Happy International Beer Day!
No, really.
My first homebrewing experiment was a huge success. So big a success, in fact, that I drank most of it last week. It wasn’t supposed to be ready until this week. Cloudy, mayhap, but very tasty.
The process feels kind of dopey. You open a couple of cans, add water and yeast and wait. Brewing for morons.
On the other hand — really excellent beer for 40p a pint! How dopey can that be? So I think I’ll do a few more kits before I try malting and hopping and doing it old school.
Currently in production: that fake vodka stuff with the high-yield yeast.
Next up: a cider kit. Cider here is hard. Very, very hard.
If you close your eyes, you can hear the hangover…
August 5, 2010 — 11:06 pm
Comments: 28
Uncle Stinky? You bastards!
Thanks to everyone who sent me this link. And by “thanks” I mean AIIIIIIIIIUlulululululu!
So the backstory — these two Scots have started up a brewery called BrewDog. Their offerings are are beers of higher than usual alcohol content, and smartassery.
By a combination of freezing and storing in oak casks, they raised the alcohol content of ale to an astonishing 55% — that’s 110 proof beer, folks! They call it The End of History — because that’s it for the experiment.
They made twelve whole bottles at that strength and released eleven, seven in stoats and four in gray squirrels. Five hundred British pounds a whack.
Um, yeah. The taxidermy. Roadkill, they claim.
They could at least have found a skinnier bottle, so old Stoaty doesn’t look like he has a goiter.
They make some interesting beer. If only they weren’t such punks.
Closer to home, my first batch of homebrew is due to be ready in about a week. But there’s been a mounting crescendo of beer pong — by which I mean a stench, not a drinking game — coming from that quarter. So I had a look today and discovered my bung has been leaking — oi, quiet down, you in the back there!
I reckon I lost about a half pint onto the floor.
As long as I was messing around with it, I figured I’d have a taste. It hasn’t cleared yet, but it was very acceptable. In fact, it was fine.
My next experiment? Crazy-ass yeast.
Good weekend, everyone!
July 23, 2010 — 10:02 pm
Comments: 20
Okay, who brews?
This is a seriously, seriously expensive country to be a lush in. To ease the burden, one of my goals this year was to get some hootch production going. I got Uncle B to buy me some basic gear for my b’day — containers, siphon hose, thermometer, hydrometer, and like that.
I started with elderflower champagne. It’s a pleasant tipple, but very low in alcohol. How low, I couldn’t say, as apparently I am too retarded to operate a hydrometer without poking an eye out or setting fire to myself.
Next, beer from a kit. That has probably finished fermenting about now, ready for bottling when I get a chance. I know, I know…a kit. Lame. But I figure I’ll start easy and learn as I go along.
After that…ummm…pass. I have very poor sense of taste, so the world is my crustacean. Probably a fruit wine, as we’ll soon be up to our eyeballs in elderberries and blackberries.
I figure some of you bastards probably homebrew. Any recommendations? Recipes? New forums to hang out on?
July 15, 2010 — 10:57 pm
Comments: 31
My mother smelled of what, now?
There’s an elder by our front door (and two in the drive) that is now in full flower. I wonder how long it’s been there. Elder trees were commonly planted beside English cottage doors to ward off witches (only one of many, many magical beliefs and herbal medicines associated with the elder).
More to our purposes, however, a quick-fermenting sort of champagne can be made from the flowers.
20 elderflower heads
1 kg sugar
2 lemons (juice and zest)
10 liters of water
2 tablespoons of vinegar
Sorry about the liters and kilos — it’s all I get any more, stupid Euro-measurements.
Mix it all together in a bucket. Don’t wash the elderflowers; they have a natural yeast that will begin fermentation (or not. If it’s not bubbling in 24 hours, add some yeast).
Stir occasionally for six days, and then strain it through muslin into bottles. Most recipes recommend plastic bottles, on account of the stuff keeps fermenting (like champagne) and is subject to violent explosion. Even in plastic bottles, watch for bulging and let off some gases if needed. Putting the bottles in a bathtub and covering with an old duvet is another suggestoin, to contain damage in the case of rupture.
Eight days(!) after bottling, it’s ready to drink.
What’s it like? Ask me in two weeks; I’ve just made a batch.
June 14, 2010 — 10:09 pm
Comments: 31
One of the lesser-known harbingers of Summer
Once every week or two, we like to take a long drive up the coast to our favorite fish and chips shop (they still cook in beef tallow!) and do a little shopping. Every time we drove up last Summer — every single time — there was a young man standing on the side of the road who gave a stiff and enthusiastic Heil Hitler! to every car that went past.
Clearly a tard or mong of some description, he always wore earbuds and carried an iPod. I’d love to think he was listening to das Beste des Adolphenschpechen but it’s probably just “Teletubbies: Oops-A-Daisy”.
When Autumn came, he was gone. As his usual post was near a trailer park, we assumed his family had a seaside Summer rental.
Welp, you guess it — my ol’ bud Heil Hitler was back this afternoon, heiling his heart out. Summer’s here!
I just got an email that began You’re getting this email because you blog about stuff real guys like. Since they’ve obviously taken time to learn about me and my blog, I figured I’d help them flog their crappy bourbon.
Actually, it might be good bourbon. I don’t know. I’m not a bourbon drinker. Anyhow, the blog that sends most unique users their way gets all sorts of fabulous prizes…some for me, some for you. It doesn’t seem likely we’ll be that blog, but if I win anything, I vow to pass whatever it is on to one of you.
Somehow, “Buffalo Trace” doesn’t sound like something I want to put in my mouth.
March 26, 2010 — 9:56 pm
Comments: 35
Shandy
Shandy.
It’s lemonade. With a little beer in.
So little beer, they sell it alongside the Pepsi and Orangina and other kiddie pop in the cafe cooler.
Yes, I know how it SOUNDS. But I really like this stuff.
Bite me.
May 5, 2009 — 6:17 pm
Comments: 32
This is my job. It’s what I do.
Nothing. Nil. Nada. Bupkis. Sweet fuck-all. I have been a complete and utter waste of human skin since I was rousted out of my nice warm bed by a hammering at the door at the cruelly early hour of one. Pee-em.
Near as I can piece it together, we set fire to the chimney last night. Again. A small fire this time, but apparently scary enough to make me grievously overdrink myself afterwards. Apparently.
Apparently, Uncle B was able to get the sweeps out on an emergency basis. Apparently. Again. That was them hammering on the door. He didn’t hear it because he was in the back of the house doing…I don’t know…his job or something. I’m unclear on this point.
So I answered the door like Mad Madam Mim, with one open eye and my jeans-front wadded up in my fist. I’m becoming heavily dependent on this crazy American woman gambit, you know.
Anyhow, the chimney really shouldn’t have sooted up this fast (our last chimney fire was on January 8). So, we probably need a bigger-diameter chimney lining (>£1K) and/or a new stove (>£1K). Probably both.
We think the old stove was Frankensteined together from pieces and is missing some bits. You might think a stove would be a simple thing with few important constituent elements, but you’d be SO WRONG. Jesus, what’s the matter with you?
It’s supposed to have some fire bricks and the air intake probably isn’t working right, which means our combustibles aren’t completely combusting but are laying down a coating of flammable soot on their way up the chimney.
Or some shit. I don’t know. We’re coming to the end of the heating season, so I refuse to think about it yet.
If you’ll excuse me, I’ve waited patiently for twelve hours for some hair o’ the dog…
March 26, 2009 — 9:02 pm
Comments: 31
Beer. Sale. Two great words that go great together.
w00t! Our local market had a beer sale today — three bottles for…shit, I don’t know. It’s not like I pay for anything. I’m a foreigner; when I want something, I point and grunt.
Poor Uncle B hates beer, but it was a sale on brew exclusively from the Badger Brewery, so he was cool with it. (You’ll notice there are seven. Spot the one that isn’t Badger).
Tonight, we’re putting together the paperwork for my next visa, the FLR(M). It’s my Married Lady License (though it will cover civil unions and homosexualists, also). I intended to do this the day after we were wed, but I didn’t on account of I’m a lazy sack of shit. Also, it’s taking 14 weeks on average to turn this one around, and I can’t work until it comes through. So you can see why I’m in such a hurry.
Asking Uncle B to interface with government in any way involves a good deal of throwing things and saying the f-word. So I’d better go.
And drink some fucking beer.
March 25, 2009 — 9:43 pm
Comments: 16
We hung Grandma tonight
Relax. Pictures are hung, people are hanged.
Great great great grandma, actually. I got her name; I’m told there’s a resemblance (honestly, if we want to wear crochet’ed earflaps in the house, I don’t see what business it is of anyone else’s). She buried three husbands and owned a bunch of property, including slaves (we saved the receipt). Lived most of her life in Louisiana, but came back to Tennessee to die. Or they shipped her body back, anyway.
I stumbled over her grave in Nashville’s old city cemetery once quite unexpectedly; I had assumed she was in Monroe. That must have been quite a trip for a stiff in 1850. There was a high pointy iron fence around her grave, and no caretaker in sight. I badly wanted to scale the fence and read more of the inscription on the stone, but I feared that would end badly.
Anyhow, Granny has been propped up against the wall of the dining room ever since my stuff got here. Uncle B and I salute her politely whenever we pass through the room. We’ve gotten so used to her company, we kind of wanted to keep her in that room. Tonight, Uncle B noticed some damn fool had screwed a heavy screw into the beam above the booze pile by the door, so that’s where Granny lives for now.
Keeper of the Hootch. I don’t know if Granny Weasel was a drinker, but (knowing what I know about the rest of the fambly) the odds are very much in favor of it.
February 5, 2009 — 7:43 pm
Comments: 21
Any excuse to eat fruitcake
Him, not me. I can’t stand the stuff — though I had a bite of this one and it wasn’t bad (it didn’t have that horrible boozy taste; Uncle B was terribly disappointed). The powdered sugar snowflake is a nice touch.
Sorry to be so damned boring. I’m chasing Father Christmas this week with my skirts flung over my head.
That mental image? You’re welcome!
December 15, 2008 — 9:00 pm
Comments: 26