Getting back to the basics

I'm a broken record. The rationalization and impetus for seemingly every one of my posts in the last month has had something to do with my (and my roommates') unemployment. So what the hell... here's one more.

Recently, we've been dedicating ourselves to the simple things in life. Specifically, we're starting to make things from scratch. Because (a) we have the time and (b) it's cheaper. A win-win! (And according to this article, we're apparently not the only ones who feel this way. Stupid GFC.) Here's what we've been up to:

Brewing beer

I covered most of this in this post from a few weeks ago. And Little Bear Brewery is still going strong! We just bottled our fourth batch of beer -- modeled after Newcastle Brown Ale -- and are about to start work on a ginger beer. To the left is our wheat beer, nicknamed Wheat Bear. It has a really great aroma and nice initial taste, but the aftertaste is currently a bit bitter. We're hoping that this gets better with more time for maturation.

Even more exciting is the stash of beer that we're starting to build up. Behold (part of) our stockpile, currently at 114 bottles!!


That's 85.5 liters (22.5 gallons) of beer!!

Growing vegetables

This has mostly been Shorty's labor of love. On our balcony, we now are growing the following: tomatoes, roma tomatoes, basil, coriander, peppermint, spring onions and lettuce. They all still need some time to grow, but once they're ready, we can cross those items off the weekly shopping list!

Some tomatoes and herbs.

Lettuce.

In the works for the future is some rocket (arugula), chili and a lemon tree.

Baking bread

Shorty's girlfriend was kind enough to give us her family's bread machine, which had been collecting dust in their garage for the last few years. Our apartment, on the other hand... we're putting it to extreme use.

After starting off with some basic white breads, we're starting to spread our wings a bit. Recent experiments have included French bread (as seen to the left), cajun jalapeno bread, pesto and pinenut bread, banana bread and herb bread. There's another thing to cross off the shopping list... although now we're buying a lot of flour.

Homemade pasta

The beautiful thing about the bread maker is that it does so much more than make bread! For example, it makes pasta dough. Taking advantage of that, I made some ravioli the other day. This was a brutally long and painstakingly monotonous process -- it takes forever to flatten the dough, make the filling, drop it onto the dough and then seal the dough around it -- but the result was very nice.

Below is a picture of some ravioli (with much pasta sauce on top) and homemade bread with garlic and cheese. Good stuff.


I also made some linguine (or something resembling it) last night, which was much easier to do. Maybe I'll just stick to that in the future.

Homemade pizza

Another use for the bread maker: pizza dough! Short took the lead on this one, and created several different pizzas the other night. Here's a sequence of pictures of him making it:

Spreading out the sauce -- in this case, barbecue -- on the dough.

Adding some cheese.

The toppings: chicken, onion, red pepper, hot pepper, etc.

Some more cheese!

The final product.

Coffee

And lastly, Short surprised us last week with a cappuccino/espresso maker! So now we're making ourselves fresh lattes and cappuccinos and whatnot.


A return to the basics! We clearly have the time. It's saving us money. The perfect win-win.

Home brew: it gives my life meaning!

So. Unemployment is really starting to hit home. I have no solid leads for a new job, and there's seemingly nothing on the horizon. I'm progressively sleeping in later. I'm running out of things to do, and the fact that Sydney's been hit with an awful week of weather has not helped the cause. I've officially lost track of what day it is. The money is dwindling, day by excruciating day. And my potential DOD (day of deportation) just lingers over me.

Of course, I'm not alone. For I currently live in an apartment full of unemployeds. On the weekends last year, I'd sleep in and wake up to an apartment full of people. Now, I do that on a Tuesday. Or a Thursday. Or, well, every day. So we're all very much in this together.

We needed something to do, clearly. To keep us occupied, keep us motivated, keep us sane. The main caveat, of course, was that this activity couldn't be expensive.

And that's when one of Maz's friends introduced us to the world of home brewing. At first, I think we were all skeptical, and had many questions. That would be a really time consuming, right? Isn't it a complicated process? And doesn't it take forever to yield something that's not only alcoholic but actually tastes good?

Quickly, these concerns were put to rest. Yes, there'd be some work, although it wouldn't be nearly as much as we first imagined. (But would it have been a bad thing if it was that labor-intensive?? We have nothing but time!) And the actual process, after you get past what can look like a daunting set of instructions, only has to be as complicated as you want it to be. And it doesn't take long at all; on the shorter end, you can have a quality beer ready to drink within two weeks!

So, to recap: a cheap task that will keep us occupied... and that task involves producing alcohol??!?* Ummmmm, where do we sign up???

*Yeah, we might currently be in a reduced-spending mode, but you know that we're not sacrificing alcohol. God forbid.

Maz and Short bravely did the first few batches: first an Australian-style lager, then a European-style lager, then an India Pale Ale. Each beer was surprisingly good, and each one seemed to improve upon the last.

Yogi and I, encouraged by the results, teamed up to have a crack as well. But before starting, there were a few matters to attend to. First was our "brewery's" name. And for that we decided on Little Bear Brewery, which is derived from parts of each of our names. In German, Klein means small or little. And Yogi's name is like, well, Yogi Bear. So Little Bear it was! Simple, straightforward, catchy. A logo is very slowly in the works.

The second matter to attend to before starting was collecting bottles in which to bottle the beer. Because while Maz and Short bottled their beer in plastic bottles that they simply bought, we decided to bottle our beer in glass bottles. This, however, posed the challenge of acquiring said bottles. And as far as we were concerned, there was only one way to do that: drink ourselves silly! So for the next several weeks, just about every time we bought beer, whether it was to casually drink at our apartment or to rambunctiously drink at a house party, we'd buy 750 ml (25 fl oz) long necks of Cooper's Pale Ale. Why Cooper's? Well, it's a solid beer, the bottles' brown glass is good for keeping light out, and the tops aren't twist off. (This last point was important because our cap press can't put bottle caps on twist tops.) And why 750 ml bottles? Well, each batch of home brew nets about 23 liters of beer. (For the metric system-challenged, that's roughly equivalent to six gallons. Let me repeat that: SIX GALLONS OF BEER!!!) So we could either collect 60 regular-sized bottles or 30 long necks. And after a few weeks of calculations, we concluded that 30 bottles is precisely two times more manageable than 60. We're still not sure if that's purely coincidental or not.

For about a month we drank those long necks, slowly accumulating our stock. And finally, after a big Australia Day Weekend in late January to cap off this monstrous month of long neck after long neck, we reached our goal. Our hearts were content. Our livers were furious. We were ready to start brewing.

We made a trip to Dave's Home Brew in North Sydney, consulted with Dave himself on our first beer and settled on modeling it after an Australian pale ale called Little Creatures.

Yogi and I came back to the apartment, cleaned and sterilized all our materials, mixed up the various ingredients (boiling water, liquid malt extract, brewing sugar, hops, yeast and enough cool water to get to 23 liters) and then... well, we let it sit for a week to allow for the mixture to get its fermentation on. Then we cleaned and sterilized our 30 bottles, filled each one with our precious beer, added carbonation drops, capped the bottles and then... well, we let it sit for another week to carbonate and mature.

And that's it! That's it! One week after bottling, Yogi and I had our first sips of what we had come to call Bears and Creatures Pale Ale.* A week probably didn't give the beer quite enough time to mature -- it's generally recommended that you wait at least two weeks -- but our curiosity got the best of us. And you know what? It was still great! Fantastic! I couldn't have been much more pleased. A really rich, hoppy flavor and a great amber color. The head left a little to be desired, but we're hoping that that develops a little more in the coming weeks.

Now we're on to our second batch, which is a wheat bear. Tentatively we're calling it Wheat Bear,** and we just bottled it this morning.

*The origins of this name are fairly straightforward. Our "brewery" is Little Bear. And the beer we modeled this batch after was Little Creatures Pale Ale. So knock off the "Little" from each name and you have Bears and Creatures Pale Ale.

**Really hope I don't need to explain this name!

Maz and Shorty bottled their fourth batch the other day, and they've recently dedicated themselves to glass bottles as well. However, this poses our next challenge: accumulating more bottles! But this time, we've spared our livers and have purchased 84 empty Cooper's long necks on eBay. That will bring our bottle collection to 140, which is enough for five batches of beer. So I'm hoping that's all the bottles we'll ever need. But if it isn't, well, that just means that we'd have 105 liters (NEARLY 28 GALLONS!) of beer. And that should hold us over for a while. I think.