Ian Coutts's Blog, page 3

Tacos, sorted: Guest post by Catharine

We are heading into Christmas, which in our house means – perversely – eating fairly sensibly. That’s because half the crew around the table will be vegetarians. Theoretically, this also means we should be eating relatively cheaply. Indeed, it was wonderful to check out at the grocery store yesterday with the several days worth of food we’ll need and face a bill well below $100. But of course that was before visiting the cheese shop. Four pieces of artisanal cheese and we should be looking at...

Porkilicious: guest post by Catharine

The subject of sausage had been much on my mind, so I took myself off to John’s, our nearest butcher, for casings. We’d already bought a couple of pork shoulder roasts at the supermarket, but I grabbed another at John’s because the notion of pulled pork was also starting to raise itself in my consciousness. Not pulled pork instead of sausages, but as well. We are heading into the longest, coldest nights, after all, and Brown Food is needed.


Thursday we loaded the casings, meat grinder, slow co...

Pardon my polypin

I am not ashamed to say it – I kissed my own polypin.


A polypin is a small barrel. With a capacity of four and a half gallons, historically it was the smallest that beer came in. The next size up was a firkin, which held nine gallons, and then a kilderkin, which held 18. At the far opposite end of the beer barrel spectrum was the tun, which was good for 216 gallons.


One thing I knew when I decided to make beer from scratch was that I wanted to make it in in a barrel. It just seemed like the mos...

A New York state of mind

Two permits and one inspection, and Mark could sell his beer at farmers’ markets

I have seen the future of craft brewing and it is New York State – I hope.

My recent trip to upstate New York was prompted by several beer-related reasons – my ongoing quest for a firkin (more on that later), a chance to visit a beer lab, a chat about hops – but high on the list was a chance to visit Mark Van Glad.

In his late twenties, Mark is the owner and brewmaster of Tundra Brewery, a micro located in the rolli...

Look upon my tuns, ye mighty…

Grayson (l) and Dave (r) in the home brewery to end all home breweries.

There’s home brewing – and then there’s home brewing.

I do mine in five gallon lots – unless I am doing something highly experimental, in which case I drop down to two. That way if I really blow it, I’m not left with all that much bad beer to drink.

Five gallons is pretty much the norm. Although there are those who are a little more ambitious. And then there are those who are really ambitious. Here’s a neat shot of the outfi...

No more desserts to conquer?

Gooey goodness, years in the making…

As a kid, I was obsessed with two desserts.

One was “tunnel of fudge” cake. I first saw this on the old Steve Allen Show. A woman in the studio audience baked one for Allen, who delightedly cut it up and ate it on TV. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but cake and fudge juxtaposed with tunnel told me it had to be good.

The other one was upside down cake. I remember learning about it from a school reader in grade four or five. Again, I didn’t know what it was...

You make my heart sang.

We’ve been in a bit of hiatus in terms of beer making recently. Our last attempt at making malt in July produced several pounds of damp barley covered in long white slivers of mould. I always wondered why old-time brewing stopped in the summer, and now I know. Too hot and too humid. On the farming side, this year’s crops are doing very nicely. The barley was a foot tall last time I was at the farm, and the hops were starting to produce lots of cones. I may harvest some of them this weekend.

Ju...

Razzmatazz. Or not.

I admit to a long-standing bias against fruit beers.

A bias that is, I recently discovered, irrational. In my ongoing beer education, I wanted to try brewing a beer with wild yeast. My wife and brewmistress (one and the same person, I should add) suggested that we should do that by creating a fruit-based beer – an Eastern Ontario take on a Belgian lambic. So we brewed up one of our two-gallon experimental lots, using the wild yeast, two-row malt extract and Cascade hops, and then tossed in che...

Guest post: Catharine and the bear

Looking for a marshmallow and a sailor suit?

Last Saturday we met the bear. Not really face-to-face, but close enough: he (I realize it might well be “she,” but to avoid confusion I will opt for the masculine, in case future entries involve Mama Bear) was just a little ways up the hill in the field across from the farmhouse, waist-deep in the ripening hay, busily working at something on the ground. (Wild strawberries was my romantic and Bergmanesque guess. But no, Bernard the farmer said later...

In search of the elusive acrospire

Only the acrospire stands between this stuff and beer.

I’m warming to this malting experience. I guess because, although still redolent of a science experiment, it’s moving more firmly in the direction of Science. We have set up a little germination lab in the back room, where it’s nice and cool. It involves the fish bubbler, the five-gallon black enamel preserving kettle, a colander and a blanket. Every once in a while we go in and uncover the now-swollen barley grains and have an argument ab...