Puppykicker

The ginger beer is now in bottles:

1 x 2l bottle

10 x 1l bottles

16 x 500ml bottles

I'd normally use at least litre bottles, or two litre bottles for preference (to get the drink off the sediment) but you use what you can get. It'll take a few weeks for the pressure to build up and for the drink to carbonate: so sadly not ready for this weekend's Greenbelt ops meeting.

I'll take some of the mystery drink with me instead.

What's new in homebrew?

I paid a visit to Peter and Mark at the Brewshop in Edgeley on the Bank Holiday weekend to see what was available and blow me if they hadn't been keeping a set of Limited Editions back for me.

"Shall I help you load up the car?" says Mark.

I explain about the whole not-owning-a-car-anymore thing, so he says that he'll deliver them during the week. Four shiny boxes of wine kit.

I've just started the first of them: the Australian Riesling. Now, on the whole, I'm not keen on Riesling. However, that's mostly to do with the acidity-sweetness of the mass-market stuff: I should be able to dry this one out a bit and get more of the innate flavour. It worked OK with last year's gerwurstraminer...

I've also started this year's Puppykicker. It's going to be ginger beer again, since that seems to go down well, with the minimum amount of "becareful of Rob's lethal homebrew" comments.

Freudian slip

When we visited the village yesterday, our experienced team mate whipped out balloons and blew them up for the children. When Rob was given the chance to blow one up, he once again demonstrated hitherto unsuspected skills as a children's entertainer.

Today, when explaining that you may as well get into the spirit of things, he managed to utter the phrase "Well, if you want to blow up a child then give it to a balloon...."

Give him a break, he's still adjusting to the time zone lag.