A Collection of Updates

As you can imagine, having several projects and plans all bubbling along together often means that beer related stuff that I am up to doesn't get written about on this here blog of witterings. So I thought I'd lump a load of odds and sods together and make one post out of them - sort of like making a soufflé and hoping it doesn't go all flat on me.

First up, the International Homebrew Project. If you recall, and if you are one of the homebrewers to have emailed me confirming your intended participation, the democratic opinion of the beer to make turned out to be a historical recreation of a milk stout, hopped with Challenger and Goldings. As I said previously, when I get the recipe from Kristen I will posting it, so please be patient and in the meantime perhaps stock up on your hops and have a look at these recipes from Ron's blog for different iterations of the Mackesons milk stout recipe.

On my own brewing front, I have bottled both my Thunder Child Extra Stout and Mrs Velkyal's Session Beer, an Irish Red Ale single hopped with Fuggles. Both beers were on the high end of the final gravity range for their style guidelines, but tasted good in their green state - which is really all that matters. My barleywine is still in primary and I am playing with ideas of what to do with it next, whether to go to secondary and add another batch of yeast, or to dry hop, or just go straight to bottle and leave it be until Thanksgiving.

There is a new version of the Pocket Pub Guide to Prague available through Lulu.com. I heard from a few people that the download was taking an age, which is hardly surprising as the document was some 600Mb, mainly due to the fact that I used massive picture files in the text. Well, I resampled the pictures to make them smaller, without too much loss in sharpness, and the new version is only about 6Mb and should be much quicker to download. While talking about the Pub Guide, my collaborator is in the Charlottesville area for the next 6 months and we are discussing a couple of project ideas - he also bought me a bottle of Matuška Černá Raketa, a Czech Black IPA.

If you follow my Twitter feed, you'll have seen me make mention a few times about the upcoming release of Morana Dark Lager, the tmavý ležák I helped brew with Devils Backbone. February 1st is the day to put in your calendar - I for sure will be there with growlers to fill and a belly aching for beer.

I think that's everything.....