half of our beans and left the others, will see what happens. Ok so its not fully scientific but if one whole row gets Blackfly all over it that must be pretty conclusive?!


P.s. have always nipped out Beans over the last 5 years and have only had one outbreak of Blackfly....but what does that say?? It does seem that getting them in early (in the previous autum) is the best plan for stopping pests though , my Beans even survived last winters -15 spells!