This one's for Gordy

:)

Sunshine!

As you probably noticed from the pictures below, the sun has finally re-emerged. Yesterday was incredibly windy - far too windy to be riding road bikes any distance - and the trails would have been sopping wet - far too wet to ride mountain bikes, especially those that need to be 100% clean for impending international travel - so we were forced to celebrate the good weather with a social beer ride.

One of our number decided to take advantage of Brisbanes new 'city cycle' scheme, an excellent bike-rental system that has recently been introduced. There are now hundreds of bikes scattered round the city at various rental stations, and once you've joined up you just wave your card in front of a reader, select your bike and you're off!

The idea is that they're to be used for short trips around the city, so rental prices are pretty cheap - the first half an hour is free, then there's a sliding scale. And once you've dropped a bike off at a station you can simply wait for a couple of minutes and check out another one. And if you need to find a bike station and you have an iPhone there's an apple app out there to assist.

I hope that this catches on as it's a fantastic idea. The main problem is the nanny state helmet laws over here (mandatory for all bikes) which means that you need to carry a helmet round with you before you can take advantage of it. But from the reactions we got yesterday with just one city bike, people seem interested. Check it out at http://www.citycycle.com.au/ .

The bikes are pretty heavy, but that does mean they make good anchors to tuck regular bikes behind on a windy day


whilst you're relaxing and enjoying a brew or two
Lipton Ice Tea of course.

Getting palmed off

Brisbane is a subtropical city, which means that we're blessed with a multitude of palm trees. When I first got here as a backpacker back in 1999 I was fascinated by the concept of palm trees in the middle of a city, and pretty much all of the first roll of film I shot over here was taken in the botanical gardens contrasting the flora & the CBD. Jetlag may also have played a part in that.

However palm trees can also be a pain. They drop big fronds that can get block up roof gutters, get tangled in overhead wires and generally make life complicated. I think that gardening fasion has also swung away from palms and they're seen as 'daggy' and old-fasioned.

So how do you remove a palm tree from the middle of a housing block? You can't just saw a wedge out off the bottom and shout 'timber'. First you need to climb the tree

Then you need to chainsaw off the fronds, dropping them down to a crew with a mulcher belowNext let the chainsaw drop (using a very cool 'throw it out and let it swing' motion) and downclimb a littleShimmy down the trunk and chainsaw off the bit that's above your headand throw that down to the ground team

Repeat until the palm tree is no moreEasy.
This post dedicated to my Dad, who has a (perfectly rational) fear of both heights and chainsaws.

Still raining

Yup, still raining. Dams that were 15% full two years ago are now opening sluice gates, watercourses that have always been dry are now full and everyone's getting a bit twitchy. I had an American friend visit over the weekend and the poor lady had to cope with the worst weather I've seen in the five years I've been here and the worst exchange rate in 20 years!

Pictures when there's something other than rain to take pictures up.....

Wet weekend - addendum

As I've said before, we don't ride much in the wet in Queensland. The trail fairies don't like it if we leave trails in the mud as these can soon become rain channeling ruts that will blow out the singletrack. And the riders don't like it because - well, it's muddy isn't it? One of my friends will even stop, get off the bike & daintily skip around even the smallest puddles. This normally leads to someone who's lived & ridden in the the U.K. (yes, usually me) saying 'You think this is muddy? This ain't muddy - we used to ride in mud so deep you'd need to use a snorkel / so thick we lost a rider in there once and had to wait 6 months before he surfaced / so sticky I've still got some in my ears 5 years later', etc etc etc.

To be honest they can be a bit soft down here when it comes to mud - everyone knows there's no such thing as bad conditions, just bad equipment :). But this weekend there was a local XC bike race held on private land, which meant that the public trails were not being damaged and the riding could continue. Some people pulled the plug early but the valiant continued

Even the mudskipper left me eating my words - he rode whilst I peered out at the clouds going 'oooh - I'm not so sure.....'

Wet weekend

It's been a bit of a miserable weekend this weekend. What with reading, beer making, household chores, some work, a bit of domestic shopping, regular doleful looks at the wet roads and eventually some flat-out laziness I didn't get any riding in - or in fact any other exercise at all. Note to self - anything brew-related involving grain will take up most of the day, so do it when it rains and go riding in the sunshine instead!

My body is suffering from hunching over laptops for most of the week, and i have many more weeks of being out on site instead of at my desk coming up. I need to make sure I make the effort to get out and exercise before my shoulders lock up completely.

Not realising the gravity of the situation

You can measure the amount of sugars in a solution by measuring its gravity using a hydrometer. If you make a note of the gravity at the start of a fermentation process and then remeasure it at the end you can find out how much the sugar content has decreased. Since the sugar is turned to alcohol by the action of yeast you can use some complicated maths (or simple lookup tables) to figure out how alcohol the resultant solution has. And if your brew consists entirely of fermentable sugars you can use the Original Gravity to estimate how alcoholic the end result will be.

I was using this over the weekend when I was making a hop-free sage ale. Instead of using a malt extract I decided to work on my mash technique and extract the sugars from 1.5kg of grain instead. Once I'd mashed & sparged the grains I boiled the resulting mix up for an hour or so with an ounce of sage, 2 ounces of liquorice root, 3/4 kg of brown sugar and some marjoram (this wasn't in the recipe but there was a mix up at the greengrocers). This produced about 8 litres of a wort with a gravity of around 1050 - enough to produce about a 5% by volume solution. I wanted 10 litres so I made it up with a mix of sugar & water to keep the sugar content up. Once that cooled I pitched the yeast and added an extra ounce of fresh sage leaves to add extra flavour and sage goodness.

After a bit more reading up it turns out that a hydrometer reading is very dependent on the temperature of the brew. I've been measuring gravity at temperatures hot enough to hurt, and this will apparently decrease the reading significantly. After compensating for temperature the OG of my wort was around 1060, leading to a brew that should be about 6.5% alcohol by volume. Add in the extra alledged intoxicating effects of sage and this should be a brew to treat with caution!

I've also started drinking the wheat beer & have sampled the ginger beer. The wheat beer is a bit bland and home-brewey, but the ginger beer has a nice dry gingery burn with a slight clove aftertaste. I was quite impressed, but Liz asked when i was planning to brew something that she would like. Ouch...