Smoked Pork Shoulder and Brew Day

You may remember that back in January, I smoked a pork butt for pulled pork sandwiches. See Hickory Smoked Pulled Pork if you need a reminder.

It turned out great. And it was lots of fun.

At least it was lots of fun for most of the day.

To get that 9 lb pork shoulder done in time for dinner, I got started very early in the morning and kept the meat on the smoker for 13 hours.

My smoker is not a set and forget cook, so I was paying attention to the cooking meat most of the day.

At the end of Hickory Smoked Pulled Pork, I mentioned that in the future I would consider getting the butt to the wrap and then finish off in the oven.

Electric Smoker Guy

So, you may remember that I got a grill / smoker for Christmas. Technically, I got a picture of the grill / smoker ... but that is a story of its own. And ... eventually I got the actual grill and the actual smoker box.

As a result of this gift, I've gotten into smoking meats.

If you want, you can take a look at all the blog posts about the smoking I've done so far: Sheppy's Blog: Smoked

I have started looking at different Barbecue / Smoker forums because ... well ... because I now have a smoker.

Cinco de Bealtaine Irish Stout

The 5th of May was the American Homebrew Association's Big Brew Day.

One of my Homebrewing Friends ("Doc") hosted an event at his house and invited me to brew at his house.

I usually brew alone, and I've never brought my equipment "on the road". Generally, I'm pretty inefficient at fetching and readying my equipment during brew day. I usually get the next piece of equipment or brewing ingredient "Just in Time", and quite often take several trips down to the basement rather than bringing everything up at the same time.

This helps my fitbit stats, but is rather inefficient. A manufacturing engineer would never approve of my process. A Time and Motion Study would yield all kinds of low-hanging-fruit-improvements to make the process smoother.

I don't care. It works for me.

However, it does mean that I'm not used to getting everything I need together for a brewing road trip.

Smoked Chicken Green Chili

So ... I had a work potluck on May 4th (May the Forth Be With You). We had a weird Mexican / Star Wars theme. Strange, but it works.

I decided I wanted to make green chili with smoked chicken Thursday night.

Given that I would not have a lot of time for smoking the chicken, it being a work-night and all, I decided to start with boneless skinless thighs.

Along with the chicken, I smoked some Anaheim and Jalapeno chilies. It took around 2 hours to smoke the things and stuff and not too much longer to get everything combined in the crock pot.

It really turned out great. My dish did not last long at all at the potluck.

Shipping SCOBY

As you may remember, I have been brewing Kombucha on a regular basis.

I basically have two one-gallon batches of Kombucha going at any time. One with a standard black tea base. The other is made from green tea.

According to my "records" I've done 22 batches of kombucha since September 30 last year.

Anyway, the SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast) gets pretty big after a few batches and I end up separating it and throwing most of it out periodically.

That is somewhat of a waste. I've reached out on facebook and instagram asking if anyone was interested in taking SCOBY off my hands. No one took me up on the offer.

Until this past weekend.

This past weekend, my sister texted me about the possibility of shipping SCOBY to her brother-in-law for his birthday.