Cracking beer, Grommet!

Over the weekend Alice and I bottled our new brew (which we've called "Sauce of the Nile").  In order to get the empty bottles ready for sterilising, I visited the cupboard where we keep all the beers - both empties and those being conditioned. There had clearly been a spillage, so I opened the boxes of Cleopatra's Asp (bottled on 15th April) to find an empty bottle stuck in the middle of the box. I lifted the bottle out and found this:

From what I've read about bottle bombs, this doesn't appear to be one. Even the cap is still firmly in place - it's just half of the bottle's base that has come clean off! No other bottles in the batch have any sign of problems and when opened are just nicely carbonated giving only a little hiss on and certainly not spraying everywhere!

I've asked on the homebrew forum for peoples' suggestions about what might have happened, and how we could avoid it happening again.  I was worried that the ambient temperature of about 30 degrees C caused problems, but explained that getting the beer any cooler for long-term storage isn't really possible without leaving the air conditioner running for months on end.  However, people don't seem to think that's the problem (although the heat does slightly increase the pressure in the bottle).

Instead, most people agree that it's a structural weakness in the bottle.  Now this itself is a bit worrying as all our beers are bottled in these bottles (Stella lager) and we don't really want to see 46 litres of beer on the floor!  This, however, is the only bottle that's had a problem and the half-moon of the base that has come away seems so perfect that I reckon only a structural weakness in this particular bottle could have produced it.


One suggestion is thermal shock, which is a possibility as we oven-bake the bottles to sterilise them, but since we let them heat up (and cool down) gradually is certainly not the perfect explanation.  I'm tempted to go with the suggestion that the bottle itself had been chipped or something, and we hadn't noticed it.  It only seems to have burst in the last few days since the cardboard box was still damp from the spillage, so it had survived 6 weeks without a problem!  I'm definitely concerned about leaving the bottles over the summer in the heat, but am being as optimistic as possible and hoping it was simply a one-off bad bottle.
 
I guess we could look into keeping them in the fridge, as it stays on all summer anyway...

Another general update

It's approaching the end of the year (only four weeks to go!) and so things are getting manic again.  Everyone is trying to pack in as much stuff as possible, and work continues apace with reports, exams, paperwork, etc. to sort.

We, as usual, are involved in everything.  We've only just finished the big gala dinner and we're starting to get ready for the graduation in a couple of weeks' time.  Friends are having parties (for birthdays and just-because) that we're going to, and we've still got one set of visitors with us and another set arriving in two weeks!

Earlier in the week we went downtown to met with Gordon G May, the author and adventurer who rode a 1952 BSA Bantam from Stockport to Cairo.  Check out his website at http://www.overlandtoegypt.co.uk/ for information on the journey, and to find a link to his blog.  It was my dad who told me about the project, and I was following him online when he made his first (failed) attempt in late 2009.  I sent him a couple of messages saying we'd be interested in seeing him when he made it to Cairo, he said he'd be in touch when he made it.  With his new attempt I again followed his blog, and was really pleased to get an email last week saying he was in Alexandria and would be arriving in Cairo the next day.  We arranged to meet the following evening, so headed downtown to the Windsor Hotel (an ex Officer's Club) to meet him and his bike, Peggy:

We initially had a cup of tea at the cafe opposite the hotel, where we spoke about a few things and got to know each other.  It turns out Gordon had lived for a while in Finsbury Park so knew Alice's area pretty well; he's since moved to Stockport so that gave me a connection to him as well.

In my email to him, we'd offered to show him around the area since we were quite close to Attaba, Mohamed Ali Street and Islamic Cairo - an area of Cairo we adore.  He was keen to give it a go, so we spent a really lovely few hours wandering around and chatting about all things under the sun.  He told us about the business he used to own in New Zealand for which he used to buy materials from SE Asia, so was really in his element in tent-makers' market.  We said how being in the old city at dusk is magical, and managed to baksheesh the guys in the beautiful Bab Zuwela to let us climb the minaret 2 hours after they should have closed, and view the panorama.  We went into Cairo's oldest fez workshop, dealt with the hawkers across the road, and ate at the Khan El Khalili restaurant.  Afterwards we took a taxi back to the Windsor, argued with the driver about the price, and got lost in the suit-making workshops off 26th July Street.  At least we now know where they are!  Throughout the evening we spoke about visiting Stockport, which prompted him to ask where exactly as he lives there. We told him about Eggnog and co, and it turns out his son lives in Romiley where they do.  He, he said, lives a few minutes down the road. "Not in Bredbury?" I asked, half jokingly (this being where Stu lives). He laughed - yes!  It really is a small world.

While all this was going on, it was the big Cairo football derby between Zamalek and Ahly, so we saw street cafes packed with guys watching the match on badly-tuned TVs.  We had a beer in the hotel bar before we headed home, but not before I'd chewed the cud with Gordon over some ways he could cool his poor 2-stroke engine.   We discussed the possibility of a solar-powered fan to blow a bit of air over it, or fashioning a kind of funnel to catch the air and channel it over the engine.  I can't wait to read the blog and see how he got on, especially as the temperatures here are getting quite high.

It was a truly wonderful evening, and one that happened by complete chance with a man who turned out to be the most fascinating, easy-going, and generally lovely blokes we could have met.  We really felt he appreciated us taking the time out to go and visit him and show him a side of Cairo he almost certainly wouldn't had seen if he had been left to his own devices.  Our local knowledge helped to point him in the direction of the used car parts market, which he was incredibly grateful for.  When he arrived in Egypt the border authorities scratched the paint off his frame number, and it turned out the 9 at the end of the number was actually a 0, meaning the number on his bike doesn't match his carnet.  He eventually managed to get across the border, but wanted to get a mechanic with number punches to redo the frame number to ease any future problems.  We're sure that somebody in the used car market will be able to help, and we're really pleased we were able to point him in the right direction!

Homebrew: Cleopatra's Asp

General update

Wow - what a few weeks.  Over the last month and a half I've been working on a mammoth musical task, producing a video of Lou Reed's "Perfect Day" for our school's 20th Anniversary gala dinner spectacular.  It required hours and hours of work recording, filming and editing over 500 people around school, but came out brilliantly in the end.  I'm a bit reluctant to link to it directly on the blog as the video hasn't been officially approved for wider-world viewing, but will try to get a copy to people who are interested in some form.

The show itself was enormous.  Imagine a football pitch, with a large stage on each corner.  On the centre spot is a fifth stage, which is linked to each of the four corner stages by a 25-metre runway:

The shot above shows the full scale of what was put on.  In the foreground you can see one of the six speaker towers we needed to use in order to provide sufficient coverage of the 'arena' without suffering too much delay.  Each side also had a projector screen to relay a mix of pre-recorded videos and live footage of the show.  On the ground, each stage looked like this:

The light and sound setup at each end of the arena was about the size of a stage at a small festival!  As a sound-geek it was absolutely brilliant to work with such a colossal setup, and get to play with some seriously nice kit.

Alice returned to her role as Stage-Manager-Extraordinaire for this show, and worked tirelessly to get every one of the 240 people taking part to the right stage at the right time.  It really was phenomenal to have achieved such a feat, and was without question the biggest show we've ever been involved in (and, somewhat sadly, will probably be the biggest show we'll ever do).

As respite from putting on this event, we also brewed 40 pints of cider for Dave.  His mum visited a few weeks ago and brought a John Bull cider kit, which we brewed for him using our equipment.  It's nice to have the fermenting bins and an insulated box to do it in - we're getting the hang of controlling the temperature using ice-packs and chilled water, and so successfully managed to brew the cider well below the ambient temperature of the sweltering heat of Cairo summers.  I'm still on the lookout for further insulation, though, and want to extend the box so that it completely covers the fermentation vessel.  At the moment the FV is a bit tall for the box so it's not completely enclosed.  A bit of an extension should fix it :)  Anyway, we bottled the cider a week ago and it's clearing nicely.  The sample we had left over from bottling seemed pretty good, but with some time to carbonate in the bottles and allow the yeast to settle out it should be quite a reasonable drink.  Advice on the web suggests mixing it with a bit of apple juice if it's too dry, but on first tasting it actually seemed to be okay.

This week we've welcomed Laura and Effie to Cairo.  They're out in Egypt for about 2 and a half weeks, and started off in Cairo.  Due to a delayed flight from the UK they had a very tight connection in Vienna, so their bags arrived a couple of days after them.  Fortunately the sausages were still cold so we've frozen those and look forward to a sausage-and-mash dinner sometime this week!

Along with many other goodies they brought out a Coopers Australian Pale Ale kit.  I run some adverts on my history revision website that pay me in Amazon vouchers, and there are some homebrew stores that allow you to buy from them using Amazon vouchers.  So, ultimately, my educational website pays for my beer!  Our previous brews had been 3kg kits, which come ready mixed apart from adding water and yeast.  This one needed sugar adding so we also got them to bring a bag of 'brew enhancer' which is a mix of dextrose and spray malt, and is said to taste better than straight brewing sugar and definitely better than white cane sugar.  Since the bottled cider had had nearly a week in the 'climate control' we boxed them up to settle, and started the Coopers over the weekend since we wanted to take advantage of the (relatively) lower weather temperatures at the moment.  It's ticking along nicely, so will be bottled in a week's time and then left over the summer to condition.  By the time we get back in September it should taste divine!

On Friday we went with Laura and Effie to the pyramids (Giza, Saqqara and Dashur), and on Saturday took them around Islamic Cairo and the Khan.  Although Alice took a school trip to the pyramids earlier in the year, this was my first time to actually stand beside them.  Even when we visited the Giza plateau in the September when we first arrived we only went to the Sphinx and didn't bother with the pyramids since we'd had a pretty rubbish day.  It was nice to finally go back, and not feel hassled by the hawkers.  I've found that our manner means they rarely bother us but if they do they give up quite quickly and target someone else.  "Ana mish eyes" (I don't want...) is a brilliant phrase: not as aggressive or rude as "imshi" (go away) but more assertive  than a simple "la" (no).  It confuses them, too, and usually just results in a "you speak Arabic well" rather than continued determination to sell us junk.  I liked following this up with "shukran, an aish henna, fil Ma'adi" (Thank you, I live here in Ma'adi) which really seals the deal and sees the hawker trotting off!  It was also our first time going to the tourist restaurant that Sayed has taken our other visitors too near Saqqara, and we were pretty impressed.  It's nice to know what we send people out to do!

Other random thought - Gad at Attaba is brilliant.  We first went with Matt and Becky when they were out here, and returned yesterday with Laura and Effie.  It's an Egyptian fast-food restaurant, but has a secret 'eat in' area out the back.  Three shawerma, two plates of chips, koshary, three cans of coke and a bottle of water...all for 50LE and within a stone's throw of our little walking tour around Islamic Cairo!

Fish and Chips Egypt