Having been house sitting for the past two weeks and having to catch up on a variety of things outside work - I haven't had much time to do anything on the brewing front.

But I have been able to get into the rhythm of the daily commute to work, at least - from where $partner and I were house sitting. A nice 12.8km ride in either direction, with some nice challenging climbs (by my standard) along the freeway.

In the week and a half that I've been commuting by bike, I managed to clock up about 180km. Awesomeness ensues...

Now I'm back home, and as of tomorrow will be doing the daily 9.6km, fairly flat ride from Innaloo to Subiaco. Should push past 1,000km on this bike in a few weeks easily with the odd weekend ride.

Combining this with being lazy and cheap by having meal replacements twice daily has also been a winner, and I've lost a bit of weight too - which is always nice. Swapped some stories and sachets with one of the managers at work, and confirmed that OptiFast VLCD is king. Also have a supply of emergency flavoured tuna in my desk for snacksies if I need.

Back to the not-so-healthy, but ever so fun SPIRITS! I managed to con my housemate into trying my liqueurs the other day:

* Mint Liqueur
* Coffee Liqueur
* Pear Schnapps
* Apple Schnapps

And the results are... promising! The mint liqueur used a ridiculous amount of mint and it shows, it tastes like very strong tooth paste, but not in a bad way.

The Coffee Liqueur is tasty and tastes like you'd expect it.

I haven't blended the Pear or Apple Schnapps yet, my favourite by far is Pear - as the rackings get sweeter you get a different range of mid/high range flavours from the Pear, though I think some flavour from ripening of the fruit also came through.

Apple was also ok, but was a very light and strong flavour - perhaps from the woody seeds present in the apple. I'd like to try this one again with a different variety of apple.

I also had some time to put together a from-scratch "Baileys" Irish cream recipe using thickened cream, Vanilla essence, and an Irish Whiskey I made with Still Spirits mix-in. It's nice, but the spirit base comes through quite strong. I will try again, but this time with Thick Cream instead of Thickened cream. My bad.

Over the course of this week, when I'm not working on slampt's alarm panel (see what I did there?), I'll be throwing on a Ginger Beer and another batch of spirit base.

Also, I've been taunted all week by Shay's tumblr posts about Milk Liqueur. That's right folks, motherfucking. milk. liqueur.

I think I'm going to have to give this a go as well... the concept is just too appealing to pass up. I hope Shay doesn't mind me doing the same thing... tough luck if she does :)

I'm now at the point where I think I need a huge collection of sealed glass jam/pickling jars to try various things out with... if you've got any spare, your donation is more than welcome.

The list of things I want to try is currently sitting at:

* Ginger Beer
* Ginger Wine
* Aged Bourbon
* Milk Liqueur
* Chilli Liqueur

... by the way, still not over Milk Liqueur.... but for now, bedfordshire calls.

After my computer's power supply dying earlier this week and barely being at home, I managed to spend half my weekend catching up on my todo list - hooray!

My liqueur attempts seem to be going well. I've pulled the first two rackings off the Apple and pear schnapps, and can probably pull another two(?) off before I'll be faced with coming up with an ideal blend of each racking for a final product.

I've also pulled the leaves out of the mint liqueur, but have done nothing as of yet with the coconut - and I'm not really sure how I'm going to go with that one as it's not really like a soft fruit of leaf like the others are.

On a related note, my partner bought me some chilli plants for Christmas which have been going nuts in the sun... I'm hoping once I get some fruit I can do a chilli beer and chilli liqueur of sorts. Fun times :)

I'm also planning on growing my Naga Jolokia seeds, which I think I mentioned in a recent post - which will pack considerably more punch. Maybe some kind of hot sauce will do nicely for those.

In the meantime though, I'll have to settle for beer. Owing to my beer fridge debt I took the time out to stock up again with some: Miller's Chill; Millers Genuine Draft (at the recommendation of a colleague); Three Kings Cider; Tooheys 5 Seeds Cider; Bintang (I know, I know...); and.... James Squire IPA.

.. the IPA is an interesting one, I've heard a lot about it and I've had a few without really realising it. It's short for India Pale Ale and it's a bit different for me. I'm not generally a fan of the sharp bitterness of it, but wanted to give it a chance and especially try it with some appropriate foods. One thing though, it's definately great in summer - wet and cold... so don't be too suprised to see some foody posts coming up in relation to the IPA.

So that's about it for now, another rambly post that leads nowhere... I'm contemplating kicking off an apple cider once I offload some more wine, as well as trying out a strawberry liqueur.

Oh, and daily bike riding to my new job to offset all that delicious beer :)

Hell yeah. With my wash ringing in at a final 1.000 SG, I fired up the Turbo 500 still for it's inaugural run on Monday. All I can say is: wow.

The still fired up quickly, and boiled hard for little over an hour before putting out product. Not expecting it to start putting out so quickly, I ended up taking 150mL heads instead of 50mL (dissapointing) and got things underway.

In a little over three hours the still put out about 3.25L of spirit at a whopping 95%. Hooray. On the first run I managed to control the water column temperature fairly evenly - however on the second run I had to play about with it quite a lot.

The second run performed the same as the first, 3 hours, 3.25L of spirit at 94%. Joy. I wonder if the difference was because I didn't do the mandatory wash of the column packing between runs. Wash number three, which is scheduled this weekend - will be sure to give an indication.

I also need to get a small amount more of column packing - as there's a small amount of volume in the column that needs packing. That should increase the efficiency and produce better distillate, but at these percentages I can't really go much higher before the product starts using the moisture in the air to dilute itself.

All in all, very happy with the product - so now I can produce a bunch of base spirit for testing flavourings with.

So far the coffee liquer (not using my base) is delicious. It started off tasting like it was coffee added to spirit (funny that), but has aged really quite well.

I've also kicked off a Mint Liquer. 3/4 cup crushed mint, 150mL of 94% spirit and 150mL of sugar syrup. It smells crap now, but hopefully after a few weeks the mint flavour and odor really comes out and I can take it off the leaves.

Also in the works: Pear Schnapps, Apple Schnapps and Coconut Liqueur. I've got the ingredients, but now need to find a chance to put them all together.

Updates soon - I promise :)

UPDATE: Oh noes, it turns out I committed a blog faux pas - I've already got an article called Smells like teen spirit! Oh well...