What a great day today.  Was able to get into every session I wanted.  While exhausting, I did manage to get a lot out of the day and was able to get onlune everywhere and blog the sessions.  I’ll need to take a few minutes of reflection sometime tongiht, but right now I’m a little beat.

While I’m thinking of it, I should mention that I found another sushi place last night that was fantastic and totally made up for the garbage they served me at Benehanna (still can’t spell that) the other night.  I traveled north on the subway last night to a section of Atlanta called Buckhorn, which was supposed to be a great soppoing and club district.  Found out you really needed transportation to make that trip meaningful.  However I did stumble upon a place within walking distance from the train station called Ru San’s.  The coolest selection of special rolls I’ve ever seen.  You could get various maki and sushi/sashimi orders by the piece for very little $$.  Fully recommend.  Here’s a look at their place…

That pic actually came out pretty good.  Lately my camera phone pics have been terrible. 

I’m off to a Promethian reception at the aquarium.  Hoping this one is less crowded than the other night. 

Sometimes that which you come away with isn’t what you went in looking for.  Case and point, while reading Will Richardson’s blog this weekend, which by the way is a great read so no offence to him by not posting about his content, I noticed that he included a little widget on his page highlighting various books.  Turns out this is powered by a nifty little twist on social networking called LibraryThing.  This site allows you to create an account and add books to your profile, subsequently encouraging comments and personal ratings on the various books in your ‘library’.  You can read other user’s comments, participate in dialog about the books, join a book group around particular interests and search for books based on ratings/tags/etc.  You could even put together a library of other people’s libraries.  I think I’m going to include a book widget on here so I can share some of my reads too.

Threw together a batch of cider today. Can’t wait to see how this turns out as I never made hard cider before but Tripper and I figured to do a little experimenting with it. I mixed my batch up like this…

Ingredients

• 5 Gallons unpasteurized apple cider, newly pressed
• 5 pounds of all natural honey
• 1 packet of Champagne yeast

Began by sanitizing my primary fermenter, bung, large cookpot, large wooden spoon and thermometer with some sodium metabisulphate. Poured 4 gallons cider into the primary fermenter and I heated up one gallon on the stove to moderately warm (maybe about 120). Then poured the honey into the pot. Figured the honey would dissovle more touroughly in the warm solution but that might not have been necessary. Let the pot cool to about 100 degrees and pitched in the yeast (which I had dissolved in a small quantity of warm cider). Again, I really don’t think that, because we are using the unpasturized and untreated cider, the yeast was really necessary. However, I’m going for a nice strong, dry cider-wine kind of deal and think that yeast is going to give me a more vigorous fermentation. I’m thinking that perhaps I should have used a little preservative to kill off the natural yeasts, but we’ll see how it goes. After mixing in the yeast, I pour the remaining juice back in with the rest in the primary fermentaion pail and throw a lid on with a bung.

Things I want to keep in mind:

• I know that after the initial fermentaion, a second (malolactic?) fermentaion will take cider over to vinegar and I don’t want that to happen, so I think after the first vigerous rush dies down (I’m thinking a week to 10 days) I’ll want to rack into a carbouy and top up to minimize the exposure to oxygen.
• I wish I could find my hyrdometer to take a reading.
• I would like to bottle these in wine bottles. Don’t think I want the carbonation. Just a nice dry, smooth tasting cider wine.
• Maybe I will do a couple bottled. My understanding is you want to encourage a secondary fermentaion during the bottling process by added 1tsp sugar for every pint bottled.
• I’m going to want to battle this as soon as it stops working. Figuring about a week and a half to the first rack, another rack in a week and a half then maybe bottle a week after that. So I should be ready to bottle in about a month.
• Should be left in bottle for at least 6-8 months. So we’ll have some good necter next summer. I want a good part of this batch to really mellow, so I’ll try to keep most in the cellar for at least a year. Should be good for up to 3 years.

Had a surprise hatch the other day. 12 chicks total.

Gunnar at three months. He’s gonna be HUGE!