Grrr!

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!

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.

[Show as slideshow]

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

• 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.

• Our Wedding!
• And Honeymoon! (photos when I finally manage to sort them…)
• A Boneshaker win for me!
• Village Ball
• Loads of friends’ birthdays and family visits
• A visit to the Lovibonds Brewery in Henley-on-Thames (thanks Jeff – great day!)
• Veggie patch digging/harvesting/sowing, and loss of all tomatoes to blight
• Chutney/Xmas cake making
• Beer: a Fuggles-based bitter, a wild hop honey ale, best and ordinary bitters for the Sutton Festival. And a new mash tun and boiler to come soon (with luck).

Phew!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

1. The BIOS utility (2.0.0) didn’t give you a progress bar for the rebuild option as I’d expect and as the manual states.
2. It’s not obvious that the array is rebuilding at all…
3. …unless you download and install the Promise Array Management software where you can see the status and progress when booted with the degraded array
4. When it rebuilds a 750GB array, it takes literally hours (about 12 in total, though I lost count…)…

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

4.25kg Maris Otter
200g Caramalt
200g Flaked Barley
40g Flaked Maize (chucked in to use it up!)

Mash 90min at 66C or so.

Challenger 7.1%, 90min 22g
Hallertauer Hersbrucker 2.1%, 90min 40g
Hallertauer Hersbrucker 2.1%, 15min 20g
Styrian Goldings 3.9%, 15min 35g
Styrian Goldings 0min 40g

Yeast US-05

Went fairly smoothly – though lost a pile to the hops – got 21-22L at 1045 or so. I wonder if US05 is going to do it’s usual massive attenuation here….

Looking forward to 5 large measures each of some unfiltered single cask – even the one that I have no idea what the tasting notes were… (OK – it’s an Ardmore – a speyside – and it’s 14 years old. I know nothing more that…)

The Queen’s new website was released today – even Sir Tim Berners-Lee helped her out at the official launch.

I think she could maybe do with a new calendar too… Their current one (see screenshot on left in case they fix it) seems to be a day out. It’s Friday the 13th Feb tomorrow – there’s no Saturday the 13th Feb, well, at least not this year…

My guess is that there’s a developer somewhere that doesn’t realise that the day of the week returned by the function that retrieves the royal appointments is for weeks that start on a Sunday and not a Monday…

(PS – Oooh, Friday the 13th – do the Hogs Back Brewery still do their special brew on such dates?)

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Apparently, the outstanding amount was due on 1st January, 1900, and was for the grand total amount of £0.00. Hmm.

I would have scanned it in but it turns out my scanner is buggered… still, it had a really annoying bit of dust on the detector anyhow.

EDIT: Got it scanned in – here we go…!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite