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The snow has gone!

Recent beer – a brew marathon:

• Dark mild – racked into keg and fined; 13 pints remainder bottled (somewhat cloudy!)
• Belgian Blond – dropped 65 points in 8 days. Chimay yeast=wow.  Crash cooling, should be a good one.
• 80/- – probably mostly done inside 4 days. Give it a while to tidy up though. Smells caramel and roasty.
• Mad Boris RIS Mk II – the most foam I have ever seen; 35-40L at least. 1.088 OG rapidly dropping still!

Flipping cold. About -9C last night (and -17.7C the other side of Oxford), and more of the same tonight.

But the cold weather has bought some unexpected visitors – notably there were a few reed buntings (pictured) flying around the garden all day (first time I have seen them here), as well as a late visit from a pair of siskins who haven’t been around for ages. Yesterday, a local great spotted woodpecker popped in for a while. All this as well as a load of chaffinches, goldfinches, robins, blue tits, great tits, coal tits, blackbirds, song thrushes, a pair of yellowhammers, wood pigeons (grrr) and the local house sparrow colony.

Nice.

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Welcome to 2010. This year’s upcoming stuff:

• Annular Eclipse over Africa, India and China on 15th Jan
• Total Eclipse over the Pacific on July 11th (and quite a long one too)
• Total Lunar Eclipse on Dec 21st
• The Winter Olympics
• The World Cup

I won’t be going to watch any of these events (though I might just sneek a peak of the lunar eclipse if I’m up early in the morning and it’s clear). And, if I can help it, I may avoid the World Cup on TV almost entirely too…

In brewing news, my Southwold bitter just lasted the holidays, my East India Pale Ale (Amsinck, 1868 – from the Durden Park book) has finished and is in the keg, and I have a big starter of yeast recultured from Chimay Red to play with in the near future.