All kinds of beery, really. The picture to accompany this post is of a bottle we'll soon be enjoying tonight - some De Cam lambic, bottled in 2005. It's one of the last two (eek!) bottles left from our trawl of the delights of Cambridge's brilliant beer shop, Bacchanalia on Mill Road. After tonight, there'll just be one bottle of Drie Fonteinen Hommage.
But there's some other beery stuff - first, it looks like we'll be having to wait longer for the new brew to be ready. While putting up some shelving in the garage, the tap got knocked rather firmly. Cue much spraying of beer at a right angle to the keg. A quick tighten later (and fingers crossed no infections of anything nasty), followed by a sample next day shows everything apparently ok - all re-pressurised and tasting nice. But a bit cloudy, so the poor thing needs some time to settle down again.
I've also got two new brews planned over the next few weeks. As usual, I'll be ploughing through my copy of Wheeler & Protz's Brew your own Real Ale at Home, and the next two planned are Wheeler's recipes for Wiltshire Old Devil (an 8% number I'll attempt to bottle) and Marston's Burton Bitter. Well, I say as usual, it's this collection of recipes I've used for all my brews so far except one - the brown ale I have on the go at the minute, which I cobbled together a recipe for myself. And very nice it is too. And here it is, from a couple of weeks back. It's still this lively, even down near the end of the barrel:
The other beery treat we've got to look forward to is a jaunt down to London for the Great British Beer Festival at Earl's Court on Thursday week. The beer list is now online, which is great, presented in a tear-your-hair-out frustrating search facility, which is emphatically not great. Not that something trivial like that will detract from our enjoyment. We missed last year's festival, because we'd recently moved house and we didn't know if the boys would be up to the train journey, so it'll be great to get back to our usual August treat.
Now for tonight's treat. Time to open that bottle...
2 comments:
Hi, I just found your blog via Craft Matters. I'm not a big beer drinker but these look great, my fiance would love them! The most adventurous we have been so far is to make our own elderflower champagne (copied very successfully from River Cottage) which is lovely and very easy, but I'd love to have a go at beer or wine.
Hi - thanks for the comment!
I'm very impressed with tales of elderflower champagne. We must finally get round to trying that next year. Beer making is really easy, but it probably requires a bit of start-up investment in equipment and it is pretty long-winded.
If you've got a good patch of elders near you, it's well worth making some elderberry cordial in the autumn.
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