Love is Brewin'...

Why hello! What ever do I mean by the post title of "love is brewin'"?? I'm guessing you may be asking yourself that. Well, sadly, I don't have a recipe for you today so I thought I'd share some other adventures going on in the Barbershop these days!

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, life is extremely busy right now so it's getting much more difficult for me to keep up with the blog; hence, my less frequent posts. I also feel like I've been in a bit of a blog "funk." I just haven't really felt much like taking pictures of the food I've been making (but obviously I have been cooking!). There have been some blog-worthy dishes happening around here, but for some reason, I just haven't had the motivation to snap some photos and write about them. So, do forgive me. Hopefully I'll be back on the regular blog bandwagon soon!

In the meantime though, every now and then I may share a non-food post with you all, if you don't mind. So, here's one of those types of posts!

This past weekend Mike and I brewed our first beer for the wedding (so now do you get the "love is brewin'" post title?! :)). It's not a secret that we're planning to make homebrewed beer as one of our wedding favors for our guests (so don't worry; I'm not letting the cat out of the bag here ;)). Having just passed the 3-month mark to the big day, it's time to start brewing! At a minimum, beer takes about 1 month to be ready to drink, but 2 or 3 months is more typical. So, we're on our way with making our beers!

The first we brewed is the one that should "age" the longest - a chocolate stout. Mmmmm. Although I just revealed one of the types of beer we're making, I'm not going to reveal its name. That part is a secret!

Some pics of our super fun brew day from this past weekend:

Grains!

It was SUCH a hot brew day! No air conditioning for us during the brewing process... That, coupled with the heat that the brewing process generates, made us sweaty fools by the end of the day! Yikes.

Mike, adding some of the hops to the boil!

A chocolate stout obviously needs chocolate!!!!! We put in a pound and a half of chocolate into this batch. Oh yeah. :)

Melting the chocolate to add to the boil!

Whiskey was no help whatsoever during this process. He really needs to be doing more to earn his keep... ;)

The final product, getting ready to sit and ferment for a bit!

But first, it must be aerated! And to do this, Mike uses a drill! Neato.

So now our chocolate stout is fermenting nicely, and there are a couple more small things to do to the batch in the next few weeks. Then, we bottle it!

I'm not sure if any of my blog readers are homebrewers, but if you're at all interested in our recipe, just let me know!

And a couple other things I've been up to?

Baking spent grain bread from the leftover grains from brewing...

Gosh I love this bread.

And making an old recipe again - these awesome no-bake peanut butter oatmeal chocolate chip cookie dough balls. Now these are the perfect treat to make for these hot days we've been having! I haven't felt much like turning on the oven to bake, so these little dough balls are the perfect compromise. If you've been experiencing the very hot and humid weather like we have been here in Boston, you must make these! They satisfy your sweet tooth craving without needing to turn up the heat with the oven. And they're definitely on the healthier side too!!

:)

Thanks for reading my "love is brewin'" post! Hope everyone's staying cool and having a great month of August so far!