Literature

Like any good Librarian, I've started to build up a collection of homebrew titles. There is always something one can learn of this ancient art, and not having the best recall in the world, it helps me greatly if it is written down.

If your looking for recommendations; here is what can now be found crammed into my bookshelf between Bruce Campbell's autobiography 'If chins could kill' and Umberto Eco's 'Foucault's pendulum':

• The Complete Guide to Beer & Brewing by Laurie Strachan 

This is a good introduction to beers and brewing with some recipes for the novice homebrewer (adding additional hops to can kits) and a few for the more adventurous (extract and all grain). He tends to have a harsh word in regards to Australian beers and some of his advice is a little lacking in detail and occasional at complete odds with what I have discovered to be conventional wisdom. My general impression is that that it is well written however, I am not convinced that following his directions will really set the novice brewer onto the right path.

• Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher

With a name like 'Randy Mosher', you would imagine he has a lot to live up to and in this book he succeeds. It is an excellent all round read; full of interesting and essential facts and useful recommendations. The style is light-hearted and this makes it an enjoyable read. There are plenty of recipes, ranging from novice to advanced to get you started, including a number of interesting brews that have already been requested by my wife (the Juniper Rye Bock for starters). If there was ever anything you needed to know about beer or brewing, you'll find it in this book.

• Clone Brews 2nd edition by Tess and Mark Szamatulski

As the subtitle suggest; there are over 200 recipes for commercial beers in extract brewing format. All of these recipes are supplemented with additional instructions for mini-mash and all-grain brewing methods. This is an invaluable resource, and although a  large majority of the beers are a bit too commercial (do I really want to brew a Foster's Lager?), there is plenty here to keep you occupied.

• Beer Captured by Tess and Mark Szamatulski

Another great title by Tess and Mark. 150 excellent beer recipes. There tends to be a bit of an American focus however, the beers that appear in this collection are the higher end range of brews set out in the same format as Clone Brews. This is another must for anyone wishing to go further than can kit brewing.

A new direction

It would appear that I have let this blog lapse. It cannot be helped; my life is clearly not interesting enough to recount every detail. An unused blog however, is such an eyesore, and to this end I am resurrecting it to a new glory. It shall be a diary of my home brewing endeavors (and potential home cooking tragedies) so that I may catalogue and monitor my efforts - what works, and what doesn't. Read it, or don't. It shall be here nonetheless.

Bibo Ergo Sum - I drink therefore I am.

A Spot of Tea

The Good Doctor and myself were shocked to realise that we were married 5 years last weekend, so after the usual jokes about giving her wood were done (look it up) I took her on a secret treat to the Sir Stamford in Circular Quay for High Tea.

Such a smashing experience. We were greeted with a glass of chilled Perrier Jouet Champagne and then served an amazing assortment of savoury canapes, sweets and finally scones with jam and cream. The tea, whilst not the star of the day, was a good brew and complimented the pistachiao creme brulee, mini cheesecake, cannelloni and brownie's well.






It was a great way to spend the afternoon and the Good Doctor and I left with our stomachs bulging and our hands shaking from the sugar rush.

To my credit, I did manage to give the missus wood for the anniversary, in the form of a beaded necklace which she models most artfully in the above photos.

Art

After 18 months of inking...the masterpiece is almost finished. It started out small but snowballed, taking on a life of its own. I woke up one day and realised that it was now halfway down my back.

Enough! I cried. Just finish the damn thing!

I present to you the unfinished artwork depicting the Japanese legend of the Death Stone:

Crossing the border for the French

Last Saturday, the Good Doctor and I went to the Capital to view, amongst the regular dreary attractions, the works of the Parisian Masters at the National Gallery of Australia.
The paintings were decidedly Post-Impressionist, determinedly Symbolic and inherently Divisionism...ish. They were....excellent as you would expect world class art to be. The highlights were, of course, those famous pieces that are recognisable to event he most uneducated and ill-informed plebeian (which is why I knew of them...).
Van Gogh (which sounds like one clearing phlegm from their throat) stole the show with his Starry Night and self portrait, but we were equally impressed by a number of pieces by Roussel and Denis that were precursors to the Art Nouveau style (inspired by Ukiyo-e)

 

But art is art...and that was only part of the experience. We arrived on Saturday afternoon and found that there was a significant line of people waiting to see the exhibition. It looked far too long to join and still expect to see a single Cezanne before the Gallery closed so we bought our tickets for Sunday instead.

"Why is the queue so long?"

"Because of the long weekend."

"It's a long weekend?"

"Where are you from?"

"Sydney."

"It's a public holiday on Monday for everywhere else but NSW."

Lesson 1 learnt. Always check before you plan your trip...A: is it a public holiday where you are going, and B: is it school holidays where you are going.

Having learnt our lesson well, we decided that we would arrive early before the Gallery opened on Sunday so that the time spent in the queue would be shorter. If they only let in 500 people at a time...the line will move faster in the morning because the exhibition won't already be filled with 500 people. That was our cunning logic...cunning....like a fox.

We left for our $99 special secret LastMinute.com hotel room to find that whilst we were at the NGA, a function had started at our hotel, and all the parking was full. I was livid...the Good Doctor a little less so. I had the strange idea that if I had paid for a hotel room to stay overnight....I should have a right to park on premises..not three blocks away because some slack jawed rural bint was having her 21st birthday or worse, a wedding reception, in our hotel.

So I furiously parked our car three blocks away and sought refuge in a bottle of light beer (I was driving after all). The pizza and warm oily nuts calmed me somewhat and by the time we walked back to the hotel I was resigned to the fact that it was a pretty shitty hotel and this is what one should naturally expect from Canberra. The used dinner plates left out in the corriders of our floor only confirmed this when stumbling out the door at god awful o'clock in the morning they were still there.

We did however, learn something that night. We don't really like Goth clubs anymore with their monotonous and boring post-industrial/EBM/Noise/I-installed-fruity-loops-on-my-computer/anyone-can-be-a-DJ-with-a-premixed-cd music, and the people wearing plastic hair and the entire Lip Service catalogue all at once...

I mean...there used to be some sort of style, effort and interesting music played at clubs....oh well...kids these days eh what?

We arrived the next morning at 9 am (for a 10 am opening) and joined the already considerably long queue. As we waited the line grew, and grew, and grew until it stretched around itself twice.

We waited...

and waited...

and waited...

...until we finally stepped into the gallery at 11:45 am.

It was a nice exhibition.

I could say more about it..but unfortunately it was just nice. The paintings where there, but there was no explanation to the order. The audio tour did not provide any insight into the works (an awful lot of time was spent describing the painting as though we were physically unable to see it in front of us - although there was one blind person there with their guide dog) and at the end we were confronted with Starry night PVC aprons (flashbacks to the previous nights Goth club) and Cezanne pencil sharpeners.

We fled. 

Our day of queues did not end there gentle reader. Oh no. Not by any mark.

Just outside of Goulburn we hit another queue that crawled....

...and crawled..

..and crawled through 20 kilometres of traffic winding it's way past the site of a rather banal and un-fatal accident between a truck and a car.

Our 3 hour trip back home took exactly 6. 

I do however feel decidedly British after our weekend experience. We would have only had to complain more and eat chips to have the total experience.

A thought for next time.

The Art Gallery of South Australia

This weekend past we were fortunate to be in the environs of Adelaide for the Adelaide Fringe Festival. As part of this weekend away we visited the quaint (read; small but nice) Art Gallery of South Australia. Amongst its collections were a number of surprise pieces...masters of both European and Australian art that we did not expect to see.

In particular, we were impressed by the following pieces of Australian art....art that not only illustrates so effectively the Australia that we know...but marked specific moments in the Australian cultural zeitgeist.

 

A break away! by Tom Roberts 1891 

This piece is prominent in the memory of my youth as I spent rainy days poring over my mother's art history books. Not only did it have an impact on my impressionable young mind, but it also made an impact on Australia as it gave a visual identity to a country heading towards Federation. Amongst the juxtaposition of action and serenity, it provided a symbolic depiction of our transition from European settlers to a modern nation. This image has always been significant to me in the portrayal of our landscape; the sun bleached trees, dry heat and dust that typified the environs I grew up in.

Evening Shadows, a backwater of the Murray, South Australia. by H J Johnstone 1880

I had not seen this piece until the weekend but was very impressed. The subtle wash of light and the serene stillness are such a contrast to the reality of  our landscape that this image constantly jars at my cultural identity. This is the Australia I wish I was in...the quiet, cool and peaceful landscape of majestic Eucalyptus set under a gentle sky. So authentic and yet so fake...this image was painted from a photograph in Europe...our bold and harsh sun kissed sky muted to a pale English summer evening. Even the stillness is unnatural, an artifact of the medium from which the image was transferred abroad.

The art gallery has a few other astounding pieces including a Wright of Derby, a Vernet and supposedly (according to their website) a Waterhouse, Renoir and a Tiffany which we didn't find on the day.

Next weekend we are off to Canberra and the National Art Gallery to see the French Masters before they leave our shores.

January

Two full moons have passed since our New Years celebrations and what have I accomplished?

I have conquered nations, brought vicious men to heel with an iron fist and filled my brain with the knowledge of ancients. Unfortunately this all adds up to pure bunkum when you realise it involves me sitting on my derriere fiddling with buttons and joysticks (ooeer matron!).

January has seen me enter a new period of determination;

• I am determined to learn more Japanese so that with the arrival Nipponside of my new niece/nephew in April I shall be better able to engage with them like all uncles should, 
• I am determined to learn how to play the guitar so that I can idle away the twilight hours strumming tunes made popular by the likes of Bowie, Perry and Smith, 
• I am determined to improve my sewing ability so that I am no longer shackled to the insulting commonality of "off-the-rack" clothing.

I am determined.

Right after I finish this level.

Call of Duty 5 : Modern Warfare 2 has been the flavour of the month. Immersive, bitter, gruelling and packed full of enough OMG moments to justify PTSD counselling, or at least 20 minutes facing a blank wall.

This came close on the heals of Mass Effect, possibly one of the best rpg/action games that was released last year - enough so that I played it through twice just to try out different abilities and game paths. To further my inability to focus on the creative, the second edition in this three volume game series has been released with the announcement that you can port over your characters from the first edition. There goes my life.

And whilst the Good Doctor has been delving deeper into Athiesm with The Portable Athiest, I have been revisitng the entire Wheel of Time Series, a fantasy series I orginally started reading in High School and have since learned (15 years later) that they will finally be releasing the last three books in this 14 volume story.

All this was nothing when considered against my plans to travel this year. A Grand Tour encompassing the Nippon, Eastern Europe, Germany, France and England. Unfortunately these plans have been put on hold till 2011 due to the Good Doctors new position starting at UWS in May and the financial yoke we have decided to burden ourselves with in the form of an apartment and new (secondhand) car. I guess we just keep dreaming and saving.

And lastly - January has seen another session undertaken on my body art in a lame attempt to finish what shall surely be compared with the Sistine Chapel, in time taken to complete if not in skill. We wait...and hope the next 4 hour session will see it's finish (before someone loses an ear or an eye). But where have I heard those words before?