Home Life

The High-Tech Lagering Facility

Welcome to my Home Brewery, set in a small, picturesque town in Inishowen.

In addition to buying the occasional tin from the internet, I'm busy with all sorts of home brew related nonsense. For example:

The kitchen is now my centre of operations. For about one day a week it's both a sticky swimming pool and a sauna, and for the rest of the time it's a giant game of tetris, as I try and squeeze empty pop bottles into the food cupboards and hope nobody notices.

I also garden. Mam and Dad bought me a hop plant for my birthday some years back; a Nugget hop, a high alpha acid hybrid, with a spicy aroma. This year I've added several more British varieties to the farm (Progress, Early Bird Goldings, WGV, Fuggle and First Gold).

I'm also planting bucket-loads of barley, with myriad success. After my girlfriend* went to the Guinness factory in Dublin and brought back a handful of (liberated) barley, I planted it. 8 have grown. So if they seed, I'll plant those, and if they seed I'll plant it, and if it seeds I'll plant them, and I may eventually have enough barley to make a brew. And by then I may have collected enough equipment to do it properly. I also cadged a bag from a local farmer. Enough for a good few pints definitely grew, but threshing by hand was so boring, that I soon packed it in. After all, for €1.50 / kg, why bother?



Hop Plant "Nugget"

And then the library. A mixture of Argos and Grandad made bookshelves, all in a delicate, anti-gravity balance. Now, stacked according to theme (I used to work in a sort-of cheap arsed bookshop, where I regularly got so bored I'd occasionally rearrange the books to create a pleasing rainbow effect according to the colour on the spine), between music, and crime set in the 19th century, is my 'home brew' section. You can see a list of the HB books I've collected in the review section... which is handy if you're thinking of buying some - though not from me! I'm far too precious.

So, that's the status quo, but for regular updates, you need this:

Home

* I know what you're thinking - A blogger with a girlfriend? But it's true. And she could have an entire bookshelf dedicated just to poetry, but she'd never bother to organise it that way. I'm only one more looming deadline away from doing it myself. And those windows could do with a re-putty...