After showing someone how WordPress works yesterday I realised that I had not posted for a couple of months – whoops! A catch up: I didn’t travel back over in September, rather staying out for the wonderful weather in Brisbane and coming over a couple of weeks ago.

So what have I missed? Tescos now has two floors and a gladiator style travelator for the pikeys to play on, there are quite bland looking £20 notes and there seems to be a need to speak Polish as well as English to get anything done.

Lets not even go into the murky weather, which is fine when you are going around the green fields of Nantwich as it looks quite quaint, but venture towards Liverpool and the hellscape of Stanlow/Ellsmere Port area loom up like some prehistoric volcanoes erupting with smoke and fire. I half expected to be swooped by some pterodactyl, however it turned out to be a pigeon that has been breathing in the fumes too long. Nice.
Saying that, the 3000BC burial chambers on Anglesea are quite cultural, anywhere else it would be £15 to get in rather than jump over a gate and away you go. It was good to go through North Wales into Snowdonia, the proper bit of Wales, with proper welsh weather sadly.
The main thing that has struck me looking ‘outside in’ on the UK is how parochial things can be, established systems such as legal, banks, companies house, the post etc can be slow slow slow – yet no one complains. We nipped down to london the other day (don’t stay at the Grange City – it isnt 5* like it claims) and so being an internet type, I bought the tickets online. Get to Chester station and the machines are broken, and I am asked why did I bother to buy online?! Nothing like customer service.
Also, I just have to mention this, £1.05 for a litre of petrol!? Try 43p Again, do you see anyone complaining? What is wrong with people?
Brisbane, Singapore, Duabi and London so far this month, and we are looking at a mini euro tour as well, so hopefully some nice geo-located pictures up once the new gadget arrives – so more then!

Last Saturday morning (the 8th for the brewing diary!) myself and co-brewer Nick settled into our regular brewing routine. Up early in the morning for some bottling and then by mid morning be ready to kick start our next brew.

We bottled up our second pilsner, this time we added an extra 500g of light malt to hopefully bump up the ABV by a very small amount – we are aiming for 4.5% ideally.

With that bottled our thoughts turned to our next brew. We have made one nutty ‘ale’ previously, however it came out more of a dark lager rather than anything overly creamy and full bodied. It does taste nice, however it is not the stouty / porter that we set out for.

With this in mind we thought we would target the top end of the scale, a nice rich heavy alcoholic stout.

Recipe:

1.8kg Brewcraft Irish Stout
1kg Morgans Chocolate Malt (liquid  in tin)
1kg Morgans Dark Crystal Malt (liquid in tin)
1kg ’stout combo’ which has a mix of light and dark malt with dried corn syrup.
0.5kg light dried malt.
0.5kg golden syrup.

25g hop bag of fuggles was steeped for 30mins and then chucked in the fermenter with some pre-started Safale S-04 yeast and 20 litres of Brisbane’s finest water, which is not that good in all honesty!

The original gravity was read off at 1.090 and various mathmatics points us towards a heavy ale at 7.5-8.8% , and if you believe one online calculator it will come out as 10.2% !

Total cost for this was $52.90 , and with expected 18 litres to play with after racking and gravity tests we expect to fill roughly 50 bottles (330 ml) , giving a cost per bottle of $1.06 excluding carbonation drops and other odd charges on top.

Last night myself, co-brewer Nick and our respective girlfriends went out to see Brisbane’s ‘Riverfire’ event where barges of fireworks are exploded up and down the city center. After the fireworks we nipped out for a cheeky turkish meal which was sadly ‘BYO’ on the alcohol front.

After a short trek through a dubious area of Brisbane we ended up at a ‘bottlo’ and purchased a six pack of Asahi bottles. It is the usual Asahi Japanese fare, a crisp drinkable beer but quite watery and so lacking character there is little to write about. It is Ashai, it is a generic beer.

Incidently the label states it is a ‘beer for all seasons’ , which when told to Nick he misheard as a beer for four seasons. Much hilarity ensued when it was pointed out four seasons and all seasons are the same thing.

After the delights of great turkish food and generic ‘Japanese’ beer – I am sure it is brewed on license out here – we ventured over to the always great Belgium Beer Cafe. By day it is an excellent bar cafe serving great food and the usual suspects of belgium beers, and by night the bar area swings fully into life.

To kick off with we had a glass of the cherry Kriek, while Nick got stuck into some Leffe Brune. The Leffe was the usual malty glass, but for some reason I always prefer the Leffes on tap rather than out of the bottle.

My Belle-Vue Kriek was very good, usually I dont opt for the fruit beers but I thought it would be good for a change and it did not disappoint. Krieks are made by steeping cherries (or other fruit such as raspberries) in belgium beers thus giving a fruity taste. I must admit this was a better beer than I had remembered, as the Belle-Vue Kriek is quite a common one, and previously I had found it to be too sweet. This time it hit the spot!

We moved to the bar area where the next order was a ‘glass’ of Hoegaarden for me, despite not being overly chuffed with the whole Inbev shifting of production from Hoegaarden to Jupille thing. I have missed the taste and to get it on tap over here is quite rare, so I placed my morals on hold and had a half pint glass of the canal water. This was the first time I had observed someone use a knife to slice the overflowing head square with the top of the glass! Personally I think the heads of Belgium beers is a fun element each having different heights and styles rather like peacock plumage but more beery.

Nick had not tried it before, so went ahead and ordered a pint. If you have not had a glass of Hoegaarden before the branded containers are thick chunky glass that exagerate the weight of the pint. Nick’s pint was the size of his head! Fun times.

As a sign off I finished up with the normal Leffe blonde glass, a nice enough end to a good night.

I am back in the UK for a few weeks from Wednesday / Thursday depending which part of the world you are in, so this weekend has been spent catching up with people and sorting the diary. Last night I ‘caught up’ with the Queensland Roar who were taking on Adelaide Utd, a fixture I have seen before but with two new look teams it was a much better game.

Still Roar have the knack of creating but not finishing, and their ‘marquee’ signing of Craig Moore ended in misery after he was sent off. Whoops!

So ignoring the air fare, $21 (£8.60!) to go and see a decent game of football compared to £17 to see league two dross or £33 to sit in comparable seats in Mold Trafford… I know what I would choose! Roar have all the chokeability of Wrexham in fluro orange rather than dragon red, yet without the cold trudge home as this is Brisvegas where the sun always shines, even at night