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.