This week, I 'ave mostly been eating...

Here's a short but happy update on 'the craic' this week.

• Homebrewed Smithish went down spectacularly well for my first extract brew. Sweet, malty, great looking head (about 4 inches every time... so not quite a pint) and it was appreciated by everyone, including non-Smithwicks drinkers. I'm thrilled at how well it turned out. Recipe and critique will follow soon.


• Also, fantastically, the home made cider recieved some positive feedback. The words 'ripped my insides out' were thrown around a little, in a lighthearted kind of way.


• Birds have pushed a home advantage and are now 2 - 0 up in the barley stakes, but I've sown a third lot, and I've put a big net over it. This isn't to catch the birds, but to keep them off. Though if I catch one in there, I'm not sure I can be held accountable for my actions. Disclaimer: No animals were harmed in the making of this beer, but some jackdaws did recieve a stream of verbal abuse and a shook fist.


• I got a some malty ingredients (wheat malt, whole pale malt and some Magnum hops) and Burton Water salts for my birthday, and I'm on the hunt for a 3-4 gallon tin to cook it in. My aim is to make an American IPA (with English hops... ooh, I am naughty).


• I turned 25, and recieved plenty of bottles of ale to sample (6 with the word OLD secreted in somewhere! Very clever, Richard! Cheers!). Having tried a few, I'm keen to try and make a Golden Ale (Badgers'), and the Hopping Hare was very interesting.


• And finally, I'm reading Ray Daniel's Designing Great Beers which I got from ma & pa. Surely I'll know everything now?

So, with that busy week over, and only about 10 pints left in the fountain, sorry, beer barrel, I'll settle down tonight with a beer, a book and a shotgun across my lap. Is that a jackdaw cackling or some community gardeners laughing at me from behind the cabbages?

First blood to the birds...

... Round one to the Goodwives of antiquity.

After all that glorious weather, followed by incessant rain, everybody’s barley on the Inishowen Riviera is sprouting like something from a fairy-tale – all except mine, that is. Some gardeners plant marigolds next to carrots, etc, or nasturtiums next to cabbage, to encourage the pests to eat the decoys, and not the actual produce. It works wonders. Plant barley in an allotment, and the birds will go crazy for it, and leave everybody else’s stuff well alone. I’m glad my barley was of some service, at least.

But that does leave me with a problem. I’ve no barley growing for the rest of the project, which is mostly to do with barley. It’s a bit too late in the season to sow more, but I might do anyway, next time I’ve a spare half hour. However, I’m now only going to have room for a half plot of barley, as the idea of the allotment is we’d get some vegetables from it too.

So it would seem that the old wives from the past have been conspiring with the birds:
Ravens in league with history’s brewers, the weather in cahoots with farmers of old. I’m not being paranoid, of course, but I’m sure I occasionally catch a whiff of Humble Pie cooling on the windowsill of “it’s not as easy as it sounds”.

I BURIED the seed… how could they know?

The barley has arrived!

Well, to be precise, the barley landed last Wednesday, but the hot spell we’ve been having, in spite of being perfect weather for sowing barley, isn’t conducive to actually doing any work. Add to that the long Easter weekend barbequing and generally not being in the house, I only managed to get the barley in on Easter Monday, but, thanks be, in perfect weather and in plenty of time. However, the irony of not getting any barley sown because of boozing in the sun didn’t escape me.

So one of the allotments in the town plots has been given over to barley. My absence from the allotments had been noted, but I really did need the good weather… though I’ll be known as the fair-weather gardener now. I’ll have to put in some rainy hours to put paid to that. Having said that, while every other gardener is labouring over the lettuce, or caring for the courgettes, I’ve two months till I need to do anything with mine. Maybe I’ll take a chair down there… watch the world struggle by.

My wonderful barley, coated and treated with something nasty, means I should have a trouble free germination, with barley resistant to almost every disease known to a farmer. It’s guaranteed not to catch TB, scabies, the lot. However, this blessing took an interesting turn the morning after I’d sown, when I woke up in a cold sweat, worried I’d poisoned the avian population of Moville. Apocalyptic images of bird carcasses littering the streets, newspaper headlines scaremongering the public, top military scientists get involved, and upon discovering the source of the problem, point their combined, accusative finger at me; well it got me out of bed early enough to get back to the allotment to add some bird deterrents before my nightmare vision came to pass.

As usual, either no picture, or one doctored from the internet. Never mind, soon I'll be posting pictures of the 'Adventure in Barley' up in the Challenge page. But for now, please close your eyes and imagine some dirt with nothing growing in it, and you'll be on the same page as me.

Anyway, after that week, I think I deserve a pint. And I'll get one precicely 5 months from now.

The Homebrew Gods have left you a message:

The homebrew gods have been busy dropping hints this week. Firstly, things are coming together nicely for The Challenge. Someone I know knows someone who will be sowing barely in the next week or so, and he’s agreed to get a kilo of barley for me. The Co-op we’re helpful, as usual, but they didn’t know if the varieties that they had in stock were 2- or six-row barley. Two-row is traditionally used in proper beer, and the lighter beer from America uses 6-row, as it lends itself better to additional (cheaper) ingredients, like rice etc. Six-row is also used in malt whiskies, but that’s a bit out of my league just yet. Anyway, I’m left with two varieties, Quench and Snakebite (both sound like words thrown around a pub, so I must be on the right path). I’ve also been allocated a small plot at the allotments, and a couple of friends have offered me some space in their gardens, one in a veg patch, and the other in a lawn. I’m thrilled at the idea of having somewhere to grow my barley, but less so about returning a lawn to its original state after I’ve turned it into a barley patch!

I’ve also found a massive stock pot in which to boil the beer. It’s at the local GAA club (God knows what they use it for), and I’m sure they won’t mind lending it to me once in a while if it’s for a good cause. I was ‘looking for the bin’, and rummaging through their cupboards after a meeting the other night, and ‘happened’ across it. Nothing quite like thrift to keep the price of a pint down.

But, whilst being both gracious and generous, the homebrew gods have also been encouraging me to ‘get my finger out’, as it were. There’s competition! I hear there’s a fella in the next town over who wants to set up a microbrewery. Now, I’m not saying that I do (yet), but if I did, I don’t need this upstart who’s been brewing for years getting in before me!

And finally, I’ve also been sort-of asked to present a homebrew demonstration at the local gardening club meet. Quite how I’m going to condense a 4-week process into a 90-minute talk is yet to be worked out, but I suspect it’ll involve something Blue Peter has been doing for years… cheating.