Just Humans Being...

A bubbling pan of Brewer's Gold and Cascade hops with warming winter spices of cinnamon, cloves and ginger, sultanas and orange peel. Mixing brown sugar and barley malt extract in the fermenting bin. Straining off the hops into the sugar and malt.  Stirring to dissolve the sugar in the hot hoppy brew.  We added enough cold water to cool the brew and sprinkled on the yeast. We leave the yeast on top. Then the lid gets fixed on tightly... And topped off with a snazzy blanket to let it work it's magic for around 10 days. It's Day 23 of World Vegan Month...we're not being very disciplined with our blog posts, but hopefully we'll manage to share some foodie posts over the next few days.    Bye for now! Love Kay and Sime xx

This year we have taken the opportunity to get homebrewing again and so far, we've made over 200 pints... All vegan and organic, using mainly foraged herbs and flowers, along with organic sugar and malt extract, yeast and pure spring water. We started out making our old favourite - nettle, goosegrass and ginger with a few dandelion petals thrown in for good measure.  Next up was the very popular lemon balm and lavender and then we decided to purchase some dried hops...we visited a small organic brewery where we were treated to a little tour and were able to buy a couple of different types of hops - one quite bitter and the other more floral. This resulted in a light, hoppy lemon balm bitter.    Our fourth brew was using the floral hops with rosemary and lavender, then using the floral hops again - we made a hops and lavender beer, which wasn't so good. We think the bitter hops would have worked better...nevertheless it's still very drinkable. Our latest ...

Our home made organic hops & lavender beer! Sime has been passionate about real ale for many years, but unfortunately - not a lot of it is vegetarian, let alone vegan... Most breweries use fish finings (isinglass) or egg whites to clear their beer... We don't use anything & within 3 weeks of making - it is sparkling clear & ready to drink! This recipe contains approx 200g dried hops, 100g dried lavender, 2kg malt extract, 1kg raw sugar & 5 teaspoons of dried yeast & along with about 25 litres of filtered water makes just over 40 pints of delicious home brew... We simmer the hops & lavender  for about an hour in our largest pan (holds about 5 litres). Put the malt extract & sugar into the fermenting bin with more boiled water, then strain the herbs & add the lovely smelling liquid to the bin. Top up with cold filter water & once hand hot - pitch the yeast. It takes about 1 week to ferment & once it's stopped bubbling,...

It feels funny not going away this January... But it's nice - being at home & having time to potter about. Work has thinned out for now & we're glad.  After the shock of losing several properties in November & panicking about lack of money - we realise now that we will make it through the Winter & everything is going to be fine! Of course there is lots to keep us busy... We're preparing one of our en-suite spare rooms ready to use for B&B, so Sime's been busy with paint again & I've had to get our accounts in order - they do get badly neglected when we're out so much & for the first time in 4 years I'd filled in our tax returns & had forgot to post them before the deadline...  Luckily, there was still time to submit them online, but it's been a pain & we've had to pay for the commercial software - which we could have done without! Nevermind, it's all sorted now & we can forget it until next time. We'r...