Riverfire 2013

I've been to Riverfire most years and although the fireworks are good, I've always enjoyed the plane and helicopter displays more. This time I wondered if I'd had enough of standing in massive crowds for hours on end just to watch a few flypasts and thought maybe I should stay at home and work on the garden instead.

Nah, who am I kidding....Superhornet flyover

Are you humming 'Ride Of The Valkyries' in your head?

If not, why not?

Blackhawk

Brisbane police employing a hardline approach to traffic control on the freeway. 'Move over to the inside line if it's empty...or else'

I was wondering of the pilot could see the pink bunnies as well

 A very unnerving view of an Apache

Close enough for an almost gynaecological (gunacological?) view of the pointy end

I love the spray these things put up

After the aerial displays it took almost 30 minutes to get off the bridge and then ride back over the river. So to escape the crowds we had planned to watch the fireworks from the top of our local mountain, Mt Gravatt, and although it needed a 30 minute yomp to get to the top it was well worth it. It was a lot more relaxed than Southbank, with people kicking back on the grass with a picnic and a beer or glass of wine  

whilst enjoying great views of the city below

The fireworks looked good, but being so far away meant we could hardly hear them. So it was good, but I still think that being there on the night is better - if you can cope with the crush. It's also hard to get decent photos that far out with a telescopic lens and no tripod! 

 

Armakeggon

Last Sunday was 'Armakeggon', a craft beer festival at Archive bar. There were more than a few beers to sample

 and even at just before 11am more than a few people waiting to sample them

This year they offered the beers in 100ml tasting cups, which meant lots of back & forth to the bar but it also gave you the chance to try a number of different beers without writing yourself off. Too quickly. Here are three of the ciders, mid sample 

We were lucky enough to grab a seat on the balcony upstairs, with a great view of the world walking past underneath  

but we weren't there to gawk at passers-by, we were there to drink!

The beers were many and varied, and I've only got pictures of a few. This is a 'Golden Age of Bloodshed' spiced Saison

and these are a 'Caramel Zombie Assault' (on the left) and a Saison Dupont (on the right). The combination of slightly salty toffee and banana made a kind of liquid banoffie pie

Other standouts included the Rogue XS IPA, the Gypsy Tears lambic stout, the Love Tap hoppy lager and the Craison crayfish saison. The latter (made from marine crayfish, not yabbies - I checked!) was most intriguing with a nice fresh saison-style fruity mouthfeel at the start and a faint lingering taste of fish. Fun to try, but I didn't go back for another and unusually for me I'm not wondering how to make it myself.

We managed to try pretty much everything we were interested in and still find time to finish off with pots of our favourites. All up it was an awesome day, so thanks to Graham for being excellent company and holding the table during my frequent 'comfort breaks'. Monday was not as awesome as I had to be at a clients site at 9am for a 2hr meeting to discuss business processes for implementing strategic reporting objectives, but somehow I made it through.

Which leads me to the Friday song...Chumbawamba & Tubthumping.

Must be hard to be in Chumbawamba - their career spanned three decades and mainly comprised of anarcho-political punk music. But everyone just remembers them as a one-hit wonder with a drinking song... 

Acid on me brain

Just a quick one today, been on site with a customer so no time to put something together...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MSzvtVFfEM

Full size all-grain batch

After my initial experiments with 'brew in a bag' I thought I'd see how far I could take it, and whether it was possible to put together 23 litres of a 5% ish brew without needing to buy another, bigger pot. After some reading up I found that the largest grain bill that people normally use with a 19l pot is around 5 1/2 kg, so I decided on 5kg of Marris Otter & 1/2 kg of un-malted wheat berries

That took about half an hour to grind, and I added a few teaspoons of dark malt to bring a bit of colour 

It left a bit of a mess in the kitchen as well...

In the meantime I bought 17l of water up to around 78 degrees C in the stock pot. Once I hit the right temperature I took out around 3.5l in a jug and kept that close to the pot along with a 2l bottle of room temperature water and a freshly boiled kettle. I put in the brew bag, tipped in the grains, mixed well and then used the various water containers to top up the pot as much as possible whilst trying to hit around 68 degrees C

When I hit the right temperature I covered the pot in a couple of sleeping bags (yes, that is the bag I carefully washed last week laying on the dusty concrete floor) and left it for 90 minutes

At this point the classical texts say 'kick back and have a homebrew' but I had a kitchen to clean & mop

After a 90 min mash I lifted the bag and drained into the pot whilst squeezing the bag, then left it to hang and drain thoroughly.  This gave me around 10l of wort at around 1.080

As a time saving measure I put the initial wort on the heat straight away, whilst I sparged the bag in 60 degree C water for 10 minutes before hanging and draining in the same way. I'm using the table to shield the pot from the wind.  I also threw the first batch of hops into the wort before it came to the boil - this is known as first-wort hopping and adds a deeper flavour to the beer.

Once the sparge was complete I had around 8l of 1.020 gravity wort. I added as much liquid as possible to the pot and carefully let it come back to the boil. This is another reason to first-wort hop - if you had a completely full pot of wort on the boil and through in hops at that point then you'd probably get a boil-over.

To make sure I pulled all of the sugars out of the grain I carried out a second sparge with room temperature water and hung & drained the bag again. This gave me around 6l of very weak wort (1.014 gravity), and so after the main wort was boiled, hopped, cooled and strained in the usual way I added this weak wort to the fermenter to bring up the volume. Don't forget to boil it first to sterilise it though.

After all this I ended up with around 20l of wort with a gravity of 1.052, and I added a litre of water to bring it up to 21l (that volume works better with my secondaries) at a gravity of 1.050. This will give me a roughly 5.5% brew if it ferments out all the way out to dry. This is a bit disappointing as it shows I'm only accessing around 65% of the sugars that are available in the grain. I'm doing all I can to pull out available sugars so I think that the issue lay in the coarseness of my original grind. Next time I will grind a lot finer and run the grains through twice. And I'll set the grinder up outside so I can get way with leaving the cleaning to the local wildlife...  

The doctor will see you now

The last time I cooked a beef brisket it came out with excellent flavour but the meat was dry. I hadn't followed the full recipe that time, so yesterday I gave it another go with a bit more attention to detail and some more barbecue toys.

First off I added a rub to the meat, left it overnight and then injected it several times with a mix of Imperial Stout and salt water

 

You do this because the meat cooks for at least 6 hrs, so it needs some additional help to keep it moist. Poke the needle in and squeeze gently as you pull it out. You can see the meat bulging as you pump it, it's very cool.

One for the beef, one for the chef

I got the smoker good & smoky at around 230F and left the meat on it for a few hours. I went mountain biking and I recommend that option to anyone cooking this (particularly Graham), but it doesn't heavily affect the flavour of the meat

After around 4 hrs (when the meat has reached 150F or so) I tightly wrapped the meat in aluminium foil with a few spoonful's of my injection solution, stoked the fire a bit (temperature was dropping) and left it for another couple of hours. This is called a 'Texas crutch'. Apparently at around 150F there are a lot of juices coming to the surface of the meat which evaporate and keep the meat from further heating up for a couple of hours ('the stall'), and the Texas crutch helps prevent this by capturing the juices instead.

I waited for the meat to hit around 200F and then took it out  and opened it up. Yum.

Blade (which I think is the Australian term for what Americans call brisket) has two distinct pieces of meat on it, the main chunk and a smaller top section called 'the flat'. I took the flat off , re-wrapped the main body of the meat and left it in an esky for half an hour or so (should have been longer but I was hungry). The flat was chopped up and cooked in the juices that came out of the tinfoil; this is known as 'burnt ends'.

Fresh buttery brisket, home made mustard and a home-brewed beverage. And some green stuff for health purposes...

After some time in the Esky the beef came out looking, smelling and tasting fantastic. Much moister than last time and melt-in-the-mouth. You could almost cut through it with a butter knife.   

The only problem is that it only holds this texture whilst it's warm. Once it's been stored in the fridge it's still tasty, but it won't have that smooth butteriness. So I had to eat as much as possible that evening... 

Caption competition

I'm undecided what to add as a title for this photo...The odd couple? Little & large? From the sublime to the ridiculous? Dumb & dumber?  (sorry guys)

So I'll open it up as a competition. The funniest caption suggested in the comments section of this post (as judged by Liz) on the 21st September wins both worldwide approbation on the interwebs and a bottle of mead cider. Let's see what you've got... 

Spacemen 3

Yesterday was 'R U OK day', which seems a suitable time to post this up. To quote the awesome tagline of the time, 'For all the fucked up children of this world, we give you Spacemen 3'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=TIfJgvzq0fU

It's in the bag...

One of the things I realised over the bikepacking weekend was that I hadn't washed my sleeping bag for a while. Like since I bought it. In 1999, when I took it on a years backpacking trip.

Ah, the memories came flooding out today...

 

Bikepacking over-nighter

After much email conversation we finally settled on both a date and destination for a bike-packing overnighter - we headed out to Stradbroke Island to escape the election coverage. I was on the trusty Mongoose, with the dry-bag holding my tent, sleeping mat, sleeping bag and clothes and my side pannier holding various other bits & pieces like a stove & mug, coffee, bike spares and whiskey flask. The dry-bag weighed in at just under 8kg and the side pannier was a little lighter.

We had some outriders on our way to the ferry - two guys who couldn't make it for the entire weekend but who came along to make sure we weren't just camping in a back yard and photo-shopping the pictures afterwards.

We gently weaved our way out East, admiring the many huge properties on the way - a nice ride in its own right

And after a quick coffee we were queuing up to load the bikes onto the ferry. Unfortunately when we got to the window they asked us to walk around to the office, but it still makes for a good photo-opp!

 Before we knew it we were on a fully loaded barge heading out to the island.

After a quick beer at Dunwich we rode out to our campsite at Adder Rocks. It's around a 20km ride on quiet roads with a wide shoulder and plenty of shade (in parts), although we soon started to hate the word 'undulating'. It was interesting learning to ride a laden bike - when you hit a hill you just gear down and spin your way to the top with no rush & no dramatics. This was helped by the fact that the 8kg weight located nice & high on the back end played hell with the balance when I got out of the saddle. At first it feels like you're going really slowly but you soon get into the flow of it and time gently passes under your tyres, and for every sweaty climb there's a wonderfully smooth descent.

The campsite was beautifully placed by the beach and we were lucky enough to score a prime spot. 

As an aside when I first came to Australia at around this time in 1999 I flew into Brisbane and, after a few days in the big smoke, cracked and came out to Straddie. It was only when we pulled into the campsite that I realised that it was next to the hostel that I stayed in all those years ago, and I still remember laying in bed the first night listening to the waves and thinking 'what would it be like to live here?'

Anyway, we soon had the tents up

and had our bikes approved by the local wildlife

I'd told everyone that I was looking forward to a swim so I girded my loins and took the plunge. It was nippy at first but soon I stopped mincing through the waves and dived in. Glorious!  

By this time we were developing a powerful thirst so we had a quick sight-seeing tour up to Point Lookout - note to self, be more careful putting on bibs when you have sandy feet.

 Nice shadow, idiot...

and then we dropped in at the Straddie hotel. The tents in the background are for the triathlon festival that was on that weekend, although I don't think anyone confused us with the competitors...

The hotel was a bit over-gentrified so we rolled back down to the Point Lookout bowls club for fried buttery goodness. That bread at the front is a 'garlic loaf', essentially a load of bread sliced and then covered with garlic butter so thickly that it ran out of the slices when you squeezed it.

After a great sleep it was coffee time

 and after breakfast it was time to do it all again to get home. The roads were partially closed because of the triathlon so we had a good easy ride back

with some slightly surprised & amused looks from the triathletes. This guy was the leader but he still took the time to give us a thumbs-up.

Every bike-packing ride should have this kind of infrastructure set up for them

It was a hot day getting home and I was struggling near the end until some fireroads perked me up

The loaded bike tried developed 'tank-slapper' handling on the loose downhills which helped keep me alert...

It was a great trip, which started off as 'a quick overnighter to test the camping gear' but ended up an awesome weekend away, and better still both my bike and my body held up to the strain. Cheers guys - where are we going next?