As a contrast to a previous posting which has since been removed about the poor service we received in an Abingdon pub, I thought I’d balance it with praise for some good customer service we received in various Abingdon pubs on the same day.
The Punch Bowl staff and landlady were friendly and welcoming as usual. In addition they offered free turkey and cranberry rolls, and warm mince pies to all the customers. The Morland Original I drank was in good condition and well served. Continue reading
We have now put our mobile Good Pub Guide into beta testing. If you want to try it then text the word GOODPUB to 87080 which will take you to the download site where you can obtain the java application for your phone. During beta testing it is free to use apart from your data transfer costs through your operator which should be fairly small compared to using web sites. This works on all major UK operators and on most handsets from the last few years (requires MIDP2 java ). By texting in you are agreeing that we can use your network operator to locate where you are so that we can search for pubs near you. The application shows details from the Good Pub Guide 2008 as well as maps.
I am making some cider at the moment. I have approximately 10 gallons (50 litres) brewing away. The juice was part of a bulk order from the nearby Millets farm which was split amongst members of our Oxford Brewing Group.
There is no recipe to speak of… basically I made some dried wine yeast (10 teaspoons) into a starter with a little brown sugar boiled in water and cooled. Pitched it into the apple juice in the containers I collected the juice in (food grade 5 gallon plastic). The next day it was fermenting out of the top and all over the floor… so I took it outside for a few days until it had calmed down.
I recently got a new (used) car (Vauxhall Zafira) and now am trying to sell my old one (Nissan Primera, 2.0 SLX). The new car is much bigger than the old one and more suitable for transporting the children around with a lot of luggage space and the potential for up to 7 people in the vehicle.
After reading an article in the Craft Brewing Association‘s magazine Brewer’s Contact which indicated that beer that is sparged too much may have some off tastes, I decided to try a bit of an experiment.
The plan was to collect two seperate runnings from the sparge, dilute the first runnings to match the second, and then treat both runnings the same in terms of hops, boiling, etc. Then to compare the tastes. Continue reading