REverberations - Home Brewing

Our house - now with more bells!

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 23:37:10 -0600

Those of you who have dropped by to our new place may have been left waiting at the door for us to answer. No longer! The broken doorbell we inherited has been replaced with one that actually works.
On the downside this will mean that all the door-to-door salespeople and bible bashers will start bothering us again. It's been nice without them for a few months.

New beer on yesterday, didn't time it very well this time and may have to buy some for the next few weeks. Not good over summer.

Me a star?

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 06 Sep 2005 22:34:24 -0500

Liz just unterrupted my cleaning up after putting on a new batch of homebrew to point out that Alana Patience is a partner of some pseudo-celebrity or other on Dancing With The Stars.
Why is this of interest? Well, I went to primary and Liz high school with her, and, even though that I'm fairly sure she doesn't count it as a career highlight, I danced with her way back in primary school. I think I was the least bad partner for her that the school could find.
Does that make me a star by proxy?

A great night on the town

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 21:54:30 -0600

There's going to be some names missing from this post - to protect the guilty in most cases.
A mate at work had found out that The Macquarie Hotel has just started a microbrewery. Us both being interested in homebrewing (our brews went down a treat at the housewarming), this tickled our fancy as it is just a quick stroll up the road from work.
He had also heard that last night was opening night via the internet somewhere. A quick phone call confirmed this.
So, finalising some stuff at work, off we went. Rather than the more obvious entry of the public bar at the front, I spotted one labelled "Brewery" at the side. Promising. In we wandered.
Up to the bar, we wanted to grab perhaps one of each of the types of beers to rate them a bit. Ordering the first two from the bar went kinda like this: "Two wheat beers please". "Here you go. Next!". Notice the lack of monetary transactions there. I did.
So, we had to try a few more of course. We went downstairs to tour the rather impressive brewery bit. We listened to the Minister for Gambling and Racing ramble on about how good it was that pubs brew beer now. Also the brewer and owner spoke up - far more interesting overall.
We tasted both the wheat beer (my favourite - starts like most other wheats but the finish is more lagery) and the pale ale (not quite to my taste but accepted nonetheless at the price) a few times over, just to be sure. We ate various finger foods. We listened to the rather good jazz band they had playing there. A lovely little party.
I spotted the owner of a well-known brewing company that I have had previous conversations with and had a quick chat which went I started something like: "This is a good beer, but it's no [name of one of his beers]". Him: "Yeah, but it will get better. It would want to". He put the beer down and walked away after a cheery goodbye.
Going back for perhaps our sixth round, the girl behind the bar asked me "Do you have a sticker?" "No", I answered truthfully. "Well bring it next time please", handing me my order. We had noticed some of the other people there had name stickers on them, but not all.
It was about this time that we deduced that we weren't really supposed to have been there. I should point out at this time that nobody challenged our entry, nobody challenged us being there and we would quite happily have paid reasonable sums of money to try out the brews.
I'm sure we'll get back there at some stage, so they'll win from us out in the end.

Sick, but life is good

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 10:01:00 -0600

Many thanks to Jenny from work who seems to have bestowed upon me some tonsillitis. I can still talk, but I wonder how much longer that will last.
There's been plenty of things I've wanted to blog about these past few weeks, but it has been rather difficult while without bandwidth.
I can post from work, but I'd rather not do that, plus there's plenty of other things that they are actually paying me to do instead, so they tend to take priority.
Still listening to heaps of podcasts, brewing beer, and working quite a lot.
Wedding still looking like November this year, a short-ish honeymoon afterwards, then a trip to Europe to continue our travels and check out the World Cup in Deutschland for some length of time in 2006.
As for NZ in April, it is possible yet doubtful. We have a lot of expense coming our way in the short-medium term.

Home Brewing Again

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 03 Oct 2004 13:02:00 -0500

According to my log, the last batch of home brew I did was on the 9/11/1999. So, nearly five years later I've got another one brewing away down in the shed.
It's quite fun of course, turning water and the golden-syrup-y wort into beer with the help of yeast and a little sugar. Very cheap too - ignoring the bits I had to re-purchase due to them being lost somewhere between our last three houses, the actual beer components cost me under $20, and that has made something like sixty bottles. Haven't counted exactly.
There's some great recipes out there for different beers I'll have to give a whirl once I get back up to speed.
It takes between one and three months for the batch to be ready, so there should be plenty to enjoy come the warmer months housesitting. I'll put another batch on in a month or so also.