Making beer - the three year old edition

I've mentioned before that I homebrew beer periodically.  The last batch got a bit too excited.

Tadpole's been doing her own "brewing" too.

Here, she's boiling the wort, with my last batch in the background.  This (I've been informed) is vanilla beer.

Beer starts out as wort (or beans) in a carboy.

After putting the beer in a carboy, you need to add an airlock.

It's important to syphon out some beer in order to weigh the original and final gravity

But first you have to separate out the yellowish crud at the bottom.

You need to get the finished product into a bottle.

Cap the bottle, of course.


And eventually, you get to drink the finished product!

So this happened

Just, y'know, doing some laundry a few days ago with the girls.

Tadpole decided that the cat needed a blanket to help him sleep

Make that two blankets.  Sprout is growing curious.

Another view.  Note how long he's just sitting and letting the girls play around him.

The cat finally got up to move, but not far.

Bedtime Songs

Tadpole doesn't really let me do bedtime songs very often anymore.  We have the bedtime routine, with books and teeth brushing and potty (often twice) and climbing into bed and a story.  And once upon a time, there were songs, but she doesn't usually let me sing bedtime songs anymore.  Now she kicks me out.  So that she can "read" her books for a while, and then maybe ask mommy to sit with her, and eventually fall asleep.  Which, as long as she doesn't wake her sister up, is fine with me.

When she does let me sing, the current rotation is:

"Puff, the Magic Dragon" (substituting her name for little Jackie Paper, and little girls instead of little boys)
"The Child Song" ("Circle Game" by Jonie Mitchell, which I learned sometime in grade school because my Friend's School was weird).  Again, substituting girl for boy where appropriate.
"Bring me a Rose in the Wintertime", again a favorite from grade school.

"Where Have All the Flowers Gone" has mostly worked its way out of the rotation.  And I can't do "When the Saints Go Marching In" anymore because Tadpole yells "Nine!" on "... in that number" now, so it's not exactly a bedtime song.

I'm looking forward to singing some of these with Sprout, when she gets to the bedtime song phase.  And after I can't do counting songs like "Twelve Days of Christmas", "Green Grow the Rushes O", and "Children, Go Where I Send Thee"

Mock my bedtime songs, I dare you.

Beer

I may have mentioned before that R decided a while ago I should get into beer brewing.  I have about 40 bottles of batch 5 downstairs trying desperately to bottle condition.  The flat beer (a very strong and hoppy ale) is pretty good, but I'd like to get a bit of carbonation ...

Yesterday we had friends over and started Batch 6 (Northern Brewer's Caribou Slobber, which I'm making again because it was so good last time)

This morning the cat woke me up, I stumbled downstairs to feed him and heard an intermittent buzzing, which I at first took to be a big.

That's a 5 gallon batch overflowing a 6 Gallon Carboy.  There's clearly wort in the airlock.

This is exciting (yay! Beer is fermenting! My yeast is active!) but also kind of scary (google homebrewing blowouts if you're curious)

So: gameplan:

Sterilize a new bung and airlock, along with syphon hose. Fill a big tub with enough sterile water that the syphon hose can reach. Guide the hose down and use a tub of water as my sterile airlock.

I've done this before with a 1 gallon batch. What could possibly go wrong? :)