Push the tempo

For some reason I ended up not riding a mountain bike for over 6 months this year, and cunningly timed my reintroduction to dirt to match the rising Spring temperatures. It's been a struggle to get my mojo back but I've also tried to use the time to re-assess my basic skills like cornering, using sites like this as a guide. I've simultaneously been seeing a physiotherapist to sort out my long-standing back issues, and between the two I think I'm starting to see results. I can ride for longer and more regularly without back pain, and when I am riding I feel more involved with the ride instead of just sitting on top of the bike watching the trail roll by underneath me. Don't get me wrong - I'm still talking 18km dirt rides and granny-braking twitches around corners - but it's slowly feeling better.

After Saturdays pump track session I was keen to get back out on the trails and see if anything from the jump park translated to the dirt. I'd ridden around 40km on Wednesday night to sample beer & compare beards so my legs were a bit tired on Thursday morning, but I left work early and headed out anyway. It was a little disappointing because I didn't seem to have any 'flow' and things felt stilted. After a bit I stopped worrying about it and just rolled around , pulling over to let other riders pass whenever I saw them (Note to the trainers out there - a thank you would be nice when someone does this!). As the saying goes, a bad day on dirt is still a good day. But surprisingly when I got back to the car it turned out that I'd ridden around half of the sections significantly quicker than I ever have before (based on the readings of a GPS plotter that I started using a few months ago and which will remain nameless). Of course speed isn't everything and a GPS plotter may capture the miles but not the smiles, but it's interesting to view my progress objectively. It's a long, slow and highly enjoyable process...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGpkNPbSa2Q

 

Old guys jump day

One of the guys we occasionally ride with is selling his jump bike, which caused some reminiscing of 'back in the day' when we used to go out to jump parks and BMX tracks to make fools of ourselves in front of the local youth. That lead to a visit to the Blue Nurses jump park in Ashgrove for one last session - there's a pump track there as well, so it's a good mixed-ability venue and you don't even need to get your wheels off the ground.

We got there at around 9 in the morning on a humid, overcast day and for a while we had the park to ourselves

 There are a few different lines to hit - the big tabletop proved to be a draw for safely re-educating the body & mind and the pump track was hard work but fun

 The push up is an integral part of any jump session

 As is plenty of sitting around 'checking out the lines'

 However it didn't take long to figure out that the big line was a bit beyond us

 with a large margin for error if it went wrong

I was on my trail bike with XC race forks and a lightweight 16 spoke front wheel so had decided to keep my wheels on the ground and work on my cornering instead. That didn't last, although the forks started creaking alarmingly near the end (the next few pics from Fly)

Gordy brought some trail-riding style to the party

There's a middle trio of jumps at the park that are all rollable and that most of us had jumped before, but which we'd been avoiding talking about or even looking at for most of the day. After a 6 year old rolled wobblingly but successfully over them on a pink bike with a basket (seriously!) we gave her a huge round of applause and, after she'd left, decided it was time to give it a go. I wasn't happy with the sounds my forks were making so borrowed a bike

and after a few trial rolls both Dave & I managed to get some air - it's a lot more intimidating on the shorter jumps than a big tabletop because if you get it wrong you have much further to fall and another jump to run into the front of shortly afterwards.

No photos of me on them, so you'll need to take my word for it!

I thought we'd spend an hour or so there, most of which would be spent lurking in the shade talking. But after more than a couple of hours of rolling around fairly constantly my head was throbbing from the sun and my body was aching, so despite wanting more I called it a day before the injury-inviting declaration of 'one last run'.

I think that jump bike may no longer be for sale...

Bad Mother....

Late last year we were playing around with making sourdough, using a starter that a friend gave us. We tried a few different recipes (the Alaskan sourdough pancakes were awesome) but after a while I decided that it was too much like hard work just to get a couple of loaves of bread and my time was better spent making beers & ciders. We put the sourdough 'mother' in the back of the fridge and promptly forgot about it for 6 months or so.

We found it during the move and it was looking pretty bad - it had a rancid, overly-sour smell and separated out into an evil dark fluid sitting on top of an off-white cake of flour. We almost threw it out but because of various dietary fun we're having at the minute decided to see if we could rejuvenate it. A few months on and our mother is healthy & productive again.

Which brings me on to the tune of the week (which to be honest is a reasonable tune with a great video). Graphic language and very violent imagery warning - do not watch this in the same room as anyone with a delicate disposition! Don't be mislead by the picture below, there's a lot more blood than boobs...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=Rgox84KE7iY

Dinner in a pumpkin

Shortly after we got our kettle Weber we invested in 'The Complete Australian Barbecue Kettle Cookbook', a classic guide to using the barbecue that was first published in the mid-80's and which is still in circulation 25 years and 26 printings later. It's a useful guide but some of the recipes are a little dated, in a wonderful kind of way.

Something that caught my eye early on was 'Dinner in a pumpkin', where you hollow out a pumpkin and use that as both the cooking pot & the bowl. There are breadcrumbs, lentils, onion, chickpeas, beans, tomatoes, brisket, chilli & a few spices stuffed into that 1 dollar pumpkin (got to love the markets...)

After a couple of hours in the kettle it looks like this - unfortunately the outer skin of the pumpkin had split at this point so it started to collapse  

and the transfer to the plate proved less than elegant

despite my best attempts to pretty it up

Despite the serving difficulties it still tasted good. Not great and a little bland to the modern palate, but I have rice & chilli-laden plans for the next one.

There are any number of exciting recipes in the book that I'm keen to explore, particularly because half of them involve pork products. I'm particularly looking forward to the 'banana wrapped in bacon'... 

Adventures in all-grain no 3

After my last all grain session I took away a few ideas on how to improve the process that I was keen to try out. The first was to set up the mill outside, to limit the clean-up process

This worked well, although grinding 4 1/2kg of barley in the middle of the day was hard, hot work. Next time I'll do it the evening before!

I also ground the barley to a much finer level this time, which should enhance the yield of sugars that I can extract out of it with my 'brew in a bag' style method.  

I hit my first hurdle after bringing the water to temperature  - when I poured the grain into the stock pot / brew kettle it didn't slide into the water in the way that it usually does - the finer grind meant that it sat on top of the water and formed little clumped islands. I needed a lot more and more vigorous stirring to break the lumps up and get the grain into the pot, and that lead to a bit of messy overflow. Next time I'll take more water out of the pot, and add it in afterwards.

Apart from that the mash, sparge & boil went as normal. I used 4 1/2kg of Marris Otter and 1kg of wheat with a 90 minute mash and then dunk sparged twice, as before. This will be an IPA so I used 80g of Fuggles at the start of the boil and 120g of East Kent Goldings with 5 minutes to go, and I added in a kilo of jaggery with 30 minutes to go. Jaggery is a Sri Lankan palm sugar with a rich caramel flavour, and to enhance the maple notes I also used a couple of teaspoons of fenugreek seeds. The use of 'adjuncts' like sugars & herbs to change the flavour profile and to boost the sugars is a little contentious in  brewing, but as you may have guessed I don't really care about the Reinheitsgebot.

After the boil was done I let the beer cool in a waterbath in the laundry sink overnight. Then I transferred it to the fermenter - normally I scoop the wort out of the pot by hand and pour it through a sieve to catch the hop pellets, but this time I tried re-using the brew bag in the fermenter as a kind of filter. It was a lot quicker to pour the wort directly in, but then I needed to hoist the bag out and let it drain off. So the overall time saving turned out to be minimal.

Admittedly that may be due to the ridiculous amount of hops I'm using! 

The other mistake I made was not boiling all of my sparged wort the day before. Remember I'm dunking my 'used' bag of grain into water in order to extract the most sugars out of it, and then using that slightly sugary water to add to my fermenter to minimise the dilution of the beer. That sparge water needs to be bought to the boil to sterilise it before it's added to the beer, and then cooled back down to room temperature again. I'd used up all my big pots on the main boil so had to do this the following day, which added a lot to the 'faff factor' and tied up the laundry sink for another half a day - I think next time I'll invest in a 25l 'beer cube' (essentially a large plastic container) and use that to hold both the hot main wort and the sparge water overnight. That'll save on water and will also free up a pot.

The other problem I have is the heat - we're in the middle of a Spring heatwave at the minute and the temperature of the laundry is reaching 30 degrees during the day. This is too high for the yeast I'm using so I'm resorting to iced waterbaths and evaporative cooling by soaking an old hoody in water. That hoody kept me warm on any number of camping trips - it's huge so fits over anything else I'm wearing - and it's funny to think of it keeping beer cool now. Not sure how effective it is, I may need to switch to Saisons early this year.

Speaking of recycling, the warmed water goes on the garden and the used grains &b hops go in the compost bin

Hmm - grain, hops and a collection of miscellaneous vegetable matter. I could chuck some yeast in and make a beer out of that....   

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!