Some brewing photos

We had a lovely bbq yesterday and broke out a few bottles of the homebrew 'flinty osciloscope'. Here's a few photos of my brewing trip so far!

Here i am pouring the wort


Here's my very professional brewing set up!





The rest ofthe photos can be found here

Here i am pouring the lovely ale. It's a nice fruity number, with a hint of bananas in the nose!




It's a nice beer, as proven by the fact we drank 8 litres of it in one day!

I'm looking forward to our next excursions into homebrew - an elderflower champagne we've started in a bucket today, and a few bottles of raspberry gin which i'll try to knock out later this week...

my next home brew beer will have to wait until we're into our new hosuse, just to save any more upheaval of the spare room here now! but i will have more space in the new house, aided also by the previous owners who've said they will leave us a beer fridge and a few crates of empty beer bottles - perfect for us to load the beer into!

it's been a while

Long time no post

well

Since i last posted i've been busy in some respects and not busy in others.

I've been lovingly monitoring my homebrew both in the barrel, and now i've bottled it. Having read quite a few forums i was quite prepared for a bit of a troublesome time when it came to bottling my beer. In the end it went very smoothly. I lugged the barrel downstairs and set it on the worktop in the kitchen. I then sterilised my bottles in a water/bleach combo having already run them through the dishwasher. when ready to go, i set my bucket underneath the barrel, with the tube attached.
I rinsed out 3-5 bottles at a time and filled straight away. I then placed a sterilised cap on top and finished my mini batch. Once i had 5 bottles i capped them off with the machine and moved to the living room. Then i did another batch.

I did quite well not too lose too much beer from overfilling bottle. because i only had a tube and the tap on the barrel it was tricky but i found the way around that was to kink the tube and fill a section then release into the bottle and the flow was good.
My eye for when the bottle was full was ok, aided by the sunny weather brightening the kitchen.
It's now conditioned at room temp. for 10-11 days and is now under the stairs. I hope it's cool enough under there!
I tried some one week after bottling and it's pretty good. It's going to improve with age i'm told!
I've callled it flinty osciloscope (sp) : two words randomly taken from the dictionary. I like that name!

Next on the agenda is elderflower champagne and raspberry gin. Ooh!

May has been a bad month for me exercise wise. with the two bank holidays i've missed 2 sessions of my core class and a trip to france threw another out the window. I've also needed to use a lot of my lunchtimes to head into town for various reasons so have not been to the gym much.

The trip to france was good in respect to getting away from the office and doing very little. I read at least one book a day which shows our lack of activity!
i've felt like i lost a hand recently. My phone broke so it's been fixed. I'm so surprised that the lack of my month old phone would throw me out so much. I guess it shows how much i've taken to it. In fact i am writing this blog post on the phone now!
It's also allowed me to 'embrace' twitter and i'm really enjoying it so far. In general i seem to love the e71 and all the techy geeky stuff i can do with it!

As i say i haven't done much exercise in may, but thursday saw me get right back on that horse! I did the usual gym session, plus a cycle to jordan hill and 5 a side football. I found out yesterday night that my cycle up is 3.2 miles so that times 2 plus nearly 2 hours of football really does knacker me out!

But it's good fun, i enjoy it and i feel better afterwards!

Bring on the summer

belated exercise post

Right,

Well, on thursday i did 20 minutes on the cross trainer, with a bit of interval training (100m sprints, 100m slower) thrown in. I've realised i may be focussing on strength training more recently, whihc doesn't help loads for the athletic, running based sport of ultimate. So I'm going to try to throw more cardio when possible.

I also did some core work, which always makes me feel good.

Without actually trying too hard, it seems that I've lost around half a stone ish, it seems to have shot off in the past week. It's odd because I was doing 3-4 gym sessions a week before easter (from miud january) without any change, and since easter I seem to have started to get going on weight loss. I'm only trying to lose a bit, as I'm just a bit higher than I think I should be.
I also seem to need a new notch on my belt, which is a more uplifting sign of more exercise.

I also played 5 a side again on thursday night, there were only 9 of us so it was 5 v 4, which we kept changing around. Strangely in the first half my team were dominating when we had 5 (as you'd expect!) but when we gave up 1 player to go down to 4, we still managed to keep in front, mainly due to poor finishing from the other team and hard work on our part to create space whilst attacking, using one player to draw defenders out of space.

I found it interesting because when we dropped to 4 players we immediately started playing differently, moving around more and playing more one/two touch football without allowing the defence of the other team to settle. We didn't talk about this, it just happened naturally.

I really am enjoying 5 a side. I haven't played any football at all (other than just kicking a ball around) probably since my second year at uni, so at least 8-9 years ago. It's a good run about, wiht adequate standard and alsos good fun.

I look forward to next weeks game!

I'm also looking forward to getting my homebrew out of the tub and into bottles! I'm hoping this will happpen this weekend, though I have to wait for the brew to tell me it's settled and ready for bottling. Fingers crossed!

Brewing up a storm

Right then,

I’ve entered the ranks of the homebrewer, clearly on the unsteady rung of the novice brewer!

I was given a Coopers Lager kit as a Christmas present, which did interest me, though time and putting the carton to one side made me forget about this for a while. I found this again recently and redoubled my efforts to brew up some lager! A friend has lent me a brewing tub, and some of the other equipment required to start it up.

I spent many an hour surfing the many homebrew forums to see what I needed to do, and quickly found out that lager is supposed to be more tricky to homebrew well than ale. Only time will tell with my efforts I suppose! Luckily Lager only requires a single ferment in a large vessel then can be siphoned into bottles for a second fermentation along with a healthy dose of sugar, for carbonation.

I found time last weekend to get the brew going and set about making a yeasty, lagery smell in the spare room. I think I may have hindered the brew slightly because on one of my forum trawls I’m sure I found a note saying to sprinkle the yeast on top of the wort and not to mix in. So I did so, hesitantly. I then immediately started searching the forums for more information to ensure I had taken a correct action. I couldn’t for the life of me find the original post I had read, however I did find a cunning Coopers promo youtube video on how to brew up one of their batches. I patiently watched the video and soon saw that the yeast should have been stirred in.

I shot upstairs and made some hasty circles in the brew with my stirring rod. I think it will be ok, because on opening the tub I got a good ‘ppsssh’ of fizzy carbonation. Some of the forums I’ve seen have told tales of rescuing brews mid fermentation so I don’t think I’ve done too much damage in the hour I’d left it alone.

I have no idea how I hadn’t found the Coopers videos before I started the brew, as I did do a lot of trawling, but it may be useful again for the future!

I am also well aware that I haven’t been as clinical in my sterilisation as I could have been and this may affect the brew. I have also not got a good control of the temperature of the wort as I think I could have, as many home brewers do seem to take great care to maintain the correct temperatures. I’ve got my tub wrapped in an old sleeping bag and camping mat, and the thermometer hidden underneath always seems to show a constant 19-20 degrees, which although low for ale, should be ok for lager.

I tested the brew yesterday, checking how it was going with the hydrometer. It’s nearly ready to bottle, only a couple of more days I reckon. I also tasted it, and it’s currently like flat, fruity lager, so I think it’s going well enough!

Speaking of bottling I have been preparing for this by rooting through the recycling and digging out my old beer bottles. I’ve combined this with some plastic bottles so will have a mixture of materials to store my beer in. I may have made an error though in only buying bottle caps and a capping device after I’ve started the brew. All I can do is hope they arrive before it’s ready to decant.
I’m also a little concerned by the prospect of over priming bottles and having a glass explosion when storing the beer. Only time will tell I suppose!

So, once I get the beer into bottles, it’s only a 1-2 week wait for the beer to be stored at room temperature, and then as long as your patience can hold out in a cool dark place for the bottles to condition well!

I’m not sure I have the patience for this!

yesterday's workout

Ok, so yesterday i did the same routine as last thursday at the gym. It seemed killer on my upper body though!
No gym today, but i'm planning a cardio & core session tomoro...

a new session

I tried a new gym session today, first proper session of the week after the core class on monday.
It's taken from an msn home article. I did:
-3 x 15 dumbell double arm raises , lying on back with arms out to side, lifting arms above chest.
- 3 x 10 dumbell alternate shoulder raises, sitting up, arms out elbows forward.
- 3 x 15 dumbell bicep curls.
-2 x 15 dumbell lunges each leg
All dumbells were 7.5 kg each arm.
-3x 15 barbell squats, with 40kg
- 3 x 15 benchdips
- 3 x 20 double crunches
- 3 x 20 bicycle crunches
- 3 x 15 lat pull downs with 30 kg
- 3 x 20 fit ball trunk raises - face down on fitball lifting upper body up.

Then this evening i've played about 1.5 hrs five a side football, with work colleagues. The standard was mixed but i was pleasantly surprised with the level of play. I managed to score a few goals, one good blast past the keeper, another following up to a rebound and a longer one on one break against the keeper- during which i heard the shout "gotta score this"!
I spent much of the (shorter) second half in goal, in 2 periods. The first was a clean sheet with multipe saves from me. The second saw me picking 2 balls out of the net. The first was due to my reliance of going to my left and the shot beat my right leg from close in.
The second was a shot across my goal to the left which i got a diving hand to, but couldn't keep out.
Overall it was a good runaround, and combined with the cycle to and from jordan hill was just about exhausting enough!