Getting back to blogging...

...has been a bit of a job this year, what with illnesses and trying to catch up with doing a bit of work (see www.63336.com), rescuing beers and trying to get everything at home back to some kind of normality after all the Christmas excitements. Not to mention the garden! Great plans afoot there. Compost heaps, leaf mould, shifting plants and redesigning one area to include 6 raised beds, not to mention chipping all the ex-shrubs so they can go on the compost heap.. The composting is all going really well. After we shifted over to the new containers back in October, we've now pretty much got a new batch usable compost. Thanks to the bokashi system, pretty much all our kitchen waste is now composting away.

I'll get things going again with a few brewing updates. The saga of the 'Christmas Beer' has been rumbling on. After shifting it outside (big mistake with it so cold) and then back in to revive it, the revival not taking hold and a bit of head scratching, I dumped in a yeast starter that I'd cultivated from (an otherwise pretty disappointing) Leek Brewery's winter beer and hoped for the best.

It seems to have worked - although I did find another problem which might have been more significant than the effect of the cold upon the beer. Anyway, some pics first. The first is of some cloudy beer after it first revived, having been warmed up after the initial problem:

It came out ok and I had high hopes at this point. However it then went decidedly flat, so having dumped in my yeasty starter to get it going again I took off some beer, cloudy but a bit more lively and let it settle to clear up (the first pic). This is a good indication that the beer in the keg will also clear down. The second pic is of it in a re-clouded state!

And then yesterday I drew off a pint for drinking, pictured below. And what a relief, it tastes really nice. Hoppy, but not as astringent as it was before, I don't know whether the Leek yeast has softened it a bit and taken some of the edges off, but it was good and even had some reasonable sparkle to it:

The *other* problem (sigh) was that I noticed that the blooming tap on the keg appeared to have developed a leak. Now that tap not being airtight could be a more significant factor in the keg losing pressure, the beer going flat and all that than the cold. So I did something ludicrously drastic: unscrewing the screw-plug bit of the tap (cue beer fountain) and replacing it with a new one. It's nice and tight now, but could well have boogered up the whole thing again! We'll see.

On a happier note, the new beer, one of Graham Wheeler's mild recipes (Bateman's Dark Mild) seems to be doing very nicely. A week-old sample came out of the tap at the expected lick and tastes delicious already - chewy, roasty with a coffee-ish tinge. Can't wait for that one to be ready: