Work To Live

I try not to get Sam too involved in my obsession with astronomy, but tonight I was staying up until 2.30am and Sam, busy binge-watching Warrior Nun, inadvertently came along for the ride. Recent predictions of naked-eye comets - i.e. those you can see without even binoculars - had left backyard astronomers frustrated, as time after time they failed to deliver. It had been over 20 years since I last saw a naked-eye comet (Hale-Bopp in 1997), so I was naturally cautious about optimistic reports of C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) - or Comet Neowise . After a miserable run of weather, tonight was forecast to be clear. So, after a hard day measuring and cutting up sheets of polycarbonate roofing, I cracked open several beers and waited for the early hours. This would be when Neowise was just about high enough in the sky for me to glimpse, without being drowned out by the approaching daylight. WHOA!!!! Naked eye comet not half?!! Its nucleus and tail were clearly visible to the naked eye. Grab a pair o...

Brew Day! After literally months of waiting for our Grainfather brewing equipment to arrive, it is all finally here and it was time to do our first "proper" brew. We've dabbled with grain+extract brewing with mixed success, so it was inevitable that we graduated to all-grain brewing. We've committed pretty heavily to the Grainfather system, having forked out for: Grainfather Connect - this is the combined mash tun and boil kettle Grainfather Conical Fermenter - as its name suggests, the fermentation vessel (FV) Grainfather Sparge Water Heater - essentially a glorified tea urn Sam also bought me a very cool gadget that I had been drooling over for some time now - a Tilt Hydrometer . This is a small cylinder that you drop into your FV and it continually monitors both the specific gravity and the temperature of your fermenting brew, broadcasting the data via bluetooth. I will no doubt blog about this more in future! The plan was to install all the equipment in our Brewe...