Summer

I was gone for ultimate or work quite a bit over the summer. Between practices, tournaments, workshops and conferences I was at home for something like four weekends in four months, which provided content for the travel blog, but it is  really strange now to have some free time. I don't really know what to do (I spent this weekend in bed and on the porch with a nasty cold).

I did try to cultivate some hobbies while I was in Zürich. I had two such endeavors over the summer. A balcony tomato vine and my first continental foray into homebrew. While neither turn out perfect, the second way much closer to be considered a success.

I grew up in the garden. I am pretty sure I got into college because I wrote about playing in the compost pile. Growing a potted tomato vine on my balcony couldn't be that difficult, could it? I got three slightly larger than cherry-tomato sized tomatoes from my vine, but at one point I didn't think I would get any. By the time the last tomato was close enough to ripe to pick, there were no leaves left on the vine.

I guess I didn't realize the importance of tomato stakes.
(this was after I untangled it from the rosemary bush) 

So, I built my own, with special levels to accommodate the
existing vine branches. The poor vine had been through enough!

But soon the leaves yellowed and dropped:

A call to my dad diagnosed it with "the blight"
Plucking the bad leaves did not stem the spread.

Not all hope was lost, they continued to ripen:

48 hours difference.

In the end, they were eaten unceremoniously as a trio, with just a little salt and pepper. An afterthought, as I was rushing out the door to catch my flight to Stockholm.

Homebrewing was slightly more successful. It ate up a lot of refrigerator space and had my neighbors ask me to keep the noise down (bottling took much longer than expected), but it was fun + science-ish and now I have just over two Kiste-s of trinkbar beer (a Kiste is a plastic crate that Germans buy beer in, which makes it easier to transport and take back to the store to get your deposit back).

  

Part of the process. Yes that is pantyhose over a strainer.

Measuring the specific gravity (inverse of the density)

All set up to ferment in my room. Quickly moved
to the basement due to noise and temperature.

To keep the temperature down I filled discs with water, which was
pulled up into the towel and due to physics (chemistry?) lowered
the internal temperature by a few degrees Celsius.
Thanks Internet for the idea!

I waited some weeks, monitoring the specific gravity to see when fermentation changed, then bottled, put the bottles in the fridge and waited four more weeks and voila:

Pröschtli!

It is fine to drink and actually pretty tasty, just a little strange, because it isn't filtered, so there is some yeast in the bottles. It is also a little, ummm, unevenly carbonated, so it is best to open a new bottle over the sink :) My bottle caps are lime green - still working on a label. Stop by and test it out yourself!