Homebrew Mead - Part 1: Stir It Up

A couple of months ago we laid up our first batch of Mead (honey-wine) to ferment. Some friends of ours who own some bee hives were generous enough to give us about 6lbs of honey (enough for the recipe) and so on a cold December night after decorating the Christmas Tree, we went to work.

The recipe is very simple: Honey, Water, Orange(s), Rasins and of course Yeast.


Heating up the honey to make it pourable (still wasnt easy to pour!)


Leah on orange cutting/stuffing duty


Steady does it


We are now working on the 5th month that this batch has been fermenting, once we pull it out and sample/bottle it, we will post the results. The instructions and recipe we used can be found here (the rest of the site has some more in depth details).

See the rest of the pics of that night in the slideshow:

James & Israel @ MSP

Uncle Ben took James and Israel for a tour of the MSP hangar, where they got to sit in the helicopter and watch it start up and get a ride and then eventually take the stick for a short while and bring it down for a touch-n-go...while blindfolded!









(ok well they got to sit in it at least!)

Eden & James Birthday 09

Man time flies by quickly, seems like it was just a year or two ago I was watching Eden take her first steps, and now its Claire. Or just a couple of months ago that James was destroying everything in sight...ok maybe that was just a couple of months ago...but the point is that time is moving ever faster and seems to accelerate as our family gets older *sigh*



Earlier this year Eden and James had their birthday's; 7 & 5 respectively and this years theme was StarWars (as picked by them) can't you tell!



As you can tell everyone was having a great time especially TheGryph!



Here is the attempt at a DeathStar cake a.k.a "Ol'Poopy"



We also took the kids to Chuck-E-Cheese for a day of games (which they loved)



See the rest in the slideshow: