how to reuse beer bottles for your home brew

We're heading to the mountains tomorrow for a little weekend getaway with friends.  I'm packing the essentials: flannels, boots and home brews.  Since Beau moved to kegging instead of bottling, there's a real shortage of bottles around the house.  So how are we going to get the beer up north?  Per usual, I raided the recycling bin.

I started by soaking the bottles for about half an hour.  The labels will become waterlogged and be easier to rip off.  Return them to their kiddie pool for awhile and the adhesive will get easier to scratch off.  I used a leftover bread clip to spare my nails.

Eventually, the labels will come off with a bit of scrubbing (OK - some will require a LOT of scrubbing).  The labels on the brown bottles above were made of metallic paper and the adhesive was apparently super glue.  A little vegetable oil helped convince them to leave.  I used to swear by Goo Gone, but now I'm inclined to think it makes Al Gore and the polar bears cry.

Next up, the bottles went into a sink full of scorching hot water and dish soap.  They soaked for awhile before I scrubbed the residual cooties off of them.

Once they'd been rinsed and dried, Beau filled them up with home brew.  He used a bottle capper and some fresh caps to close them up.

Lastly, I slapped on some labels made by the Beer Labelizer to distinguish between the IPAs and the ales.  

Thanks to the scavenged bottles, we pulled together enough containers to have a proper taste test this weekend.  

come on irene

We lucked out in my area of Massachusetts this weekend with just one big tree down on the road in front of my neighborhood and a smattering of leafy debris in the backyard.  Still, I moved the garden inside before things got going on Sunday morning.

Easier than putting bike helmets on them

A baby turkey from the rival gang* ran into trouble though.  One minute he was waddling around with his family, the next he was in the backyard, chirping the most heartbreaking cry.  Lucky for him, Beau leapt into action and ran outside to hustle him back to the tree line where the rest of the flock had disappeared shortly before.  St. Beau, patron saint of poultry, returned from his adventure unscathed.  

The rest of the day was spent safely indoors engaging in various cabin-fever fighting activities.  I taught myself how to cast-on and (generally) how to do the knit stitch but after half a dozen attempts, things were still going terribly wrong when I tried to start a second row.  I figure some frustration is probably healthy for a person though.  It reminded me that not everything comes so easy.  I'm sure it'll make success that much sweeter in the end.

Knitting abortions

While I cussed and threw balls of yarn across the room, Beau was happily overhauling the basement and jamming out to a mix CD from high school that was discovered in the clean up (featuring among other gems NSync's It's Gonna Be Me).  When I was finally permitted to enter the sacred man space, I was delighted to find that our dedicated junk room had been reborn into a home brewery.

Behold!  The Man Cave

Like little alcoholic soldiers getting ready for battle

I hope everyone else out there faired as well as we did, both physically and organizationally this weekend!

* There are two flocks of turkeys in the woods behind our house.  Our flock of six birds including three adults and three babies, which frequents our backyard in the morning and early evening, and the group that we call the rival gang, which is too large to get a clear count on the members. 

mein haus ist ein biergarten

It seems like only days ago that Beau was horsing around with his very first Mr. Beer kit, but he’s already outgrown the simplified brewing process.  This weekend, he took me to the Witch’s Brew to buy all manner of big-boy supplies – hoses, buckets, giant carboys, sacks of grain and even a packet of special yeast that sat in my purse while we ate lunch in a restaurant because the poor little guys would have fried in the hot car.

My kitchen turned into a small scale brewery on Sunday.  I’m inclined to think that makes me a relatively indulgent wife, considering I stepped in beer puddles on a few occasions and the smell was … unpleasant.  Something that my entire arsenal of Yankee candles couldn’t handle.  The aroma finally dissipated when the ribs that were being slow-grilled for dinner burned and I turned them into a divine broth.  Nothing quite like pork and onions to clear the air.

But what’s a little stink between spouses anyway?  Beau was happy as a (drunken) clam, which made me happy even if my feet were sticky.  Now the house is aired out and we have five gallons of ale bubbling away in a corner.  The bubbles, I have learned, are yeast farts (unrelated to the smelliness).  The yeast eats the sugar and makes carbon dioxide.  I’ve taken to watching the gas escape from the airlock while dinner is on the stove.  Fttttp.