Beans

You know you're drinking too much coffee when your barista gives you a sample of the new beans to try out! Thanks Tim!

At last real beer

Mmmm beer...

Just had my first taste of proper English bitter in nearly 2 years. I didn't realise how much I missed it. Good thing I've made 23 litres of it!

Whoops...

I appear to have inadvertantly imbibed the entire contents of my hipflask whilst watching A Better Tomorrow (honestly there is no way you can watch this film sober (though my cantonese has improved maarkedly)). To attempt to counteract the deleterious effects of about 4 double measures of finest Irish whiskey I have just drunk the first of two 750ml bottles of water. It's going to be a long night.

Drink writing

Never ever drink and write, ever.

Fish and drinks

Dogfish resting

Last night the company Emily works for held their Christmas party at Sydney Aquarium. The aquarium is one of Sydney's top attractions, and deservedly so. It may cost $25 to get in but the sting of this wears off the instant you see the platypi (platypusses?) which are right inside the main entrance. I didn't have the presence of mind to take any video footage of them sadly, but I did take some from the oceanarium which you can see above.

The party itself was held in a room that you get to only at the end of walking round the aquarium and before the gift shop which sells a wide variety of high-quality tat. One whole wall of the room is glass looking into the largest and most fully stocked larder tank in the place. The overall effect is a bit like a ten foot tall screensaver. It has a bizarre hypnotic effect that transfixes normally hyperactive ritalin candidate children into awed silence. Why they don't have a webcam focussed on this I can't imagine. They do have 2 rather boring webcams focussed on the crocodile and the fairy penguins (stop that thought, the penguins are rugged Aussie types).

hypnotised by the tank

Quite a large number of the canapes served at the event seemed to be fish or fish based. I couldn't quite get the image of the waiters with a fishing net and waiting deep-fryer out of my mind.

The worst thing about parties where the drinks are free is that it always seems like a good idea to go somewhere afterwards to carry on. It never is, ever. The next thing I knew I was looking at my watch and wondering how it came to be 3am and how much crap I'd actually been talking. Judging by the feel of my head this morning I was talking quite a lot of crap. The Christmas party season has started, there will be at least another two to go to. I hope they don't end up finishing at 3am, but I know at least one of them will...

Today's word is 'Dusty'

Oh, it's empty. Must be bedtime

'Dusty' is Australian for hung over. I'm so dusty that people are scrawling 'clean me' in the dust on my back. I'm so dusty when I brush past people in the office they start sneezing. Quite, quite dusty.

Yep, definitely empty

We went to the Feastibility food & wine festival yesterday at a performing arts school in Newtown and I indulged in too much of one and not enough of the other.

Besides my self-inflicted woes I am also battling the kind of apathy that, if it gets any worse, may prevent me from breathing. I think I might need a holiday, a good thing I am going to Tasmania for a few days later this week.

I have also been trying to get various technical things on here working so that I can post things on here whilst away and put maps on the main page. It isn't working and it's annoying me, a LOT. I have put most of the time I would normally spend writing on trying to fix bugs so I'm apologies if people have been checking to see what I've been doing. I have been cursing at the computer. I have figured out how to post here one way but the other ended up here, which is no use to anyone. It's going to take the nice people at blogger a while to sort it out so I shall begin ranting writing again instead.

The Great Ginger Beer Experiment: Drinking

Hubble bubble beery trouble

You might be wondering what happened to the Ginger Beer. Before I interupted myself with Holidays and expensive toys I opened the cupboard it was brewing in to see how it was going. To my surprise there was no broken glass and sticky residue all up the walls but 13 well behaved bottles of nicely cleared liquid. Could it be that I have finally after all these years succeeded in making drinkable Ginger beer? To the Fridge!

Putting on a blast jacket and carefully handling one of the bottles in case the pressure inside had reached explosive levels I chilled one of the bottles over night. With the beer I ordinarily brew this can often mess the flavour up a bit and make the beer go cloudy but with Ginger beer this doesn't matter.

24 Hours later I put the helmet and blast jacket back on and gently remove the bottle from the fridge. With a feeling of some trepidation I undid the lid and found myself slightly disappointed that instead of a sharp explosion and a fountain of Ginger beer, I have the proper hiss of a well carbonated drink. Pouring it into the specially bought jug the first thing that I noticed was the fantastic smell. All the lemon, ginger and vanilla aromas has been preserved and it still has the cough-syrup smell. The colour is about right and it is cloudy – because I put some of the funk from the bottom of the barrel in each bottle there are little tiny pieces of ginger floating in the beer. This puts a certain person off the drink itself but it is actually not much worse than traditionally made lemonade and is perfectly tolerable.

The taste is unbelievably gingery, and slightly acidic from the lemons which also feature in the taste. The vanilla isn’t hugely noticeable but has definitely made the drink a lot smoother. It isn’t very sweet, it’s not quite sharp but it certainly isn’t super sweet. I can’t taste the alcohol but it’s in there somewhere as the sugar that made it really sticky when the mixture was put in the fermenter is totally gone. It’s actually a very palatable drink and would be fantastic on a hot afternoon. I just have to wait a month or so until we start getting those again!

I have now satisfied myself that it is actually possible to make decent Ginger Beer though there are a few things I would do differently. Perhaps next time I will put the ginger in a muslin bag before I start boiling the mixture – that would keep the bits out. I also think I used one lemon too many and would definitely consider putting a bit more vanilla in too. It remains to be seen whether I can abstain from guzzling the whole lot before the hot weather returns, especially as I now need the bottles to make real beer!

Friday office booze

Friday office booze
Originally uploaded by dataphage.

A random stranger has just walked into my office and handed me a glass of wine. Shame he couldn't find a glass of red.

The Great Ginger Beer Experiment - Bottling

15 brown bottles sitting on the sideboard

Looking at my ginger beer in its' bucket it looks as if the time has come to bottle it. Bubbles have stopped rising to the surface and it looks like fermentation has slowed almost to a stop. I'm slightly concerned that the mild disinfectant properties of the ginger haven't affected the brew too much. The reason I can't tell is that the sludge generated by the yeast coming out of suspension is almost identical in colour to the pureed ginger in the brew which has also sunk to the bottom of the fermenter.

Raw ginger beer

I disinfect my bottles and put the priming sugar in. Back in the UK I had a siphon with a tap, here all I have to get the beer from the fermenter to the bottles is a length of tubing which means I have to put my thumb over the end of it to stop the flow of liquid into the bottles. This results in a spray of sugary ginger beer all over the kitchen. Lovely, that's going to be sticky for weeks.

I managed to get most of the liquid into the bottles, eventually. As expected at the bottom of the fermenter is thick with a yeast and ginger suspension.

Funk at the bottom of the barrel

A small amount of this has gone into each bottle in the hope that I can keep the ginger flavour strong and that I might yet be able to make a more traditional cloudy ginger beer in place of a clear amber ginger ale. The next step is to see if I can squeeze the last two litres of ginger beer out of the funk at the bottom of the barrel. I don't have time or a filter good enough to deal with the quantity of yeast so I am going to have to seive the mixture and have a couple of bottles with more funk than I would actually like in.

Mmmmmm yes!

Seiving this causes a fantastic mess. By now the whole flat reeks of yeasty ginger and is covered in a thin film of syrupy ginger beer which is beginning to stick me to the floor. My shoes make a sucking noise and have to be released from the floor's grip with a sharp tug. Eventually I managed to squeeze an extra litre and a half from the ginger porridge at the bottom of the fermenter which I carefully poured into three extra bottles.

The funky three

There is so much solid matter in these three that they feel significantly heavier than the other bottles. If there is a candidate for bursting the bottle it will be one of these three.

I tried a little of the mixture that was going in to these three and in all honesty it wasn't bad. It's come out a little dryer than I would have liked but there isn't a hint of the dusty muddy flavour that has been the case with all previous attempts. I'm hoping that I've fermented the beer for long enough that there is no fermentable sugar other than the priming sugar left in the bottles otherwise the beer will cover the inside of the cupboard with broken glass and ginger beer. It's a bit hard to tell if this is actually the case as the lactose has sweetened the mixture so I can't tell by tasting it. It is now a matter of time. I have to wait probably another fortnight before I can open one of these bottles, presuming that they don't open themselves in the meantime.

The Great Ginger Beer Experiment

1.1kg ginger

I have been in Australia a year now and it is high time I began brewing again. Aussie beer isn’t that great and I’m missing a decent pint of bitter. Thankfully the Aussies are quite interested in home-brewing so 15 minutes with Google and I’d found a homebrew shop 5 minutes drive from where I work. $130 later and I have enough equipment and consumables to keep me happy for several months. Before I start to brew proper beer that tastes of something however I have unfinished business with Ginger Beer.

I have been trying to brew drinkable ginger beer since I was a child. The first abortive attempt was based on a recipe from the Food and Drink programme on BBC 2 in the 1980s. The presenters cooed and clucked over what was clearly a new idea to them. Egged on by their impressed pouting faces as they exclaimed how much better it was than the over-sweet and not gingery enough shop-bought ginger beer we boiled up our ingredients, bottled them with the right amount of yeast and left the bottles in the cellar to ferment until ready to drink. I religiously checked the bottles for a week to see if they were ready to drink always drawing a blank. Then one Sunday evening we were sat back in post-dinner post-muppet show reverie when we interrupted by a loud POP from the cellar. The bottles were either blowing off their lids or simply exploding. I was so surprised I nearly soiled my pyjamas.

The problem with ginger beer is that you need a great deal of sugar to keep it sweet. But the yeast you use to brew it consumes sugar and turns it into alcohol and CO2. If you give yeast a super-abundance of food it just keeps going until it runs out, or its’ own by-products kill it off. Yeast won’t tolerate alcohol much above 10% by volume but it is much less sensitive to CO2 and much more efficient in producing it. Thus ginger beer is much more difficult to brew than ordinary beer. In ordinary beer you don’t want any sugar left in the brewing process all the sugar turns to alcohol and you are left with the flavour of malt and hops. In bottle and cask conditioned traditional beer a small amount of priming sugar is added to the bottle or to the barrel to achieve the fizz. The mass produced beers that you buy in cans or bottles are actually brewed until flat, filtered, pasteurised and then artificially force carbonated in the same way that soft-drinks are. In Ginger beer you need sugar left in the mixture to keep a little sweetness or you end up with a very dry ginger ale.

This leaves the home ginger-beer brewer with a few problems. Pasteurisation to stop fermentation and force carbonation isn’t really an option because of the amount of kit needed. Teenage over-enthusiasm aside neither is producing a special-brew strength ginger beer, although from the research I’ve done the final strength of the original brew was around 11%. You just don’t need that much alcohol in it so a way to keep it fizzy but keep the alcohol levels down must be found. The way this seems to have been tackled in the late Victorian era was to maintain a steady fermentation in a jug, pouring off the product into a bottle to finish the fermentation/carbonation and serving the brew with the yeast still very much alive in it. This is how I approached a much later adulthood attempt at ginger beer.

Still using baker’s yeast to emphasize CO2 production and not alcohol I started a jug of warm water, sugar, ground ginger and yeast. You feed it a spoonful of sugar and a spoonful of ginger everyday for a week then pour off the fermenting mixture into a bottle, leave that for a few days then open and enjoy, or not, in fact decidedly not. The same sort of mixture r