hopefully new exercise start, and not the end of the homebrew!

Well. After last week's relative lull in the gym department- i cycled the 15 ish miles to work twice, and on the second time did another 3 miles each way to where we play football, but no gym other than the monday core class- i'm stepping up a gear.

I'm trying to do more cardio, some calorie burning hopefully! My core class on monday was surprisingly mild after a couple of tough sessions!

So yesterday i did 10 minutes running - hitting 1.5km. Not great, but i don't like running machines. Then i did 20 minutes on the cross trainer, doing 4km. Again ok, not great i burnt 200 ish calories, just off my target and hr was 143.

Today's workout was the same setup and times, in reverse. 20 minutes swooshing left my legs as jelly. Quite strange. I was again close on my calorie burning and average hr, but not quite there.

I'm going to try to do the weights session tomorrow, followed by 5 a side.

On the brewing front, my second brew is now bottled and conditioning in a warmish room. Then it's out to the shed for some cold conditioning, which can't come too soon for my liking for 2 reasons:

- firstly this supposedly needs 12 weeks in the bottle before drinking. I doubt it'll last that long!

- secondly i may have overpriming this with 1 teaspoon, not half, per half litre. I didn't double check my measurements, so only me to blame.

I'm hoping for no bottle bombs, so fingers crossed.

Next on the home brew list i thinks are a cider kit, a raspberry or cherry beer and another session beer, maybe another lager or a pale ale...

Rock on!

legs a go go

Gym today

I did 20 minutes on the cross trainer, trying to keep a good tempo of 12 km/h (i think...) and at level 10-14. I threw in a coupla longer sprints near the end to spice it up!
My hr stayed above 145 averaging 147 over the time, and i burnt 210 calories in 20 min over 4km, which is over my target of 10 cal per minute.

I then did 100 sit ups on the swiss ball and 60 bicycles.

I've clearly not done much cardio recently as i really felt my legs were wobbly this afternoon. In a good way of course!

Looking forward to the swansea beach tournie this weekend. I have no idea what to expect, as it seems to all be uni teams i've not heard of before. Things have changed since i left uni for sure!

Raspberry Gin

Inspired by our recent efforts in homebrewing beer and elderflower champagne, I've branched out into a raspberry gin.

After much research I decided to follow this recipe , as the cottage smallholder is a very interesting blog, with many surprising and interesting alcoholic recipes, that I'd love to try, however this gin does float my boat. The only downside is waiting at least 3 months before getting it into a glass!

Anyway, it involves the following:

2 bottles of gin (we've not followed the recipe here and bought the cheapest we could find - in fact it's one gin for me, and one vodka for 'er indoors). We may live to regret this, but being an experiment, we can always adapt wit hthe next batch (I'm hoping to try to convince 'er indoors that another bottle this summer wouldn't be a bad idea!)

300 grams of raspberries - I bought 2 smaller boxes, and discarded any mankier looking ones after washing.

300 grams of white sugar - maybe a touch more for the vodka

I basically halved the sugar and berries. I rammed the berries into each bottle, funnelled in the sugar, and topped up with spirit.

Then the aim is to shale regularly until the sugar dissolves, then put it in a dry, cool, dark cupboard and forget about it for ages. It's important to keep this out of the sunlight, to stop any UV light affecting the gin. You can test regulary, as the website says, and top up with sugar if needed.

I think I'll take the berries out in a bout 6 months time (so around November/December time), as they can turn against you if left in there.

You will have leftover gin/vodka from each bottle, so either have some spare bottles to top up, or get 'em into jam jars with the leftover berries and some sugar for a touch more fruit spirit, as we've done!

I'm looking forward to it already!

Elderflower Champagne

Well we bottled the elderflower champagne last night. There's various conflicting recipes for this so it's definitely an experiment on our part. Here's what we've done;

On sunday morning we picked a bunch of elderflower heads, taken from positions facing the sun. Theory is that the heads smell like bananas earlier in the day and cat/dog pee later!

Into a 10 litre bucket we poured 1.5 litres of boiling water and 1 kilo of sugar. Then topped with cold water to 10 litres. We added 8 elderflower heads (6 larger, 2 smaller), 3 lemons- halfed and the juice squeezed in, then the shells dropped in too. And finally 4 tblsp white wine vinegar.

This was covered with a tea towel, stirred occasionally and left for 24 hours. The recipe we were following said to bottle then, but having read other recipes (mainly the river cottage one) we decided to mix in a pinch and a half of yeast and leave for another day.

That took us to last night, so we sterilsed 10 litres of plastic pop bottle and poured in the juice, strained through a muslin and a sieve. They're now stored in the shed, i'll be checking the pressure on them to see how it develops.

We did find conflicting recipes, the river cottage being most controversial. HFW uses 24-30 heads of elderflowers for 10 litres, ferments for 4-5 days and then checks for yeasty development. I may have to try his in the future for comparison.

We decided to add yeast mainly because i feel that as the flowers are still early, their yeast capabilities might not be at their fullest. I've no scientific evidence for this, just a hunch!

Anyway it's time to play the waiting game before trying out the bubbly!