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.
Just doing my water treatment (boil it all, nothing more) and yeast starter for my next brew, a Coopers India Pale Ale which I'll brew up tomorrow. Will make according to directions with 1kg glucose for a nice, light flavour. However I think I'll boil up a big bunch of hops to try and get it a bit more bitter.
In other news, Pomegranates are 7 to the £1 at North End Road market. Yum!
My latest project is a geek travel guide. It's currently kinda limited to the UK because the Openguides software doesn't quite handle coordinates outside the UK, well not in an ideal way.
The idea is that we geeks and engineers like seeing interesting engineering hacks, the bigger the better, when we're travelling. That means things like Nuclear power stations, big dams, the sites of engineering accidents, spy stations and the like. I'd be curious what fellow geeks and engineers think of the idea. And, of course, it's a Wiki so get in there and add some stuff!
The address is temporary and will change, but I'll remember to update it to point to the new location so this blog entry shouldn't get out-of-date.
I switched to full-finger gloves on the bike today. Had the heading on briefly last night too. We all know what that means! cold weather here we come!