Coo-coo for Cacao

Today I ditched work.

This morning after coffee I roasted the cacao beans in the oven. I started them off around 400 and slowly lowered the temp to about 300 for a total of 20-25 minutes roasting time. The house smelled glorious. If you are trying it yourself, what you want to hear is the popping sound of the water evaporating from the beans. Afterward, we removed the husks, which was quite easy to do just by hand. Separating them out was a little trickier, but no big deal. Then, they were easily crushed with the back of a spoon and dumped right into the black beer, which is now 2 weeks old.

One snag in this whole plan came about when I went to buy the cherries. I was wondering a few weeks ago when the cherry "season" officially ends, so I went out to whole foods and was happy to see that there were cherries in abundance there. For some inexplicable reason, I DIDN'T BUY ANY, somehow confident that they'd still be there for me when I eventually needed them. Turns out, the end of cherry "season" was approximately now.

SO, after futile trips Wednesday night to 2 or 3 different Whole Foods stores, and also the Harvest Coop, and even after Vanessa drove me around to Shaw's and Stop & Shop, I finally gave up and started re-thinking the whole plan. But it was quite evident that I needed to press on with the original idea. I thought about getting dried cherries and re-hydrating them in some brandy or something, but the ingredient lists for same always included some kind of vegetable oil, presumably to keep them from sticking together in one gross congealed cherry orgy. As we all know, lipids do not play nice with beer, so that idea was written off. I ended up finding jarred sour cherries, not a pie mix, mind you, just pitted cherries in a sugar water brine, with the only other ingredient being food-grade citric acid, which I am fine with. So I chopped the shit out of them and added I think about 1.5 pounds. Oh, also a vanilla bean got in there as well. Here is a video of the first blurp from the airlock after I sealed the fermenter back up.




(Yea, I was rocking Dark Side while all this went down -Cheers, Richard Wright). Normally at that point in the day, I would have been at work, just finishing my coffee and reluctantly getting around to checking my voice mails. This was a much better use of my time, I think.
____________________

In about 30 minutes Diesel & Liz are expected; tonight we are seeing Sigur Ros at the Bank of America Pavilion (or whatever the shit they call it these days) which is probably my favorite venue in town to see a show. Should be tight. I've never seen this band though I've been a fan for a long time. Also, it should be noted that while I'm not POSITIVE, I think The Bones and I have totally kick-awesome seats. More to come on that later

Peace
-Wrence