Just bottled my exceptionally bitter IPA. Brewed from a Coopers IPA kit and it's certainly damn bitter. Should be nice when it's ready.
Also just cracked into my Belgian Wit which I thought was going to be a write-off. The flavour up until this time was cloyingly sickly fruit. Now it's spectacular. The fruity flavours have mellowed and now take a back seat. It's great! Think I'll take some to the Halloween party tonight.
My work is in such a delightful area. Apparently there was a shooting just outside the office last night around 1800. This morning I get to work to find Police and Fire Brigade around the building because someone jumped from the top floor canteen.
Anyone wanna offer me a job in London?
The only good DJ left on Radio 1, John Peel, has died.
A very sad day for all music fans. This man has broken more new bands, giving them their big break, than probably any other. His incredibly broad and varied. In one programme he would play everything from 78s from the 20's through hillbilly bluegrass to gabba techno.
Over the weekend, Scott and I went cider making in the Forest of Dean. Was a great weekend away in beautiful countryside and we learnt the pleasures of making traditional cider. We also got to bring back 25L of fermenting cider.
Photos here.
I seem to have injured my foot. Possibly a stress fracture, according to the quacks. Hurts like buggery ("Nothing hurts like buggery" - Doug Anthony All Stars) and was throbbing all night.
I'm off to do a cider course over the weekend in Gloucestershire. Will have to scale back my activities there, unfortunately. Fortunately my drinking arm is in good shape.
In other news, my geek tourism site is hitting random blogs all over the place. Not many people actually adding stuff yet, but it's ticking over. Blogistan should be good for my Google Juice.
Just hope I don't get Slashdotted in the near future... That would just wipe out my server.
My geek tourist site now has an Openguides address: engineer.openguides.org.
What part of no junk mail were you having trouble with, McDonald's?
Put the Coopers IPA in the bucket yesterday. I boiled up a huge couple of handfuls of Fuggles hops for half an hour to try and get a bit more bite in. Fuggles is, supposedly, an aroma hop and I got these very cheap from Spencers Homebrew so wasn't worried about using loads.
I chucked in another handful and continued boiling for five minutes or so, just for a bit of aroma. Then I strained the lot into the bucket with the beer.
When I tested the Original Gravity (1050) I had a taste. My, it's gonna be one bitter beer! I guess that's kinda authentic to the IPA style, and not really a problem. I just hope that it has enough residual sweetness to counter the bitterness, since I used 1kg of glucose and no extra malt. Must remember to prime with malt, then.
Well, apart from this, anyway.
I just spotted this out the back window of our flat. As you can see, autumn is well under way and the squirrels are gathering their supplies.
A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Allen took us up to Snowdonia to climb Mount Snowdon. Of course, being Andy, the nice easy tourist walk wasn't dangerous enough and he convinced us to climb the hardest climb, via another mountain called Crib Goch. Little did we know that this would actually involve rock climbing, knife-edge scrambles with many hundred metre drops, being completely wet and no visibility.
Anyway, we made it but ended up having to turn back. Fortunately we ran into some very experienced mountaineers who showed us the fastest way down, or we might not have made it in daylight. Ack!
Photos are available here. Most were taken by Thomas.