On His Master's Voice

I plunged my nose deep into the glass and sucked in a long, slow breath, savouring the rich smells that swirled out of the glass.

"Mmmmmmm, you can really smell the dark fruits and winter spices."

Bec glanced over at me, as she walked out of the kitchen leading our two-year-old by the hand, "C'mon Audrey, let's go to the bathroom, Dad is being a beer wanker."

Well, that didn't take long, did it!

I was tasting Little Creatures' latest single batch, Day of the Long Shadow. I still haven't drunk one, it was Bec's glass that I was sticking my nose into. I think I'm a little scared of the 8.9% alcohol, and 4 standard drinks in a single bottle. But it is waiting in my fridge, crammed in and standing shoulder to shoudler with the eggs and the soy sauce and the milk. Our fridge is full almost to bursting point. The reason being that it's currently hoarding our normal foodie contents plus all the contents of our drinks fridge. I'll get to why in a minute.

My first batch of beer has been nervously put together; the washing and sanitizing of old fermenters that had been sleeping under a blanket of dust in the back shed, the trip to the homebrew store to pick up a basic extract kit and a few other essentials while firing questions at the staff member there, being a little deflated by the unenthusiastic answers that came back from said staff member, grinning at the smell of the hops before adding them to the boiling wort, looking up the word wort in the dictionary, checking the temperature of the fermenter every few hours to see how she was travelling. And that's where I've kind of come undone. Temperature control.

From all reports, you want to keep that fermenter at a pretty constant 18-20 degrees during the 1-2 weeks of fermentation. Well, my first problem here came when the stick-on thermometer on the outside of the fermenter didn't work. The fermenter has been bubbling away, so it's not a complete disaster, but trying to keep the temperature of the back room in my shed constant has been nigh on impossible.

My solution to this, for my second batch, is to tranform our 1950s His Masters Voice fridge from drinks fridge to fermenting fridge. The fridge is a classic, and was the first ever fridge that my wife's grand parents bought. It still works amazingly well, to the point that if you have the thermostat control set to normal, it will freeze everything. It took me a full 24 hours to defrost all the ice that had formed around the freezer chest. But it now stands proudly in the shed, ready and waiting to give that fermenter a great big warm hug.

The first batch is now resting up, with fermentation almost complete and bottling scheduled for next weekend. I've had a taste. I didn't vomit. I'll take that as a win.