A good beer is one of my favourite indulgences and, as I am in the very fortunate position of being able to afford a bottle or two now and again, one in which I fairly regularly partake.  I enjoy, you understand, I savour.  I do not guzzle.  Mostly… 

Back in the days of early wedlock, finances were much more constrained and I, in common with most of my contemporaries, regularly turned my hand to making my own wine and beer.  (Should you be considering taking up this hobby, I can do little more than recommend my post of October 2019, Possible Hobby #3 – Home Brewing.  If that doesn’t put you off, nothing will.)  Beer making is something to which I have recently returned, not for financial reasons, but because I wanted to find out how well I could do it.

Well, truth be told, it turns out that I do it rather well.  My beer is clear, bright and unexpectedly crisp.  God knows how strong it is, but it goes down surprisingly well* and tastes better and better with each successive glassful. 

I haven’t yet slipped back into wine making, although I am strangely partial to a slightly hazy, over-sweet, violet-hued, florally perfumed Pinot.  Anything but Chardonnay.  The truth is that wine-making requires far too much equipment.  With beer I need a bucket and some bottles, easy, but with wine I’d need demijohns, airlocks, sufficient chemicals to stock a lab, corks…  And everything has to be so clean.  God forbid I should ever feel the need to put labels on anything.  With my current output, if it’s in a brown pint bottle, it almost certainly is IPA.  If it’s in a clear pint bottle and removes limescale from the taps, it is almost certainly cider (a new venture), but if I branched into wine I would feel obliged to label it with some kind of information: red or white; sweet or dry; explosive or emetic…  It’s just too much work.  Whilst I feel the pull of pouring out my own cru for guests: ‘Yes, I brewed it from all the dandelions growing on the field behind us.  No, I didn’t know they’d sprayed it with paraquat.  I’m sure it’ll be fine.  Chin, chin…’ I do not feel the yen to sterilise everything I touch.  By and large it isn’t necessary.

With beer I rinse things through a bit.  I put the bottles through the dishwasher – which my wife loves – fill them, crown cork them, leave them for a few weeks and Hey Presto, if they haven’t blown up, they are ready.  If anyone comes across a dead fly I tell them it must just have landed in their glass: ‘At least it died happy ha ha!’  If anyone comes across a dead mouse things are not so easy…

Anyway, I pass on this information to you simply as a way of letting you know that I am about to open a bottle, so if I disappear from the blog for any time again, you will at least know why…

*I edited this sentence which originally (and, I would stress, completely innocently) said ‘…but it has a good head and goes down well’ in a bit of a rush when I realised that the original might leave you with the impression that I had received a blow to the head with a copy of 50 Shades of Grey.  Nobody wants that…

No man is an island – although some of us are a little wet all round…