Wine Festival Goodies

For several years now I’ve attended the Decatur Wine Festival with my friends Emily (of Spatialdrift fame) and her husband, Adam.  We were back again today for more wine drinking festivities, and I thought I’d share what I’ve learned to expect from this sort of a wine festival.

To give you a little background on my wine experience, let me be clear – I’m wine illiterate.  I like going to a wine festival every once and awhile because it gives me a vast array of wines to taste, as well as a lot of knowledgeable people happy to talk about what makes their wine special and what their favorites are.  As pretentious as a wine festival sounds, I’ve always enjoyed the Decatur Wine Festival; I’ve never felt looked-down upon for lack of knowledge, and I’ve never felt out of place for lack of a monocle.

I can’t speak to all festivals, but I’ve enjoyed Decatur’s every time I’ve been.

What comes with my ticket?

When you purchase a wine festival ticket you’re buying several hours of as much wine as you can stomach.  To help you out with that, you will get a booklet with a list of all the wines and hopefully a tiny golf pencil to make notes by your favorites.  At Decatur’s festival they also give you a small wine glass in which to taste all the wine.  Others might simply have small disposable cups to drink from.

How is it set up?

Wine distributors and crafters will have tables setup in open areas with selected bottles of their products.  They do they pouring for you and are usually more than happy to answer any questions you have and give you suggestions.  Many tables will also have some sort of printed material you can pick up if you like a specific type of wine.  This year there were 69 tables and almost 500 different wines being served.

Wine tables right at the festival’s opening.

Besides bottles of wine and printed information, the tables will have water kegs and buckets for you to clean out your glass between wines.  To stave off drunkenness a little longer, once you’ve sipped your selected wine you can dump the remnants into a bucket rather than being forced to finish the entire sample, then wash your glass out with a little water and put the water into the bucket as well.

Most tables used cardboard buckets the size of a popcorn bucket as their wine-disposals, but this one below had their own fancy metal bucket.  Oh ho!

Water keg and disposal bucket

Will there be food?

Because downtown Decatur is a pretty hip-and-with-it place, all the local restaurants come out for the wine festival and have tables of their own.  While it can be tricky to juggle a plate, a wine glass, and a booklet, it’s always worth it; the food has always been delicious.  I’d assume most other wine festivals would have food as well, if for no other reason than to provide cushion for all the alcohol you’re ingesting.

Delicious curry, pad thai, and cheesy roll from Siam Thai

Gentlemen from Chai Pani serving out tastes of Indian street food.

This year we ate thai food from Siam Thai, Indian street food from Chai Pani, and pizza from Sapori di Napoli.  In the past we’ve also had samples from The Iberian Pig and Raging Burrito, but we didn’t move fast enough this year.  Blast!

Any final tips?

Keep your hands free!

The biggest suggestion I have for wine festival attendance is to think carefully about what you’re bringing with you.  We only heard a single wine glass break during the festival this year, but that served as a good reminder to keep your hands free.  I’d suggest that you leave your purses at home, for instance, and if you don’t need a jacket, don’t bring one so you don’t end up carrying it around.  Any additional items that might clutter up your hands mean it’s likelier you’re going to drop your wine glass or spill wine on you or someone else.  If you want to take pictures, consider it carefully – do you need your camera, or will your phone do?

Some people come prepared with a lanyard specially made to hold a wine glass; it has a little basket on the end that the cup rests in and leaves a hole for the stem.  Every year I think about how handy it would be to have one, but then I realize buying one for something I do once a year makes no sense.  But if you want to go to a lot of wine-related events, this would totally be worth your time.

Budget your time!

With 69 tables to visit in only 3 hours, we came to the realization that we needed to run through our booklet and look for anything we really wanted to try before our time ran out.  The booklet came with a handy map, so after finding the tables we wanted to see we plotted a quick course through the streets to efficiently get through the most interesting-looking bottles.

I’M THE MAP I’M THE MAP I’M THE MAP

You’re drinking – be safe!

This should be pretty obvious, but you’re drinking – either designate someone DD, take a cab, or plan on walking to a restaurant for dinner while everyone sobers up.

Anything else I might see?

Well…there are a few other things you might see:

Throngs of people

Rex Wine Roosters

Giant inflatable wine bottles

Discounts at local businesses

What have your wine festival experiences been like?  Hopefully as positive as mine.

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It took a month or two to wrap up the important stuff, two months or so for me to accept that I should do a Part Two sooner rather than later and then highlight the finer details in a Part Three, and then another three months to finally get around to it. I really did want to have the room “finished” in the designer sense, but these things take time when you’re on a budget, so let’s just cover what made the room usable – since we’ve been enjoying using it for a while now!

When we last left off, the new drywall was in place, but the room was still without trim.

We added trim to the windows and doors, around the ceiling and across the gap between the drywall and our wainscoting. Adam caulked it all up to look right – sometimes extensively. We had our moments of doubt, but in the end it all looks great.

Adding the trim back around the windows and the ceiling.

Caulking the trim.

Then we painted the old spackle ceiling bright white to brighten the room, and painted the ceiling, door, and window trims with our house-wide trim color: Benjamin Moore’s Adobe White.

Painting the ceiling to freshen it up. I would’ve loved to removed the lousy texture, but that’s a pretty big DIY undertaking, so we skipped it.

After that, it was one to painting the much-discussed browns! Adam and I (and our parents and friends) had a number of long, involved discussion about colors for this room. One color we knew we’d have is orange, so as to move our glorious orange vintage curtains into this room and have something a bit lighter and fresher in the dining room.

Having called so many of the shots throughout the house, I wanted this room to be driven by Adam’s ideas of what would make the room an awesome, comfortable, and somewhat retro gaming den (we’d be moving the current living room TV and all the consoles in there). Though I was concerned about the room being too dark, I stuck to my guns by keeping my mouth shut (mostly) and letting Adam do his thing. I think he did a great job.

Cutting in for the light brown paint.

Light brown paint applied!

One of those mid-project decisions that inevitably crop up was the color of the trim. Ultimately we decided to paint the trim the same as the rest of the house, but originally it was going to be dark brown. But the trim we bought came primed, and the light trim looked so nice in the space that we changed our plan. We think the house has a more cohesive feel now that some elements are the same, which is important if you’re going to throw strong colors around like we do.

Applying the dark brown paint to our old paneling used as wainscoting.

Next up was to add the built-in shelving we’d planned to go all around the room. This was challenging since this old house doesn’t exactly comprise straight lines and right angles. We used chalk lines to get the exact levels marked, and then tweaked from there to make things meet up and still look right compared to other lines in the room.

Marking a chalk line to hang up the shelving.

Using photos to see where the studs are (to place the supports for the shelves).

Putting up the shelves.

Mary and Kunal came over to hang out and help us put some finishing touches in! Thanks guys.

We had some help!

Putting the finishing touches in place – screw covers for the shelf supports.

Lookin’ good.

The work was easier in a lot of ways that other jobs we’ve done, and harder in the sense that we don’t have the same stamina we did to just come home from our day jobs and then work for hours like we used to do when we first bought the house. This project definitely took longer than we expected for that reason. It really came together though, with a few important adjustments, compromises, and new ideas that developed as the project progressed.

We had a stroke of inspiration for a feature that would really help make our room into the badass gaming den we wanted it to be. More on that and other nice details in the final installment, coming soon.

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Brewing

Brewing requires beers to drink, of course!

Adding hops to the wort.

The recipe called for orange peel, among other things.

The brewing was fairly easy; made even more so by some schmancy equipment we procured: a giant stockpot and a propane burner. It was much more pleasant to brew at scale out in the fresh air, rather than trying to jam into our kitchen and use our tiny pots.

Cooling down the wort.

The wort, prior to getting the additional water.

Bottling

This bottle filler lets you fill the bottle from the bottom up, which is better for the beer (technically still wort).

Silliness with wort… this is basically flat beer. Sampling the dregs is a good way to preview your brew…
or at least, it’s good fodder for speculation.

Beer time!

The final product definitely fit the description in the book: “finely carbonated and displays a large, white, creamy, dense head with a bright golden color,” though I suppose that might be more of a bright golden-caramel color in our case. Close enough.

Sampling… good stuff.

The clone brew was smooth, and tasted like a Belgian tripel, so success there. It has a dry, slightly bitter finish and has gotten more marked as the beer comes into peak maturity (it’s at two months, with a 2-6 month peak). Our hydrometer claimed 4.5% ABV, but everyone who drank it noted that it felt like more… more like the expected 8.5%. Not sure what that was all about, but even folks who didn’t know it was supposed to be 8.5% remarked about the beer’s effect.

All in all we think it turned out well, considering we did have to make some availability-based substitutions to the recipe. Our next brew will probably come from the Clone Brews book, too!

 
*The owner of this website is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking spatialdrift.com to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com. I always link to products I use myself and I will always label these links for you, so you don’t have to click without prior knowledge.

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Washing soda, borax, and castile soap.

The castile soap, cut but not yet chunked or grated.

Once you’ve assembled the ingredients, the process is pretty straightforward. First cut up the soap bar into small pieces and grate, either by hand or with a food processor. Then, dissolve the soap in two quarts of water on the stovetop, stirring nearly constantly.

Granules of castile soup. At this point the kitchen was already smelling fantastic.

The castile soup in the pan of water, ready to heat.

Dissolving the soap in the hot water

 Meanwhile, get a cup of borax and a cup of washing soda and stir into 3.5 to 4.5 gallons of hot water. The original recipe calls for 4.5 to make the total five gallons, but we only had enough large containers to hold four gallons of detergent, so we made it slightly more concentrated. We’ll probably use a .5 cup of detergent per load, instead of 1 cup.

Then stir in the dissolved bar soap mixture until everything is thoroughly combined. Then pour into storage containers and have at it!

I’m not sure we’ve hit on the best containers for storing our homemade laundry detergent just yet… we’re currently keeping some in a reused store-bought detergent container and some a reused drinking water container with a tap. Taps are convenient, but these two containers are both so large that it is hard to shake them to keep the detergent mixed up.
 

The detergent, ready to go!

So far we’ve done a couple week’s worth of laundry with our new creation, and everything seems to be going well. Hooray.

Edit: Still going well, two weeks later. The detergent can be a little snotty… for lack of a better word, but we just give it a shake or two before dispensing and everything seems fine. I don’t think the clothes really come out smelling like anything, and while I don’t want them to be overwhelming, I may experiment with adding a little essential oil in the future to boost the aroma.

 
*The owner of this website is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking spatialdrift.com to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com. I always link to products I use myself and I will always label these links for you, so you don’t have to click without prior knowledge.

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After about 2 seconds of Googling, I found a great and basic site that explained how to light on the cheap.  Happy Soda: Figure on Cheap Lighting uses a scantily-clad anime figurine as a basic example on how to light well without breaking the bank and so far it’s working alright.

Lighting Setup with Claptrap

This is my initial setup.  Happy Soda suggests 2 daytime-style lights, one angled from the top (1) and one from the side through a diffuser of tracer paper (2).  Additionally there’s a light reflector of generic foam board on another side to lighten any dark shadows the 2 lights produce (3).

And luckily, getting all of these materials doesn’t have to cost millions of dollars!  I bought everything but the desk lamp from either The Home Depot or my close-by crafting store, Michael’s:

• Full Spectrum Desk Lamp: $35
• Full Spectrum light bulbs, 4 pack: $8
•  8″ dish light: $13
• Foam board, tracer paper, painter’s tape: ~$10
• Total: ~$66

(Empty box of Red Stripe for diffuser: $12 + 1 evening of drinking with friends.  Or by yourself, whatever.)

With any luck you’ll already have some of these items lying around, or you’ll be able to find a few of them on sale instead of paying full price.  For more specifics on the types of light bulb to use I’d read the Happy Soda article, but suffice it to say you want bulbs listed as daylight; make sure to double-check that they have a color temperature of 5000 – 6ooo K, as “daylight” apparently doesn’t always mean the same thing to all brands.

As compared to my frequently too-dark or too-yellow pictures, this first try at indoor lighting worked really well; the photos are far more naturally colored and the shadows aren’t nearly as stark and distracting.  I still need to find a better backdrop instead of my tablecloth, but hey – baby steps.

To test the lighting out I used a few of my gaming statues/figurines/collectibles…whatever:

Claptrap – Borderlands

Tyrael – Diablo

So you can see that the light is definitely not yellow, and that there are no harsh, dark shadows that are the product of using only a single light source (think looking at your shadow on the sidewalk on sunny day).  Now, clearly shadows still exist, especially on Tyrael’s taller model, but it’ll take some practice to get the directions of my lights figured out.

My next goal is to reduce the shadows and learn to take photos that are more interesting to look at (angles, perspectives, etc).  Until then, here’s a handful of the best pictures (of my many, many dozen)!  Enjoy, and keep an eye on Facebook, G+, and Tumblr for additional images in the future.

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A little background: this room is one of four that we did not paint or otherwise upgrade after buying the house (the others are both bathrooms and the kitchen). It was once a very stereotypical, retro-tastic wood-paneled room. But at some point, someone painted it. And then some other people painted it another half-dozen times after that. The last coat was white, and every time it got chilly, the boards contracted, leaving big ugly dark gaps.

Time for a DIY den makeover!

The paneling.

Unfortunately, it was a bit beyond us to strip the paint – at some point, someone used some kind of old school, crazy-glue-infused-caulk to try to fill the gaps. Even if we spent the weeks and weeks to get all the paint out of all the grooves, the caulk would still be there glaring out at us.

We also didn’t think we could remove the walls entirely, because the walls are original and the floors are not, therefore, the walls go under the trim, new floor, and new quarter-round that is hiding the edges of the new floor. Unless we were willing to deal with whatever sure-to-be-lovely surprises that may be lurking under our perfectly passable new floor, we couldn’t remove the paneling.

That troublesome new floor and quarter-round.

But we weren’t quite prepared to add the gazillionth layer of paint on the paneling, either. After all, how could we hide the cracks that form at eye level without painting all the walls black? Also, the hubs was in favor of stripes. I have to say I was quite against the idea of a 100% striped room, but all the other major design decisions in the house were my ideas, and I want my husband to know his wishes count. Surely there was a compromise to be found, if we thought about it enough.

The idea we came up with to make everyone happy was to use the existing panel as wainscoting, cutting the walls about 36″ off the ground, removing the wood above 36″, hanging drywall up in its place, and finishing it off with chair rails. I think the end result will be quite pleasing, in keeping with our house’s style, and an improvement over the previous look.

Adam hand-sawing in the corners, where the circular saw can’t reach.

Ta-da! The boards are cut and removed.

But first we (Adam) had a lot of work to accomplish. Cutting the walls, removing the old boards, insulating the exterior wall, and hanging drywall (with help from his dad).

You can see the funky backing for the tiles in the bathroom.

As you can see here, the exterior wall wasn’t insulated, and that just won’t do!

Now with insulation. Much better!

Dry wall all hung and ready to go!

Adam also installed a new electrical socket to power our computers in their new, post-makeover location.

Next, we mudded and sanded (and mudded and sanded and mudded and sanded) the new walls. Most of the room took two rounds, some parts three, and one very tricky spot took four rounds. So much dust! Good thing we hung plastic in the doorways to keep the dust in check. Even then we have some extra cleaning to do as it wafts or gets tracked through the house.

Hooray!

Now that we’re done wrecking the room, and have the new bones in place, it’s time to beautify this media room/gaming room/library that we call the den. Next on the to-do list is hanging trim, painting the wainscoting and new drywall, and adding the chair rail. We’re also adding ceiling-height shelving all the way around the room, as part of a room function and layout makeover – but more on that in the next post!

Fun bonus:
We found a nifty old matchbook from the late 50s or so hidden inside a wall. The phone number was just two letters and four numbers in those days! What a nice bit of local history.

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As I mentioned in the White House Honey Porter Spent Grain post, the honey porter is one of two beer recipes released by the White House last fall. They brew these beers on the White House grounds, with honey from apiaries that are also on the premises. God bless America, y’all.

While I don’t have any hives of my own (that’s in the ten-year plan), we did buy some local raw honey and go to town on this recipe. Here it is, but you should also check out the original blog post here.

Credit: WH blog

Unfortunately, my brewing images seem to have escaped me, possibly for the time being or possibly forever, so I’ll have to content myself with summarizing as best as I am able.

For this brew, we steeped grains (which is how we had them to make the bread) to provide additional flavor and color. That, and the entire pound of honey were the biggest distinguishing elements of the brewing process. This time around, we implemented secondary fermentation, which is pretty much a fancy way of saying we moved the wort from the primary fermentation container to a second container, which leaves behind a bunch of the residue (dead yeast and yeast poo).

Less sediment!

With our first homebrew, we didn’t use secondary fermentation, so that meant that we had to leave the last half-to-one-inch at the bottom of each bottle to avoid gastrointestinal distress. With secondary fermentation, we don’t have to be so cautious.

We thought this was a pretty solid brew! We were again amazed that it turned out (I am still expecting bottle rockets or skunk at some point), and we thought it tasted pretty darn good. Unfortunately, we broke our hydrometer, so we don’t know what the gravity was, but most everyone we shared with commented on how they were surprisingly feeling it after one, and pretty darn tipsy after two. So, the beer does pack a punch.

I would definitely recommend this to homebrewers. Easy, fun, tasty, and the White House connection makes for a a fun conversation starter

Stand tall, White House Honey Porter Homebrew. We approve of your message.

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I am not going to go into the details – this is not a how-to. It takes a long time to master this stuff, and there are plenty of people who can and have wax poetic on all the details, science, tips and tricks, etc.

Rather, here is a photographic journey through our first attempt and making beer (it’s not as hard as you’d think):

Making the sanitizer…

Malt!

Consulting the tome!

Adding liquid malt, too.

Cooling it down.

Me doing something. I included this just to prove I was part of the process!

And into the basement for two weeks.

Two weeks later, we bottled! Then the beer had to sit for two more weeks before it was ready.

The homebrewing process was fun, and the resulting beer was surprisingly quaffable! We consider our homebrew pale ale a success!

I definitely recommend homebrewing, especially with friends (helps to pass the time). The cost of supplies is a totally justifiable expense, since the resulting beer is typically half the price of store-bought beer. And we’d be drinking beer anyway, clearly.

Resources:
How To Brew by John J. Palmer (website)
The Joy of Homebrewing (3rd Ed.) by Charlie Papazian (amazon)
One of my favorite internet personalities, Mr. Money Mustache writes about his homebrew experiences. And a follow-up article.
http://hopville.com/

For fun (haven’t used it yet):
Clone Brews: 200 Recipes for Commercial Beers by Tess and Mark Szamatulski (amazon)

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This is fairly representative of three passes we made with the truck bed full. Also, there’s husband.

We carried things by hand, used wheelbarrows and the truck. There’s always something satisfying about driving the truck through the yard, especially when I get to ride in the bed. Re-rehabilitating the “lawn” is totally worth it, for both the novelty and work saved.

Another angle.

 These were the last pictures taken before we got the truck stuck in the mud and had to enlist our help from a neighbor (so lucky to live near such awesome folks). By this point we’d gotten all the heavy stuff, so we just did the rest of the work with a wheelbarrow.

Our toil was made easier by playing music over our outdoor speakers (still novel despite having installed them in September for our wedding) and the first bits of spring poking out.

Forsythia.

A white camellia whose blooms I completely missed last year.

And here is the fruit of our labor. A big ol’ pile o’ sticks and logs… the vast majority of what we chopped and hauled (a small amount was taken away two weeks ago). Needless to say, this is requiring a special pick up, which we will have to pay for, but it’s worth it not to have to make a dozen trips to and from the dump.

Street view.

Back view.

That’s it for now. We’re borrowing a tiller from my brother-in-law next weekend, so the saga will continue after that point.

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Mostly before, though we’d already taken down two trees. The men did an excellent job of keeping the trees off the wires.

In between our two properties, Craig/Zoe and Adam/I have had a big, overgrown, bushy mess. Cherry and rose of sharon saplings coming up everywhere, thorny vines, privet, english ivy, etc. So we decided to tear it down and start over. We’re also planning to put in some shared vegetable beds.

Cutting down some straggly trees in the way of our future beds.

You can see the gigantic privet.

Now you can’t. Because it’s DEAD.

Tree goes boom.

We got a fair amount of work done, and continued on Sunday, clearing the strip between our houses all the way back to the back of the houses. Then we went and finished the triangle.

There are at least a half a dozen of those big brush piles…. ugh.

A view of the property line… the neighbor behind us is elderly and the ground have clearly suffered as our did. Not yet sure what, if anything, we can do.

Razed ivy! And a view back to the house form the triangle!

Our most excellent view… we can now see into each others’ kitchens and have pledged to do all cooking and cleaning clothed until we have new bushes grown in.

Another view… we’re clearly going to need a stump grinder.

Here’s the brush we stacked at the curb Sunday. The pile is now much larger, but I don’t currently have any pics.

 You can see above that there are still some bushes there – those are some hybrid azaleas. They’re evergreen, fairly tall and have attractive lavender blooms in the spring, so we left those.

So now we’ve got to get it all hauled to the curb and assessed by the county to see how much it will cost to haul away. If it’s too much, we’ll pay to have a dumpster delivered and removed, but I’m hoping not to have to do that. I’ll be sure to snap a pic of the brush pile at its full glory!

I’m looking forward to getting to the business of putting in the vegetable beds and replanting some bushes for privacy. Not sure what we want to do yet. Could be more tea olives – ad favorite of Adam and I – or its native cousin devilwood. Camellias could also be nice due to their height, attractive foliage and showy blooms. Or perhaps we’ll buy more hybrid azaleas to continue what’s already there. If anyone has suggestions, feel free to pipe up – my goal would be to use Georgia natives, or at least woodland-esque plants (like the camellias, which aren’t native, but a common choice around here).

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