Selamat Pagi!

And hello from Kuala Lumpur.

It's been a long hard week. I spent most of each day standing in front of a bunch of Quantity Surveyors discussing ways in which they can use our software to improve their business and most of each evening trying to figure out how the hell our software can improve their business. The irony is I've never been a Quantity Surveyor or done anything resembling that role, so I'm constantly expecting someone to stand up and call me a fraud. So far I've pulled it off, although that may be more because the people I'm working with are generally very friendly and polite.

The apartment we're staying in is in the Mont Kiara region of KL, and we have a 3 bedroom 'Penthouse Suite' overlooking the suburbs

The views are great if you focus in the middle - long distance, however directly behind the hotel (and my bedroom window) is a multi-lane highway with a toll booth. This can get pretty busy in the evenings

and a local hobby for the lads in hotted up Protons seems to be seeing how fast they can get away from the toll booth. It can lead to entertaining viewing from the balcony. Luckily the sound insulation is pretty good so I can convince myself that the traffic sounds more like the washing of the surf when I'm trying to sleep.

The apartment itself is large, clean and pretty swanky - I wish I'd bought out some kind of wheeled toy. Although it has the squeakiest floors known to man.

It even has a maids room where a poor unfortunate maid could be installed (there is a tiny bathroom next to this room so you only have to see them when you call for them)

There are three of us sharing the apartment, although bizarrely they only gave us two sets of keys. My Australian colleague & I were just going to get another set of keys cut, but our colleague from the Singapore office went nuts and starting shouting about not following the correct procedures, how two keys was enough and how we had to follow correct procedures. After a fairly taut standoff we persuaded her to get another set of keys for us, but I think it will be begrudged for a long time!

I haven't had a chance to get out much. We eat at a local shopping area where the food is great and incredibly cheap ($2 for a main course),  and so far that's all I've managed to do. Work, eat, sleep. No exercise as yet, but now I'm settling in that will need to change. Today is the weekend so I've got some 'me time', and the first thing I did was get internet radio sorted so I can listen to 4ZZZ. After this I'm off to KL central for a wander around, to check out some old haunts and to find some new. The heat & humidity is a bit of a shock after the cool weather we were having in Brisbane so I'll need to be careful to keep my electrolytes up. Time for a nice soothing can of Pocari Sweat!

Another day another airport

Off to Malaysia today, and won't be back until mid June. Hopefully I'll get the chance to have a mosey round some of the areas I missed on my last visit, but the sad reality is that the next month is going to be basically work focused.
Not happy about being away for so long - we're trying to think about it as a couple of couple of weeks - but I guess it is what it is....

Imperialist takeover

My Imperial Stout is living up to its name and making a land grab within the garage

 The combination of a well-filled fermentor and a multitude of sugars has caused the yeast to go a bit mad  and the wort is trying to escape through the airlock

The garage smells fantastic!

A mixed bag of breakfast bikes

At breakfast this morning we had the usual mix of breakfast steeds -

A custom made Baum, hand crafted in Melbourne to exactly fit the owners requirements. And a 1991 Peugeot King Canyon mountain bike.

A Surley Long Hall Trucker set up for distance cyclo-touring / Audax. And my trusty singlespeed Roadrat

The Peugeot was in beautiful condition with almost entirely original componentry. It looked like it had been taken off the shop floor last week. Probably by someone on a hyper-colour t-shirt.

Could vintage mountain bikes become the new fixies? Maybe. I wonder if the guy I sold my 1991 Hardrock Sport when I emigrated is interested in sending it over?

Pizza Extreme

A national Pizza chain* is offering a chilli rich pizza with the tagline 'Australias hottest gourmet Pizza - can you take the challenge?'. Obviously that sort of advertising is designed to appeal to gung-ho lads who feel they have something to prove, and obviously I fell for it hook line & sinker.

The pizza comes with some nice marketing - a warning logo and a 'survival bag' with an ice-cream and a bottle of water

The pizza itself looks pretty tasty - don't be scared of the chillis on top, they're not that hot and taste more like roast capsicum than hot chilli.

 
It's hot, there's no doubt about it, but it's not killer hot. It's also not that flavoursome - it tastes like a couple of 18 yr old lads have made a pizza and then decided to go crazy with a bottle of hot sweet chilli sauce. I had to peer at a chunk of meat to see if it was chicken or prawn. I prefer the 'chicken & chilli' pizza I used to get on Oxford Rd on the way back from the Ritz in Manchester, but to be fair that was generally at 2am after a few beers.

And no, I didn't finish it in one go. But that was because I was full (honest!), and the other two slices were a nice addition to dinner the next night.

*Which will remain nameless to prevent this getting picked up by their marketing 'net scans - you can figure it out from the picture 

Stonkin' stout

As I said yesterday, I'm going to be away for 5 weeks or so. This meant that there was the possibility of a fermentor standing idle whilst I'm away, a chronic waste of brewing time if ever there was one. But what could I brew that would make the most of the solitude and the silence? I decided it was time to tackle an Imperial Stout.

Imperial Stouts were originally brewed for the Russian market in the 18th Century. The route from the UK to the Baltic States travelled through arctic conditions and so the beer had to be heavily alcoholic to prevent it freezing. And of course high alcohol means strong flavours to match. My version is a bit of a mish-mash of recipes (more of a Colonial Stout?) but will hopefully stay true to the ideas of the original:-

In the mash tun (mashed for an hour at 66 degrees)
1kg amber malt
1/2 kg roast barley
1/2 kg black malt
1/2 kg chocolate malt
400g brown malt
250g oats

In the boil
1kg pale malt extract
1kg malt extract
1kg wheat malt extract
About 3/4 kg malt extract added slowly throughout the boil

Dissolved in water & added to the fermentor after the original boil (couldn't fit all the fermentables in!)

1/4 kg malt extract (ie the rest of the bag)
1kg pale malt extract
500g brown sugar
850g treacle

Hop schedule
25g Northern Brewer, 20g Galaxy, 25g Fuggles - 60 mins
25g Fuggles, 5g Galaxy - 30 mins
25g Galaxy - 1 min

Extras
1/2 l cold-pressed coffee, 28g liquorice root - 5 mins

Yeast
2 packs Safale S-04 (English ale)

This gave 26litres of a dark black liquid with an original gravity of 1.125. If this ferments out fully the beer will be approximately 15%  by volume, however the odds are the yeast will give up at some point and I'll get a final gravity of 1.030 or so, giving a brew of around 11%. If the gravity is higher than that by the time that I'm back then I'll chuck in some champagne yeast.

It's a lot of ingredients -

(Note the liver-healthy drink - but why is it that lemon floats but lime sinks?)

The dark malts meant that it looked more like I was emptying my sump than brewing beer, and it got everywhere. Very noticeable too.

Hmm - roasty. Yes that's a beer in my hand. It's been scientifically proven that brewing beer without a homebrew close to hand produces an inferior batch*. Fortunately I had some bottles of my 'low strength' Saison Du Noir to get me through - it's almost like it was meant to be.

All I need to do now is wait. Hopefully the yeast will slowly nibble its way through the sugars whilst I'm away, then I'll leave it in secondaries for a couple of weeks to finish off and once it's bottled it will get left at the bottom of the pile to mature for 6 months or so.  

* M Shaw vs Naysayers, 'LifeAtTheBluntEnd', May 2012

My GGT can GGF

GGT (or Gamma-glutamyl transpeptidase) is an enzyme found mainly in the liver. Normally there is a low concentration found in your blood, but the levels can increase if your liver is damaged as the enzyme 'leaks out' of holes in the liver. A 'safe' concentration is between 20 & 75 U/ml, and for the last couple of years my bood tests have returned values of around 48-50 U/ml, much to the disgust and disbelief of people who know me.

After my first post-viral blood test I had a GGT reading of 150 U/ml - high enough to be of concern. But I felt on the mend and we assumed that my second blood test would be a double-check to make sure everything was returning to normal. Sadly no. My GGT had increased to 220 U/ml. 

This could be due to damage to my liver from a virus, from excessive alcohol, from drugs (both recreational & pharmaceutical) or from a 'fatty liver'. None of these are good, although given recent history the most obvious cause is the virus. GGT is also apparently highly sensitive to alcohol and I had had a couple of beers the day before the test, so there may just be a false reading from that. I certainly hope so because I'm off to Malaysia for 5 weeks next weekend.....

The good news is that I'm feeling better pretty much every day. As a friend of mine said about viral illness, 'all of your energy goes into the working week' so for the last week when I get home all I've wanted to do is vegetate or sleep. But I've managed to get out for a couple of rides this weekend. I have no 'top end' fitness - I can pedal happily along on the flat but any hill, headwind or increase in speed leaves me immediately feeling exhausted - so the plan is to try to gently exercise every day but to take it easy. Hopefully in KL I can keep that routine up - who knows, maybe I'll even find a safe route for a regular barefoot run?