Alcohol-Free Beer News

That’s alcohol-free, not free beer, thrill seekers.

Tesco have had a flurry of new-to-these-shores alcohol-free brews on the shelves lately, but I didn’t notice because I’ve been shopping elsewhere, so there’s good news and bad news on the lo-no alcohol front. Bad news first.

The first bad news is that my local Waitrose (Milton Keynes, though a small one will open in Buckingham soon) are very poor at this kind of thing. They do Becks, which is foul as we know, and they do Kaliber, which has been giving people headaches for 25 years, and they do Clausthaler, which is insipid. They also do one called Bavaria non-alcoholic beer, which has a decent caramelly taste, but (when I drank some recently) left me feeling actually dizzy, as if it had contained alcohol, and quite headachy. Not recommended. At all.

Moving on, the second bad news is on the Tesco front. They appear to have stocked a load of new stuff, including alcohol-free Stella, plus the Beck’s, the Cobra, the usual suspects, and Carling C2, which is 2% alcohol. I would try the C2, but can’t bring myself to because I loathe and despise their advertising (all that football and crap), so wouldn’t want to endorse their approach to market.

But the Stella is good. It’s clean, refreshing, thirst-quenching, and chuggable, which is everything I want in a non-alcoholic beer. No, you don’t get the famed “bite” of a real lager, but the news about the “bite”, folks, is that it’s from the alcohol. So fucking get over it, you will never get the “bite” with an NA beer. On the other hand, I’ve personally never enjoyed the bite, so sue me. I prefer it to be smooth and refreshing, with no headache, which is the perennial bug-bear of the NA beer. Unfortunately, after all that, Tesco have a DISCONTINUED sticker under the shelf with it on. Already. So they were clearly just trialing it. This is a shame, because it’s a toss-up between Stella and Cobra as to which (of the UK-available brews) I prefer.

But here’s the good news. Erdinger alcohol-free wheat beer. You know wheat beers? The ones with the little sediment of yeast in that makes the drink slightly cloudy, but very tasty? I enjoy them, but can’t drink them because of the guaranteed headache. So it was with some trepidation that I tried the non-alcoholic variety. Surely it would be a Kaliber-style experience: you stay sober but still get a rotten hangover?

Erdinger market their beer, amusingly, as an isotonic, low-calorie, vitamin enriched sports drink. Fewer calories than apple juice, they say. Exactly the right balance for quickly replacing fluids after exercise. Because of the yeast, loads of B-vitamins.

In use, it behaves almost exactly like the alcoholic version: creamy head, swirly yeast, slightly cloudy, familiar aroma. Taste? Clean, no bite, but smooth and refreshing with a hint of the wheat beer taste. I went for a bike ride and then drank a bottle straight afterwards. I’m not a great believer in the isotonic voodoo, so whatever. But no headache. That’s crucial. That means you can get home from work on a hot day, pull one from the fridge and chug it down without regretting it an hour later.

Needs to be stored upright for the full yeast experience, and there’s a knack to pouring it, but it’s really excellent. A more expensive option than the Cobra, but worth it for a treat.

Tift Merritt - Radcliffe Centre, Buckingham, May 10 2008

Photo by Jason Bechtel.

Occasionally when I go to a gig, there’s an issue with the sound. Sometimes it’s just plain bad (Dylan at the NEC); sometimes it’s too loud (any local band in any local venue); sometimes the acoustics are wrong. You’d think that a venue like the Radcliffe Centre (it’s a church, basically) would have some of these issues: a very high ceiling, with beams, tall windows, quite a few hard, reflective surfaces; somehow it doesn’t. Perhaps the beams in the ceiling help to diffuse the soundwaves; clearly the long curtains at most of the windows (though some were just hanging, having fallen from their mountings) helped, too; the fact that there were people in there (big sacks of absorbent water), also contributed.

Anyway, on both occasions that Tift Merritt has played this venue (previously in December 2005), she has remarked on what a great place it is. The grand piano on stage clearly turned her head, but she was also tempted (both times) to step out from behind the microphone and sing without amplification, just because she liked the way the place sounded. Needless to say, you could have heard a pin drop.

The audience last night were freakishly polite. There were a few young kids there, including our two, but on the whole it was the usual crowd of grey hairs, bald heads, and beer bellies. This shouldn’t stop Tift Merrit (born 1975) from appealing to a younger demographic, but this was Buckingham on a Saturday night.

Merritt is one of only two artists I’ve ever seen brave enough to step out from behind the mic (the other is Jonathan Richman), and it says something about her as a performer that she was keen to do this, and as keen as possible to take advantage of the venue’s grand piano, scanning her set list for songs she could play at it.

She played most of her new record, Another Country, with a couple each from Bramble Rose and Tambourine. Although she had at least one of her band with her (Zeke Hutchings, the drummer), she played the set entirely solo, with Zeke acting as the waterboy/roadie. She played one acoustic guitar, which she tuned herself, and she played harmonica in a holder, and she played the grand. Support act Jaymay also played the piano, but the difference in the sound produced by Tift Merritt was apparent. She brought the instrument to life, and pumped away with the foot pedal to add rolling dynamics to her playing.

So quiet were the audience that you could hear her foot tapping on the floor, as last time, keeping time, which was fantastic. From a recording you want one thing, from a live performance, something else. Merritt is one of those artists whose records - while great - capture but a tiny percentage of the power in the voice. Catch her if you can.

She’s playing Edinburgh (The Pleasance) tonight; Rescue Rooms, Nottingham on Monday, National Centre for Early Music in York on Wednesday, then Chorley and Newcastle before flitting off to Paris and other parts of Europe. See MySpace for full details. Still, it’s unlikely that any of those places will be a church with a grand piano and great acoustics.

Something Old Something Flue

room_with_a_flue, originally uploaded by mcmrbt.

The woodburner is in. The installation coincided with the best weather of the year so far.

The job is far from complete, so we won’t be paying for it yet. They’ve got some making good to do where the old gas fire was removed, and they need to fit some lead flashing around the flue at the roofline (they brought the wrong size).

It sits on a nice slab of granite in the corner and looks impressive and modern. Doubtless in the winter I’ll take some photos of it in action. I will try not to wish the summer away.

At the moment I’m still mostly posting over at my photo blog, which is my new thing.

I had a moment this morning, when I paid this month’s (larger than usual) credit card bill (due to car service etc.), when I realised that I’m going on holiday this month, before pay day, and I don’t have any money left.

In other news, my teaching load is about to get very light indeed, as my year 11 and year 12 students go off for their exams. It means around 10 less teaching hours per week, which is about half of them.

Shy and Retiring

Given the state of the railways (signal problems at Bletchley), I think I’m lucky to have travelled both to and from London today for an exam board meeting.

The weather is better today than it was over the bank holiday, but that didn’t stop me from firing up the barbecue. I love eating at this time of year, because I revel in the simplicity of a bit of grilled meat/fish, some home-made bread and a salad or two.

I made three batches of great bread this weekend (including focaccia - three Cs or four?), and just grilled stuff like sausages, weenies, and burgers. I also did some fantastico caramelised onions to go with the weenies.

At the moment I’m more inclined to blog at my photo blog, due to the novelty of the thing. I started by just putting up photos, but it’s already evolved to involve pictures and stories to go with them. Today’s entry, then, is just like a Maximum Bob entry, but with a bigger and more personal photo. My dilemma is that the excellent Monotone WordPress theme, while being superb for photo-blogging (each page chooses its background colour based on your photo), but doesn’t support a sidebar with links and so on, so I can’t just jump ship and become a full-time photo blogger.

Now that’s what I call quite wood

This is the view from my kitchen window, now I have built a log store. I looked around the web, and various places were charging ridiculous money for a wood frame with a top on it, none of them really big enough, so we decided to build our own.

Tesco were charging £150 for this, which looks okay, but is only 1.7m high and 1.5m wide, with a depth of 65cm.

I designed one using Sketchup:

The measurements were guesstimates, because I found it quite hard (first time I’d used the software) to make the components resemble the real-world items I’d be buying. Still, I had a good idea of what I needed and how it would fit together. Having built a virtual model, I found I could construct the real thing in an afternoon.

It may not be the greatest piece of craftsmanship in the world, but it is about 2m tall and 1.8m wide, with enough depth for two rows of logs. More pics are on Flickr, so click the link on the photos to see more. The logs inside are the ones we got from chopping down trees (a conifer hedge that I hated) in the front garden. We won’t burn most of them till Winter 2009/10, so I’ll buy some seasoned hardwood for use next winter.

In other news, I’ve started a photo blog, using a new WordPress theme called Monotone, which adjusts the colour of the page to match the tone of the photo. I’ve uploaded a few photos to get started, and will add others from time to time. I might prefer this to Flickr, which I find irritating for reasons I’ve previously mentioned. The latest annoyance happened the other day, when some bloke left a comment (note: not even a polite private message) more or less demanding that I send him a higher-resolution version of a picture so he could use it.

Now, photos of mine have been used by others on occasions, a couple of books, but the person involved has always sent me a private message and asked permission. I appreciate that English is not the first language of perhaps the majority of Flickr users, but manners are manners all over the world. Needless to say, I did not respond. In fact, I deleted the comment, and blocked the person, putting him in the same category as all the pervs I have blocked on Flickr.

Barbecue Breads, a public service announcement

Standard supermarket burger buns are stodgy, cardboard-like and unpleasant. The same is true of hot dog rolls. I previously blogged about using Warburton’s Milk Roll (toasted) as a good alternative for burgers, but today I made my own buns, and quite successful they were too.

For Burger Buns

8oz Pasta Flour (I used Doves organic)
8oz bog-standard strong white bread flour
1tbsp Freebake dough improver (this is half what you’d use for a wholemeal type loaf)
1.5 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
1 sachet Freebake easyblend yeast
1/4 pint milk, heated to just short of boiling in microwave
1/4 cold water, to make 1/2 pint liquid with milk, and cool milk to correct temperature.

(The correct temperature for the liquid is just a little bit warmer than your hand.)

Add the dry ingredients to the mixer bowl, and start to mix on slowest speed using a dough hook. Add the liquid and when it has mixed in (the mixture should be on the sticky side), double the speed of the mixer and leave running for 5 minutes.

Leave the dough to rise in the bowl in a warm place (oven on at this point, around 200°C in a fan oven).

When the dough has doubled in size, oil a worksurface, and empty the dough from the bowl onto the surface. Gently compress and then (with oiled hands) shape into rolls. I made 8 quarter-pounder size rolls with this batch. Shape the rolls, and then flatten them to about the height of a crumpet on your (oiled or non-stick) baking tray. Cover with a clean cloth and leave in a warm place to double in size. You could at this stage brush with egg and coat with sesame or poppy seeds, if you like that kind of thing.

Cook in the oven for about 15 minutes, or until they look brown and sound hollow when tapped. Because they’re coated in oil, the crust is nice and crispy, but the milk makes the crumb soft and just the right kind of chewy. Pasta flour adds a warm golden colour.

For Hot Dog Rolls.

A similar recipe, but this time using Italian 00 (I used an organic one from Waitrose) instead of the pasta flour. Same amount of heated milk and water, but also add an egg for extra stickiness and flavour. This dough is just slightly more sticky than the burger bun dough.

When you shape the rolls (again on an oiled surface with oiled hands), this time roll them into sausage shapes, getting them as smooth-looking as possible. Length is up to you. I keep them fairly short because my kids can’t eat huge quantities of bread. Don’t place them too close on the baking tray, or they’ll all blend together.

Leave to double in size, or even bigger if you forget about them for a bit, then cook in oven (on 200°C, fan oven, or 220°C for a conventional) for about 13-15 minutes. Cool on a rack. Some people can’t resist them warm, but I actually think they’re better when completely cool but still fantastically fresh.

The texture should be light and fluffy, with the golden hue from the egg yolk. Fantastic with frankfurters or sausages, or just scarfed down with butter when fresh.

New Offside Rule Proposal

Chief footie referee Keith “Hack it” Hackett has opined that the BBC’s Match of the Day pundits don’t understand the offside rule. I have long thought it the case that most of the pundits on TV and radio don’t understand most of the rules of the game, which is why they perpetually complain, “He went for the ball”, when Duane Gobshite glides in horizontally with his studs showing and gets a yellow card for his trouble. “That was a harsh decision, Alan.”

Anyway, the source of the offside confusion is the is he or is he not interfering with play conundrum. This is a difficult one, when combined with the give the attacking side the benefit of the doubt policy, because it involves holding two ideas in your head at the same time. Some teams have taken to distracting the goalie during set pieces, a tactic learned at the under-7s Sunday League, which you have to say ought to constitute interfering with play.

Anyway, Lawro was giving it some on 5Live, opining that the assistant referee’s job is harder than that of the referee, at which point I had an idea. They should just do away with the offside rule altogether, allowing strikers to hang around wherever they want. The quid pro quo on this should be that the goalkeeper is allowed to punch the (would-have-been-offside) striker in the face. As long as he’s “going for the ball”, of course.

Time-Warp Techno-Thrillers

I’m reading a book called Gridiron at the moment, by Philip Kerr. It was published in the mid-90s, and is a thriller set in a “smart building”, stuffed with supercomputers which run an artificial intelligence.

I love reading stuff like this that tries desperately to be super-up-to-date and spot-on-authentic, but ends up quickly dating itself. Another great example is Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, his office sexual politics thriller, which has ultra-fast CD ROM drives as its techno background. Mind you, almost any Crichton thriller is good for techno time-warp, and I love seeing the Apple Quadras in the Jurassic Park film. 68040 chips ahoy!

The CD ROM features strongly in Gridiron, too. The security system in the building is supposed to record onto them (”They hold 700 megabytes.”), but the machine delivered was the wrong spec - only double-speed, instead of the mind-bogglingly fast quad speed. Even better than this, the security system itself uses Video8 cameras. Quality.

It’s sweet, really. If you want to write about technology without getting out of date, you basically have to invent something that seems impossible or outlandish. As Arthur C Clarke said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I don’t think quad-speed CD ROM drives were magical for very long, even in 1996.

I would actually love to write a techno-thriller in which all the technology is 10 years out of date. I would set it in a school.

Txt chat msg

I was trying to talk to my students about being engaged and active consumers of media today, and a few of them started to talk about stuff that annoys them about stuff, but on the whole they’re a remarkably passive bunch. I don’t know what it is, but whenever I hear talk about “media savvy” kids or “the impact of new media”, I don’t recognise the students I teach. They’re about as “savvy” as a day-old puppy.

A lot of them have MyFace/SpaceBook/Bebo pages, but mostly they seem to use these sites for chat and yet more chat. Their involvement with new media stretches as far as MSN Chat and anything that resembles it, however slightly. The colossal waste of time represented by throwing a sheep at someone on SpaceFace, or having a one-sided conversation in the comments section on MyBook doesn’t seem to enter their thinking.

This afternoon I was forced to delete some stupid comments from one of my Slideshare presentations that had been left there (clearly) by a GCSE class somewhere up in Nottinghamshire. Obviously their teacher had found my presentation, hooked his/her class up to a computer suite, and let them access it for a lesson. So of course they spent the afternoon posting rude comments about each other. They see a comment box, and that’s what they do: call each other names, just like they do at home on MSN.

Thanks to BoingBoing, I read today a long and very interesting article by Clay Shirky on the notion of “cognitive surplus”. What he means is that - due to the increased leisure time created by the industrial and technological revolutions - people have over the past 100 years or so had a lot more time. They could have spent this time thinking and coming up with ideas and being creative, but instead of that they’ve generally passively consumed media, sinking massive quantities of time and head-space into popular media formats such as the sit-com.

Now, I recognise that unreconstructed old media are running scared and do have a tendency to trivialise the things that people choose to do with their time that do not involve passively consuming media. So there’s a tendency (not wholesale, but common enough) to sneer at RPGers and Wikipedia editors/writers and bloggers, too. That question, “Where do people find the time?” is laden with value judgements.

Then again, I think about my students, and I don’t see a generation that’s usefully using a so-called cognitive surplus. They’re slaves to their mobile phones and their ipods, and they use the internet to chat incessantly, but they’re not thinking very much about all the technology they have, or coming up with new things to do with it, or becoming active and creative, involved with anything that doesn’t involve somebody (else) producing something for them to consume.

Use less fuel - drive like a christian

I had cause to drive down to outer London at the weekend for a family party, and recorded a cool 53 mpg for the journey in my diesel estate. My bro-in-law arrived in his similarly-sized car, and when conversation turned that way (we were discussing the shocking price-per-litre at the moment - I’d paid £1.20), he confessed to only getting 44 mpg.

Now, 44 mpg isn’t too bad in its own terms, and a lot of people get less than that, but it struck me as we were talking that I used to get about that (in the same car), too: but then I started driving like a christian. Your car’s “combined” fuel consumption figure might be close to 50 mpg, but you might wonder - like my bro-in-law - why you don’t get anywhere near that.

The turning point for me came when I was filling my car around twice a week, and I adopted more economical driving habits. I don’t drive around like a pensioner, you understand. I don’t dawdle along at 40mph, no matter what the speed limit. I still like to accelerate, and I love the challenge of a bendy road (there are lots round here). I do the speed limit, but I don’t exceed it, except by a little on the motorway.

The challenge in this kind of driving lies in being able to anticipate the road ahead so that - crucially - I rarely have to use my brakes. Everytime you use your brakes, you transfer kinetic energy into thermal energy. In effect, you burn fuel in order to heat up your brake pads and disks. Being able to anticipate the road ahead is something that new and younger drivers find tough to do, which is why so many people have accidents in their first few years if driving. Not using your brakes is not about taking silly risks but about avoiding risky situations by seeing them coming.

Top tips for an extra 7-10 mpg:

• Air conditioning: unless it is actually hot outside, turn it to the ECON setting, which means it’s off. This instantly saves 4-6 mpg. I set my climate control (on ECON) to 20°C when the temperature outside is below that figure. When the temperature outside is 20° and above (which means, due to greenhouse effect that it’s hotter inside the car than that), I do turn on the air-con, but set the temperature to 22°C. This keeps the car comfortable without making the system labour. It also prevents air-con sore throat, which happens when you let the fans blast you in the face.
• Imagine you are on a bicycle. When you go down hill on a bike, unless you’re punishing yourself or are in a race, you freewheel. Freewheeling (staying in gear, engine on, foot lifted) in a modern diesel means using no fuel at all. Lift your foot when going down a gradient, and also when approaching junctions, traffic lights, or the back of a queue. This keeps brake use to a minimum, and also means when slowing down you use no fuel.
• Keep your distance. Tailgating the driver in front is not only cuntish behaviour, but it restricts your view of the road ahead and your ability to anticipate situations. Giving yourself a cushion between you and the car in front means that when you see the brake lights go on, you can get away with just lifting your foot off the accelerator.
• There is no excuse for brakes on roads you know, unless other traffic is causing you to brake. You know where the junctions and bends are, you know where the 30- and 40-mph zones are, so lift your foot, drop a gear, and drive properly. Going into a bend at the right speed means no braking, and means you get step on the gas and accelerate out of the bend as if you know how to drive. Look at your speedo the next time you corner (safely) and note the speed: this is the speed you should be doing when you go into the bend. I see so many people braking in the middle of bends: this is not only wasted fuel, but also potentially dangerous.
• Use the gears. Modern engines use more fuel when labouring. Drop to 3rd gear in 30-mph zones, 4th gear in 40-mph zones, and drop a gear or two for slow bends. I often skip from 3rd to 5th when changing up. Can you easily skip from 4th to 6th in a 6-speed car? I don’t know.
• Don’t charge your phone or otherwise draw power from the 12v socket. If you charge your phone, you will lose 2-4 mpg.
• Think ahead. Are you just accelerating very fast towards the back of a long queue in which you will run in 1st gear? Why not minimise the time you spend in the queue instead? Drive smarter, not faster.
• It’s not a race. No, really, it’s not. Drivers in Milton Keynes tend to race each other down the dual carriageways up to the next roundabout. All that accelerating and braking is a shocking waste of fuel.

That is all. Or is it?