Begging forgiveness

Forgive me reader for I have sinned. It has been over 3 months since my last ride on dirt. Mea culpa.

There was a 'Short Ride Around Daisy' on yesterday afternoon, and the lure of good trails with good mates overwhelmed my recent lethargy. It was my first dirt ride since Rotorua and I was pretty nervous about how my body would cope, particularly as the temperature was up in the low 30's. The ride was intended to be low key & lazy, but even when that's been agreed on no-one wants to be the anchor that slows a group down.

I was on the clown bike, a light agile & simple singlespeed which was held back by its heavy, clumsy & simple rider

I'd forgotton how much fun this bike was. It feels a little short when you're riding it around the carpark but in the singletrack it comes alive and pretty much forces you to have fun. As it's a singlespeed it's not possible to click down the gears and cruise up the hills so it also forces you to work hard. I was happy that I was able to keep up with the group, although I did spend the first 5 minutes of every break wondering if I would bring up lunch. Saw a wallaby bouncing through the bush as well, something that still makes me smile after 6 years over here.
We did probably 15km and I was buggered at the end of it. But despite the sore legs and the nagging headache all evening I went to bed still smiling, and even dreamt of singletrack.

Give thanks to the earth for it is good.

Spicy Saison

My saison has now been racked into demijohns for a month or so of secondary fermentation, after which it will be transferred to bottles and conditioned for another month or so. Waiting is always the hardest part about homebrew! Theoretically once you get a regular pattern going it gets better as you have earlier brews to keep you company whilst you wait, but that only works for me if I develop a taste for sour watermelon.


The yeast was too good to throw away so I've saved it and am reusing it in another saison. This one is brewed identically to the last except with the addition of this -



Zest of one orange and 1/4 of a grapefruit, 10g of coriander seeds, 1 g of black peppercorns and a gram of sliced ginger. It will be interesting to see how the two beers taste when compared back to back.


Talking of which, ironically I've not actually tasted this kind of beer before. I've seen a bottle in a boutique beer bar in Brisbane, but at $32 I decided I'd prefer to wait. Since I have around 45l of it bubbling away in the garage I hope I like it!



If not at least I'll be able to employ a Belgian farmworker for 9 1/2 days. More if he takes American currency.

Beer update

Time for a bit of an update on the beers made over the last few months:-

Coopers Kit wheat beer. This was my re-entry into the world of homebrew - just following the instructions on a kit, using wheat malt instead of sugar. I did mess around with some adjuncts in the secondary though.

Straight wheat beer - a bit plain and overly clean tasting, with that familiar homebrew yeast overtone.

Dry-hopped wheat beer - this added a bit of aroma and initial bitterness, but didn't affect the taste too much. Very much a 'session' beer

Orange & Coriander wheat beer - this was the best of the three, although it took a couple of months for the flavour to smooth out. Lightly fruit flavoured, with almost a cider overtone. Went down well with people who weren't beer drinkers, and left the ladies in the office asking for more.

Pendle Witches Brew. This was my first attempt at part mashing. Made a few mistakes, most importantly boiling up & fermenting the torrified wheat which left a very husky bitter aftertaste. I managed to limit that by mixing in some gelatin to the secondaries before bottling, which grabbed hold of the tannins and dragged it to the bottom of the demijohn.

The huskiness faded over time, and this has probably been my favourite beer so far. Liked by those who like English ale without any over-the-top flavours. Will make another batch once it cools down, and even leave some to sit for a few months.

Sage ale. At this point my natural urge to experiment surfaced. I'd read a lot about no-hop beer and plan to experiment with 'gruit' at some point (malted barley boiled with mugwort, bog-myrtle and yarrow). This was an alternative version using sage and liquorice. I also brewed 10l instead of the usual 23l, and used only malted grains - no extract.

Unfortunately things didn't go well - I initially bought marjoram instead of sage, and my maths went a little awry so I ended up adding double the amount of liquorice root. I also figured out that if you're going to try to brew all grain beers, it takes so long that you may as well go for a full fermentor load.

Reactions have been mixed. Some people hide their grimace behind a cough and say that it's unusual. Thanks Laurie. Others spit it out and declare that it's puce. Thanks Nikko. And it's got such a distinctive smell that you can't quietly pour it out in an attempt to spare my feelings. Thanks for trying Gordy.

I'm still curious as to how it tastes with the right amount of liquorice though...

Traditional IPA. Back to the English ales, but I thought I'd up the hops on this one. Also tried a traditional technique called 'first hopping' which adds to the bitterness & flavouring of the beer. It certainly worked.

This beer appeals to the hopheads, and I think it will mellow over time. It also tastes very similar to some of the 'hardcore' hop beers like Punk IPA, so although it's not entirely to my taste I think it was a success.

Watermelon wheat beer. Another experiment - the idea this time was to ferment out a wheat beer, and then add watermelon juice to the secondary to give it a subtle fruity flavour. I also bottled a few bottles prior to adding the watermelon.

I overdid the malt on this one which has produced a very strong beer (around 7%) and the alcohol skews the flavour. Not as much as the watermelon juice though, which has added a subtle backflavour of....well, stale watermelon. So a bit of a fail all round. I'm hoping that the watermelon will slowly back off over time, but that may be optimistic.

Belgian Saison. This is still at the brewing stage but is smelling lovely. It's also still bubbling 9 days after pitching the yeast, and with ambient temperatures of 32 - 34 degrees C. That's just weird yeast.....

Warm beer

The temperature is hovering between 28 degrees (on a coolish day) and 35 degrees (on a warm day) at the minute, so it's a typical if slightly cool Brisbane summer. That makes brewing difficult - most beer yeasts perform best at between 20 & 24 degrees. Kit beers often tell you to brew at elevated temperatures but this is to guarantee that the yeast will work quickly - the downside is off flavours as the yeast produces different 'esters' (or chains of alcohol molecules) which can add sour or off-fruit tastes to the beer*. These generally don't deter a first-time brewer as they expect their beer to taste wierd, but anyone without air conditioning who brews for the taste and not for the cheapness is hanging up their fermenters at this time of year.

However I started flicking through a book on Belgian beer and found out there is a style of beer called 'Saison' that is brewed at between 27 and 35 degrees. It uses a specific yeast that can cope with the higher temperatures and looks to be a hoppy wheat beer style beer brewed from malted barley. I've never drunk Saison, but I like the description and I like the fact that I can make it in the garage without worrying about the temperature!

I had to order the yeast online as my local homebrew shop didn't have it, so I thought I'd get some fresh (or at least vacuum packed whilst fresh) hops whilst I was 'there'.

The hop pellets turned out to be a lovely green colour, with a fantastic earthy smell and fresh flavour.

I also got some hop flowers, because I could

This was an extract beer, so to keep the beer pale and to give me some adaptability with brew size I used dried malt extract instead of the usual tins of liquid malt extract. I also used a kg of munich malt and 500g of malted wheat that I steeped for half an hour and then added to the brewpot.
The dried extract was cheaper than the liquid, just as easy to use and easier to store if I didn't use the whole lot in one brew. I think I'll be using that again.

Because it was an extract brew it was a relatively simple affair and before long the flat had aquired it's usual lovely beer brewing odour.

The hop flowers hydrated when they were in the brew which meant that the wort turned into what was almost a sticky soup. I needed to strain it before I put it in the fermentor, but that only added 15 mins to the process.
After dilution in the fermentor I had 23 litres of wort at a original gravity of 1.048, which should give me approximately 5% beer. Just as was intended. It's bubbling away nicely now and in two weekends time I'll rack it off to secondary fementation.
I'll keep the yeast and reuse it to make another Saison, this with the same ingredients but with the addition of some spices. And then in a few months time when everythings feremented out, bottled and aged it's tasting time!
*As I've recently found out, this can more easily be achieved by the addition of watermelon juice to the beer

Updates

It's been hard to update the blog over the last month or so. Not only have we been facing a succession of natural disasters country wide but I've also been under the weather with some kind of bug. One that left me well enough to go to work, but too tired to do anything when I got home or over the weekends.

I'm feeling better now so hopefully will be able to put a bit more time into posting some updates. So first off, I've been progressively building a new bike over the last few months. It's been a long build but it's finally done - so here is my Cotic Roadrat.

Cotic are a small UK company (only two employees) that mainly focus on mountain bikes. The Roadrat is their versatile road-going bike, which I can use as a fixie around town for now and if I feel the urge build it up as a geared roadbike or a tourer. And it's tough enough and takes big enough tyres to allow me some offroad options as well. I won't be taking it on singletrack - I have smaller wheeled mountain bikes more suited to that - but it will be nice to be able to follow my nose and take some random fireroads in the forest on the way to work.

and if I ever feel the urge to join the brakeless fixie riding hipsters I can add some style - for those of you with delicate sensibilities look away now....

A lucky escape - for some

Cyclone Yasi hit the North Queensland coast early Thursday morning - it veered away from Cairns at the last minute and impacted on an area called Mission Beach, a fairly rural backwater that I spent a few happy days hanging out at when I was backpacking. There's not much left of it now. Boats were carried hundreds of feet inland and ended up embedded in houses, cars have just disappeared and townships have been gutted. Brisbane was well out of the firing line but over the night a lot of us stayed up watching what was going on on the TV. It was pretty horrific watching the storm approach and listening to the official advice - 'stay inside the smallest room in your home. If the roof rips off, remain in the room as it is safer than leaving.' At one point we heard about two people who had rung emergency services because they no longer felt safe in their home. It was too late, no-one was able to venture out into that so they just had to stick it out.

To give an idea of the size of this monster here's a satellite photo - the coast of N Queensland is in white on the left hand side

It's hard to get an idea of size from that if you don't know Australia, so here's the same storm superimposed over Europe

Amazingly despite the damage there has only been one recorded death, a poor soul who ran a diesel generater inside a building and choked on the carbon monoxide well after the worst of the storm was over. So in many ways Far North Queensland (or FNQ) dodged a bullet, but try telling that to the poor buggers at Mission Beach, Tulley & Innisfail who've lost everything.

Living in the path of a natural disaster

As most of you know South East Queensland has recently been devastated by the worst floods in over 30 years. Thousands of homes in Brisbane and its surrounding suburbs and towns went under - not a little bit, not just a damp carpet but houses and businesses covered up to and over their roofs, people trapped & drowned in their homes and cars picked up and swept away by the torrents.

I've never lived through a natural disaster before and I never want to again. Everyone was glued to televisions, radios or the internet getting the latest information and over three days the river just kept on rising, and when it seemed like it had reached higher than you could ever imagine it rose some more. And it wasn't just properties next to the river that went under. As the water rose on the river it also rose through the storm drains, so anywhere that was under the level of the river went under. Properties, entire suburbs a mile or more from the river were unexpectedly submerged.

The rivers dropped as quickly as they rose and sometimes now it's almost impossible to belive that it happened. Until you turn down the wrong street and see the empty gutted houses where everything not moved had to be thrown out, peoples entire lives piled up on the kerbside covered in a rotting brown sludge waiting to be chucked into a truck & dumped. 146,000 tonnes of rubbish was picked up in the two weeks after the flood, 146,000 tonnes of memories will be buried in landfill.

One good thing to come out of all of this was the community spirit, the Queensland spirit. On the first weekend it seemed like the entire population of Brisbane turned out to help. People flocked into the affected suburbs and walked through the streets asking every homeowner what they could do. Those that couldn't lift, dig or sweep made sure that everyone was well fed - I could have eaten my weight in sausage in bread every day.

However now it's happening again. Brisbane may be safe and starting a long road to recovery but elsewhere in the state a cyclone is bearing down on the Far North Queensland coast. A cyclone is the southern hemisphere version of a hurricane and this one, a category 5 cyclone due to hit land in a few hours, is forecast to be bigger than Katrina. Winds will reach almost 300km/h (almost 200 miles/hr), waves will be over 12m high, flood tides will be upto 6m higher than a normal high tide and rainfall could be up to 1000mm (over 3 ft) in 24 hrs. This could potentially decimate large parts of the coastline and destroy entire towns or even cities like Cairns. It's forecast to hit towns 400km inland with the power of a category 3 cyclone, where winds are expected to 'only' hit 100 miles/hr. And those towns are not built to cope with that.

All we can do is hope and pray that somehow the power drops as we watch the horror show being played out before us. This country is tough, this country can make you work to live here. It's no wonder that 'mateship' is an intrinsic part of being an Australian. We're a long way from help down here if it goes tits up, and if you don't all watch out for each other you've got no hope.