27

Another year of my life has flown by but I have to say I'm pretty happy with where I am.

At the weekend we had a bit of a birthday party and "shed warming" with about 25 friends turning up with much drinking and merriment, all was good. The home brew on the other hand wasn't, it tasted like Doctor Pepper and that was when we could get a bottle open without the foam hitting the ceiling (which it did quite a few times, along with the chairs, table, floor and anyone stood within a miles radius!).

To make matters worse, tonight we sat down for tea (and for the first time in ages we had it in the sitting room instead of round the table in the dinning room, luckily) when we heard a massive bang and glass go everywhere. One bottle had exploded, well I say exploded but I don't think that does it justice as there was no bottle left! I quickly moved the rest outside and opened them, each one producing a line of foam about 10ft long and then fizzing till empty.

Oh well made dinner quite entertaining!

On a happier note my peas have come up!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No its super yeast!

Started my super yeast kit yesterday to make 20% alcohol. The kit is fairly straight forward although it says to fit an airlock straight away and when I've done this in the the past its always bubbled over. It hasn't yet but I've put a tray under it just in case.

I also brought a set of "Kilner" type bottles to store it in as it's only meant to take three weeks to brew and its not really the type of thing where you drink a bottle in one sitting! They also look pretty cool and I thought I could flavour each bottle differently, so far my ideas have ranged from herbs like mint and rosemary to herbal tablets and Vimto! any ideas will be greatly received.

Work today wasn't the usual inner city mess that I normally have. Instead of going to the centre of Birmingham I got sent to a warehouse in deepest Dudley to move the bathroom pods for the project I a foreman on. I sent the one wagon off and another one just didn't turn up!

We got bored of waiting and saw that there was a canal and decide to go for a walk. Turns out there is a massive nature reserve right by where we were, in the end we walked for well over an hour and picked a massive bag of blackberries (after Steve had worked with me all last week he had decided that jam making sounded like good fun - I start to rub off on people!).

Also managed to get home before 7.30 so picked some runner beans (this is a big achievement for me as so far they've produced none and none last year) and also picked off about 200 caterpillars from my brassicas!

Marrow rum - part two

I'm on a real buzz for making wine again at the moment.

Went over to my best friend in Shrewsbury on Saturday night and had a mad lock in, as he's the landlord, till four in the morning drinking all sorts of weird drinks, the one with peppers in I will never drink again! So its got me keen to get all my wine going again as they can be great fun to drink, strong and a talking point as people don't realise how easy it is to do.

Also went to Mum and Dads this weekend (the miles I do is unreal) and had a good tidy up of all my old brewing and wine making gear and cleaned some up ready to make some more in the next few months. I've got about 6 gallons of wine ready to be bottled up now - plum, strawberry, elderberry, crab apple and damson.

The made up marrow rum seems to be working. Its started to drip into the bowl and gone soft so today I made a slit in the bottom and drained it into a demijohn. I'll leave it until the morning before I'll fit an airlock on it.