Saturday, August 23, 2014

Small batch canned tomatoes.

My garden this year is producing a decent number of tomatoes. Not so beautiful, but I would like to save them. Every year we use a lot of cans of tomatoes for pasta sauces. I thought it would be nice if I could can my tomatoes and hopefully save money throughout the winter.


I used a recipe from Simple Bites. It was easy to follow, although for my first batch of tomatoes I made the a couple mistakes.
First I always get quarts and pint jars mixed up since here in Japan everything is labeled nicely with ml. So I added too much lemon juice.
Second I added the lemon juice on top of the tomatoes, which is what the recipe recommends. However this goes against the USDA guidelines for canning tomatoes which call for the lemon juice to be added to the jar first.
Third, as you can see from the picture below, I put the top on too tightly on one of my jars, and the bottom exploded.


I was glad it was a half pint that exploded rather than my pints.

There was a fair amount of liquid lost from a few of the jars, but after doing a bit of research online this seems to be fine.

Update: Since I wrote this post I put up another 5 pints, without my previous mistakes.

Monday, April 28, 2014

Munton's Yorkshire Bitter Brew


I recently bottled my Black Rock lager brew, so that means its time to start my next batch!

This time I ordered Munton's Connoisseurs Yorkshire Bitter. I have never actually had bitter before so its going to be difficult to tell if my beer comes out well or not.


I did my brew according to the kit instructions. I used regular sugar since I still haven't gotten around to buying any corn sugar.

Unlike my first brew, my black rock, this time I pitched the yeast at 26 degrees. It wasn't as quick to start, but once it got started it went crazy.

The kit is designed for 23L, but since my tank can hold, when completely fully, only 24L I ended up with a final volume of 22L. Even with 2L of headroom the yeast went crazy and I got some crazy blowout from my air lock.

I went down to the local Homac and bought some tubing and fit one end into my bung and the other into a can of sanitizer. The brew went crazy for two days. Now it has settled down (day 3) and I am back to using my air lock.

The yeast seems much more active than the black rock kit.

My second time around was much easier than my first. I already had my sanitizer mixed up and so the whole process took me less than an hour to get it started.

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Beer Brewing

Recently I have decided I want to try my hand at brewing beer and wine. Ultimately I want to brew wine as I have wanted to brew wine since I was a middle school student. Unfortunately brewing wine is a bit of a process and needs about a year when you consider the bottle time.

About two weeks ago I was talking with a friend and decided that brewing beer would be a good start.

I ordered a starter brewing kit online, and also a sanitiser.

I decided to use star san. It is no rinse which means I can soak or stray it onto my equipment and be ready to go.
1 ounce is used to make 5 gallons. So after some thinking and doing a bit of math I ended up making 5L. I used 9ml of the star san concentrate and 5L of water. After making up this batch I realised that this is a ton of sanitiser. Far more than I really need. But I will know for next time.

I covered everything with sanitiser and got started.


I used my stock pot to heat up 5L of water. To this I added 800g of plan white sugar. Corn sugar is the best to use, but I need to order it online, so I decided to just go for white sugar. If the taste is lacking from batch two I will change to corn sugar.

To my stock pot with water and sugar I added the contents of one can of malt extract.

This brought my total volume up to about 7L. This was actually too much boiling liquid. But I moved this into my fermentation tank and added another 14L of water. My temperature was still to high at 30 degrees, so I put my tank in the sink with cold water and got the temperature down to 28. Then I added the yeast and set the tank up in the spare room to ferment.

I covered the tank with an old t-shirt. Hopefully this will help maintain the temperature and also keep the beer from getting skunked from light getting into the tank.



In about two weeks it will be time to bottle!

Update: 24 hours later and my beer is bubbling. Looks like everything is underway. Just need to wait a week or so for it to finish up.