Checking in on the Hops

Goldings.

Thought I might post a check up on my hops bines.  Here they are about two months up out of the ground.

The first photo is of the Goldings, which are in a pot right in the middle of Mary's truck patch - so the other plants there are summer squash on the left and eggplant on the right.

The second photo is of the Willamette, which took off and I thought would be better at this stage than the Goldings.  Looks like a squirrel chewed the training twine on one of the runners, and we had a little setback. But all's well, I don't expect much from them this first year anyway.

Willamette.

The Beer Making Book by Erica Shea and Stephen Valand (Amazon link below) describes the two varieties as follows:

Golding:  low to medium bitterness,  flavors of dried flowers, plum and moss
Willamette:  low bitterness, flavors of pear, eucalyptus, and earth

In the book, the Goldings varieties are listed as ingredients for blondes and lighter ales, while the Willamette hops are used in a couple of pale ales.  I've brewed some of each of those, so I know that I can use whatever these bines might produce.


Here's the link to the book:

Hawksbill Mountain Day Hike

Looking south from the Hawksbill Summit.

It’s something of a ritual, whether it occurs in the spring, summer, or fall – but Mary and I find our way to the summit of Hawksbill Mountain in Shenandoah National Park at least once a year.   Most recently, that was during our vacation in late May. 

Lately, another part of the ritual for me is a stop at the Pinnacles overlook, where you can get a nice view of Old Rag, site of one of the most popular hikes in the park – for more on that, check out Bob Look’s blog in the blog roll on the right.  He’s a volunteer steward on the mountain, and is a source of a wealth of information about the trails, the wild life, and other goings on up on Old Rag.

Old Rag, from the Pinnacles Overlook.

We chose the route from the Upper Hawksbill Parking, at mile 46.7.  My Heatwole guide describes the hike: “Round trip 2.1 miles, total climb about 520 feet…A fairly easy hike on a graded trail and a fire road.  Good views from the summit.”

Page Valley below, from Hawksbill Summit.

I’m sharing a few photos from the summit with this post – the views are one of the reasons we go there so often.  But sometimes we go for the breeze, especially during the summer, because Hawksbill is highest peak in the park and it’s usually a few degrees cooler up there.

This hike will take you anywhere from 2 to 3 hours, depending on how much time you spend at the summit enjoying the 360-degree views or watching the hawks and buzzards gliding by.  There are often deer along the path, and there are always chipmunks and squirrels scavenging away in the underbrush just out of site. 

Since we can see Hawksbill Mountain from the cabin during the winter, I guess you could call this easy day hike a favorite.

Unwinding Jordan Hollow Farm Inn

This is the last of three posts this week meant to help me get caught up on the vacation week that Mary and I spent at Hawksbill Cabin in late May.  I still have a few left, but won’t put them up until next week at the earliest.

Back in 2010, the locally famous Jordan Hollow Farm Inn finally succumbed to a combination of the bad economy and some bad business decisions by the owners, and it went into foreclosure.  Somewhere in the history of this blog, a reader might find a few photos of the property back then, as Mary and I took a couple of looks at it while we tried to decide if we might make a play for it at the foreclosure auction.

At the time, the bank was sticking with a price that was just too high.  I ran some proformas and simply couldn’t find a way to make the old inn work with the mortgage that would be required – so we passed on it.  We met a lot of good local people during our due diligence, and we got to spend some time with a few good friends who could offer insight into the wisdom of the venture, so I count the whole experience as a win

Eventually the price came down to almost half of what the bank originally sought.  The moment had passed for us, but the price was too good for the property to sit for much longer and a new buyer appeared.  Now we’ve been watching the place with great interest as a lot of improvements have been made under the new trade name of ‘Hawksbill Hideaway.’

A couple of weekends ago, there was an auction of some of the personal property at the place – I guess you’d call that the final unwinding of the old inn.  The event was just packed, but after having benefitted from a couple of up close and personal looks at all the items that were up for auction, there really wasn’t anything that Mary and I could use, or would likely bid on.

That is, except for two items – the old signs for the inn.  I’d used a modified PowerPoint version of one of them on my business plan when Mary and I were looking at the place. They’d been tucked away in the old barn gathering dust; I saw them on one of my old walk-throughs, but I had completely forgotten about them. 

We stopped by the auction briefly on our way back from the farmers market, just as the crowd was moving to the vehicles and lawn care equipment.  We walked around looking at the flotsam and jetsam of what had been a popular local spot a couple of decades ago, sorry to see it coming to an end like that.

Then I spotted a lady moving the signs around.  She’s picked them up for less than $50 for both.  I chatted with her a bit, and told me she had taken riding lessons at the inn when she was a youngster, so having the signs around her farm was going to be a nice memory.

I agreed, and told her they probably were the only things I might have been interested in, too, but that I was glad to hear they were going to a place like hers where they would be appreciated.

And then I helped her load them into her car.

Rolling Grape Leaves at Wisteria

Here's the finish product - ready to eat!

There’s plenty going on at Hawksbill Cabin this summer, but I have fallen a little behind on putting up some highlight posts from the vacation week that Mary and I spent there in late May.  This week I am working on getting caught up this week with a few posts – today is the second of three.

We spent Saturday afternoon enjoying a ‘music under the arbor’ event at our neighbors’ vineyard, Wisteria.  Since we were already out for the weekend, we had the chance to enjoy their annual grape leaves rolling event as well.

Sue and Moussa put together this little annual event – generally on a Sunday in the spring – but we missed it last year due to travel schedules.  I’ve been enjoying grape leaves since my USAF tour of Berlin, where we could get the Greek, Turkish, and Balkan versions within a short walk of the base, and Mary has been making them using a family recipe for all of her life, so we made a point of getting to Wisteria to join the fun this time.

Here's a look at the vegan stuffing mixture.

Freshly picked leaves from the vines at Wisteria!

They use a Lebanese variant of the recipe, making a vegan dish that combines fresh herbs, tomatoes, chick peas, rice, and spices in the stuffing mixture.  Moussa picked the leaves from the vineyard earlier in the week, and they had been blanched before we got there to soften them up for rolling.  (If you’re making them from bottled leaves, you’d need to do a pre-boil to eliminate some of the brine.)

We had fresh made baba ghanoush and hummus with pita while we were working – paired with a couple of wine samples.  After the leaves were stuffed and rolled, Sue boiled them, and we enjoyed sitting around a chatting while they cooked. 

In progress shot, before they were boiled to finish them.

Then they were done, and we dabbed a little fresh olive oil on them, along with fresh Greek-style yogurt.  

That made for a fine lunch – there was plenty for everyone, and then some.

Another Brew Day at Beaver Run Brewery

The hops for this batch of Flat Tale IPA.

There’s plenty going on at Hawksbill Cabin this summer.  But it seems I have fallen a little behind on putting up some highlight posts from the vacation week that Mary and I spent there in late May, so I am going to work on getting caught up this week with a few posts – today is the first of three.

We’d had a great visit from Kathy that included rib night with Sally and Dan out on their patio, and then Dan announced he was going to brew a new batch of his Flat Tale IPA. It turned out that spending Sunday morning at Beaver Run Brewery would be a great way to get the vacation underway – so I headed over there after breakfast to join him, arriving just as the mash began.

Wrapping up the mash.

Already I’ve written a few posts about the upgrades at Beaver Run Brewery – they’ve been designed both to help scale up the operation a bit for the most part, but they also make everything just a bit easier to manage.  That’s especially the case with the pump – which eliminates the need to lift boiling hot wort – and the plate chiller, which expedites cooling the wort down to yeast pitching temperature. 

The wort chiller is the last step in the brewing process.

So the activity is just a lot of fun, and then you have a great product to enjoy at the end of it all.  As usual here are a few photos of the process – it will be a few weeks before we can enjoy the beer, though!