Matt's Blog

Plain View #72 - June 22, 2007 - This show is missing in action. If anyone one has a copy, please send it my way. Thanks.

Bufe

summer school

Hapkido demonstration

The Beatitudes (not our movie)

Last King of Scotland

Last Comic Standing

The triplets

Adult Adoptee List

Maly

New beer

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Plain View #40 4/5/06

Matchstick Men

Garden State

Walk the Line

Dead Hamster

Other Nonsense

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Plain View #38 3/30/06

Grizzly Man

Dear Frankie

The Olden Days

Lent

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Get your bible down. Here's this week's passages and commentary.

With a bag full of papers to sort and grade, I'm finding great motivation to do other things. So this afternoon I tackled the hall closet. Here are my findings, give or take.

20 hats (5 to Will, 5 to Maly, 1 for Grandma, 4 Adrian hats to school and 6 to Goodwill)
1 hula dancer (was to sneak it into Mike's back car window, but that's never going to happen--going to put it on my desk at school)
2 camera tripods (both old, one probably an antique, anyone want it?)
4 bags of vacuum bags
2 books
1 video cassette (my brother the attorney in a classroom courtroom suing somebody about scaffolding--they say scaffolding so many times I really should sell copies of this as a drinking game, every time you hear "scaffolding" chugalug)
1 dvd
1 violin in need of repair
6 bags of stuff (some to return to Target or Home Depot, some full of stuff to take to one person or another)
4 umbrellas
1 guitar
1 Spiderman guitar strap
1 rack full of coats (including 2 sports coats that are too small for Maly much less Will)

If anything appears in these purge updates with the words goodwill or anyone-want-it next to it, come by and pick it up if you're interested, or send me 15-bucks postage and handling and I'll mail it to you.

Plain View #31 12/14/05

Our Belated Christmas New Year Show. Happy Easter everybody!

No reply to last week's challenge

Too much Christmas giving

Intelligent design

Matt, the drama queen

Teacher gifts

Brewing

Satan Claus

Bethany's Donald Duck

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I'm reposting this because feedburner tells me noone has pulled this one down. Don't know if this is how it works or not. We'll see.

Plain View #15 7/20/05

http://feeds.feedburner.com/searscast

Recorded almost a week ago after a couple weeks off for summer vacation. We're back, baby!

Plain View #14 7/1/05

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This time I blame Filezilla. Anyway, here's the full length version of #14.

http://www.brendoman.com/images/matt/NUT_BROWN_ALE.jpg" width="141" height="252" alt="" border="0">

Bottled my clean-out-the-cupboard brew last night. The recipe is given below. I basically took inventory of what I had, pulled everything out for the mead and summer brew that I plan to make, gathered the remaining ingredients, and went to brewing. This was about three weeks ago. When I took a sip during bottling I initially thought, "Eww, did something go wrong?" I wasn't excited about tossing out five gallons of beer. I tried another taste and figured out I was just surprised by the strong taste hops in the beer. My hops, the hops I grew in my own back yard, the hops I threw into the wort during the last couple minutes of boil just so I could taste them. I'd been drinking farm stout and cider for so long that I think I forgot what hops tasted like. Oh, and they taste delicious.

So I ended up with what I think will be a nice American brown ale. I ran out of bottles during bottling, so I put what was left into a plastic pitcher. Hmmmm. I think I'll go home and finish it off now. Can't wait for the bottle conditioning to wrap up in a week or two.

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The farm stout and cider are really very good. I'm the only one who had any cider over the Christmas holiday (except for a friend I gave some to). I discovered another benifit of the cider the other night while kissing my wife. It makes your breath orangy fresh.

Not sure what the next project will be. Need to get the Christmas stuff out the garage first.

Disclaimer: My cutest reader told me that while she thinks most of the material on my blog was pretty good, the entry about making my hard cider was very boring. To her way of thinking, noone cares if I added too much orange zest, what it tastes like, etc. While it's hard to believe that noone would be interest in the details of my beer making, I suppose it's possible. So if that's you, you may want to skip the following, and all future, brewing updates.

Today I started a farm stout. That's a beer that's dark with a little sweetness to it. You know, like Beyonce. I put it in the bucket this morning and it was off and bubbling this evening. I've never made a farm stout before. I like a dark beer, especially in the winter time. And there are a number of different styles and recipies out there to try. I thought that since the farm stout has a little sweet to it, I might be able to get my wife to enjoy one too. She's not a big fan of anything darker than light brown.

Cider update: I tried one of the ciders the other day. I made a rookie mistake after bottling. Instead of putting the bottles somewhere warm where the yeast could do some carbinating for me, I stuck them in the garage where it was cold. So much for sparkling cider. Guess it's another year of still. But (without going into too many details) it's pretty pleasant. The orange does overpower the apple flavor a little. Overall, it's sweet, smooth, subtle, and strong. Everything a winter cider should be. Maybe next year we'll shoot for bubbles.

This afternoon I bottled 2 gallons of hard cider. Used some local cider, kind of local honey, and a bit of maple syrup some friends got me on a trip back east. When I opened the bucket prior to bottling, I noticed it smelled very orangy. It was then (not two weeks ago when I made the mistake) that I noticed I had cut the entire recipe in half except for the orange zest (used 2 oranges instead of 1). Ah well, every batch is an experiment. The orange was mostly noticable in the aroma and aftertaste, which was pretty nice. MaryEllen thought it tasted kind of watery. Hopefully the flavor will develop in the bottle a bit over the next month or so. The carbonation will help the mouth feel a bit too. And while I don't take readings anymore since I broke my hydrometer (and am too cheap to buy another), I'm thinking it must come in at about 12% abv. But there wasn't any alcohol burn as it went down, so there's hope for a nice smooth cider by Christmas.

I was going to brew up a pot of farm stout (sweet stout) while I was bottling, but didn't want to take the extra time. I'll have to get that going next weekend. I made a nice porter in September or October and it's going fast. Good stuff. I still have some summer beer that I'm finishing up too, an american wheat and a blackberry wheat.

Doesn't it all sound so good!