The Lammas Tide

Classic 60's psychedelia fresh from the West Coast of Australia this week - no video, but a gorgeous tune. And a timely band name too. Looking forward to the album!

http://thelammastide.bandcamp.com/

Give up for Australia

It's Australia Day this weekend and the Winter Olympics start in a couple of weeks, so this seems appropriate. Although for some reason I can't embed it so clicky the linky...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5nJF5MDGJg

Talking of satire, this is an interesting story - watch the vid (but not with the kids around) and then follow the link to the background...

 

Trail dogs

Another animal post - not intentional, I just write 'em as I see 'em!

http://vimeo.com/83947019

As Liz says, I'm getting 'dog-clucky'.

The possum whisperer

We found a baby possum entangled in our back door the other morning - his tail was wrapped around the base of the door and he was on his side, shivering but not otherwise moving. My first thought was that one of the local cats had taken a chunk out of him on the side that we couldn't see, so I got a shovel and told Liz that I was 'taking him to a warm place behind the shed to recover'. But then he moved and we could see that he wasn't obviously injured.

We had a brief panic about what to do but then Liz found the 'Wildcare Australia' website and phoned the emergency number (07 5527 2444). The volunteer on the other end answered within two rings (it was 6.30am) and told us to prepare a small box by punching holes in it, then gently pick the possum up with a towel and put him & the towel in the box with a bottle of hot water to keep him warm. We put the box somewhere dark & quiet and tried not to peek too much whilst we waited for the local vet to open.

An hour later we gently carried the box out to the car and took him to the local vet. By this time he seemed to have recovered a bit and was sitting up & peering out of the top of the box to see what was going on. I handed over the box to the assistant at the vets and she gently took him out for an inspection. Apparently he was badly dehydrated and needed to be nursed back to health before being placed with a volunteer to recuperate & reach an age where he could be re-released. I braced myself for the bill but I wasn't asked for any payment - apparently any vet in Australia will take injured local wildlife for free.

They took our details for re-release purposes, and I have no doubt that in a few months time he'll be back out there eating our plants and keeping us awake at night. I hope so!

No pictures as we didn't want to stress the poor guy out any further, but he looked a bit like this (but cuter)...

So if you find any injured wildlife, don't reach for the shovel. Get in touch with your local volunteer group for immediate action and drop them off at a vet when you can. All  it will cost you is a towel...

Skink Saison

I made up another batch of saison this weekend, much the same as the Saison Wit but with a more traditional grain bill. I mashed 4kg of Pilsner malt at 64 degrees for 90 minutes and I added a kg of Pilsner malt extract and 1/2kg of wheat malt extract at the end of the boil, but apart from that followed the same recipe as before. One thing I did notice was the Original Gravity (strength) was higher - I haven't run the numbers yet but I think the mash was more efficient, either due to the longer standing period or the slightly lower mash temperature. It'll be interesting to see how it differs from the Wit equivalent.

Whilst I was brewing one of our resident skinks (collectively known as the 'Fredlets') came out to supervise

 'No - it needs more hops!'

We have a number of these living both in and around the house and they're the source of most of the slightly unnerving rustlings we hear in the undergrowth.

The ones inside the house hang out in the laundry, and they definitely give you a fright when they scurry across the floor at night when you're on the way to the loo. The fermenters are also stored in the laundry, which is one of the reasons why I couldn't get away with open fermentation right now.

"Can I get a beer brewed by lizards?"

Hopdate # 6

Things have been a bit quiet on the hop front because after its initial growth spurt it doesn't seem to be doing much

Closer inspection shows that the leaves are looking very plae & dry, and there's even scorching on some of the tips

Hops are supposed to like sunlight, but I think positioning this one against a North-facing white wall where it bakes in the Queensland summer sun for a good 12hrs a day is probably a bit too much sun. So we've relocated it to a spot which gets the sun 'til around midday, and we'll see if it picks up at all...

 

I'm a loser baby...

I've been riding a bit more recently and have also been watching my diet, which meant that I sneaked below 75kg for the first time in a long time today (excepting the time I might have caught Dengue and didn't eat for a week). Very happy, although taking this photo was tricky as the camera weighs just over 200g...

Incidentally 'Radical Brewing' by Randy Mosher is an inspirational book for the aspiring home-brewer, with a wealth of techniques recipes both traditional and 'out there'. Without that results of book I'd probably be a few kilos lighter!

Another classic 90's tune is in order

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgSPaXgAdzE 

 

Bayview

We went exploring over the Xmas holidays and ventured down to a trail network just south of Brisbane called Bayview, aka Redlands. The locals have obviously been building and riding here for a while, but recently it's all become legitimate and the trail fairies are able to build some new trails to link up the existing & bedded down singletrack. It's great down there & well worth a visit.

The trail head is by a chicken farm - if you park here leave a couple of car widths to the main gate as they regularly bring semi-trailers through

 The trails themselves weave through a mix of different countryside, from grass tree forests 

 to plantation planting,

and narrow channels cutting through what I think is some kind of invasive growth 

The variety is mirrored in the trail surfaces, from typical Queensland looseness to slightly springy loam. One thing that is consistent is flow, with most of the trails well built and leaving you wanting more at the end. And there is always more - we rode around 31km and probably less than a km of that was on fire-roads, and there were whole areas we were too buggered to explore.

 

With all that interweaving singletrack navigation can be a bit tricky. All of the trails we rode were signed but only 100m or so into the track, which I thought was a good way of reassuring you that you weren't lost but not making the navigation too easy. 

It's strange riding somewhere where you don't know the history of the names - I'm sure there's a good reason for this, but I'm not sure I want to know what it is...

So it's definitely worth a look, but make sure you take a map or a guide - or both...

Thanks to Gordy for the navigation, Jaman for the directions and most importantly the local trail fairies for some excellent work!

Hipsters love beer...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWBV7yKWhWE

Fait Accompli

No real story behind this tune, just one I was listening to today...there's a 'proper' video out there with slightly better sound and appearances by a random sheep, but I prefer this one as I was in the crowd for this set in '92. I was a little bit closer to the stage than whoever recorded this, close enough for Toni to look me in the eyes whilst she was singing - or so it felt to my 22 yr old self....

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVRct5evwrc

 

If you're wondering about the sound quality, there was a compilation CD released after the festival with 'mixing-desk' recordings of each of the major artists that performed. The video uploader must have taken that and synched it with his video. Cool stuff!  

The hills are alive with the howl of canti's...

The first production mountain bikes used a style of brake called a cantilever - these gave the mud clearance that was needed but unless they were set up by a professional they didn't work that well and they howled like a banshee. As opposed to when they were set up by a professional, where they just howled like a banshee. I remember walking my 1990 Hard Rock Sport down a beautiful flowing trail in a tranquil valley in the Lake District because I was embarrassed about the noise I was putting out and worried that I'd give kids in adjacent villages nightmares.

Twenty plus years on technology has moved on, but you still find canti's on road-style bikes that need wider tyre clearances. I took my canti-equipped cyclocross bike out on the singletrack last night and I'm happy to report that they're just as sketchy as ever...

Rigid forks, skinny tyres inflated to 60psi, narrow drop bars and weak brakes lead to an interesting ride. Line choice is everything, although sometimes as you ping around the trail it feels like the bike is making that choice for you, and don't even consider that short-cut across the off-cambered roots. It's a mentally absorbing way to ride as you have to be very aware of what's coming up. I was feeling beaten up by the end but both the bike & I survived, and I was pretty happy as I managed to ride almost everything on an 18k singletrack / fireroad loop that I normally ride on a mountain bike, the exceptions being half of the rock garden above and a position-critical line after a steep-ish drop that I wasn't sure I could pull off and wasn't prepared to commit to. My times were generally around 20% - 40% slower than my fastest times on a mountain bike, but I managed to beat a personal record on one fire-road climb and come within a second of another on a singletrack climb.

Now all I need is my wrists to stop throbbing and the tinnitus to clear...

Yeasty frothy goodness

Back in the day before Louis Pasteur no-one really knew what yeast was or how it worked. They just knew that if you stored certain foodstuffs in a certain way in a certain place then magical things would happen and you'd end up with beer / mead / wine / bread / more beer. The unknown ingredient was simply known as godisgoode 'bicause it cometh of the grete grace of God'.

This time-lapse video showing 'open-fermentation' brewing at Sierra Nevada brewing company helps explain why it was held in such regard. This is a traditional style of brewing that is still used by several breweries because it's easy to skim and re-use the yeast, it decreases carbon dioxide pressure on the yeast (which helps the flavour profile) and the kit is easier & cheaper to maintain than a sealed vessel with an airlock. . I'd love to try something similar, but at the minute I'd just end up with a brew-bin full of ants & lizards...

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xClXKMhcFr0

Jarringly cool

One of the cool things of the moment is to use Mason jars as serving implements, and as usual we're surfing the zeitgeist in Mt Gravatt. Perfect for relishing a Summer Ale brewed by a local artisan craft brewer

Although it works equally well holding a gin-based cocktail...

Although to keep true to type these photos should be being posted on Instagram...

Escaping the sky-bully

The forecast for today was worse than yesterday - Forty-one degrees, to be precise. When the temperatures get that high there's only one thing to do - flee to the beach. it wasn't long before we had a tidy little setup which gave plenty of shade

whilst leaving us a decent view of the action

Sadly the surf was pretty messy which made it impossible to catch anything but breaking waves, with the subsequent sand-burn to the knees. A shame, because we now have a 7' mini-Malibu in our quiver

We used this on New Years day and both of us managed to get to our feet a couple of times, for the first time in just under 10 years for both of us. Take that Sky Bully!

New Years Eve Parti-Gyle Partial Mash Vatted Wit

Back in the days before refined sugars were common it was down to the brewer to get all of his fermentables out of the grain that he was using. Initially the grain (mainly barley) was left to germinate but was then heated to stop the germination process, which trapped the sugars that would have been used to feed the young shoot inside the grain. This is the malting process. The grain was then broken into smaller pieces to open up the hard outer shell  - this is known as cracking. The cracked grain was soaked in water at an appropriate temperature (generally around 62-68 degrees C), which triggered off enzymes inside the grain which help pull the trapped sugars  out of the grain and into the solution. This is known as the mashing process, and it produces a sticky sugary solution called a wort. And finally the grains were separated from the wort and washed down with water in order to pull out every possible bit of sugar - this is called the sparge. The weird names are because these processes have been carried out for hundred and maybe thousands of years, long before the introduction of hops into brewing, by many different cultures and in many different ways. I like to think that whenever I brew I'm not just making beer, I'm making history come alive.*

In Medieval times the brewers needed to provide differing strength ales for their different customers, and one of the ways of doing this was to use 'Parti-Gyle Brewing'. With this system the first runnings (ie the original wort), which are rich in sugars and highly fermentable, were used to brew strong beers. The grains were then sparged and the subsequent infusions used to produce less strong beers - important not just for a 'common' beer (what we'd call a session beer) but also because the water quality could be so poor that the brewing process actually made it drinkable.

I decided to try a variant on the parti-gyle style brew process with grains left over from my Saison-Wit. I sparged the grains a second time and made sure that they were thoroughly dunked, squeezed, poked and massaged in order to extract as much sugar as possible. I ended up with around 10l of liquid with a gravity of around 1.018.

This is only enough sugar to produce a very weak brew, so I needed to add some more fermentables to it - somewhat defeating the object I know, but it's not just interesting and fun, it also makes more beer. True parti-gyle brewing would have produced about 5 - 10l of a strong (9%)  brew and around 15l of around 4-5% beer.

I boiled the insipid mix for half an hour or so with 10g of Hallertau and it smelt overly sweet and a bit tart. I think that I may have inadvertently introduced a wild yeast into the mix by washing the grain in room temperature water which was adding a lambic or sour element (often known as 'vatted'). Coincidentally this is a desired trait of some Wit beers so I thought I'd press on regardless...

I added in half a kilo of wheat malt and the same of pale malt half an hour into the boil with 15g of Saaz and finished off with 15 g of Saaz, the zest of an orange and two chamomile teabags with 5 minutes to go.

It's a small batch so I pitched with half a packet of genetic wheat beer yeast, although the ambient temperatures may be a bit much for the yeast to handle. Not much I can do about that though.

I'll only get 10 bottles or so from this and there's a lot that could go wrong but it's been a fun experiment. And rest assured I'll drink a bottle and monitor its effects for 48 hrs before I hand any out!

*More importantly, I'm making beer.

Hot in the city...

Thirty seven degrees in Brisbane today, and hotter to come tomorrow. The only thing to do is flee to either air conditioning or the beach. Today for the sake of my surf-battered body I chose the former, hiding out in the city drinking cool beverages and watching the cricket.

By the wonders of smart phone technology I can still update the blog though. There's only one tune that seems appropriate...

Saison Season

My original plan was to make an all-grain wit beer just after Xmas, but we're going through a heatwave at the minute (38 degrees C today, higher tomorrow!) so I've given up trying to keep the beer temperature down and am once again embracing saison yeast. However I had the grain for a wit beer pre-ground, so I thought I'd try a Wit / Saison hybrid.

The dominant factor in a Wit beer is the use of wheat, so my grain bill was

2.5kg malted wheat
1kg pale malt
0.5kg Munich malt

but my hop schedule was more akin to a saison or an American pale

50g Northern brewer (60 min)
45g Saaz (30 min)
45g EK Goldings (5 mins)

Because of the small proportions of my brewpot I've decided to give up trying to max out the sugars in an all-grain brew and instead just add extra malt extract to hit the right gravity. So in some ways I'm doing a Brew-In-The-Bag partial mash, I think! The process was -

Mash grains in a brew bag @ 67 degrees for 1 hr
Drain & squeeze bag into the brewpot for 5 minutes or so
Put the brewpot back on the heat and sparge (ie soak) the bag in 70 degree (ish) water for 10 minutes or so before draining & squeezing
Add the sparge water to the brewpot (which was just about coming to boil)
When it comes back to the boil, throw in the 60 min hops and start the clock
Hop according to schedule, and add 1kg malt extract at around 30 minutes
Relax and have a homebrew

You need to be careful adding the hops to a near-boiling mix as the extra surface area you're introducing to the liquid gives lots of nucleation sites - ie points for a boil to spontaneously occur. In real terms that means that after you throw your hops in and without changing the heat your pot will go from this

to this, and beyond 

in about 20 seconds. So keep an eye on it and better still brew outside to minimise any clean-up. That also means that you can do other manly things as the boil continues...

The first sparge is in the pot and it's close to full, but there were still extra sugars available in the grain. Previously I've carried out a second sparge, boiled and cooled that and added it to the fermenter(which means a lot of additional faffing around) so this time I decided to try to make a weaker beer out of the final sparge - I'll cover that in more detail in the next post.

After that it's business as usual - cool, strain into fermenter, add yeast, wait and plan the next brew. Which will be another saison pitched directly onto the same yeast trub, but this time using pilsner malt & extract (with a touch of wheat for body) with the same hop schedule. Will be interesting to compare the two side by side...