Cookie Shot Fail and Milk Stout Brew Night

Didn't get around to posting this last weekend, but here's what was happened in the Kitchen:

The weekend started with my first attempt at Chocolate Chip Cookie Shot Glasses. Heard about these on the internets, and thought "surely I could do that in the Kitchen." So I ordered a Fred Cool Shooters Shot Glass Mold from Amzn, and stopped for cookie dough on the way home from work.

 Unfortunately, I ended up with a very nice cookie on top, and some very warm, but totally gooey and uncooked dough in the mold itself. Back to the drawing board on this one! (And no, there are no pics of the cookie dough going into the shot glass mold. Cookie dough is sticky stuff, and not conducive to step-by-step pics during the process!)

          Next up in the kitchen was my Milk Stout brew night. I'm using Midwest Supplies Cream Stout Extract Kit, but I'm going to add some chocolate flavor before bottling. I opted for a Wyeast 1028 London Ale yeast smack pack for this one. It's a pretty simple kit so brew night went fairly smoothly.

Once the brewing is done, it's time to cool things off in a hurry. I just love my copper coil wort chiller--plunk it in your kettle 15 minutes before your boil is done to sanitize it, then just run cold tap water through it. 30 minutes later, your boiling kettle is down to 70ish temps and ready to move to your fermenter. Huge time and effort saver. Being made of copper, the wort chiller being added to the boil for the last fifteen minutes supposedly affords a similar beneficial reaction with the wort as would using a copper boil kettle, but much less expensively. Most importantly, it saves me having to try to move the boiling kettle off the stove and into a tub of ice.

     After it was cooled, dropped the wort into my 7.5 gallon Speidel fermenter, added the smack pack of yeast and capped it off. Then I added some cheap vodka to the airlock* and drug the whole thing out to the living room. Normally, I'd leave the fermenter in the closet with the water heater, or the pantry by the garage door, but it's been a little chilly in both places. I was getting a little nervous about the yeast, since I didn't see any activity until Wednesday, but once it got active, it stayed pretty busy for a bit. It's still active enough that I won't be able to bottle this weekend, but that's ok--I have the second stab at my B) Endarkenment Chocolate Peanut Butter Stout to bottle this weekend. Though I outsmarted the cacao nibs this year by enclosing them in a hops bag before adding them to the secondary fermenter, the peanut butter powder was enough of a mess last year that I know I will appreciate the lack of anything else needing my attention this weekend!

*I love my Speidel fermenters. They're kinda pricey, but they're built extremely well, have great spigots so I don't have to use an auto-siphon, super easy to move with their sturdy handles and easy to clean with their wide-mouth openings. I'm not terribly fond of the airlock that comes with them, and will likely start using my standard 3 piece airlocks with them instead. (They work fine, just they are very, very large...so more cheap vodka, and a little bit more difficult to see activity. Just me being a bitchy fuss-budget, mostly.)

     So...that's what happened in the Kitchen last weekend...not sure if anything much is gonna go on this weekend or not. If there is any shit happenin' in the kitchen this weekend, all y'all will hear about it ... sooner or later. In the meantime, drink like a chimney and jump like a crocodile!