Friday Five: Keep on Puzzling

And now we bring you the latest from the puzzling files, beginning with a picture of the church at Port Arthur lent to us by The Luminosity. The trees were the hardest bit. And there was a piece missing, which we only found later after we had boxed it back up.

 Next we have this rather beautiful colour wheel made from sharpened pencils...

...and a cat, lent to me by Design Diva (the puzzle; not Melantho).

Third on the list is this depiction of Jane Austen's world, lent to me by The Purple Lady. I don't love Austen as I do Shakespeare, so this wasn't quite as much fun as the previous one I did from this company, but it was still quirky enough to be enjoyable. 

I did really enjoy piecing together this image of London landmarks, which I did with my Dad while I was visiting my parents at home.

And finally (for now), I completed this picture entitled Frosty Friends at my sister's house while Scary Sis went out to work. Clearly it's been a tough holiday.

Friday Five: Parental Perambulations

Burnt out trees on Black Mountain

My parents were here to visit last week and it was lovely to have them to stay. While mother isn't particularly keen on skipping about the place, father wanted to do some hill bagging, so we marched up a few. I also dragged mother around a couple of little strolls.

Father likes to talk while he walks. Actually, this isn't strictly true. What he really likes to do is ask succinct questions which require you to provide lengthy answers as you plod uphill. Canny old beggar!

Mum and Dad outside Centennial Winery

Five Walks with Ma and Pa:

1. Urambi Hills - little bumps out the back of my house that provide good views of South Canberra
2. Berrima - a walk through the 'historic town' of the Southern Highlands, which culminated in a visit to a winery
3. Mt Ainslie - in the middle of Canberra, the best views of the city as the Griffins intended it should look. Dad also saw a big fluffy laughing kookaburra on the way up, which made him very happy
4. Black Mountain - after a walk through the Botanic Gardens spotting native flora and fauna we headed up the hill where we came across lots of lizards, but the view is protected unless you are prepared to pay to go up the tower, which we weren't.
5. Mount Taylor - also close to my house, a short walk to the top with information panels naming the hills and lakes you can see below. Dad also saw lazy kangaroos dozing under the trees which, again, made him happy.

Dad admiring the view from Mt Taylor

Friday Five: Cricket

When I was a child, I couldn't see the point of cricket. Perhaps, even worse than that I resented it for the fact that it took up my parents' time; time which could have been far more profitably spent lavished on me.

My mother would have the television on with the sound off while every radio in the house was tuned to the commentary and if a six was hit or a wicket fell, she would hurry to the front room to watch the replay in pictures. My father enjoyed live cricket from Australia - usually atop a ladder in the middle of the night as he worked his way endlessly around the house painting the windows while wearing a headtorch.

I first started to realise its true value in the days before all-day Sunday drinking. Him Outdoors would take me to the local cricket club where we could lounge on a grassy bank all afternoon and decadently drink cider. This was the start of my conversion. It continued through local league, county cricket and international tests, culminating in the 2005 Ashes Series.

The roles were reversed as I watched live cricket from England through the wee hours of the New Zealand night biting my fingernails to the quick while watching some of the finest cricketers perform outstanding feats with bat and ball. And we won, which helped. I was hooked.

I am not a nerdy stat geek by any means. I remember moments and personalities rather than numbers and records. Of course there are now several variants on the game - the ODIs and the 20/20s - but it's still the tests that really excite me, and it's still the ones between England and Australia that I will willingly waste a whole week watching.

5 Things I Love About Cricket:

1. It's an entirely legitimate waste of time. Tell someone you spent five days lying on a sofa and they will think you are an invalid or a sloth; tell someone you spent five days watching cricket and they will at worst think you are obsessive. I get it now, mum and dad; all is forgiven.
2. Tradition - from the village green to the pitch at Lords, there is something comforting and familiar about all that history and all that sport being played to specific rules. I still don't understand at least half of said rules, but somehow this doesn't seem to hamper my enjoyment one jot!
3. The commentary - those guys (and sadly, as yet, there are no women in the commentary box) know what they're talking about, and most of them say it very entertainingly. Even more amusing are the times when they get distracted by someone's haircut or a nice piece of fruit cake.
4. The ebb and flow - when I was young and ignorant I used to be very frustrated by the fact that no one could definitively answer the question, 'who's winning?'. Now that I'm older (although I make no claim to be less ignorant) I love the fluidity of the game, revelling in the way the upper hand is often perceived rather than qualified. I don't even mind when it all ends in a draw.
5. The sound - from the gentle applause that greets the crack of leather on willow, to the raucous chants of the Barmy Army and the strains of Jerusalem on the trumpet, it couldn't be anything but cricket.

Join the Rebellion!

The Rebellion Beer Company have an open day on the first Thursday of the month – for £10 you get five pints and a talk/tour of the brewery. My Dad and I were some of the first there, but eventually there were a few hundred people present; when it rained we all huddled among the brewing equipment to drink our beer without getting wet.

I began with a Blonde (4.3%); ‘using only pale and lager malts, giving the beer a very light golden colour’, it is a fair and refreshing ale, smelling of hay and tasting of summer meadows. I moved on to Flagship (4.2%), a stimulating amber number with strong notes of toasted hazlenuts and a smooth mouthfeel that I considered to be very sessionable. So did many others, apparently, as it was soon sold out. The mild also sold out early on, so I didn’t get to try it on this occasion.

The IPA (3.7%) was so much better than one I had previously had at a pub (I won’t mention the name as I think it may just have been a one-off). It was nutty and tasty with complex flavours. This and the Mutiny were my favourite. The Mutiny is more malty and darker in colour, but the hops add a nice balance and it’s stronger at 4.5%.

(Admission – I was drinking while note-taking through this talk, so some of this may be not entirely factually correct – i.e. made up. Feel free to send in amendments.)

The tour was taken by Mark Gloyens, one of the brewery founders, and, although we had had several beers by now, it was still entertaining and informative. In the 1970s, Britain went from having 7,000 breweries to 200. The big breweries took over (80% were owned by the conglomerates) and it was all about the pubs. In 1989 Margaret Thatcher’s government introduced the beer orders, restricting the number of tied pubs that could be owned by large brewery groups in the UK to 2,000, and required large brewer landlords to allow a guest ale to be sourced by tenants from someone other than their landlord. (Shock – she actually did something decent!) There are now around 400 microbreweries in the country.

Rebellion makes 70,000 pints a week – they use this figure because people can picture it better than 200-300 brewers’ barrels. Next year will be their 20th in business, so a little history...

Two boys from Sir William Borlase’s Grammar School used to perk up to the smell of brewing from local Marlow brewery, Wethered’s (on Wednesday afternoons as I recall – I used to make the detour on my way home from school). The earliest record of a brewer on the site is from Thomas Wethered’s brewing of 1750. However, due to some of the reasons stated above, Wethered’s closed down in 1987, and the town (and local drinkers) suffered. For example, The Hand and Flowers (well-known haunt to all Borlase pupils) had to get their beer from Cheltenham (more than 100km distant).

So one day as the ex-Borlase boys were having a drink after a game of cricket, they promised to re-start Marlow’s brewing industry. 1993 was not a good year for the brewing industry, and the banks wouldn’t give them a £2,000 unsecured loan, so Mark sold his house and used the capital to start the business. He explained that they could double as a brewery museum, since most of their equipment comes from other local breweries which have closed in the last 30 years. Their test-batch was made in second-hand equipment from Courage’s brewhouse in Reading.

They started employing three people and making 5,000 pints a week. Now they produce 70,000 and employ 50 people. As there are about 400 people in attendance at the tour, it’s fair to say they are popular and successful. They sell 20% of their beer in the shop, 20% in bottles, and 60% in pubs. Their recent growth is 15% (through word of mouth, mainly), and they are now at 110% capacity and don’t want to grow any more.

Hence they have made a concerted effort to cut down on ‘exports’, which they consider to be anything outside of Buckinghamshire, Berkshire and Oxfordshire. This is because the closer to a brewery it is, the better the cask-conditioned real ale (made with yeast and sugar) will be. To this end, they have stopped selling to supermarkets (except Waitrose) by pushing the price up until the supermarkets stopped buying it.

Ideally they don’t want to sell Rebellion further than a distance of 30 miles from the brewery. They maintain that if you go to Yorkshire there will be a microbrewery within 20 miles selling beer as good as (or possibly even better than) theirs, and they would rather you drink that and keep the local microbrewing industry alive.

They paid the same duty rate as big breweries, which almost caused them to close ten years ago, and then Gordon Brown as Chancellor introduced progressive beer duty relief for small breweries in 2002. The measure halves duty tax for brewers making less than 50,000 litres a week, and tapers duty up to 300,000 litres. Rebellion now pays 60% of the duty, and all their profit comes from duty saved.

Twenty years ago the boys took a strain of yeast from another brewery (RHC Brewery in North Somerset, I think) and kept it alive. It has naturally mutated over the past two decades and has become specifically Rebellion Yeast, which has been put in the DNA bank so that it will remain the same and result in consistency of brewing.

At Rebellion the water is ‘Burtonised’ – a process by which sulphate is added (often in the form of gypsum) to bring out the flavour of the hops. Many minerals have been removed by the chalky Chiltern water and need to be replaced. (Burton-on-Trent brewed what was deemed perfect pale ale in the early eighteenth century, and people have attempted to recreate that water ever since.) The calcium reduces the pH which should be about 4 for beer (wine is 3); if it is too high the beer will be soapy, so sulphate is added. The final fermentation of the beer is completed at between 10-12°, and then an opened cask of beer needs to be drunk in two days – happy to help!

Quick Qintet: Dad's advice

In the interests of equality:

5 Things My Dad Taught Me:

1. It's never 'just a game' - play nicely, but play to win
2. The person who doesn't pour the wine gets to choose the glass
3. Never drive drunk, or let anyone else do it - if you really can't stop them; don't get in the car
4. Listen; you might learn something
5. Don't mock what you don't understand