The house smells like beer

But not in that rancid, sweet-sticky-nauseaus-morning-after-the-party way. More like a wholesome, yeasty, grainy, aromatic way. Yep, the next phase of Operation Turn-My-House-Into-An-Anachronism is under way. The first batch of Homestead Dark is now brewing away in a corner of the kitchen. Thanks to the very simple recipe here that my roomate found while meandering 'bout the web. Of course since I could never take a recipe and leave well enough alone, I modified this one a bit to. I figure that if molasses is good, honey must be ok too, and using them both must be better yet. And since I didn't know whether to steep the hops or just dump 'em in, I did both. Bottling is in 5-7 days and then they will age until the party. Oh, you didn't know about the party? October 30th, saturday night, my place. Halloween, so if ya got a costume, wear it. And be prepared for some homebrew goodness. Part of the reason for my lack of knowledge is that I did virtually no research before begining the brewing. That's part of the problem with most of my half-cocked ideas: they have a very short shelf life and tend to get pushed out of the way by new ideas on a regular basis, like the runt goslings get kicked out of the nest by their genitically superior brethren. Except I have found no evidence to support the notion that my schemes get better with natural selection. Oh, and speaking of geese, still no eggs. I am begining to suspect that they naturally shut down in the winter and that their travels may have flipped the switch into the off position till spring. Today, since they had not yet ventured into the goose shanty that I built for them, I herded them in there and fed them inside so as to introduce them to the concept of shelter, since it is getting into the 20's at night and snow is on the way. So what is next, you may (or may not) wonder? Well, a stack of 20 or so books on the kitchen table dealing with small scale farming, homesteading, and animal husbandry will surley yield some projects, but for now I'm pursuing a book I just couldn't pass up when down at the Home-Brewer's Outpost: "The Lore of Still Building." Oh yeah baby! Stay tuned for updates.

Number of dashes used in this post: 14
Number of paragraphs: 1
Number of english classes I took to graduate college: 0