The Other Don Kelly

We have an infrequent, but still recurring ant problem: every few years or so, we find ants coming into our kitchen. Now is one of those times, and our go-to solution is to destroy the colony using homemade ant bait — a cotton ball soaked in sugar water (which also contains borax) brings them swarming, they bring the sugar water back to the hive and feed everyone else, and the borax kills them all over a few days. I currently have a cotton ball near their entrance point, and it is literally covered in ants…

Anyway, when I went to set the bait I found that our previous batch was almost all gone. I couldn’t remember the exact proportions for the recipe so I had to do some Googling, and then I prorated what I found to fit in our container. For my readers, and for my own future self, here is the recipe:

• 1/4 cup sugar
• 1 tablespoon borax (we have this for our DIY laundry soap)
• enough water to make 1 cup of the mixture

Mix the borax and sugar into the water until it dissolves, then put it in a container and toss in some cotton balls to soak. That’s it!

I put one cotton ball on the kitchen counter, and one at whatever entry point I can find, and change them every day or so when they dry out. This is a bit harder to do right now, because it takes as long as a week to wipe out the hive, but we can’t leave the bait out when we have Iris over. Still, it seems to be working; the ants are not in the kitchen anymore and I’m sure we’re almost done.

Happy Birthday, Joni Mitchell! Seventy five years old today. WXPN has been playing her albums in full, along with singles and a bunch of covers.

Meantime, today is brew day. We’re making a Roggenbier, a style of German rye beer that became extinct with the coming of the beer purity laws at the end of the Middle Ages, and has only been resurrected withinin the last few decades; we’re also kegging that Pale Ale we made a few weeks ago. There has been much heating and cooling of liquids, and much cleaning of pots, kegs, glassware and other items and, in the middle of all this, we also made laundry soap — we ran out yesterday.

 

We just kegged our latest batch of beer, a rye IPA recipe called “Denny’s Favorite.”  It’s also one of mine…

Listening: “Matty Groves” by Fairport Convention

Anne and I have both become more interested in our brewing, and we broke out the hydrometer for this batch. This measures the specific gravity (density as compared to the density of water): you measure the specific gravity before and after fermenting, and the difference between original gravity (OG) and final gravity (FG) corresponds to the difference in density between the sugary pre-ferment wort, and the beer after the sugars have been converted to alcohol. Plug these into a formula to get the amount of alcohol in the beer: we got an OG of 1.040 when we brewed a few weeks ago, and today our FG was 1.006, so our new batch is about 6.5% alcohol by volume. It should be carbonated and ready to drink in about a week, but other than a taste test we’ll probably save it for Sarah’s birthday party.

Listening: “Cello Song” by Nick Drake

But that sent me on a voyage of Internet discovery, which led me to issues like calculated vs measured beer gravities — and how do you calculate the gravity? You do it by looking at the potential sugar supply of the malt in your recipe, adjusted for the efficiency of your brewing process, and the “attenuation,” or sugar-converting power of your yeast, and how do you do all those things?

Listening: “Galileo” by the Indigo Girls

Well, now I know how, but these all come more into play when you are trying to create a beer recipe; since we usually just follow recipes we don’t really need to know these things — measuredOG and FG are fine for our purposes, and that’s our one step deeper into the process.

We are now waiting for Emmi & Kyle, and Ben (with possibly Candace) to arrive for our Christmas visit — we’ll be having the chili I made the other day, and tonight is the CAT Christmas Lights night ride, which had been rained out on Saturday.

Listening: “Watershed” by Vienna Teng

I caught a cold in Canada, which seemed to be get better before it really settled in — D’oh! — so I’ve been indoors the past two days, just feeling out of sorts and sniffly. I spent most of yesterday studying up on graphing in R, but since we’re out of laundry soap I thought I’d go the other direction today and make a batch. (Anne left the ingredients in the kitchen, I took it as a hint.) Here is the recipe:

---

DIY Laundry Soap Recipe

• 2/3 of a bar Lye or Fels Naptha Soap
• 1 cup Borax
• 1 cup Washing Soda
• Medium-sized pot or saucepan, and a 2-gallon (or bigger) bucket

Grate the soap, then put it in the saucepan with 6 cups of water and heat it until it melts. Add the washing soda and the borax, keep heating until they dissolve, then remove from heat.

Add 4 cups of hot water to the bucket, then add the soap mix and stir. Add another gallon plus 6 cups of water, stir again, and let it sit and gel for 24 hours.

---

And… voilà! In basically the time it took to write this, I made a year’s supply of laundry soap for like two bucks.

Note that this is double the concentration of the original recipe, so while it’s OK for HE washers (it contains no “sudsing agents”), you should only use the amount your washer recommends.

So anyway, Musikfest starts tonight. We should be able to hear it happening from the porch, but we may also head down to check out the festivities if I’m feeling festive.