I am a Husband

1] What's the old fool on about now? I've known that for ages.

2] Huh? He never said: the git.

3] So what? I've heard that one before...

I wonder which of those choices was your reaction to the title of this post.

Actually, there is a fourth option. I am a comedy husband, represented in many an advertisement for air freshener, shampoo, washing up liquid, and numerous other household products.

Myn is away for the weekend, being a highly skilled practitioner of her First Aid craft at the Sugar Hill festival, leaving me to cause all kinds of havoc at home.

Homebrew continues apace. I bottled the "Pacific Quartet": a blend of white grapes from (guess where?) the Pacific coast of the USA, and started off a Chilean Carmenere / Carbernet Sauvignon. So far so good. However, I used a combination of screwtop, cork and sherry bottles. It always seems a waste to bottle and cork some wine, only to uncork it a few days (or hours) later, so some "easy access" bottles seem to make sense. The problem came shortly after I put the bottles in the winerack.

One of the sherry bottles rejected its cork, spilling about 2/3rds of its content on the hall cupboard floor. I discovered this in the evening and spent a fun hour or so trying to extract as much wine from the carpet as possible. I left a fan running overnight, to try and dry it out further, but was woken this morning by the sound of running water. Wine, as it turned out. Two further bottles, in fact, with a third about to go the same way. I have spent more time today drying out the same carpet again.

If that weren't enough, I managed to break the door off the washing machine this evening. While cooking dinner, I bent down to look through the oven door, and somehow managed to sit on the open washing machine door, pulling it off its hinges.

What will I do next?

Things you find in the cupboard

While looking for Something Else recently, I discovered two demijohns in the cupboard. This is not, in itself unusual (there are usually demijohns in there) but I usually remember what I put in them. Two others are there: one is an experimental ginger beer that I'm afraid of going back to, and the other is a red wine in "long term maturation".

These two, however, were unknown. They contained a liquid that was a deep golden colour, a bit like a Balvenie whisky. The nose was pleasant, and in taste, it was surprisingly similar to a dry sherry.

The odd thing is, I have never made any sherry kits. Still, it goes down very well. Shame I can't get any more.

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.