Wheezing for joy

I've been asthmatic since I was about 12 years old. My principal trigger is cold air, which is something that's been pretty well fixed by moving to Australia, but it can also be triggered by freshly cut grass and various moulds. At my worst in the U.K. I was taking 4 puffs of a preventative steroid inhaler (which caused me to lose my voice) every day during winter and still getting through about one Ventolin reliever inhaler a month. That was whilst living in the Thames Valley, ironically one of the warmer places in the UK and apparently a well known asthma corridor as the winters don't get cold enough to kill the various fungi floating around.

In the UK ventolin inhalers require a trip to the GP to have them prescribed. This means that every time you move you need to

• Register with a new GP
• Have a routine checkup with the GP
• Be recommended to the asthma nurse
• Book an appointment with the asthma nurse
• Have a routine checkup with the asthma nurse, who will generally tell me to use my inhaler if I need to
• Get the prescription
• Get the inhalers from the chemist

The asthma nurse is something that is a great idea for children, parents of asthmatic kids and (probably the worst of all) late-onset asthmatics but it can be time consuming, particularly if you're working full time. It also treats asthma like a disease or an illness, which for people who've been living with the condition for 30 plus years is both irritating and patronising. It may be something I'm not particularly happy to have lived with but it's shaped my life and it's part of me.
Over here ventolin inhalers are available over the counter with no prescription. So when my supply is running low I need to

• Get the inhalers from the chemist

It's much more civilised.
Incidentally one of the things told to kids is that many famous athletes are asthmatic and it never stopped them. What they don't tell you is that it's often 'diagnosed' to justify the presence of ventolin or salbutamol - a mildly performance-enhancing substance - in the athletes blood stream . For instance it's estimated that 40% of the 2007 Tour De France riders were diagnosed asthmatics compared to around 10% of the general population.
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/cycling/2007-07-20-3694433468_x.htm
I tried this firsthand at a cyclocross race a couple of years ago, mixing my stimulants in an attempt to create a racing machine.
Here's that finley honed machine in action
I don't want to brag or openly claim any benefits of doping, but I did manage to race for 20 minutes without throwing up. Just. I came in second from last in C grade so I consider that an endorsement.

SS world champs

Mountain biking is generally acknowledged to have originated in the late 60's, although it's hard to believe that people weren't tempted to take bikes off road for many years before that. But whatever its origins it became a popular sport in it's own right in the 70's with people taking heavily modified cruiser bikes into the Californian hills and racing them down firetrails. As the sport developed the bike companies wised up and started to produce off-road specific bikes. Many of those companies also produced & sponsored road bikes so it didn't take long until the complicated politics of road racing seeped into mountain biking.

Singlespeeding has always been a bit more counter-cultural than regular mountain biking. People would race singlespeeds in regular bike races but a singlespeed race scene also slowly grew. This wasn't tied in to any particular manufacturers or governed by any existing race bodies and so it developed it's own identity. There's a lot more fun in singlespeed racing - more beer & more laughter, although the competition at the pointy end can be just as fierce.

Every year a singlespeed world cup is held somewhere in the world. Unlike regular world cups anyone can enter without seeding races or qualifying points. All you need is a singlespeed bike & a sense of humour. This year the race is being held in Rotorua in New Zealand's North Island, and since it's so close it seemed rude not to go along and give it a shot. There are about 20 of us from Brisbane flying over in three weeks time and staying in the same set of apartments for a week - most are just coming over for the local riding & the craic, but there are about 5 of us competing in the worlds. It's going to be a pretty gruelling race, but there are apparently shortcuts available if you're prepared to scull a beer so I'm planning to play to my strengths. The winner of the race is awarded a commemorative tattoo, but I don't think my skin is in any danger. All I want to do is finish!

Check out more details at http://www.sswc10nz.com/

Rise of the Blinglespeeds

When you were young and you got a new bike the first question anybody asked was 'how many gears has it got?'. As mountain bikes developed this number started to increase until the average mountain bike now has 27 gears (although in reality there are only around 14 different gear ratios available with those 27 different gear combinations) and it is even possible to run 30 gears.

There's been a bit of a backlash in the riding community against this rising technology and a lot of people are now starting to ride singlespeeds. A singlespeed is exactly what it sounds like - a bike with a single gear

Initially this seems counter-intuitive. Why make things harder for yourself when you could ride easy gears up the hills and push bigger gears faster downhill? For me it's one of those things that you need to try to fully appreciate. Once you've overcome the certainty that you need all those gears then you can start to enjoy the ride. If you want to go faster you pedal faster. If it gets steep you stand up. It's like riding a bike when you're a kid, it's all so much more natural. The bike is quieter as there's no loose chain flapping around banging off the chainstays. It responds more quickly too - partly because there's less mechanics between you and the back wheel so every pedal stroke has an immediate result, partly because you never end up at the bottom of a hill in a high gear or spinning out when you try to muscle the bike over an obstacle. Ok, that last points is more a result of my bad riding style!
Riding a singlespeed requires a bit more muscle than a geared bike but that's something that you quickly develop. It also uses more of your body - you sometimes have to pull your body down into the handlebars in an attempt to keep the pedals turning, so you come back from a ride aching as much in the arms as you are in the legs. Ironically it can often be faster than a geared bike over the same distance - you can't change down & take it easy up the hills so you need to keep a certain speed up just to keep the pedals turning. This of course makes it more fatiguing to ride. And if your regular ride involves a lengthy flat road section before you hit the hills then it may not be a wise choice - it's hard to find a gear ratio that's big enough to allow you to cruise comfortably on tarmac and still small enough to let you climb on dirt.
One of the benefits of singlespeeds is that the lack of gearing makes for a lighter, less cluttered looking bike

Although it's possible to buy a singlespeed off the shelf the majority of them have been built up by dedicated cyclists, which can lead to some fairly specialised & blinged-out bikes . Some people have built up blinglespeeds that not only jettison gears but also suspensionThe carbon fibre forks on the front of this beauty flex slightly, which gives a modicum of suspension over rough ground. You would think that this makes it harder to ride, but the owner of this bike regularly smokes me on every downhill section of the trails. Then again he would probably do the same if he was riding a pogo stick.
You can also build blinglespeeds out of strange and exotic materials like titanium

The picture doesn't do this bike justice - if you look carefully you can see it has twisted top & down tubes. It's a stunning bike - you can't help but continually pick it up, just to remind yourself how light it is. Ti also apparently has a flex to it which gives it a unique feel.
I've switched the Scandal to singlespeed for an upcoming event but I like to keep things simpleWell, apart from the Ti pedals & wheel skewers, Renthal chainring & Teflon coated chain oh - and the titanium seatpost and the carbon-fibre based saddle, which weighs in at around 125 grammesNothing like the cheap simplicity of a singlespeed bike.

Beer update

I racked off my Witches Brew today. I was a bit disappointed because the 20-odd litres of wort only gave me just over 15l of beer - the rest of the fermenter was full of a wheaty sludgy mulch with some whole bits of puffed wheat embedded in it. This made the siphoning hard because the puffed wheat would clog up the siphon tube - some bits even made it through into the secondaries. Next time I'll clean the grain bag out after the sparge and use it to hold any extras ('adjuncts' to use the correct terminology) in the boil. That way the wort will be a lot cleaner.

The brew tastes extremely bitter and I'm hoping that this is not a by-product of the fermenting solution sitting on the wheat for a week & just part of the natural process - that the bitterness levels off during the secondary fermentation & bottling processes. Time will tell - I can see many sleepless nights ahead with me snapping awake screaming 'No! The Fuggles!'. It's all a valuable learning process but despite common sense telling me this is only a first try I will be disappointed if the end result is something mediocre.

I also bottled the ginger honey beer that's been sitting in a secondary for a while now. This has fermented pretty much to dryness so I'm taking a chance and bottling most if it in wine bottles (the fact I have a surfeit of wine bottles is a sheer coincidence). I didn't add sugar so this should turn out as a flat dry gingery lowish alcohol wine with a honey backtaste. That's if the bottles don't explode. Fortunately the 'under the sink' beer-holding cupboard is fairly sturdy so although explosions will result in a sticky mess at least the flying glass will be contained.

I now have two demijhons and a 30l fermenter free. Time to go poke around the fridge and see what's available to brew up today :)

Mean Streets

Every four weeks or so a few of us meet up for a fun ride around the city. The amount of actual riding can be variable, but we normally find some time to fit a few beers in as well - for carbo-loading purposes only of course. After all we are serious athletes.

Last night we found a new spot - some wierdly soft rubber bulges installed under one of the new overpasses. Not really sure why they put them there but it's a fun piece of development. Nikko & Gareth took full advantage of them...

The camera was struggling a bit in the low light but I kind of like some of the images it produced...


After a quick drink or two the night ended with the traditional 'waterfront wheelie'
I've got to learn how to do that.

Self-righteously damp

My car was getting serviced today so I decided to ride in to work. Unfortunately the weather took a bad turn with persistent rain overnight continuing through the morning. I decided to man up, grabbed my rain jacket and loaded my bike into the car for the drive to the garage. I used to ride in the rain in the UK all the time - how hard can it be?

After unloading the bike and getting my riding gear on whilst sheltering under the awnings of the garage I thought twice about posting my keys through the 'out of office' slot. Then I thought about it a third time, and then a fourth. Finally I posted the keys and pedalled off into the downpour.

The first 5 minutes were horrible. My raincoat (a fetching orange waterproof breathable golf jacket I bought cheap in the US) was doing its job but my head, bum, legs and particularly my feet were getting progressively wetter. The water was dripping from my helmet visor & every puddle & every passing car made my socks squelch in my shoes a bit more. But after a while I realised I was as wet as I was going to get, stopped whineing and started to enjoy the ride.

I was also riding a new track to work as the garage was off of my usual route. I rode through the middle of Toohey Forest, some local woodland that I normally just ride next to. It was beautifully quiet on the footpath, the only sound being birdsong, the roll of my tyres and the splashing of the rain
The last time I rode past this spot it was at night, desperately chasing the tail-lights of two other guys on a hectic night ride. That night there were a number of gentleman standing around looking faintly dodgy and uncomfortable to be highlighted by our night-riding lights. Today I had the place to myself - just me & the rain.

Unfortunately the ride had to finish and I had to go to work. I squelched my way in to the office looking suave
Under Bicycle Queensland rules riding to work in the rain allows you to smugly utter glib platitudes such as 'there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad gear' and I took full advantage of that on my entrance. But after I'd showered I realised I had to ride back in the same gear that I wore on the way in, and it's hard to be too smug when you've had to try to dry your padded bike undies under a hand dryer.

Brisbane may be wet at times but it's never that cold and it's easy to ride with only a little discomfort. There are problems - the roads are slippy, you're more likely to puncture as thorns & bits of glass slide through the rubber of the tyre more easily, pedestrians are more worried about dodging puddles than watching for bikes and the Australian concept of 'safe driving' in the wet seems to be to tailgate and match speed with the guy in front so that the impact of the inevitable collision is reduced. But just like in the UK, once you knuckle down, accept that getting wet isn't going to kill you and just get on with it and then it's surprisingly enjoyable.

Bottling day

No, not the beer I brewed up yesterday - it takes a bit more time than that! But the wheat beer has done its two weeks in the secondary fermentor so it's time to bottle it. I used to use large bottled water containers to bottle my beer but it looked terrible and was never very effective - plus it meant I had to drink the beer 5 litres at a time. So this time I splashed out on some flip-top glass bottles.

Sampling the young beer is a perk of brewing and it was interesting tasting the beers that were conditioned in different ways. The orange peel & coriander didn't really taste of much - its taste was even cleaner taste than the demijohns without any extra additives. The hopped batch had the best 'foretaste', but it was still pretty bland. Hopefully a couple of weeks in the bottle will help, but to be fair all I did was mix a brew kit so I shouldn't be hoping for too much.
The Witches Brew is looking very happy with a nice fluffy yeast head and plentiful bubbling from the airlock
I think I know why the sugar yield was low though - the hot water I used in the mash process was used to heat up the esky as well as the grain, and this probably took a good4 or 5 degrees away. Next time I'll pre-heat the esky with near-boiling water as well.
Saying that it's important in homebrew to pace yourself & not get too carried away. I have 4 gallons of wheat beer in 24 bottles that needs to sit for at least two weeks, and 4 gallons of Witches Brew that will need to be racked off in a week and will be ready for bottling a couple of weeks later. That's a lot of beer and a lot of bottles. I have some really interesting recipes I want to try (eg proper ginger beer from a ginger beer plant, watermelon wheat beer & gruit beer) as well as working on getting a better sugar yield with some of the other real beer recipes. But unless I want to bury myself in bottles I need to relax and let the existing beer mature. In time a natural cycle should develop.

Partial Mash

Beer in its purest form is the fermentation of sugars extracted from barley. In fact the word beer is thought to originate from 'baerlic', the Old English word for barley. The barley is allowed to germinate and then the germination is halted and the barley is kilned. The result - malted barley - is chock full of the sugary goodness that nature intended to use to power the growth of the barley. This extraction of the malt is one of the dark arts of brewing, the process further muddied by the use of words such as mashing & sparging to describe what are in reality quite simple processes.

I've always shied away from using real grains in my brewing, prefering to use kits with pre-extracted & flavoured malt in a can or mucking around with various fruits & vegetables. It's a lot easier to attempt to make potato & carrot beer or dandelion beer as you don't really know what it will taste like at the end. That means it's hard to fail - you produce a gallon or so of a dry drink tasting vaguely of whatever you boiled up in the brewpot. You may not like the taste - and most of my friends generally didn't! -but that's a matter of taste.

Recently I've been tempted down the grain route. It's hard to produce a reasonable size brew entirely from grain as it needs a fair bit of liquid which means you have to have space, large pots & pans and a sturdy cooker. There is an alternative though - you can make half of the 'wort' (the unfermented beer solution) from grain and add in liquid malt extract for the rest. This gives you a lot more control over the flavours that come through in the beer than using a standard kit, but also means that you can brew a batch in an apartment. This is called a 'partial mash' or a 'mini-mash'.

I'm trying a partial mash version of a recipe for Pendle Witches Brew, a favourite drink of mine from back in the UK. The first thing to do is get your ingredients together - the recipe uses 2 kg of 'traditional' malted barley and 250g of crystal malt to provide the grain sugars

These grains are 'mashed' - ie soaked in water kept at around 66 degrees Centigrade for 90 minutes to allow the sugars to seep out. To make this process easier I'm using a grain bag (essentially a large tea bag) inside a large Esky
The water temperature is fairly critical. The grains will cool the water down when it is added so you need to heat the water up to a few more degrees than the intended mashing temperature. A rule of thumb is 6 degrees higher than mashing temperature
However as I'm adding the water to the mashing container instead of heating it up 'in situ' I lost a bit more temperature heating up the inside of the Esky and only got 65 degrees. Never mind - lesson learnt, I'll know to use an initial temperature of 74 degrees next time.
After you add the water give the bag some vigouros poking to make sure there are no dry clumps of grain inside the bag. Also be careful not to let the bag fall into the water, else you get the grains escaping like in the picture above.

Now comes the hard part - leave it for 90 mins and resist the urge to look at it, because every time you lift that lid you lose temperature. I'd love to say that I spent the time doing manly things like drinking beer & watching sports but I ended up tidying the flat, doing the hoovering & watering the plants.

After an hour & a half you can take a look at your mash. The temperature in mine had dropped to 62 degrees (I think I peeked too many times) but although this isn't great I think it just means I don't extract the optimal amount of sugars from the barley. However, even after the mash is completed there are still more sugars to be retreived. So first off pull the grain bag out and let it drain as much as possible

(Mmmmm - beer)

Next move the bag over to a large pot containing water at around 80 degrees that you prepared earlier

Soak the bag of grain for 10-15 minutes and you'll pull out a lot more of the remaining sugars, like a Yorkshireman reusing a teabag. This secondary extraction step is called sparging - it's normally done by trickling hot water over the grains but this way is a lot easier.
Make sure you drain the bag thoroughly at the end of the sparge - a handy spoon can help if you're tired of holding bags of grain above hot pans of water
Tip the wort from the Esky into the pot. The Original Gravity of my wort (a measure of the sugar content and hence the eventual alcohol content) was around 1030 at this point.
Next comes the boil. At this point you add any extras specified in the recipe - I added some canned malt (to bring the OG up a bit) and also some 'torrified wheat'. Turns out this was a breakfast cereal, which felt a bit wierd
and made it look like a porridge
Once the mixture comes to the boil (which takes a surprisingly long time on a cheap stove) add in any hops (I'm using Fuggles hops in the recipe) and vigorously boil it for 90 minutes. You may also need to add extras into the brew at nominated times - my recipe had me adding white sugar halfway through the boil, which is unusual as sugar is generally considered 'cheating' in home brew. I think it's a way of bringing up the strength of the beer whilst keeping a lighter taste.
You also need to add some more hops 15 minutes from the end of the boil - these are more for the smell of the beer than the taste. Speaking of which, your flat will now smell of a lovely mix of malty sugars with a hoppy nose. It's good to live somewhere warm so you can leave the doors open, and a patient partner is also a must. Thanks Liz.
Once the boil is over it's homebrew business as normal. Cool the wort down

then load it into the fermentor, The whole process of partial mashing took about 5 hrs in all, although a lot of it was waiting for things to steep or boil and you can get on with other things. It gave me around 10l of wonderfully smelling wort with a gravity of around 1100 - this is huge, stronger than the OG of a lot of wines. I added another 10l or so of water to bring the OG down to 1040 (which will give a roughly 5% alcohol beer - weaker than the recipe indicates, which is probably because I didn't pull all the sugars out of the barley), and once everything cooled down I chucked in (or 'pitched') the yeast. I'm using dried yeast but I've rejuvinated it in warm sugary water so it should be good & hungry & happy to be introduced to the wort.
Now it's just a question of waiting, and hoping that the end brew is worth the work!

Rack Off!

Whilst we're on the home front, I've also racked off my wheat beer
Racking the beer takes it off the initial fermentation mulch and gives it some time to clear and for the more subtle stages of secondary fermentation to take place. I'm using 4 separate gallon demijohns to hold the beer and I'm experimenting with a couple of additives. Two are straight out of the fermenter, one is laced with hops to give it more of an aroma and one contains a combination of orange peel & crushed coriander seed in a cheesecloth bag. I'll bottle them in a week or so and a fortnight after that I get to taste the differences.

A friend has lent me a book on brewing classic British beers using malted barley & fresh hops so now I'm looking forward to getting into the arcane world of mashing, sparging, tunning and the like. I've always avoided the more 'beardy' end of homebrew, preferring to dabble with kit brews and experimenting by fermenting various fruits & vegetables with sugar, but I think it's time to up my game. It will be a challenge given our small flat but I have a few hints & tips to make it easier. But until I visit the homebrew shop I can only flick longingly through the recipes and dream. You have to love a book that has an 8 page chapter on yeast- well as long as it's not a medical text book.

Courgette Liberation Front

There's been a few comments about the inhumane conditions that my courgettes have been born into. I've been shamed into action and last weekend there was some much-needed repotting. Some of the pots will still be a little small - I like to think of them as Bonsai Zucchini - but hopefully this will give them enough room to stretch their roots


I even planted one free-range downstairs - hopefully it won't end up as food for the local wildlife...

Riverfire

Brisbane has an annual fireworks display called Riverfire. It's a huge display with 6 floating barges on the river launching fireworks synchronised to music played on one of the local radio stations, and more fireworks hanging off every bridge and a lot of the tall buildings in the CBD. Something like 65,000 separate fireworks are launched over the time of the display. This takes place in early September and attracts huge crowds - I rode past at 10am this year & there were people staking out prime areas for the display at 7pm that night
There is a fair degree of ingenuity in some spots, with hammocks strung from poles, tarpaulins covering picnic spots and beer filled eskies. Other people simply set up camp chairs and sit there from early in the morning until early evening. It was a squally wet day this year so that can't have been much fun. We normally get the bus down to the river for Riverfire but this year we decided we'd stay home and watch it from the balcony.
The display starts with two Royal Australian Air Force F-111s doing a 'dump & burn'. This is the air force equivalent of doing do-nuts in a ute in the carpark. The F-111 comes in low & fast, pulls up, dumps fuel and ignites its afterburners. This creates an awesome tail of flame that lights up the sky as the plane climbs.
Dodgy picture - better to watch this or look up 'dump & burn' on you-tube. It's apparently a specialisation of the Australian Air Force and one that won't be repeated as the planes are being replaced this year. It's a thrilling thing to watch in person - the plane can come in so low that you flinch from the light & feel the heat of the burn before you hear the plane roaring over your head.

Once the planes have done their stuff the fireworks kick off. The firework display is literally 25 minutes long - long enough for you to get excited about it, get a bit bored, grab a fresh beer and then get exited all over again. The entire city lights up, and although I have no decent pictures from this year the web can supply plenty of examples like this

The display ends with another dump & burn. This year there were two at the end - although I know these things are meticulously choreographed I still like to think that the pilots thought 'yeah - what the hell, we've got enough fuel. Let's just do it one more time'.

There's also plenty of video out there , but the best thing to do is come & check it out next year. Bring your own chair & be sure to get there early...