Epic Adventure -- Day 1 -- 30/08/2012 -- Dubai

Just to give you a heads up, these blog posts about our trip are going to be written by both Jenny and I, so forgive the abrupt changes in tone, person and language =)

So yesterday at approximately 16:00 we locked the door to 23 Melbourne Place and posted the key back through the letter box, thereby ending our 2 year residence in that particular flat and our 4 year residence in St. Andrews. Peter Wood from Luvians was very kind and agreed to drive us to Glasgow airport to begin our 5-month long holiday/destination wedding/honeymoon/EPIC ADVENTURE (Jenny’s contribution =D). 

We dropped Cosmo off in Edinburgh before proceeding to the airport, very narrowly missing a traffic jam caused by an accident between junctions 5 and 6 on the M8 that would have certainly caused us to miss our flight. After arriving at the airport we proceeded to check-in where we were told that our hand luggage was too large and our bags were therefore overweight by 16kg. We had no choice but to repack our 4 bags into 3 and jettison nearly 7kg of goods in the airport bins (not an ideal start to the journey but it could have been a lot worse [or so I’m telling myself]). Because of the aforementioned delay we made it through security with just enough time to plough through a sandwich each before boarding the flight to Dubai. Normally I am used to air travel and often find myself dissatisfied but not angered by the endeavour. This flight was different though. Normally airlines keep the humidity to a minimum on flights for reasons I don’t know, they do however tend to refrain from setting the humidity to 0%. An experience uncomfortable enough to make my nose bleed in my sleep (what little there was) and after a rather restless 7 hours we touched down in Dubai at 7:45 local time, 4:45 UK time) this morning.

We met Jenny’s uncle Bob at the airport as he graciously agreed to give us a place to stay for our week in Dubai. It was quite a shock stepping out of the air-conditioned (Carrier brand units, not York unfortunately) airport into the 35C morning heat. One quite strange and sad sight that litters the airport car park are very sandy abandoned vehicles, left behind by the international residents from Dubai who had lost their jobs during the recession and couldn’t pay the bills anymore, so just up and left everything behind. The picture here shows a lot of these abandoned cars behind a police station, nicely juxtaposed with the shiny new cars a little further away!

 Bob took us back to his house within sight of the Burj al Arab on a drive that passed very close to the Burj Kalifa, further instilling my belief that Dubai is a city that you truly must see in person to appreciate. The first thing I did upon getting to the house was to open a beer, which was met with strange looks from Jenny and Bob as it was just past 8:00 in the morning but it felt like 14:00 to us so I let myself indulge. We relaxed at the house for an hour or so and then caught a ride with Bob to the Mall of the Emirates, one of the largest shopping malls in the world.

We ate a brilliant lunch, of sushi, crispy duck and  green Thai curry at Chop Chop, a restaurant right next to a window looking into SkiDubai (an indoor ski slope, a bit strange to step into -4C from 45C!) and watched  the latest Batman film in VOX cinema to unwind from a tiring day of travels.

Dan and I are now sitting on the grass outside Bob and Gillian’s house, having a braai, throwing balls for Lewis, their son, to catch and listening to the call to prayer. If you have never been to a Muslim country, that statement will pass you by without a thought but if you have been to one, you will know what an ethereal and atmospheric experience that can be, coupled with the intense heat and humidity, it really feels like this adventure has begun!

Diary of a Brewer: BrewMogs Black Puss*

Not long after starting my most recent job at 'Luvians Bottle Shop' in St. Andrews I became the one member of staff that was consulted on all matters pertaining to beer production. This is probably because I am the only member of staff that has ever taken part in the production of beer (as far as I know), and while other staff know more about the taste of certain beers they often turn to me for explanations as to why and how the brewing process imparts these tastes. 

The manager of Luvians, Peter Wood, was particularly interested in my brewing experience. Peter is running an event he has titled 'Forage a Feast' in which he gives himself one year to learn all the relevant skills, and barters for all the necessary items, in order to prepare a Christmas dinner for as little money as possible. As to date the one missing item from his Christmas menu was a beer and so he asked me if I could teach him how to brew. It had been a while since I had brewed a batch of beer at home and I was delighted to help. So one evening after work Peter came round for dinner and the brewing evening commenced.

Firstly, we had no recipe laid out beforehand. We did have at our disposable 2kg of pale malt extract, 1kg of dark extract, 2kg of pale malt, 500 grams roasted barley, 500 grams chocolate malt, HOPS, a bag of free coffee grounds, and ale yeast capable of fermenting to around 5-6% abv. Based on these ingredients we decided to make a coffee stout and started planning the recipe. To design the recipe we used ‘Brewmate’, a program that stores the colour ratings and fermentable sugar contents of many different malts and allows the user to change ratios of ingredients, thereby calculating the original gravity (OG) and final gravity (FG) measurements as well as the bitterness rating in international bittering units (IBU). Once we played around with grain ratios for about 20 minutes we decided on the following recipe:

1kg pale malt

500 grams roasted barley

300 grams chocolate malt

1kg pale extract

1kg dark extract

2 tablespoons coffee grounds

30 grams East Kent golding hops

We brewed following the basic instructions laid out in my previous post 'Example of Homebrew Instructions' with the addition of 2 tablespoons of coffee grounds during the boil, we were careful not to overdo the coffee and so collected a sample of the wort during the coffee addition and cooled it for tasting. After 9 days in the fermenter I bottled 46 x 500ml bottles. To top it all off Peter had a friend of his make labels for our beer mocking a company whose name is very similar to BrewMog..... controversial? I sure hope so.