Greenstorm's Journal

I bottled a couple of boozes this weekend: I fortified the dry seville orange mead with vanilla-orange instead of carbonating it, and bottled it like that. It added a lively fresh layer, I think it turned out ok. I also bottled the redcurrant wine, which is basically delicious juice-tasting.

I have an unknown port and a plum dessert wine upstairs to bottle still, plus assorted others that have been bulk aging forever: my perennial favorite, a cherry flanders-red style roselare sour; a sour crabapple cyser; an apple-quince cider; a strawberry-apple sour; and a lacto-sour berlinerweisse-style mead (when I did a cyser in this style it tasted like lemonade I swear).

The alchemy involved in brewing and aging is just... fun. You can aim for something and sometimes arrive exactly on-target or sometimes arrive somewhere unexpected. If you don't like it you wait and it will usually eventually be good. The flavours are recogniseable but more interesting and complex than the starting ingredients. And it's a hobby that benefits from waiting, from starting and stopping, from patience.

If I get two more things bottled then I'm making two rhubarb wines or meads this spring: a rose-rhubarb and a plain rhubarb or rhubarb mead.

I wonder if rhubarb is enough of a fruit to call that a melomel?

I love that feeling when a hobby circles around and feeds into another hobby.

F'rinstance, farming --> excess produce --> preserving --> booze --> distilled stuff
farming --> fertility and weed control --> extra eggs --> preserving

distilled stuff + eggs = advocaat and aged eggnog

It just feels good

Okay. I've been avoiding writing about this because writing makes it true, but: basically the chimney in my house is failing. That is, the system which provides my home with heat cheaply and effectively is not real safe to run right now. When I bought the house I knew the wood stove was relatively new; what I didn't know or guess was that the chimney was probably original, that is not at all new, and had probably had several fires in it. It had also been painted at some point which made both experts I talked to click their tongues and sound unhappy. Now it's inside a vey flammable pine surround.

So I've been doing a deep dive on chimneys: mine is a double-walled insulated one. It would have come in sections of 3' that would have been fastened together, likely screwed together like giant screws. The point of the insulation is twofold: it keeps the heat from coming out and burning the house either through normal use or in a chimney fire, and it keeps the inside of the chimney warm so creosote doesn't deposit in it and block it up.

My house is a weird shape that basically you can't really get on the roof well. The chimney needs to be lowered piece by piece through the roof as it's screwed on, and likely needs to be anchored at someplace in the middle. This in all likelihood involves a couple hours with a cherry picker truck or something similar.

The way my chimney is failing is that the join between sets of pipes is curling back in two places, curling a little bit more every time I clean the chimney. This starts to let heat out through the joins. When wood is heated and cooled repeatedly it lowers its burning temperature. If I were to have an actual chimney fire the chimney might not contain it and I might have a house fire, which is not supposed to happen with a proper chimney.

The whole thing is exacerbated by the fact that we had a soaking wet summer. There were only two weeks without rain; we had rain almost every 24 hour period. Most folks didn't get their grain off. So my wood is damp, and pine is the only real available firewood up here, and so I'm getting a lot of creosote in the chimney. This would normally mean cleaning it a lot, but cleaning it damages it more. The creosote increases the chances of a chimney fire, which would be extra bad in this situation. And so it goes.

I'm looking at options right now. The ground is frozen so running a natural gas line is expected to be at least 3x the summer price, but I could sell the really nice wood stove and replace it with a gas fireplace/stove, both the stove and running the line has a cost and we have a dickhead natural gas company with the highest rates in my province so I'd be saddling myself to them. Replacing the chimney is expensive, likely no one can do it till spring, and my wood is still wet. I could run on electicity until spring but that will be super expensive too and my home isn't really well-equipped with electricity, it's ok right now because we're in a weird warm spell but I'm not sure how -20 or -30 would do. Pellet stoves, well, fibre is getting more expensive and that's not going away; true of wood too honestly.

So I continue to explore my options, talk to contractors, etc etc. I could put in a natural gas stove, run it on propane, and convert to natural gas in the spring when they can run a line but that may not be cheaper than just running the line now. In any case my house is a weird a-frame shape so snow slide down the long sides would shear off any pipes; the gas has to come into the house on the shorter walls. And then I'll have a meter reader on the property, which means dealing with dogs and the gate.

I might make very different decisions if I planned to stay here permanently rather than being uncertain of that.

Bah.

Anyhow, that's been the last couple weeks for me.

On the plus side a friend of mine bought 25 bottles and did a 25-person gin advent calendar, so we've got a bit of a social thing tasting and comparing notes together. I've turned off the woodstove and am running on electricity right now, so I'm a little less anxious about the house. And I'm eating through my preserved stuff from the summer, which both feels lovely and is giving me lots of jars back.

Tasted and bottled some booze the other day. It's been quite awhile.

Blackcurrant port and Seville orange bochet are bottled, and they're lovely: the latter is off-dry and the former is nice and rich. I did the blackcurrant port when I was about to leave Vancouver, to use up the berries in my freezer before the move. I did the bochet also in Vancouver in March 2017, when I found a 40lb case of Seville oranges; that's when I bought my food processor to deal with them.

Sometimes hoping for the future pays off, and booze is such a good teacher in that regard. Need to do some more racking and see what else is good.

This weekend I haven't gone anywhere; not out of town, not to Dave's place (Dave is out of town), not yet to work. Instead I started yoga again and spent some time feeling like I belong in my home, like my space is my own.

It's a great feeling.

All the things I like are here: stuff to make booze including booze to clarify and prep for bottling and bottles to play with and frozen gooseberries to start into wine, my kitchen stuff (I just made a batch of beef stew for tonight and loaded the slow cooker with bean/veggie stew for the week), stuff to clean up (not my favourite, but gives me a sense of power over space), my rabbit friends, my books, my music, my houseplants, and my door to lock the world out.

So nice it rained today. That's always restful and helps me slow down.

I'm reminded that I can make a life I love. I guess I entered the summer needing to be social, and when my social needs filled up I forgot to check in and start cancelling things. So now my social is topped up, and I've been desperately needing this time to myself. Dave's two-week trip back home was a great space for me to catch up on all the things I needed to do (I've been SO BUSY. Too busy, I don't like the pace) and now finally to catch up on myself.

I'm also reminded just how important exercise is for my mental health. The bike or walk to work from the new place here in the west end just isn't enough for me, and I was having trouble getting out of bed and being excited about my stuff. After just a couple yoga classes I'm back to being pretty happy and level feeling, and also to being super productive. This is a lesson I'd best not forget.

School starts next week. I'd been worried about going into the school year completely burnt out. Now I have a little breathing space, and it will be ok. I'm not really looking forward to being on that kind of budget again, both time and money, but my goal is to actively tweak the time thing until it works for me, and I have a bunch of stored wealth (wine kits! books! Fabric! Unlimited yoga pass!) to coast on for awhile.