I've got an old ipod kicking round here somewhere. It's a 4th generation, 40gb machine, the one with the tiny black and white screen at the top. It's about is thick as a matchbox, and heavy enough to drag my pants down if it's in my pocket, hence why I rarely use it in public anymore.
Back in 2005, it broke on me; froze at a ski chalet halfway up a snow covered mountain in Slovakia. Literally froze, I guess. This made the rest of our travels a little quieter, but for some reason I never threw it out. It sat in a draw for a year or so, while we saved money for more travel. I had taken it to the Apple store, where the guy serving me listened to the whirring sound the hard drive was making, holding it up to his ear and squinting his face.
"Hmmm, I've never heard one do that before."
I had no money for a replacement, and so during a quiet day at work I went searching on the net for any possible fix. After scouring various ipod forums (yes, they really exist), one particular method kept popping up. I'd dismissed it, mostly, as a bit of a myth. But the frequency with which people were swearing by this method to bring a dead ipod back to life meant I just couldn't ignore it. And so that night I grabbed a knife from the kitchen and slid it along the seam of the ipod, between the white front and silver back. I jimmied the knife until the white part came loose, and I pulled the face off the ipod.
It was still connected to the silver back of the ipod, which held all the hardware, and I was careful not to rip them totally apart. I gingerly prised out the hard drive, gave it a few taps with my index and middle fingers, and put it back in its snug little spot. I forced the front of the ipod back on, plugged it into the charger, and hit the buttons for a reset.
A few minutes later, my ipod was alive again.
Don't ask me why. It just worked. Over the next few years, every now and again the ipod would once again pack it in, and I'd have to pry it open with a knife, give the hard drive a tap and a shake, plug it into the charger and jiggle the hard drive just so, like an old tv antenna, before the ipod would spark back to life and I could put it back together. The silver case is all bent out of shape from where I've stabbed it with the knife over the years, but I kind of like it like that.
These days, I've worked out that as long as I don't let the battery run out, it keeps chugging along. I can no longer update it, but the 40gb hard drive is currently holding 45gb worth of music, so I'm not complaining.
I don't understand how it works, I don't know why simply tapping the hard drive brings it back to life, but it does.
For me, that's how homebrewing kind of feels at the moment. I get the ingredients, I know what goes in, and kind of understand what those ingredients are up to in the big plastic fermenter, but despite all the reading my distinct lack of any understanding of chemistry or biology means I'm still just taking it all for granted, that throwing this malt and yeast and water and hops together turns into beer.
Just like my trusty old ipod, it takes a little bit of love, a little bit of trial and error, and a little bit of faith to get the beer going. It ends up more than the sum of its parts, and that's pretty awesome.
We've cracked open a few bottles of the first batch, and it's pretty much as I expected; drinkable, but nothing spectacular. It looks like beer. It smells ok. It has a nice frothy head. And it tastes reasonable. But there's a lingering taste, a green-ness, that annoys me, as though I'm drinking a beer brewed by the Grinch. This may be due to having only been in the bottle for a month, but is more likely related to the fluctuating temperature during fermentation. We've got a few bottles left, and will give them another few weeks before trying again to see if they've improved any.
The second batch has been brewed and is fermenting away in the old fridge, doing its little thing; the yeast dancing with the sugars, or something. Something sciencey, that I'd love to be able to describe in an entirely non-sciencey way. But first I think I need to know why they're dancing together.
