Overseas jolly

Generally when I go overseas with my company it's to visit a client. It's always good to see new places but those visits can get pretty hectic as the client is expecting a specific set of results, most of which I'm generally not aware of until I get there and some of which have been oversold by the sales team and are simply not possible to deliver. So I'll spend all day talking to 4 or 5 guys who all have differing and often contradictory views about exactly what it is they want the system to do and a lot of my evenings frantically trying to figure out how to make the system do that. And the weekends catching up on everything else that I haven't had time to look at during the week.

Some people love that pressure. My old boss, a fiercely intelligent lady, thrives on being put in that situation and pulling something out of the bag. She's left us now and is working for a company where she's on site three weeks in every month, and she raves about her new job. I can do it for a week or two but I find that it puts a lot of pressure on me, both body and soul. I don't exercise, drink too much, eat bad food and only get a few hours of sleep a night because my mind will never shut up. My old boss has offered to recommend me to her new company and in some ways it's tempting, but I know it's not something I could do long-term.

However after 8 years with the Australian arm of the company I get to go on my first 'jolly' at the end of the month. I'm off to Dubai for three days of meetings to discuss various procedural & corporate-type things with colleagues in a sister office and then I'll be staying on for a couple more days for a look around. It'll be good to be able to relax and enjoy the visit, and somewhat sadly I'm even looking forward to flying on the A380 over there. That may change after a solid 14 hrs on the plane though.

Todays tune & video is dedicated to the trip - it's worth viewing on youtube and maximising the size as it's a pretty awesome video 

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uYs0gJD-LE

 

Not really Dubai-related as the singer (MIA) is an English / Sri-Lankan artist and the video was inspired by automotive craziness in Saudi Arabia and was directed & filmed in Morocco by a Frenchman. But you get the idea.

 

Some will think that I'm verging on the popular here (sorry Marin) but I have a soft spot for MIA. Catchy songs, interesting instrumentalism and kick ass videos like the above and the below...

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeMvUlxXyz8

 

Hopping mad

Some ominous looking pots have gathered into the corner of our garden recently

They were eagerly awaiting the delivery of some hop rhizomes - one saaz, one cluster and one fuggles.

These are used to propagate hops - theoretically you just plant the rhizome in plenty of soil and let nature do its stuff. You can see by the new white shoots that it's keen to get on with it.

Because we don't own the property, and will probably be moving in the next year or so, I can't dig them into the ground so I'm using large containers. Each holds 2 1/2 bags of potting compost with some water retention granules mixed in, and because hops are a climbing vine that need to entrain their branches onto something I've also added in an 8' stake and some twine.  I've positioned them at different places round the house to see which sun pattern works best.

It's supposedly too warm up here to grow hops well so it's a bit of an experiment to see what happens. I dashed out eagerly this morning, but nothing so far...

Stand by for regular hopdates!

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...