Ambiorix gets tastier

Hey all, just a random update. Opened (carefully) another of my ambiorix beers tonight. I got most of this one, though it took about 15 minutes to settle down in the glass - half in the glass half in the bottle meant I got to save most of it! It's quite tasty now, there's still a homebrew twang from it, but it's not as sour as it used to be. That said I'm wondering if every bottle is slightly different, because of different amounts of beer/sugar in each one, as in the mixture i bottled mightn't have been fully homogenous....hmm. I haven't had any feedback yet.

I bottled some of my second brew tonight. A Fixby Gold, which looks nice. I ran out of bottles, some of the ones I had weren't clean enough to use tonight so I'll have to find myself about 8 litres' worth of bottles in the next couple of days. Hopefully it'll be ok in the bucket for a couple of days yet!

And isn't it a great winter we're having? We had been thinking of holidaying in Ireland this year, but seriously, with weather like this? C'mon Bord Fáilte, get something done about it.

Topical Thinking Point for today - The return of college fees would surely be A Bad Thing? Aren't we sposed to be a knowledge economy? If the economics of gaining knowledge are personally punitive, we will not achieve that. Is the tax return on a higher-qualified population not sufficient to cover the costs? I'd have thought it is, but might be wrong. The current system, while not perfect, at least allows equal access to all on a monetary footing. If fees of 3-4k a year were introduced, attendance at courses would be dramatically cut, surely?

A serious day - bottling, strawberries, and sausages

So, with the weather being well, ok, and us both having the day off, it being a Sunday, we headed off. Enniscorthy is the target, being the venue for the Enniscorthy Strawberry Festival. Subdue your excitement.

There was an All-Ireland Farmer's Market - consisting of about 17 stalls, not even one per county! Some of these sold strawberries (2), other sold preserves, cheeses, meats and vegetables. So that was ok - we had a sausage roll there made from sausage about 40mm diameter (verging on the too-thick side of cookability I think) which was tasty.

As there was little else happening, bar a cookery demonstration (and neither M or I were interested) we decided to seaside it, and ended up in Rosslare watching the Irish Sea do what it did. We stopped for grub on the way home in the Ramada resort near Tullow - this cannot be recommended as a course of action to anybody and we should have come home and barbecued, though we were absolutely ravenous at this stage.

Decided to bottle the beer tonight. This is a messy operation, and the following were noted:

1: Count your bottles, make sure you have enough. Add about 6 bottles to the "enough" number, because you mightn't actually fill the bottles as much as they claim to hold.

2: Get a no-rinse steriliser/sanitiser for your bottles. This will save on water and time. I had to rinse each bottle a couple of times - wasting water. This is A Bad Thing.

3: Grow some more arms, or else ask a helper to pass by. Someone to hold the siphon in the bucket whilst you're at the other end filling bottles is very brilliant.

4: Check the top of all bottles that you're proposing to use, as some fancy bottles (Wychwood ales for example) won't take a crown cap with the capper I've got.

5: Have a towel or 2 handy. Just in Case.