We Bought The Farm

Top of the World

Via a thread on Ask Metafilter, Hillman's Top 100 Wonders of the World. I've visited 43, with a 44th ( No. 53) planned as part of our summer holiday.

Brewing Update

Sparging the grain bed to recover more fermentables

I spent yesterday morning brewing up my second batch of all-grain ale. This one is called "cooking bitter" and it's one of the recipes I picked up from Richard at the brew shop during the workshop. The first batch was also one of his, called "best bitter". I figure while I'm still learning there's nothing wrong with using some tried and tested winners. We tried the "best bitter" at the workshop, where we brewed the "cooking bitter" (later sampled) so I know that, properly crafted, these are good ales.

The first batch went well, although we were missing some hose and connectors that meant we weren't able to sparge the grain bed very effectively, and as a result I feel the recovery suffered. I measured the final runnings at 1012 and the OG of the wort was 1045, which was a little low IMO. The FG of the first batch was also a little high (1012) but I reckon it's fermented on down a little bit more in the keg.

By contrast, the batch I brewed yesterday, which had a lower grain bill than the first batch, came out at 1054 OG and the final runnings were about 1007. The difference is in the sparging, I suppose. It's blubbing away under the stairs and will probably be ready for the keg by the time I finish off the first batch.

I will say that I've noticed the first batch is fairly low alcohol. I guess 3-3.5%. It's an easy-drinking ale that exacts no penalty (so far). One thing I've read suggests that if you take a few extra steps during the process you can remove a lot of the "hangover" components - hop oils and the like.

I've asked Richard about ordering up some new grains in anticipation of my first crack at a more authentic Sierra Nevada clone. I'll be starting from a Cat's Meow recipe. I'm not sure what I'll do about the yeast. I've got a couple of bottles of SNPA, but I'm not convinced I really want to start cultivating my own yeasts just yet. I think I'll try with a good English ale yeast and take my chances. What's the worst that can happen?

Syndicate This

I've finally been bitten by the RSS bug.

First it was podcasts. I think they're brilliant; they're on the way to totally reviving my walk to the station in the morning. My iTunes fills up and I synchronise in seconds. I'm particularly enjoying Grape Radio, KCRW's Good Food and Eat Feed. I can't wait for the BBC to offer more feeds, like the Food Programme - their trial is pretty limited.

And now it's RSS feeds. My new job means I need to sift through a lot of news, and I've found a newsreader to be really useful. As an upside, it also lets me keep track of what's been posted in the blogosphere. I've got it set to update every 30 minutes.

Anyway, I didn't understand the utility of this before, so I turned off the syndication feature of this blog, but, well, it's really always been there. I've added a link on the left side now, or you can grab the feed here. In my case, every 30 minutes is overkill.

Putting a name to the face (slap)

Some time earlier this year I stood waiting to board a train at a metro London station. The doors of the train opened, and out of the blue a teenaged boy smacked me straight in the face. It wasn't until I was reading an article in this weekend's Guardian that I found out this was more than an isolated incident. I can only conclude I have been "happy slapped".

What a disgusting idea. Smacking an unsuspecting person while someone else takes a picture with a mobile phone. Then they text it around to their mates with some suitable caption. But apparently the phenomenon is on the increase. It's a London thing, coming your way soon.

We have a Pope - really!

No, you just have to read it and smile.

Back to Work

I'm back, I guess. It's been a hectic month. I'll try to keep up with the blog a bit better in the months ahead. I guess when it comes down to it, getting on with life takes precedence over keeping up the blog. This posting is necessarily a bit journal-esque.

So, what's been keeping me so busy? Romania was a big part of it. Another two-week stint, wrapping up at the end of April. I guess that's the end of my Romania jaunts for a while. It's still an interesting place, although not much has changed since I first went out there in the late 1990s. I guess with the promise of accession to the EU being so tangible (as soon as 2007 if they can meet the conditions imposed for reform of competition, corruption and border controls), it will start to feel like a much more dynamic place. But at the same time it's a bit depressing. They have a LONG way to come to make up for these 15 years of "false revolution", where the people's hopes and aspirations have been on hold while crony politicians control the slow-motion unraveling of a basket case economy. I suspect the EU, and if they make it, the euro, will ultimately be very good for Romania. I have a lot of friends out there, so I'm hoping this will be their new chapter.

The reason that's possibly my last trip to Romania for a while is that I've moved into a new job. Same company, different division. I've been seeking and have found a position with more business-side responsibility than technical stuff. Or maybe technical stuff of a different stripe. It's early days to know exactly what that means, but it will certainly come with a steep learning curve, something I'm enthusiastic about.

My treat to myself for staying the course and completing another Romania trip was the outfitting of the all-grain portion of my home brewery. Back in April a friend and I took a course in all-grain brewing. It's the next step after kits (I've probably brewed 10-12 batches from kits). So, last weekend I went out and bought in all the equipment I needed to brew the first batch ("best bitter"). And on Sunday morning I brewed, along with my 3-year-old helper. The results are in the fermenter at present, and my other treat will be some kegging equipment to cut down on bottle washing and the like. Man, I like the looks of this. It's not that difficult and good fun, so I propose to be pretty active on the homebrew front. An empty fermenter should be all the inspiration I need.

I haven't actually done the economics on all-grain brewing. The gear was expensive as there was little overlap with the back end of the brewery. This brewery uses electricity rather than gas for the boiling, but I looked at the meter during the brew and it didn't seem excessive. Certainly to start from grain is a much cheaper option than using extract-based kits (I'm paying about £2 per kg for grains, a batch needs about 5kg, and I've now got quite an inventory of hops in the freezer). The other big outlay is time, but in terms of the number of hours I don't think it's gone up greatly since the new kit boils much faster than the old, which saves me a good bit of time in the process. The big increase is in cleaning up. Oh, and I have to patch the lawn where I sloshed some scalding water on the grass. Not a good thing to do.

I've been keeping up on reading, although I didn't get through as much as I thought in Romania. I finished re-reading Charles Handy's The Hungry Spirit: Beyond Capitalism - The Quest for Purpose in the Modern World, which was a book I bought and read during my MBA days. It's a simple read, but with a good message about "portfolio working" and the end of the conventional career. Dangerous stuff to be reading when you're stuck on the corporate ladder.

I also finally finished reading Thoreau's Walden. I found this a long slog. The opposite of a page-turner. I know it's regarded a classic, and I did fill my Moleskine with some memorable passages, but I didn't get out of this what my aspiring-good-life-back-to-nature self thought I would. I contrast this with Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, which is often compared with Walden, and which I enjoyed much more for its more purposeful contemplative sense. Maybe Walden just doesn't translate that well to the present age. Maybe I'm just too shallow.

And now I'm reading Iris Murdoch's A Word Child. Part of my "Read English Authors in England" year. I had borrowed Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities, but didn't get there (yet) due to slow progress. But the Murdoch is wonderful. I've still got a ways to go, but there is some stunning stuff here. One section in particular left me shaken with the tension, near tears as I looked up from the book on the train. I borrowed this from our local library - had to order it from the storeroom as it's the only copy in the whole system - and I was very surprised to see that it had not been borrowed since 1989! There were maybe 5-6 borrows per year before that, so it seems to be very much a case of "out of sight, out of mind."

So, where to from here? I'm not sure. My interests change. My landscape changes. My horizons change. But anyway, for what it's worth, I'm back.