Does a beer ship in the woods?

"Beer. It always seems like such a good idea at the time, doesn't it? What's worse is that beer seems like an even better idea after you've had some beer."

Steven Hall

The looming festive season and tonnes of thirsty travelers due on the doorstep has galvanised us into a fermentation frenzy. The bug was planted (pun intended) with a tilt at yoghurt making using the previous culture as a starter. Although that project has had limited success at this point, there was enough encouragement to prompt the great homebrew IPA experiment, helped along by many youtube videos, the odd online forum and the friendly folks at Country Brewers. So on Sunday we cracked open all the packets of goo and powder and plant extracts and popped them into an impressively professional looking bucket to get the following living brew.

It's the yeast we could do

Within a few hours the pot was bubbling away, filling the air with pungent hoppy goodness and making the rudest noises. We shifted it a few times to find the best spot, and it's now sitting in the bathroom, contentedly gurgling to itself. If all goes well we'll be bottling in a couple of weeks and then welcoming Santa with a nice frothy cold one about the time he does his Southernmost run.

Not to rest on our laurels, we then built a GBP from scratch. We have made ginger beer before, using the frightfully useful CWA cookbook and relying on wild yeasts found on sultanas. This time round we actually stumped up for some champagne yeast and even as we type the plant is happily churning away like some ginger infested lava lamp. In about a week we can bottle that and then a few days after it should be good to drink.

Years ago we solved the problem of exploding glass bottles by not using any glass bottles! Twenty four 600ml bottles of water from the supermarket is around $6. The water is used in the production stage and then the bottles are re-used by filling up with the ginger beer and sugar mix in preparation for in-bottle carbonation. If you squeeze the sides in when filling, the bottles expand quite safely and the resultant brew is quite refreshing (and this time around most likely alcoholic thanks to the commercial yeast).

Also on the weekend we gained another goat - Genie joined us for a bleating fest in the vain hope that the constant complaining might bring back our three wanderers who haven't been seen in these parts for about two months. Come back you obnoxious Capra aegagrus hircus, all is forgiven (almost - Anthony's ankle still hurts).

Genie in a rare moment when her mouth is closed