Roasting a Pig part 1

This weekend was our pig roast. It was exhausting but I can’t wait to do it again. In this post I’ll go over our pig prep and next time I’ll post some photos from the event. On Thursday I decided I wanted to serve three brews at the roast so I overnighted some kegging equipment and we installed in on Friday and force carbonated Headless Horseman.

Then we got our smoker as rental from nearby and picked up the pig on Friday afternoon. We made a brine solution in a CLEAN trash can, split the Pig the rest of the way down, and sunk the pig and four chickens in brine around 5:00 PM.

We took some obligatory photos with the pig. Then it was time to start the charcoal and roast away. We put the pig on around 1:00 after removing it from the brine and trussing the cavity closed with the 4 chickens inside.

We stayed up with the pig, some people sleeping in shifts, all night. We added more charcoal every 45 minutes to an hour to maintain temperature. We also had a tiny amount of bourbon and home brew.

Come daybreak I was the only one left manning the spit. This picture captures it all, charcoal chimney, spit, home brew, fire-pit, and a bottle of bourbon. Someone even found time to draw a poorly crafted pig with chalk.

After a couple hours of solo work, the rest of the crew was awake and ready to rake some charcoal.

I’m going to save the rest of the roast for another post, but here’s a shot of the finished product to tide you over.



Oh I almost forgot, this is a brewing blog. Yesterday I made some mead. It’s a part of our winter repertoire. I went for a standard Cyser with no spices, just pure unadulterated honey and apple wine. We used a champagne yeast to get it pretty dry and we’re going to bottle it (something we haven’t done in years). I got the yeast going in a starter of honey, water, and yeast nutrient.

I connected our drill to carboy brush so that I could stir and aerate the honey – apple juice mixture.

Pretty excited about the results. It’s already bubbling away in the closet.

Today we’re making a trip to the local home brew store to stock up for several brew days. The remaidner of the week we will be brewing:

another batch of pumpkin

An IPA that will be cask conditioned in a tapped oak barrel (super excited about this)

hard cider

milk stout

That aught to keep us tipsy through Christmas.