Hoppy New Year

Our New Year's Day tradition is a walk or snowshoe with friends followed by a simple meal of soup and homemade bread. This year, we also celebrated with homemade hops soda Bill brewed in November. This experiment was a huge success -- not too sweet with just a nice amount of hoppy flavor.

Homemade soda is easy to make. Before Bill started homebrewing, we made soda occasionally using extracts and plain old bread yeast. We would mix it up in a large plastic container and serve it with a ladle. It was a novelty to kids who don't remember the dancing Kool-Ade pitcher or Fizzies. But it wasn't nearly as flavorful as the sodas Bill brews and bottles now. His soda doesn't usually have a lot of fizz (except for a batch of root beer he made with brown sugar, which was more fizz than soda). But they're deliciously drinkable.

When we were kids, soda was an occasional treat. It's not quite so rare and special to most people nowadays. But we hope the kids in our life remember with fondness events celebrated with Bill's homebrewed sodas.