The Bubbling Blonde

To live up to the Greelis in me (and really the Palkie, too) I have taken up a new hobby, home brewing. As Great Grandpa Greelis did during prohibition I am taking up the art of creating beer at home. My first batch, the Bubbling Blonde, as she has come to be known (really a recipe called the Arctic Blonde, which is also a good name), has been produced start to finish and is close to ready for chilling and drinking. Here is a quick trip through the process.

First you must create the wort by steeping the grain and then adding the hops. For my first time it took me 6 hours start to finish. It should take about 4 once I iron the kinks out.

Once the wort is ready you siphon it into the primary fermentor where it bubbles for a week and the alcohol is created.

The wort then gets "racked" into the secondary fermentor and it hangs out there for another week. Here the Bubbling Blonde is hanging with her red head counterpart.

Bottles must be de-labeled and sterilized.

Two weeks from the beginning it is ready to bottle! I am filling and Sara is capping.

A final product! The Bubbling Blonde must now age for a few weeks.

Two weeks later and we snuck a taster. Though tasty, she is still a bit young and needs to mature a bit more. It's hard to be patient! Next on the docket, a Mr. Charlie's Amber.

Old Threshers Weekend Mount Pleasant, Iowa

Hello blog followers! Tonight I am documenting my first trip to Iowa to hang with Sara's folks and explore her childhood stomping grounds. It was also Old Thresher's weekend in Sara's hometown of Mount Pleasant. This year was the 60th reunion of Old Threshers and is always held over the five day Labor Day weekend. In the 70's, before other towns established their own Threshers celebrations, the reunion would grow the population of Mt. Pleasant from a town of 8,000 to hundreds of thousands some years. Sara confirmed that the town was not nearly as hectic as it had been back in the day, but it was nevertheless a buzz with excitement and lots of out of towners.

Just in case you don't know (cuz I didn't), the "old threshing" machines were steam powered engines that did lots of work out in the fields. There were plenty of threshing machines but I thought what was even more impressive was the number of smaller steam engines that helped the farmer with chores such as shucking the corn or powering a table saw and around the house pumped the well water or powered the washing machines!

We had to have a photo in front of this display with our GIGANTIC funnel cake! Funnel cake, Sara explains, is a sorry substitution for the ever popular and much anticipated Indian Fry Bread that was for the first time anyone can remember, NOT available anywhere on the grounds. The effect of this loss was much more than any outsider such as myself could have imagined. Before we had even gotten to go to Old Threshers, we stopped at the local grocery store to pick up a few items. In the checkout line a woman was overheard explaining that there was no Indian Fry Bread this year. Gasps of shock were heard from all around. These strangers were instantly united by a slight believed undeserved and threats of boycott were seriously considered.

Last trip home in July, Sara's mom surprised her and presented Sara with her long lost lifetime Old Threshers train pass. The train is an actual steam engine that circles the entire Old Threshers park depositing riders on either end of the expansive grounds. Sara purchased this train pass in 1979 from the proceeds of a summer of mowing lawns and extra chores around the house and cost a whoppin' $25.00, certainly no chump change back then. Apparently unearthed in their recent move (Sara's mom says it just showed up on her desk one day), Sara's idled pass was as crisp and clean as the day it was purchased. Sara reports that the treasured pass was lost promptly after purchasing and had been used only one year. So when the conductor came around to punch our $2.00 tickets, Sara proudly flashed her card in all of it's pristine glory and rode for FREE...theoretically (Actually, I reminded her, the ride cost her approximately $12.00 but she insists that will drop exponentially as she plans on returning just to make use of that pass).

I did enjoy the ride!

Here are a couple of shots of us posing in front of a steam engine parade and eating MORE Old Thresher junk food!

Here we are at the banks of the Skunk River, allegedly the scene of one of the best senior pranks I've ever heard.

Betty, Sara and I making a trip to Old Thresher's. Seriously people,us and a hundred thousand other people bought full weekend passes and went back numerous times. There's a lot for a city girl to take in. This trip was to see one of the Scott family friends perform in a concert.

Sara humored me and we went back later that night to see Collin Raye and Restless Heart in concert. I loved it! She tolerated it!

Monday we had a "pizza on the grill night". Seemed like a great idea and there was certainly potential. We each built our own personal pizza with exotic toppings and Warren manned the grill. It could fairly be said that Warren did not bring his "A" game that night as major carnage ensued. Carcinogens galore. The toppings weren't burnt, so we scraped the top layer and choked that down thinking of course of the starving children elsewhere. The final pic is of Warren trying to get rid of all evidence of this disaster.

Mia and the Scotts on their new back deck overlooking a beautiful back yard.