Hey there, OysterGirl blog readers! Bet you despaired of ever hearing from me again. Hopefully in my absence, you have been availing yourself of the Good Word of the Day over at MissLynn.com--not to toot my own horn, but there have been some doozies already, and the feature is only two weeks old! Which reminds me that I need to archive last week's words after I'm done here.
Well, clearly I fell hard off the blog wagon while on vacation. I blame lack of sleep and general laziness. But now I am (more or less) back into the regular swing of things here at home, and it's time to get back on that wagon and see where it takes me.
Since I got back from Oregon, I've started my summer babysitting job on Tuesdays and Thursday, and in between Dave and I have been working on finishing up the Miss Lynn record.
In other news, the garden is growin' away . . . I came home to sizable plants of string beans, edamame, winter squash, zucchini, cukes, melons, and a big line of beets. It seems that somebody got at the arugula and carrots, 'cause the promising sprouts I left developed into only a few plants by the time I returned.
I do need to catch up on vacation pictures, so here follows the long-promised photographic evidence of my VIP tour at Bend's Deschutes Brewery!
When we first arrived, there was a tanker truck out front, pumping its contents into the building. Apparently this was a grain delivery in process. I will admit that I hadn't given the process a lot of previous thought, yet somehow this was not how I imagined the grain got into the brewery.
Big ol' bucket o' hops! Waiting to go into the cookin' pot.
Part of the creation of the wort (i.e. the malty stew of ingredients that later ferments into beer) is the careful addition of certain components at various points in the process. These are pre-measured ingredients awaiting their respective turns to go in the brew.
The Deschutes Hop Room. Boy, is it ever odoriferous (a.k.a. stinky)! As you can see, those bales of whole hops are bigger than Kristen.
And this is what the whole, dried hops look like up close! I tried one--I don't think they're likely to replace Fritos as a viable snack food any time soon.
INSIDE one of the kettles, where the hops are about to be mixed into the wort.
And the inside of an empty kettle. Seams in the metal would be hard to clean and would promote bacterial or fungal contamination, so these giant stainless vessels were forged as whole pieces and shipped from Germany to Bend. Making delicious beer is a laborious and serious process for the people at Deschutes!
Two of the German kettles as viewed from above.
They also take quality very seriously, so they are constantly testing the different beers for taste, smell, and appearance. This is the room where the panel members do the testing.
Being a former librarian, I recognized right away that this was the beer library. Just kidding. But it really is! Deschutes retains one case of every batch of each beer brewed for reference, in case any issues should arise in the future. I think this is extremely cool, although I think they should change the name to either A) beer-brary, or B) li-beery. (Feel free to voice your personal preference in the comments section below.)
Throughout the entire tour, I was struck by how similar the process Deschutes follows is to that of a homebrewer--the only real difference is scale. Homebrewers use an airlock during fermentation to allow gas to escape during fermentation without allowing outside air into the closed system. Below is the larger scale version of this concept: a hose in a Rubbermaid bucket. Fancy.
Once the beer is all beer-y, it's time to put it in bottles! This is the part of the tour that reminded me of the opening sequence of Laverne and Shirley.
The bottle-washer--you really have to see this in motion to appreciate it, a still(-ish) photo doesn't do it any justice.
That was it for my day at the brewery! It was great, and I sure did feel like a VIP.
Coming soon (and only a month late): our afternoon at the children's museum!
1 comment:
Libeery!!
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