Tag: homebrew

Resolutions Update 2.0

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

Part of my resolutions are about to begin. My friend owns some exercise equipment and I’m going to use some ski machine thing I think, or at least something which he says is going to probably make me sick from the twenty minutes of effort I have promised him. The reason sick is actually a good thing for once is that as a result of my attempts at beer making I have not been too far from the toilet these last few days. If this continues I may be writing a piece soon detailing a salt water cleanse, or at least the benefits of it, over the intimate details of the procedure. My friend also drank the beers on Saturday but was sick on Sunday and seemingly felt better after. I unfortunately trained myself when younger not to be sick which can be good when drinking and smoking excessively but along closing the heart chakra apparently, which is perhaps a story for another time, it does mean that my body doesn’t necessarily expel poisons by vomiting in times it should. This attempt at doing some crazy amount of exercise when already feeling a bit weak and ill is completely the most ridiculously illogical approach and reminiscent of tv series from my youth like Jackass or Dirty Sanchez. I am though willing to give it a shot because while I doubt it’ll actually make my sick, I know it is at least an opportunity at making a start on my resolutions and I’ve passed up on far too many chances already. I am though losing weight by being ill so at least the belly is slightly shrinking. Does that mean I am inadvertently sticking to my resolutions? Only in the most perverse of ways. I also accept fully that nothing I say in any articles after this one can be taken with any seriousness and I may have completely destroyed any sense of credibility I have had the good fortune to acquire these last two months. But fuck it, here goes nothing….

…If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs is a line from a poem by Wilfred Owen about the folly of patriotic war and death, this line about the effects of chlorine gas during the First World War. It feels comparable to what I can taste in my mouth now. That old familiar taste of iron. The stabbing sensation in the ears and the throbbing of the head. My legs feel like jelly and either I’ve got cramp or I’ve hurt my hamstring but I completed twenty whole minutes of surprisingly gruelling exercise skiing, running with some bag on my back, lifting some heavy ball repeatedly and doing push ups. I didn’t vomit, I knew I never would despite the silliness of the first paragraph. I should be proud of myself apparently. I’ll let you know tomorrow if I manage to scrape myself off the floor.

The Yin Yang Brewery

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

The beer didn’t brew properly. It is unclear at which point it went wrong but certainly it didn’t carbonate although I doubt that was all. In two bottles I used honey instead of the sugar they provided and they nearly exploded when I opened them, although they still tasted like shit. It is possible that the beer wasn’t kept warm enough, the instructions that came with it suggested keeping it at 18-20 degrees but I found things online suggesting 20-22 degrees so that may have been an issue. I also didn’t properly use the little oxygen / carbon dioxide thing, which has a proper name that I can’t remember, but which you put in the little hole at the top of the fermenting barrel. There were no instructions on it with the brewing kit as a whole so I just put it in place but discovered halfway through the brewing process that it was supposed to have either distilled water or some spirit to help filter the air going in and out. I put whisky in it but it may have been too late. I did notice on about day two that something had happened with the fermentation process and it seemed like it had risen pretty high so maybe that thing without liquid was an issue. Saying that it did ferment I think because the barrel was full of yeasty dough like gunk at the bottom so something happened.

Clearly then it could have been many things but what I am left with now is this sickly liquid, not thick like syrup but it seems as if it would like to become so. The two bottles which I used honey as the sugar are now gone, one partly over the wall, sink and table top as I opened it and the rest in my belly. There was one bottle which seemed to carbonate slightly using the sugar they gave, that is also now drunk as is one of the sickly sugary bottles that didn’t work. I suspect then that the rest will be going straight down the drain which is a terrible shame but the inevitable conclusion to a failed attempt.

Is this the end of my beer making career, most likely not but that will probably be down to whether I view it as an obstacle in the road or an experience to learn more, which would ultimately make it a success. That then would be the lesson we could learn from every situation that doesn’t work out as we had initially thought and hoped it would. These moments are not failures, but opportunities, now you know more about what you are trying to achieve and yourself in the the process. What a wonderful opportunity failure is, why do we not see it for the balancing yin and yang that it is and as some bad negative thing. It will only ever be how we view it and that is the one thing we at least have control over.

A Shinning Moon

Hamar WilliamsLeave a comment

To carry on the misery, the deeply held pain myself and many others are feeling about this election gone bad, like milk but not the good stuff you can turn into something tasty if you know how, the bad stuff good for nothing, the stench so bad it goes straight in the bin, lumps floating on its surface like the boils of decay on putrid skin, the skin that covers up corruption and wanton self-serving betrayal. But I won’t, how about something more positive to mask the disappointment of hope smashed on the rocks of despair. What do we do when we want to forget pain, we stuff it deep within the folds of our soul, or we drink, we drink in search of the perpetual warmth of alcoholism or at the very least a nice whisky to take the edge off it.

If my phone hadn’t run out of battery and I hadn’t lost my charger now would be a great time to add a photo. In fact if you are reading this and there is a photo attached it means I went back to it and added one subsequently. To add photographic evidence of my successful attempt at creating the elixir of forgetfulness, the murky liquid gold, the self made man to the Etonian heir, the home-brew to the hipster microbrewery. You guessed it? Well understandable if not, but today I took my first step on a (continued) journey of suppression and made myself thirty-five pints of beer. This may be the start of something life changing, especially if my mate gets his way and we start producing enough to sell, but for now its just a combination of curiosity and pleasure. It is unclear whether it’ll be a success and I’m not necessarily excited as I’ve managed to convince myself that somehow I’ll mess it up, I just can’t quite believe its going to work somehow. All the same I’m pretty pleased with myself.

In about six days it should be suitably fermented to bottle and in a further two weeks after that it should be perfect to drink. Therefore in roughly twenty days from now I’ll be able to start on the road to suppressing my emotions and living in a world of denial and ruby ale drunkenness. In between then though we have three weeks together of me either twiddling my thumbs or feeling sorry myself. I could just get over it of course and get on with life but then where’s the wallowing, where’s the self-pity, what would be the point of making all that lovely beer.