Home brew in Peru

I did my first brew on the weekend. It was almost a freaking disaster...

It's been a trail from day one. First I had my grain stolen by the cops at the border, so I had to get a second shipment smuggled in.

Next step was making my mash tun. Got hold of an old esky easy enough so I thought the rest should be easy too. It's been anything but. I decided to go with a slotted copper manifold in the mash tun, which I was able to make, although cutting 120 slots in the thing was a pain in the rear. Next step was to fit a tap to the esky, seemed easy enough. Take out the bung insert a 1/2inch brass thread and put the tap on one end and the manifold on the other. Well trying to find a brass thread was next to impossible. Couldn't get any kind of thread that would work, no where no how. In the end I found a little hardware place who had a brass tap with a thread about the size I wanted, and got him to cut it off for me. But then he had to spend half an hour filling the end of it so the nut could go on either end. It took me at least two weekends to get this far, I did waste a day with hangover so that was kind of my own fault. So got my thread home, fitted it all nice and tight into the mash tun, no leaks. Woo hoo.

Next step is crush my smuggled grain... Well as you know a two roller mill is going to give the best crush. But I haven't seen one of those around here, so I figured I would go with the Corona mill, from what I could find online it works ok, if you can set the gap between the plates large enough. Sounds easy enough. Well being a homebrewer I didn’t want to spend too much money so when the missus said her Mum had one we could borrow, I said “sweet”. So we got that sent up on the bus, I planned to do the crush on Saturday as I wanted to do it the day before as I had heard that these kind of mills left a lot of dust in the air and it didn’t want that to get into the brew. So down to the bus stop we go to pick it up, to find out they are closed. Have to come back tomorrow. By this stage I am starting to think that maybe it was never meant to be…

Brew Day. My attempt to get out of bed early and get things started didn’t go exactly to plan. But I was back down the bus station by 11am, got my mill and raced home to start my brew day. First problem for the day, I have 5kg bag of pilsen malt, the recipe calls for 4kg. I have no scales, I figure I just guess. Divide it into 5 equal looking piles and then mill 4 of them. Good enough. Lucky for me Milka had a better idea, we take the whole bag next door to the shops and ask the nice lady to weigh out 4kg worth, please. Then it’s back to the house and grind. By midday I had the mill all set up and operational, after a lot of tweaking with the space setting on the mill I got what I thought was a reasonable crush, probably a bit too fine, but not bad for a first effort.

Next step get it in the mash tun with the hot water and let it sit. Water. I figured the water in Cusco wasn’t the best so I would use bottled water. The plan was to buy a 20l bottle use the water then use the bottle for my fermenter. Perfect. In hindsight it would have been wise to order the water the day before. But I figured they deliver, so what the heck, do it on brew day, no worries. Well we (the missus) rang them, they said half an hour. This was about 1pm by 3:30pm I figured they weren’t coming and I was running out of time. So plan B, go down the shops and buy one there. Did that and an hour later I was heating up my mash water. At last things seemed to be going right. A bit late in the day to be starting the brew, but I wasn’t worried… I should have been. To speed things up I was heating my mash water in part on the stove and in part with the electric kettle. All good, chuck in my fancy new digital thermometer to check the temp and sweet it’s looking good. Then not so good, the thermometer is reading all over the place. I take it out of the water to check the temp of the room and apparently I am standing in a 60 degree kitchen (Celsius that is). Crap. I chuck it in the freezer to test it out, nope the freezer is reading 40 degrees, I am melting here!!! It’s dead. What to do. I need the water to be about 75 degrees, but I have no way of know what freaking temp it’s at. So I bung my hand in and go hmmm. Call the missus over for a second opinion, throw a little hissy fit “why is every thing so damn hard!?!?!”. And then decided bugger it, I either through the lot out and forget about it, or I chuck the water in with the grain and hope for the best. So in it goes, at god know what temp. I figured it was a bit cooler than it should be so I whack another jug of boiling water in for good measure.

So I spend the next hour tweaking with the thermometer, no joy, it is screwed. Hour is up, time to drain the wort from the mash tun. Now in a perfect world the wort should be sweet tasting. The soak in 66 degree water for an hour converts the starches in the grain to sugar, giving it the sweet taste, this is very important as it is the sugar that is converted to alcohol. No sugar = No beer. So the moment of truth will it be sweet or will I have to toss the lot… It’s sweet!!!! And the crowd goes wild!!! But how sweet? This is where normally you would use a hydrometer to check the sugar content of the wort. But I didn’t have one… I figured I could get by with out one, no worries. As there isn’t a home brew store in Peru, so it isn’t that easy to get one either, so this one isn’t entirely my fault.…

So on with the show. I batch sparge the grain in my mash tun. Basically dump in another 10l of water at 80 degrees (according to my trusty hand in the boiling pot technique) and let sit for another 15 mins, then drain. So at the end of this I have just under 20 liters of sweet wort. Time to boil. By now the time is somewhere after 7pm, but I can’t stop now, must keep going.

My boil pot is a 24 liter pot the mother in law bought us, Milka refused to let me drill a hole in the side and install a tap. Considering the problems I had installing one in the mash tun, that was probably a good idea. So on the stove it goes, it’s just big enough to cover two burners so I crank them both up and start cooking. It took another hour to bring it to the boil. Time to add my hops. Oh crap, still no scale, no way to weigh out 25 grams… No nice lady at the shop, it’s 8pm on a Sunday night, shop is closed. So it’s back to my piles method, I know I have 100 grams in the bag, just split it into 4 even piles and Bob’s your uncle, 25 grams. So into the boil goes my hops, an hour later it’s done. Now I need to cool it down. So I take the pot and stick it in the bath tub full of cold water for half an hour or so to cool it down. Then I need to drain it into my fermenter, problem now is I don’t have a tap in the brew pot, so it back to old fashion siphon method, with me sucking on the hose to get the flow started. After straining off all the gunk (hop crud), and swallowing about a liter (my siphoning technique needs some work) I end up with about 16 liters of wort, again with out the hydrometer I have no idea how strong this will be, but I decide to top it up with another 2 liters of water anyway. Bung in the yeast, shake like crazy and hope for the best.

The next day I wake up early and jump out of bed to check on my precious brew, there it is bubbling away nicely. It’s not the clearest looking beer I have ever made, in fact it is quite hazy due to the over fine crush, and I have no idea how strong or more to the point how weak it will be. But it’s bubbling, and I am happy. Next step bottling…

I have learned a few lesson from this experience. Number one, don’t start your brew day so late. By the time I finished it was 10pm and I still had to clean up the kitchen. Which I did do, well I gave it a go. And I forgot about the mill and all the dust that was in the other room… Luckily Milka cleaned all that up for me. Thanks Honey… Lesson two, order or buy you water the day before. Lesson three, find a hydrometer before I brew again. And lesson four, water proof the thermometer. Turns out from reading a few articles online that it doesn’t like being submerged in water, so I will have to waterproof the probe before the next brew day. I am sure there were a few other lessons in there as well, but I can’t remember them all…

I'm in the JUNGLE!!!

I'm in Iquitos, so far I've not done a great deal other than eat and sleep. And it been GREAT!!! Ok so I lie, I have done a few things. Check out more of my photos HERE

That's all for now, I am off to India soon.

Cheers
Zac

Alive and well...

Just a quick note to let everybody know I am alive and well after the recent earth quake here in Peru. Luckily I was in Cusco when it happened and didn't feel a thing.

Thanks to everyone who has emailed to check up on me.

Hey Mum! I was on the radio!

So how did I end up on the radio? And where?

Well the where is easy, Sucre - Bolivia. The why, is going to take a little be longer. So go get a cup of coffee, and I'll tell you all about it.

While I was in Sucre, we arranged for some of the group to go and visit a local school and hand out some gifts (pens, pencils and the like). Anyway the school is one of the poorer schools in the city of Sucre, and I was told it had 800 children. That's about all I knew. So we load up our bus and off we go. On they way out to the school, I give the guys a bit of a run down on what to expect and what's going to happen based on previous school visits I have been on. Normally what happens is we get met by the principal or some other official, who shows us around and tells us about the school, we visit a class or two to hand out the stuff we brought along, the class will usually sing a song or two for us, and then we are expected to sing something for the kids. Now this sounds pretty easy, but it almost always ends in disaster. Get a group of about 15 adults together and then give them about 30 seconds to come up with a song to sing and see what happens. If they are smart they will go with something simple like, Old McDonald or the Hokey Pokey (They call it the Oakey Cokey in England, don't ask me why), and they will normally do ok, for a verse or two and then it disintegrates into either everyone mumbling along looking around to see who knows the words or just straight out fits of laughter. So with this in mind I warned the guys while will on the bus that they might need to sing. So they spent a couple of minutes going over options and came up with 2. Yes you guessed it. Old MacDonald and the Hokey Pokey (we had a mostly Australian group). So the bus ride out spent practicing Old MacDonald, right up until the moment the bus got bogged...

Fortunately by this stage we were just down the road from the school. So we all piled out of the bus and walk down to the school. Where we were swamped by hoards of kids, all about waist high. It was all very crazy, and there didn’t appear to be much in the way of order. But we were led into the Directors office and introduced to the big boss, who proceeded to welcome us, in Spanish. Being one of the only ones to speak Spanish in the group I was left to translate his words of welcome on to the rest. Well he spoke at length for what seemed like 10 or 15 minutes without pause, I then turned to the group and translated his 10 or 15 minute welcome speech into a 30 second version. I am pretty sure I got it all in, well the important stuff anyway. We were then led back outside where a semblance of order had been restored by the PE teacher. I could tell he was the PE teacher cause he was wearing a blue tracksuit and had a whistle on a string around his neck, just like PE teachers everywhere. So the PE teacher got out the microphone and introduced us to the school, and then various students came up and performed in front of the school for us, singing a couple of songs. Except for being paraded in front of the entire school (about 600 not 800, though there only seemed to be about half of them present), everything was going pretty much as I had expected. The kids all then went back to their classrooms, well most of them, there still seemed to be heaps of kids running around, and we were led back into the directors office where we were given lunch. Potatoes and spaghetti, tasted pretty good too.

While we were tucking into lunch, Nela the lady who had organised the trip for us came up to me and explained that a reported had shown up, unexpected of course. So I am thinking reported = newspaper. But no, we go inside to chat with the guy and he is on the phone and I can hear him saying “Good morning” and explaining about the gringos visiting the school, so I lean over to Nela and ask her what’s going on. She explains to me that he is a reporter, for a Sucre radio station and he is going to do and interview with us. So I am doing my best to follow the Spanish and getting pretty lost, but fortunately Nela is doing most of the talking. Then I hear the guy introducing me and he hands me the phone and BAM! I am on the radio. I’m not sure if anything I said was understandable (you try giving a radio interview in a second language), but I told them where we were from, why we had come to visit, and explained what a wonderful opportunity this was for us all. I think I might have repeated myself a little bit, but it seemed to go over well.

After all this excitement we were then taken to visit a class room, where as predicted the kids sang for us, fortunately we didn’t have to sing anything back. Then we were led to the next class room, and then the next, and then I started to get the idea that we would be visiting every class in the school, and yes that was the plan. It wouldn’t be fair to leave anyone out. So we continued our tour of every class, some of them even stayed back at lunch time so we could come and say hello and listen politely as they sang for us. I am not sure how many classes we saw, I think at least 12, but I think there were are few more. By then end we were all exhausted, and a little relieved to get back onto the bus, which had be rescued from the mud by some of the kids or so I was told.

All in all, it was an amazing experience. I have visited a few different school here in South America but I will always remember that one, and not just cause I was on the radio….

I found Jesus, he was at the hairdressers!!!

I went for a haircut the other day, and got a dose of religion at the same time...

I decided it was time to get the hair cut, and I wanted to go short. But short with style, not some dumb bowl cut. So I went looking for the right place while I was in Curitiba. What is the "right" kind of place you ask? Well to start with, I was looking for someone with two eyes. Made that mistake before and got a cut throat shave from a one eyed man... Generally I get it cut by a dude, not sure why... I also wanted somewhere with a bit of style, not just a plain looking hair cut place... So I went out and found the campest looking hair dresser I could find and walked in (his name was Paulo, and he might not have been gay at all, but it was the look I was going for).

And this is where the fun began. My Portuguese is shite, my Spanish is average and my ability to describe what I want in the way of a hair cut even in English is appalling. I got as far as explaining I wanted it cut short, then we gave up and got out a magazine so I could just point to what I wanted. During the pre cut hair wash, we established that yes my name is Zac and yes it is from the Bible. So we begin, the dude is cutting away and trying to make the usual hair dresser small talk and finding the language barrier a slight problem. But we get past the "Ah you’re from Australia? Muchos Kangaroos?" and then onto the other classic South American question, "so are you Christian?"... Of course I go with the standard evasive answer of, well my family is (ha!), but I am not so sure... Now depending where you are this either goes over ok and they let it go, or they start asking "What?!?!?! How can you not believe?" Fortunately it seemed the Paulo was going to let me get away with this answer.

So he keeps cutting and I am thinking this looks alright, not as short as what I first thought I wanted but ok. Then he changes the scissors for some other kind of weird scissors and goes again, by now the hair is starting to pile up. And I am thinking, ok ok, I said I wanted a change... but did I really mean this short? So now it's about the shortest it's been in about 10 years. Ok so I realise that what I think of as short is probably still considered long for most. But hey work with me here, I have had it in a pony tail for about half of those 10 years.

So it looks like we are all done, and Paulo takes me back for the post hair cut wash. So we are washing washing washing and Paulo calls over a girl who works in the shop and they are having a little whispered chat, and I am struggling to follow the Portuguese. But it turns out she speaks English and Paulo has asked her over to translate for me. She tells me that Paublo would like to invite me to go to a meeting with them, and I am thinking ok what the hell is going on here, so I ask what kind of meeting, and she says in the Church on Sunday. And now I am thinking phew, I was a little worried for a minute there, the idea of being invited to church is a bit of a relief as I wasn't sure what was going on. But sadly I wont be able to as I am leaving town that day (true). So there is another rapid Portages exchange between her and Paulo and then she starts to tell me that with my biblical name (thanks Mum and Dad), I should already know this, but Paublo wants to tell me that nothing in life is chance, that everything happens for a reason and that God has a plan for all of us. The whole while this is going on, I am lying there trapped as Paulo washes my hair for me, there is no where to run to, and no where to hide. And after the initial thought of shite, what the hell is going on here, what have walked into, I started to think yeah, this all sounds pretty cool, these guys were really genuine and I think had I been around on Sunday I might have even gone to church with them. Maybe…

Now the point of this story isn't that I almost found God at the hairdressers, but that occasionally you meet people who open you eyes to the world around you. And that's what Paulo did for me. I am not a great believer, but I do sometimes like to think that things happen for a reason, it gives me hope.