It has been a while since my last note here, been a very busy period. Basically, we have found a brewery location that we like and are able to buy (the owner is eager to sell), however we have concerns about the strength of the land supporting the foundations of the building (just the frame/skeleton as the floors have none).

The area was previously affected by floods, which now should no longer be a thing, and the warehouse has subsided by about 20cm on one side. We are discussing it’s safety and options for securing the foundations with various engineers and should soon be in a good position to make a decision and return to the negotiation table.

We are also considering a new build on a different plot in the village just in case this warehouse is not safe. However, we both really want the warehouse to work out.. it will be like a 3 minute walk from our future house! So I am slowly transferring funds over to Japan in the hope that we can close this deal over the next month or two.

On our flights to Hokkaido I designed, and we tweaked a tartan which I think we are going to register as our brewery’s official tartan.. because.. why not?

We are off to Eastern Hokkaido for a business trip for a few days as of tomorrow morning.. if we are lucky we are looking at a max temp of 0°C so that’ll be nice..

Felt my first earthquake today, it wasn’t overly strong but nonetheless unsettling. It is somewhat of a surprise that I’ve spent almost 3 years in Japan (over various visits etc.) that this is the first time. Lasted about 20-30 seconds, of gentle shaking, most folks were unperturbed, but my wife looked pretty rattled.

Happy to wait another 3 years or more for the next, thanks.

There is a Shogun movie coming out in 3 days time?!?!?

Right then, time to watch the original TV series! It is after all probably the reason I eventually ended up living in Japan.

Well our youngest daughter has tonight learned how to say “please, Papa” , so that’ll be game over then.

After waiting for months for my wife to have time to cut my hair, I have this evening, the day before my 47th birthday decided to commit to long hair.

If I unfurl one of the fire locks it now reaches under my chin, my hair is pretty curly so it doesn’t necessarily look as long as it is but for the first time we were able to tie it up at the back and it isn’t an unpleasant look. It needs a few more months before the sides can be tied into so I maintain a straggly rogue-like appearance, which is a little different than the full on barbarian look that I have been wielding of late..

.. it remains to be seen how my DPS fairs but I am looking forward to my enhanced stealth skills.

I am currently reading a book on craft beer packaging design and trying to design templates or drafts for a proper designer to interpret once we are happy with the general look and layout etc.

The core beers will have some sort of vector art landscape background (Scottish or Japanese themed) on the label and I have been trying to simplify the logo and info panels. Definitely making forward progress. However..

My wife, whilst being happy with the general designs asked a good question. Do the designs highlight the inclusive ethos we want our company to be based upon and I guess they partially do (they highlight that they are vegan and gluten-reduced) but I am wondering how we can incorporate inclusion for groups of people. Obviously we could use the colours of various pride flags for different designs and it is one option of course..but I think we could do more. We could include images of varied people within the label design but hoping to keep the design somewhat uncluttered.

So, does anyone have any recommendations on good websites or literature on inclusive graphic design? I’ll also search of course but would be grateful for suggestions from more knowledgeable folks than me.

A very short post on the Visit Kochi website about our aspirations. It feels nice to be included despite not yet having achieved anything of substance.

We Are Kochi-ke: Jon Kelbie

Just checked the Visit Kochi draft about me, it’s short of course, it’s a FB/Instagram post but it feels good to be included as part of the ‘We are Kochi-ke’ series.

Kochi-ke basically means the Kochi family, Kochi being the name of the prefecture where we live.

This is the spiel from the Visit Kochi website is ’ “We are Kochi-ke (Kochi family)” is all about highlighting the stories of the people who make us proud to call Kochi our home. Whether you are living in Kochi now or only visited once, you are part of the Kochi family.’

It’s a short piece about me living here and chasing my dream to become a brewer, and has some nice pictures that our friend Aiko took.

My wife wants to study for a Japanese beer qualification in an effort to learn more about beer, it’s core ingredients, production processes etc. She also wants me to do it, despite my own qualification somewhat superceding it. I agreed as I definitely need to improve my Japanese, especially in relation to beer and brewing. Also studying together will give me practice talking about it in Japanese.

There are 3 levels, and we are going to study for levels 3 and 2. Level 1 is unnecessary, it involves writing sections and I don’t have time for that level of study again but from levels 3 and 2, I should be able to more effectively talk about brewing in Japanese.

So, I spent about an hour or so fiddling with my once presumed dead kindle to wipe it and align it with my JP account. Bought the text book for the course and spent about 4 hours slowly reading through the first chapter of the first part. It is only 5 pages long but I am very rusty so much of it was looking up new kanji, noting the readings and key points. I am now ready to study this part with my wife..

This is the part that doesn’t appear to be considered.. 4 hours for 5 pages.. during February we will study chapters 2 and 3 of part 1, that’s 43 pages.. based on today, that’s about 35 hours of study on top of us studying together, March is the biggest month at 44 pages.. there will be repetition of kanji and I will become less rusty but.. it is pretty daunting.

Just composed an email to a brewer way up in Hokkaido to introduce myself and to ask if we can visit for a chat.

This chap built his brewery in the gym of an unused former elementary school.. and he received masses of government funding to do so. Reading some interviews and learning about his setup, his brewery is MUCH bigger than we ever plan to be but seems fascinating as the gym building looks about the same scale of the two gym halls that we are currently considering (read: perpetually waiting to hear about) both of which are also attached to unused former elementary schools.

Anyway, it will be the furthest, most rural and certainly coldest brewery that we will have visited, should he agree.

Also completed paperwork, just awaiting checking by my wife, to seek approval for a business trip to the Shizuoka prefecture. It is jam-packed with breweries and has a very vibrant craft beer scene. Exciting times!

A thought just crossed my mind..

.. as someone who may at some point in the future have a brewpub

.. as someone who would like some live music events on occasion at said brewpub

.. as someone with over a decade and a half of working in pubs, most of which had live music

.. as someone who loves karaoke and has been known to sing with some bands at pubs he worked at in the past..

.. as someone who owns an acoustic guitar, though doesn’t know how to play it.. yet..

.. maybe I can line up a gig or two for myself, on occasion..

Now, when I should be sleeping, I am thinking about what a set list might look like.. most of the bars I worked in were (varying degrees of) Irish and so was the music.. I can think of many Irish songs to fit the bill which is fine, my heritage includes Irish lineage.. but I want to have more Scottish songs.. I have some ideas but want to shift responsibility to you so that I may sleep..

.. so, throw your acoustic suitable Scottish song suggestions at me!

.. incidentally, I have sang both Caledonia and The Braes o’ Balquhidder, acapella at a university event in Okayama many years ago.

This evening there is a small craft beer fare with the 5 breweries from the prefecture getting together to launch a brewers association.

Afterwards, the brewers are all getting together to have drinks for the first time.

As you are all aware, I am not yet a brewer as the location securing challenge is immense here. Regardless, one of the brewers invited me to the event and post-event drinks. Subsequently, the other brewers shared their enthusiasm for us to come along.

.. enter the 18 month old daughter who has an uncanny ability to cause sleepless nights immediately before days which require more energy..

Excited to be invited to the inaugural event despite not yet being a fully fledged member of the brewing family but by jingo am I tired.

I really need to get better at writing a daily activity diary for work purposes. I need to submit such a document, in Japanese, to my department head each month and trying to remember everything and piece it together from emails and LINE messages is tough!

The new year family gathering is without a doubt the most challenging event of the year, but I did better than last year when it came to (difficult) conversations and it only took several tonnes of terrible beer to pierce the language barrier..

.. I want to make beer that is easy to talk about despite the language barriers.

Getting closer to Hogmanay, perhaps the only day of the year that I feel vaguely homesick. I miss night time celebrations and bringing in the bells with friends. No real point in me staying up to bring in the new year here.. I will be the only person awake.

My wife just asked my daughter what day her nursery Christmas party is on.. and yep, that’s right, it’s on the 25th, a full school day..

As he sleepily sauntered through the frigid void that exists between the partition of the room where they sleep and the partition where the live, his tired eyes fell upon some clothing atop the chest of drawers.

The long John bottoms eyelessly peered back and nodded, motionlessly before, in a surprisingly gravelly non-voice suggested that “It is time”.

His legs though humbly grateful for the additional warmth knew that it was merely a marriage of necessity and stoicly resolved to endure the additional itch burden they would experience in the months to come.

Reaching out towards the marl grey thermo-regulated undergarments he returned the nod and ceded, “It is time, it IS time.”

We had maybe our last or at least second last design meeting with one of the construction companies we are in discussions with.. should find out how little they remember about our stated budget and how far our endless reconfigurations made that stated budget nonsensically inadequate.. fun times!

One of the (minor) contributors to my decision that I was ready to move to Japan was that Christmas is a lip-service only event here, not laden with the debt-ensuing pressure of buying mountains of gifts so that your kid isn’t bullied (mileage may vary, that’s what it was like for our neighbourhood when I was a kid).

As an example of how it’s not actually treated as a special event, just a low key commercial opportunity for retailers, my wife and I have been requested to attend health checks on the morning of the 25th. Pretty sure we had our annual check ups earlier in the year so don’t need to attend but regardless, it’s just another work day.

Finished reading a book about farmhouse ales today, completing a series of books on sour beers, wild beers and farmhouses.. and I now know my long game aged sour beer approach and have formulated a saison recipe (in my head) to add to my slowly evolving theoretical repertoire.. sure would be nice to have a location for our brewery sorted soon so that we can move towards a point where I can actually make these beers..

For the meantime moving onto a book which I have had for ages but wanted to read after the aftershock of intense studying for my postgraduate course had died down.. all about yeast, 50+ pages down this afternoon and mainly just revision at this point, interesting though.

I have a list of 18 brewing books I am awaiting subsidy approval on so I really should make efforts to get through the ones I previously bought through the subsidy.. probably about 70% done with them though.

My eldest daughter’s first milk tooth has broken free from its gummy domicile.. in this part of Japan there is seemingly an old tradition where you throw teeth from your lower jaw on to the roof of your house and those from the upper jaw, under the house.. for luck, I guess.. apparently it has been decided that this will be happening..

.. all the while I am silently sitting here, wondering how I can somehow switch it with something so I can keep my firstborn’s first tooth as a keepsake..

I just implemented auto-translations of my English notes using the DeepL API and now I can’t think of anything interesting to write! 😅

I have given my site a small overhaul, adding fediverse commentary, switching out an ever growing and ugly category cloud with a list of breweries we’ve visited here and manually updated the Japanese side of the site to bring it up to date..

As a result I have written a working script to query the DeepL API for auto-translate of short form messages.. I just need to scale the mountain that is the micropub server in order to integrate it.

I will start with only notes, and the process will be that when a new note is posted via micropub a duplicate Japane Hugo template will also be created and the content will be sent to the DeepL API for translation..

Eventually, I’d like to add photo posts but this will require translation of the alt tags too which is slightly more complex than I fancy for the initial phase.

I don’t blog often but long form posts will remain manually translated.

Today is a day of enigma unravelling as I try to find a suitable power and frequency converter to allow me to buy the fermentation control chillers that I want for our brewery.. there are 4 key requirements..

1. It must be able to convert the frequency from 60Hz to 50Hz
2. It must be able to step the power up from 100v to 230v
3. It must have the capacity to run 3 chillers (eventually) continuously, supplying each with 1380 watts
4. It must be able to handle up to 30 A output.. I am a little unclear on whether this is per cooler.

Finding sites selling transformers and sharing all of this information is challenging.. and most of the time they only satisfy 2 of the 4 requirements.. anyway, I’m not yet frustrated! 🙂

Made my 4th or 5th stew of the season and they are getting pretty good! Really fresh vegetables from the Kochi Sunday Market and the Kochi Organic Market contributed to a very colourful and tasty dish.

Lacking vegan convenience foods has really upped my cooking game!

I see a number of folk are using mastodon as a static blog commenting tool and I might have to look into that and see if it would work with the GoToSocial api (I think it would).. pretty sure that my syndication scripts already pull the relevant post URIs and would be easy enough to deploy as a replacement for cactus comments.

Not sure exactly when this will happen but I am intrigued..

At a local event today, just enjoying some craft beer from my friend’s brewery and faced with an encouraging choice of vegan food (3 stalls!), when a lady walks up to me and introduces herself.

She knows who I am and seemingly all about me. It turns out this lady is the head of the prefectural government department in charge of bolstering tourism related businesses in the area. Not only that but she is very excited with regards to our plans.. this is a very good sign.

We received some advice on how we might best position ourselves for some prefectural funding..

Good craft beer, vegan food and funding advice are all rare in these parts on their own.. in combination must be unheard of.

Sometimes the non-availability of ingredients that I took for granted in Scotland, in this corner of rural Japan is a shade frustrating.. 3 supermarkets on a hunt for sun-dried tomatoes and this far empty handed.. I didn’t even try the supermarket in our village as it is only stocked with Japanese staples.

Both of my girls are currently into Lego.. as was/am I.. but neither are ready for a star wars introduction.. I hope this phase doesn’t pass by the time they are.. there is no way I can justify these prices just for me..

Sampled 4 beers tonight, 3 shared with my wife.. 2 non-IPA Japanese craft beers from recommended breweries, a Guinness and a low alcohol (<0.5%) IPA from somewhere in America..

.. the low alcohol beer was by some margin my favourite of the 4.. we have 2 other low alc beers from the same brewery and 6 more (4 varieties) from a Scottish brewer (though they appear to have been brewed in Belgium)..

Legitimate research and off to a better start than expected.

I am really loving Baldur’s Gate 3. I mean I am taking a very long time to progress because I am creating a whole abundance of character builds and having a blast. Only near the start of Act 2 with my main campaign so still lots of adventuring to do.

The last time I played a similar game was probably Icewind Dale which I remember playing with my old flat mate @lesault@infosec.exchange over LAN but I don’t recall how far into that game we got.

If I was in Scotland I would definitely be trying to get my gaming friends into a regular multiplayer game but not something that I could see working from Japan. I do know a few gamers here though so will try to see if there is any interest.

I have set myself a new mini-project (though I suspect it will develop into a fairly major project), to unravel the mystery of whether gluten-free brewing is viable in Japan.

The lack of maltsters and suppliers of gf grains, exogenous enzymes and yeast nutrients makes it sound like an impossible dream but I’ll pull some threads and see what I can do.

Have been considering learning to play the bagpipes, recently.

Any pipers here with some advice for an absolute beginner?

Been pricing chanters and they seem reasonable.

New phone received, was so excited to see the repairability of the Nokia G22 that I forgot to check the dimensions. It’s a behemoth!

Currently, de-googling as much as I can without a custom ROM.

What a bizarre evening.. one which would be a lot more convenient to explain with a keyboard featuring a more functional T key.. sigh

It all started when my fairphone 2 died, completely unexpectedly this evening when working completely fine earlier in the afternoon. No dropping or anything that might make it break.. have returned home and taken it apart cleaned, reseated everything and re-assembled.. still fucked. The last phone I was ever going to buy seems to have outlived that dream.. I am seeing some tech articles in Japanese about the fairphone 4.. wonder if it is supported here..

If I had any idea what the issue was with the phone, I could order spare parts, but would have to order for delivery to my parents in Scotland and then have them send here as there is no support in Japan.

Anyway, not the weirdest part of tonight.. when walking the dog at around 9pm, we met a snake.. only about 25-30cm.. not the bizarre part but wanted to mention it..

So.. I normally keep my eyes primarily on the ground when walking my dog in the dark due to the large wildlife population and me not wanting to step on frogs.. but tonight I looked up and witnessed something which I currently have no explanation for.. so, technically a UFO.. or UFOs as I will attempt to describe.

As I looked up, I saw a line of maybe 9-10 star-like lights, that is to say they looked like stars, they didn´t have perceptible spheres/cones of illumination that you might expect for a light source closer to land.. there is of course a lot of space between the elevation where that sphere/cone of illumination would be perceptible and actually being some sort of gas orb in space.

Strangely, they were moving.. in a line.. too slow, horizontal and linear to be explained away as fireworks (its firework season).. only white light, unchanging, unblinking.. and then after 10-15 seconds, one by one from start to finish the lights went out..

1. I am a very pragmatic, cynical, and logical person.
2. I was drinking some alcohol, but not a lot and on my return from my walk home I disassembled and re-assembled a mobile phone.. so not drunk in any shape or form.
3. I am certain there is some simple explanation for what I witnessed and am not suggesting that i witnessed anything extra-terrestial.

When I told my wife about this on my return from walking the dog, she mentioned that around this time last year her younger brother had a similar experience, albeit with less lights than I saw.

I m curious as to what it could be, I know a guy in the village who is a drone programmer and I would text him to find out if he was doing anything with a large number of drones.. but my phone is fucked.. so I guess I will just have to let my imagination run wild.

Some of the keys fell off the refurbished x1 carbon laptop that I bought and seem damaged so aren’t going back on. Were they less frequently used keys I would live with it but F5 and T are keys that I cannot live without.

Wasn’t able to find reasonably priced individual replacement keys but found a replacement keyboard..

.. I probably should have had a look at the replacement procedure before buying.. this is not going to be fun!

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Lenovo+ThinkPad+X1+Carbon+6th+Gen+Keyboard+Replacement/154084

72 screws holding the keyboard in place.. and a whole disassembly adventure before getting to that stage. I am suddenly cognisant of why I stuck to desktop assemblies in the past.

Been meaning to try overnight oats for ages, but not a breakfast eater so didn’t get around to it. However, as my wife is concerned about her weight and we are both trying to improve our fitness, I suggested we give it a go and prepared a batch last night.

I may be a concert, my concern primarily the texture and perhaps if we went with chia seeds over flax seeds I wouldn’t have enjoyed it as much, but it was very tasty indeed. Went for a cocoa, vanilla and maple syrup recipe and it seems like we will stick with it for a while.

Not sure if it was a result of eating in the morning or not, but this morning I doubled my distance on my second visit to the pool, tapped out at 1km, which was a fair bit further than my target.

Just ordered some dried cranberries in order to ramp up the breakfast decadence and found a Japanese soy protein powder manufacturer who doesn’t put dairy into the mix (you’d be surprised how common a practice that appears to be)..

Then finished a brewing book and started reading up on gluten free beer brewing..

All in all a good day.

Last day working at the brewery today.. (we miscounted and “gained” two weeks).. looking forward to being there, not so much looking forward to not being there..

I was fortunate enough to be invited along to a pre-opening event for a new craft beer brewery in our prefecture’s capital city. My friend/mentor Ken got me on the list and we attended together.

It was such a good experience,not just because I didn’t have to drive and the beer was free. For the first time I was with the small core of brewers here and completely accepted within the group despite not yet being a brewer. I loved having a chance to drink with my future peer group and look forward to many future occurrences, but we need to get our brewery odd the ground before I become a fraud!

What was pretty awesome also, was that the head brewer at the new brewery lived in Scotland for about 5 years, studied the undergraduate version of the course that I just (post)graduated from and seemingly work for Brewdog for 3 years.. he knew who I was when I introduced myself and I suspect we are going to become pretty good friends over the years ahead.

We are still traversing a very stressful period of location hunting but today reaffirmed that we made good choices when we decided to start a new chapter in our lives.

Returning after a long break to sweet home 3D has warmed me to one of the (for now) available sites we have been recommended..briefly met the owner who seems like he may be willing to sell it.. we’ll see.

Teetering on the edge of depression at just how difficult it is to acquire (or rent) land in an area of such abundance of unused land and empty properties that I am employed on a government scheme designed explicitly to combat this problem..

Well, that’s my librem laptop finally packed in. I was hoping it would eek out its pitiful existence long enough for frame.work laptops to be available in Japan as I’d like the next laptop I buy to be the last. I guess I’ll need to search for a refurb to tide me over for now.

Quite the turn of events today.. cheeky wee rascal turned down a drip, and an overnight stay with her 3 favourite people in order to stay at home with her papa.. that was unexpected.. maybe I’m higher than 4th after all.. good times had and we may take our first papa and daughter trip to the cinema tomorrow if there is anything at all on that I will be able to understand.

Our tomato farming friends gave us a big bag of tomatoes which were not pretty enough for sale.. they are utterly delicious.. made a pizza sauce with some of them this evening.. was fantastic!

There may be an almost complete lack of vegan options for eating out here but the swathes of fresh produce, frequently free, makes giant strides towards making up for it!

Been really enjoying listening to music on SD card in the car rather than streaming (from my jellyfin server).. so just purchased a second hand Sony Walkman mp3 player online so that I can listen offline elsewhere. looking forward to it arriving!

I have now participated in a Japanese wedding (ours) and a Japanese wake, tomorrow will add funeral to the list.. I intend only to be a witness when we get to the creation of life ceremony, two is plenty.

Here in Japan there are clothes with slots for fans, or fans sewn into them.. this is likely true of other hot countries too but Scotland.. not so much. Anyway, I haven’t looked into them much as I imagine they devour batteries.. but I just thought to myself, what if they could be paired with a solar powered backpack.. the maybe we could go for a cycle in the Summer.. and now I may have a fun project to explore..

A curious thing just happened.. just before bed I picked up the kindergarten bags of both my daughters as is my habit, in order to grab the used clothes for washing..

Due to today’s shenanigans our 1 yr old didn’t go to nursery, but when I dropped off her older sister I also dropped of her bag as we anticipated her attending after the local doctor checkup..

So obviously there were no used clothes in her bag.. but all 3 face cloths were wet..

They were in a water-resistant zipped bag, just by themselves.. if she wasn’t in attendance how did they get wet? Why do we have to brand everything we supply with our children’s names if they are being used even when they aren’t even there? Wtf?

Wow, been living in rural Japan for a year already.. seems to have passed so quickly, especially in the context of sharing a bedroom with a (now) 1yr old sleep thief.

I quite enjoyed season 3 of The Mandalorian, more so than the previous 2 seasons, but let’s be honest.. it’s no Andor.

This was some day for one day, we had our meeting about the site we want for our brewery with the son who is representing the family who owns it..

.. lovely people, their concerns were about how it would work for us rather than anything relating to themselves.

.. they are open to us buying it on one condition, we take all of their land in the village..

.. so we need to find out how much land that is whilst testing water quality etc.

.. beyond exciting!

Five years ago today, I was the happiest, proudest and tiredness man in Scotlandia as I has just become a papa for the first time.

Fiver years on and I am still very tired but in Japan..

The 4th craft brewery in this prefecture opened their taproom doors today and we popped by to support them. By this point I know the brewer well and we frequently share info and ask each other for advice so I understand his struggle to get to this point and am delighted for him!

Hmm, the company who owns a piece of land we were considering for our brewery (whom I figured were tactically playing down the chances of them selling it to raise the price) have emailed us with a price.. it isn’t bad, we could negotiate it down a bit but certainly affordable.. if our preferred site turns out to be a no go (though it still very much seems like a deal can be made).

So looks like we are down to two sites, one preferred and one back up, but importantly both I the village we intend to live until we evaporate into the ether. Totally different projects depending on which we get.

We discovered that a close high school friend of my wife’s works with one of the two sons of the owner of the preferred site and he is the same age as me and a seemingly approachable and friendly guy.. seems pretty upbeat that the property could be used for a brewery.. I think we may call the owner tomorrow for a catch up.

Visited Mt. Koya today and it was beautiful, however I did not appreciate the sudden dip in temp (was about 27°C 2 days ago and 9°C today).. spending the night in what we thought was an old unused train station converted into a hotel.. it is still very active..

Tomorrow..Adventure World

As we (hopefully) close in on the location of our wee brewery, talk at the wee brewery where I have been interning has inevitably been moving towards the end of my contract and the next steps etc. My mentor is pretty much sure that he has taught me pretty much all that he can and he has confidence in me, I feel ready too but, as excited as I am about the next step in the journey, I am really going to miss working there.. I have loved every minute and will be eternally grateful for the opportunity.

My contract runs until end of June so still a couple of months to go but it is flying past so quickly.

Having been very quickly (within a space of a day) being told that new potential site for brewery was a no go, we found another site nearby.. spoke to a very friendly local who told us who the owner is and he was sure they would sell it to us (as they previously sold a plot to him).. he called them for us and gave us their details.. we called today and they are open to negotiating since they don’t seemingly have any plans for the land.. my wife is going to meet them tomorrow to discuss..

.. meanwhile a forestry friend showed us a few sites on a mountain that may be available at very low cost.. mostly too small but then he showed us an empty house (with workshop and Kura (grain storage building)) at the top of a nearby mountain which is empty.. we are very interested in this site, and on our way down the hill we met the mum of a school friend of my wife who knows who the owner is and is going to pass on our details next time she sees her (hopefully within 2 days).. even better, if we get this place, he is going to try to get the land opposite to build a campsite!

.. we suddenly have several excellent options, all within the village we live in..

.. things are getting pretty spicy!

Whilst waiting for progress on our water supply discussions to likely future brewery site, we have started parallel investigations into an alternative, nearby site which potentially offers many advantages over the first site.. but it is owned by the village so probably more hoops to jump through to be able to use it.. the first site is owned by the family tea farm so progress on that front may be quicker..

However the first site is in a wooded hill whereas the new site is flat and has better access.. would be a less challenging and less expensive build.. going to follow the stream by the new site today to try to find the water source and see what it looks like, whir up my fledgling 3d modelling skills and start to put feelers out about it..

Investigating just one site at a time here isn’t advisable given how slow processes are.

Yesterday, on my drive home from work I saw four wild monkeys (Japanese macaques)! I had heard that there were some on this Island but didn’t expect to see them on that route.. made my day!

Note to self: hack micropub endpoint to handle audio files.

Not sure if this will work at all (might on GtS but probably not in my site), but recorded this whilst walking our dog in the darkness the other night.. the frogs are back.

My parents arrived today and with them the 6 cans of beer from my favourite Scottish brewer. Two for us, to for my in-laws and two for my brewer friend/mentor.. my folks were travelling light..

Was almost on tears with the first taste.. there is way to much poor to mediocre small batch beer here giving craft beer a bad reputation.. whilst there are great brewers they are small and don’t have a wide spread (generally by choice) but there needs to be way more emphasis on quality over band-wagoning cheap ass table sugar liquors and marketing them as craft beer..

.. and with a sip of beer from the fledgling brewery who first inspired him to (very fucking slowly) follow the same path, his fierce dedication to the raise the quality bar of Japanese craft beer was re-forged.

.. as he reclines against the tiny food preparation area of his inadequately sized kitchen space, the protagonist, not for the first time, has expanded his sights a shade more aloft..

.. it is not for profit but borne from a desparation to be able drink a beer that doesn’t resemble domesticated pet piss that drives his determination.. such is the power of barrel-aged maple ale and raspberry and toasted nut porter..

.. the only thing that could possibly vanquish his unbridled desire to eternally change the craft beer industry in this super corporately focuses nation is the onset of sleep..

.. but our battle-aged hero has an unlikely ally in his almost one year old progeny, her impatient demands for mid-sleep liquid snacks and the females in his family (who represent 75% of the “bedroom”) incessant talent for talking perpetually whilst awake or otherwise..

.. will our grey-haired, white-bearded, ginger eye-browed, middle-aged, peddler of as of yet non-existant theoretical future beers love up to this moments expectations and indeed will he ever stop typing this unnecessarily long drivel-filled, failed attempt at a goodnight fediverse post?

Hard to say really, maybe time wil. te..

💤

Our first non-domestic visitors (my parents) since moving to Japan have landed on Japanese terra firma. Still enough time to tidy the house etc. before we go pick them up this afternoon.

Looking at hop rhizome sites and hoping to place an order and get planting soon.. but first I need to confirm that I can definitely use the plot of land which has been suggested for them, and then that it is actually suitable.

My parents arrive for a few months on Friday so could be a good project to start with extra hands.

I am so tired that when I yawn my eyes release tears.. thinking of collecting and brewing a beer with them.. a gose makes most sense..

Approaching second return date for Leviathan Wakes which I borrowed from the library and I’m only about 150 pages in. It’s a great read but I just don’t, unfortunately, have enough spare time and energy for such a tome. Will revisit if I get more time or go on holiday though as I definitely want to finish the book at some point.

I recently posted about the annual medical test that we did for the first time since moving to the village, and today I got the results of my tests.

Firstly, I am happy to report that my move to veganism appears to have cured my hyperuricemia (which was detected the last time I did one of these tests, in uni in Japan in 2010).. this is good news and to my mind somewhat expected.

However I seem to have fairly low HDL cholesterol (just below recommendation) and high triglycerides.. which I am primarily attributing to my intake of monster energy drink as a result of a massive lifestyle change and parenting of young kids.. also whereas I used to snack on nuts in Scotland, almost everything here is seasoned with some sort of animal extract so I snack a little less healthily and more often than I did when I was in Scotland and healthier options were more abundant.

Not too concerned about this as my job will become increasingly physical and I can easily cut back on sugary drinks and fatty snacks.. just relieved that nothing serious came up.

.. I did recently receive a notice that I am eligible for an array of annual cancer detection tests too (not all free). Waiting for the results from the first set of them will be nerve-wracking but I think these annual checkups are a pretty good service to offer.

I really love my fairphone, due to my clumsiness I had to replace a few parts last year and it was a breeze, it’s a great device but I am not sure that I would have bought it if I had known they were Europe only.. the replacement parts had to be sent first to Scotland and then Japan which wasn’t inexpensive.

I really love the design ethics of the frame.work laptops and, as per fairphone, their adherence to the right to repair. I would love to buy one but they too do not (yet) sell to nor deliver to Japan.

I want devices that won’t need replaced wholesale every few years but this seems pretty difficult in this part of the world at this time.

Just when we thought we had more or less decided on our future brewery location, an unrelated conversation with my brewer friend leads to us finding out about another location in this village that is potentially for sale.. and it is bigger, flatter, more accessible, has existing buildings etc. etc.

The time to be bold is upon us.. we are going to drop by tomorrow and be more direct than is customary for these parts.. fingers crossed!

At some point I am going to write a script to auto-translate my website posts as I rarely remember to manually do so so the Japanese part of the site looks abandoned.

.. should be simple enough only minor complication will be for nested notes such as photo descriptions but shouldn’t be much of a hurdle.

Today was the first time back in the brewery where I intern, for a month.. it’s so good to be back.

Realistically, I am not sure how long I can stay there as at some point preparation for our own brewery will take up all of our time but, I wholly intend to help out as much as I can until we reach that point.

Couldn’t stay up until 1:45am for the rugby, but what a nice result to wake up to!

We have a meeting tomorrow with the deputy mayor and various department folks to discuss water supply to likely brewery site and hopefully will get him to mediate a meeting with the nearby country club owners who pump village water up to top of the hill.

Once we get an agreement in principle then we can get a professional to come and test the water. I’ll borrow a water testing kit too and have a go but that’s just so that I can play with a chemistry set 😄

Then, if all goes well with the results of the water tests we can finally have an official chat about renting or buying the site from the family eat farm.. then the fun really begins!

Day off today, so I have thus far spent the morning tweaking my brewery designs.. which whilst fun, is somewhat work adjacent.. need to do something else!

Finally finished watching Andor this evening, definitely my favourite of the TV shows this far.. didn’t even finish the Bob’s Fett one, found it super tedious.

Wee syndication test

Test since moving servers

Just had a meeting with another groundwater company, this one was prepared with geological maps of the area etc. Not likely groundwater at the brewery site.. but very likely in the farm in front of it..

.. super expensive to bore though and the farm uses pesticides so we’d need to drill down very far.. not sure it’s in the realms of realism for us right now. Will try to chat with the country club about their water supply .

We had a meeting with our town hall to discuss water provision at the potential brewery site. It went pretty well, the village has a water treatment facility and a groundwater pump already and seemingly from their perspective the water is so pure they barely treat it. However, the country club near neighbouring the tea farm where our brewery may be built pumps the water up the hill and we would have to find out more about whether they do any additional treatment and discuss the possibility of a supply contract.

Whilst they were a bit quiet about whether they would pay for exploratory bore hole work at our site, they said our subsidies could be used to test the water pumped up via the country club so this is now plan A.

Interestingly, they think that perhaps the site which I would prefer but which we considered off the table due to multi-level governmental red tape might not be so difficult and may be back on the table. This sliver of hope was very well received!

Still patiently waiting for frame.work to start shipping to Japan so that I can replace this Librem p.o.s. and start playing rimworld in the only (occasionally) warm room in the house.

.. our second winter allegedly starts tomorrow.. I don’t want to work from the office.. although chances are the nursery school will be inaccessible and the day will be spent looking after the girls anyway.

Designing the housing for your dream job is actually a lot of fun and pretty addictive, who knew?

On my 3rd and favourite iteration of a brewery design for the most likely (at this point) future brewing site.. looking cool.. can only imagine how much cooler it would look if I had actually watched or read any tutorial before jumping in arse first.

Going to measure some of the other potential sites from a map and see what I can conjure up for different layouts.. tomorrow that is, for tonight I shall play rimworld!

Despite the wasted hours trying to find 3D models of brewing equipment, I really enjoyed the experience of designing our future brewery yesterday, glad there is still much to be done in that regard.. it’s much easier to explain things and develop ideas when you can actually see how the future might look. Bring on Monday!

First on the list of things to work out is how to add floors to the upstairs level in Sweet Home 3D.. was a bit surprised that it wasn’t a very obvious action.. I’m sure I can find a tutorial video or some such.

Learning how to use Sweet Home 3D to work on brewery design and am struggling to find free or inexpensive 3D models of brewing equipment.. I have a horrible feeling that I am going to have to teach myself how to use Blender at this rate.

Visited the probable site of our future brewery today to meet a couple of groundwater experts to ascertain the likelihood of there being groundwater at the site..

.. there is a non-zero chance..

So we need to bore to find out.. which is pretty damned expensive.. so we are going to see if the town hall fancy paying on our behalf..

In other news, cheeky wee rascal jnr has officially registered her first word.

The criteria applied by me is that it had to be repeatable, seemingly intentional and verified by both parents.

The word is Papa - she pointed at a photo of me and said Papa.. repeated 4 times in with pauses between and dual verified!

やった!

Hopefully in the coming weeks I can raise some issues with GtS and brid.gy and finally get them to work well together and I can get reactions sent to my site.. had it on a previous site when I was on another fediverse software and it was awesome..with the current site I wanted to write my own scripts to handle it.. with some success, I can post to the fediverse and reply, favourite and boost posts from there.. but the feedback scripts were never written, so responses are not displayed etc. I have less enthusiasm and time to write them myself as I did in the past.. so would like to use brid.gy again..

.. considered using bridgyfed and turning my site into a fully fledged fediverse account (which I also tested in the past) but I like GtS and I like my current fediverse account so don’t really feel like changing again , even though this would definitely be the easiest implementation as my site is pretty much already compliant.

So far I have managed about as much sleep in 2023 as I would have back in Scotland where the new year is yet to begin.. which sucks because I haste house to myself and stayed sober in order to encourage a good night’s sleep.

Anyway, hope everyone’s 2023 is a marked improvement on your 2022? 明けましておめでとうございます!

Going to a restaurant this evening with an interesting take on vegan friendly.. I have to take my own food.. but I am welcome to eat it there..

..

Heading to a special annual event today where the beers from the brewery that I intern at are sold to the local community at discounted rates.. should be fun.. oh and I’m not working this event.. I am participating from the customer side!

You can add civet or maybe badger to the growing list of wildlife found in our garden.. three of them this evening!

My cooking skills levelled up so much when becoming vegan re-inspired me to return to the kitchen, but since moving to rural Japan they continue to grow.. being the village vegan puts a fire in my belly.. (not literally, I have to add heat post-cooking as my daughter can’t yet handle spices). Today I made a mixed Japanese mushroom pie with roasted vegetables and the in-laws (and I) loved it.. we saved a plate for my brother-in-law who is working.. but we all have our eyes in it..

Made a 5 mile round trip through the deep snow to the supermarket and back to buy food for today and tomorrow’s dinner..

Tonight is barley and kabocha stew Tomorrow is mixed mushroom and black ale pie

Even helped a stranger by pushing their car through some tricky snowy roads.

The plan that my wife an in-laws’ came up with for how to spend tomorrow was that we’d take the presents for the kids and stay at their place this evening..

Under normal conditions it’s a 10-15 minute walk.. but we can’t walk there with kids and presents and there is just no chance that the roads between here and there can or will be cleared..

So, I guess we’re going to be staying her after all, which is good because here is where my bed is.

Seemingly there will be no further snow today, so it’s a perfect time to clear the ~100m road up to the house of the 3+ft of snow, without any useful implements as my wife wants to go shopping..

.. aye, have at it, good luck.

The snowfall took out our electricity.. our only source of heat in the glorified shed that we live in.. thankfully it was only temporary!

Was meant to be going to the brewery today.. about a foot of snow has fallen overnight and is still falling.. the road to the brewery is narrow, windy and mountainous.. I have never driven in snow before.. undecided .

Cheeky wee rascal jnr. was this evening attempting to stand of her on volition for the first time. I was pretty impressed by her determination, I’m jumping to no conclusions but she does seem to demonstrate some of my traits, more so than her sister did.. anyway.. she managed 3-4 seconds a few times and was beside herself with excitement.. pride²

I obviously knew of the existence of fingerless gloves in Scotland, I just didn’t understand their place in my hierarchy of needs.. I was lucky enough to live in places that were warm enough to not risk frostbite indoors.. and outdoors I wore thick gloves when warm..

.. now that I have a pair and am wearing them for the first time, I am not sure that they will be coming off before Spring! Though, I ordered another pair of indoor gloves today (with fingers) too.. indoor gloves.. what an eye-opener!

We’re it not weird enough that I had a photoshoot yesterday afternoon.. we have a meeting tomorrow morning about another photoshoot.. oh how I wish I still looked like my profile picture and not a sleep-deprived barbarian Santa..

Today was our presentation in front of the mayor etc. my nerves just about held together and I don’t think I did a bad job though mainly as we chopped it down into about half the size as we realised we prepared way too much. Glad that I don’t have another presentation in Japanese anytime soon and that all of the high stress tasks for this year are now done!

Hopefully we did enough to get the mayor (and his funds) on board for our plan A situation.

The vegan event went well today, at least from the catering perspective.. time will tell how well the workshop went .. if even one village cafe or restaurant puts a vegan option on their menu enabling me to eat out in the village the. I’ll consider it a success.

On the train home from a rare night out. We visited the city to attend an event that a few of our friends were involved with. I initially noticed the event on my village vegan IG account but my taco truck friend (also a sound engineer, formerly for Los Lobos and Norah Jones etc.)invited us saying there are vegan options.. the event was a collaboration between his culinary and musical selves as well as a local nut butter company and another friend of mine who will soon open his craft beer brewery.

.. I initially thought that the vegan offerings would be only from my friend but when we arrived my attendance was announced.. My name was on the menu blackboard and they made a proper big deal about it.. I was a little embarrassed at first but Christ on a bike, the food was amazing!

The weird thing was I met someone who I believe to not be Japanese and indeed to be natively English speaking who perhaps felt that I wanted to speak in Japanese and after an initial chat told me she read my posts on note.com.. a Japanese blogging site.. fuck me, my mind is blown.

What, surely not, checks diary, can it be?

.. seemingly I’ve been married for 10 years today..

😶😯😲😳🤯

That feeling when you see mentions of a new star wars series in your timeline and finally get control of your remote control only to discover that Disney+ is wise to your Japan move and won’t be sharing it’s goodies with you any time soon.

I really need to find some time to re-implement brid.gy into my site, I need my photo posting process to be website based with syndication out to here and IG as I’m not posting to my website (and as such not here) these days.

My final assignment of the current course and of my PgCert was announced yesterday. I was really hoping for a topic that I had already researched to some degree as December is insanely busy.. but alas, it is on something that I haven’t read a single paragraph about to date.. balls!

It will be interesting but I don’t see how I can actually get it done with the amount of events that have been placed in my schedule.. wish I could just clear the decks and focus on this but cancelling engagements isn’t the done thing here, even if you had nothing to do with their arrangement in the first place.

In other news, cheeky wee rascal jnr has discovered the advantages of bum-shuffling and can now slowly move around the room.. increasing the need for morning ☕

Perhaps a somewhat controversial thing for a wannabe brewer (beer) to say but Fire One Day Black chilled coffee is by far the best beverage that Kirin produces. So much so that it’s appearance in convenience shops is brief, they sell out quickly. Very much my go to daily ☕

Back in 2010, I started dating the girl who would become my wife, we were in Okayama, Japan and the world cup was awesome. Watched every game, mainly with friends and beers and supported my host country as well as I could.

Skip forward 12 years, we are back in Japan and the game that I am struggling to stay awake through is the first and maybe last of the tournament I’ll watch.. My interest in this sport ended at a Scotland vs Canada friendly match in Easter Road some years ago and shows no sign of returning.

Thankfully, I am here to try and support my host country in other ways, so I don’t feel guilty.

Another village festival where the only “vegan” option was fries (cooked in the same oil as chicken). just as well I knew not to have any expectations and had a big bowl of ramen before we attended.. but the village must do better..

.. next stop though is the brewery where I intern, where for the first time in ages, I’ll be drinking the beer!

Thinking ahead to when we have a brewery.. I want to brew in a kilt, yes, it is gimmicky but story is everything here and it would be a crowd pleaser.. but I don’t want to brew in a woollen kilt for obvious reasons..so looking at utility kilts and wondering if I’ll ever be welcome back in Scotland if I wore one..

Cheeky wee rascal jnr has a fever and we’ve had name sleep for a couple of days so had to reluctantly cancel my shift at the brewery today.

On the plus side, we are just finalising the schedule for our next business trip to visit breweries in Ehime prefecture at the start of next week. All 5 of the breweries I contacted are happy for us to visit and have a chat, so pretty excited.

Rustling up some pumpkin and barley stew for dinner using ingredients (including the barley) primarily grown in this village or our family veggie garden.

Smells pretty good!

I have to record a 2m20s or so presentation contribution tomorrow.. wonder how many hours that will take.

My family are away visiting my wife’s grandmother which meant that I had the weekend to research for my assignment. However, due to sleep deprivation, I was way too tired yesterday to focus so got very little done.

Thanks to the village’s early morning public announcement activity any hopes of a long lie to capitalise on the empty bedroom were dashed..

.. this morning I will bathe in espresso and hopefully power through my assignment.. still tired but what else is new..

As well as working very hard over the past couple of days, I have also had the chance to visit my friend’s washi factory in the village and see the world’s thinnest paper being made.. which was cool.. and also been rushed in the pitch dark by a wild boar whilst walking my dog.. which wasn’t cool.. life is a rollercoaster!

Another day, another early warning national alert about missiles being fired in the direction of Japan by North Korea..

Washing kegs today! 36 inside and out.. it doesn’t feel like a chore yet, all part of the glamorous life of a brewer (I’m just a keg washer right now but some day!).

Today at the village festival, which I attended after completing my assignment two weeks early, I was encouraged to take part in an activity called katanuki in which for a small fee, I randomly selected a thin candy square with an animal imprint on it.. the challenge is to remove the animal without breaking the candy frame, using a safety pin.

Seemingly my wife has never seen this completed successfully.. today on my very first attempt, I completed it and won a giant inflatable baseball bat for my daughter.

.. It didn’t seem like something that few people complete but there were a whole lot of people coming over to watch. Life is weird sometimes.

Looking after my baby girl whilst her sister has her sports day and I started singing to her .. Caledonia.. but I couldn’t remember the order of the lyrics on the second verse so I played the Dougie MacLean video.. which led to..

.. SRU - Highland Cathedral .. .. Stanley Odd - Son I voted yes .. Stanley Odd - marriage counseling .. The Proclaimers - cap in hand..

.. wondering if there is some sort of theme developing..

I appear to have mistakenly picked up a non-study-mode-triggering variety of chilled coffee.. certainly well below the RDA of studytocin..

Maybe another mug will help..

Today is the start of a 3 day study marathon, by the end of which I hope to have completed (a decent draft at least) of my first assignment.. if I get it finished it will be almost 3 weeks early.. but I have so many appointments and meetings this month that if I don’t get it finished by the end of these 3 days it might not get finished in time.. which is crazy..

Seems like I’m going to have to be the one to reach out to other group members to start talking about assignment 2 as well since no-one else has.. I really think group assignments and distance learning are an awful match but we are where we are..

The last couple of days at the brewery have been pretty physical and I didn’t sleep well last night so today’s study session is proving to be quite the challenge!

Covered the material from the lecture, just need to get through the additional reading and maybe make a start on research for my first assignment..

.. but currently I’m trying to work out if I can use a Cornelius keg as a portable continuous coffee ingestion system..

Just watched “Everything everywhere all at once”, what a profoundly excellent movie that was.

Today, I will start studying my latest uni course on “Cereals, Malting and Mashing” which started this week. Will be learning all about the structure of a barley kernel.

I may also start researching my first assignment on climate change and it’s impact on barley crops.

Last night when taking our dog out for his walk in the pitch black rural neighbourhood, we were stopped in our tracks immediately upon leaving the confines of our house by a booming bark. My best guess was that it is a wild boar and carefully retreated.

My wife and brother-in-law (the latter being somewhat of an expert on them) confirmed this morning that we do indeed have a wild boar living about 5 metres from our house.

Going to try and convince it to leave this morning before my brother-in-law takes more.. terminal.. actions. Can’t have a wild boar living quite so close to my daughters.

I was seemingly a cameo on NHK’s spot on the brewery I am interning at, but I missed it as I opted to help out for an extra 4 hours today at said brewery.

My daughter saw me on TV though and is seemingly very proud.

Instead of perpetually skipping through my unorganised music collection, I’m going to try to listen to brewing related podcasts on my drive to the brewery today..

.. lined up are “troubleshooting acetaldehyde”, “fundamentals of CIP” and “yeast stress”..

Rode an electric kickboard for about 24km today on a trip into the mountains to harvest some hops.. easily the most fun I have had in a very long time.

..seriously considering buying one.. I’d far prefer to travel by an electric scooter for short errand runs than in a car..

.. I had, I seem to recall put aside some money for a steamdeck.. can get a kickboard for about the same amount.. hmmm.

Holy shit! Vegan pizza (and soup curry) available at a food court in Kochi city.. accidental find.. my other options were onigiri or potato, result!

A couple of interesting things happened today..

.. we were travelling over a local mountain on a rarely travelled road and I saw my first wild boar, a young un, was very cool.

.. was told that some of the snakes around these parts are venomous.. tonight’s dog walk in the pitch black, unlit rural neighbourhood was a shade more edgy than normal.. yon lass from encanto with the super hearing had nothing on me.. I heard EVERYTHING!

Have a couple of days off! Wondering what to do, I have a few little tasks that I’d like to get through but they will all require more coffee, a shower and air conditioning before I can even think about them.

Just registered for my next uni course which is exciting after such a long break. So I may study a bit before I head around to my brother-in-law’s place to hook up his internet.

The things I want to do are related to my future brewery but I need to force myself to take the days off when they come.

Wondering if any Gàidhlig speaking friends can suggest a third ’te’ ending word with similar vibes to slàinte and fàilte?

Full disclosure, I want to make three beers in the future utilising my in-laws’ tea and ’te’ can (artistically.. loosely.. sort of) be pronounced similarly to how the Japanese word for tea is pronounced so I have 2 out of 3 names..

.. and zero recipes.. yet..

A month or so after deciding to retire my pixelfed instance (purely due to being to busy to administer multiple personal social media sites - well mainly at least), I have created some social media accounts for the future brewery.. all on the evil silos, let’s be honest the fediverse isn’t a welcoming place for businesses (which is fine) regardless of their small, local producer intentions.

Anyway, Instagram seems to be the most useful tool for connecting with locals around here and I’m not dis-enjoying (?) the initial endorphin fuelled set up game.. I have enough traction to combat the slippery slope of these gamefied silos for my personal accounts but for future business purposes at this point for documenting our story is ok, I think.

Allegedly, according to openweathermap.org the temperature here today will not breach 30°C..

.. I live in hope but have little faith that this will be the case.

A wee bit surprised to turn up to the brewery to meet an NHK camera crew filming us making beer today.. hair is a mess..

They seem quite interested in our story too and have taken some of my details..

Interesting adventure indeed!

The day started by helping out a my friend Masa and he showed me his potential future tortilla kitchen, then I scouted the Northern boundary of the village and now have 10 potential sites for the brewery.. No clue about availability, just currently un-utilised spots, seemingly abandoned buildings or potentially shared spaces with existing tenants.

Just pulled together a map and document with photos of sites..

.. very much not a day off so I may take my day off tomorrow instead :)

Today is my day off so I am going brewery location hunting around the village.. technically that’s working but I’ll take my time and really try to explore.. without traipsing too much on people’s property!

This evening our 5 month old daughter achieved two milestones .. she managed to get her foot into her mouth for the first time.. and then shortly after she rolled over on to her tummy from lying on her back, again first time..

I started calling her “destroyer of worlds” and then she fell asleep on my chest.. so she is MY destroyer of worlds.

Saw my first tanuki in the flesh today.. one who I hope was just dangerously narcoleptic and not in fact deceased on the road.. 😳

Seemingly we now have a tanuki living in our garden! My wife saw it yesterday morning.. I am only mildly jealous..

On the mountain road to the brewery where I work there is construction being done and on the days that they work the road is closed for 50 minutes out of every hour. I really need to get better at working out when it is and isn’t happening. The sign has a date range but makes it clear that work doesn’t happen over the weekend.

.. however I am often here during the week and they often aren’t working despite the sign.. hmm.

Busy weekend ahead bartending as this is apparently the taproom’s (expected) busiest weekend of the year.. but to maximise my utility I also volunteered to come in a couple of hours early to vacuum-pack a big bag of hops.. no point in half-assing the brewery experience, if the brewer is going to be exhausted then so am I.

Just spent 3 hours manually weeding “our” garden whilst my wife’s parents wielded powered machinery to tackle the big stuff.. rural living is just a constant battle against the super-fast growing foliage..

If it was down to me I’d just let it win.. fucking knackered!

In the mountains of Towa (where I accidentally left my phone last week and picked up today) doing a spot of river swimming.. I love this place, so isolated and the water is crystal clear!

Unfortunately a rockslide closed the road to the brewery yesterday and is still not cleared so instead I’ve built my wife’s office desk, finished a book about IPA, updated my brewing database a bit, started a book on water (from a brewing perspective) and started giving the shadowing method of learning Japanese a go. Busy day.

My wife should be picking our dog up from the airport in about 1 hour!

Would have liked to have been there but I need to pick up my daughter from nursery, it’s been a while since we’ve been able to have dedicated time to ourselves so I’m looking forward to it.

One of the many things I find pretty amazing here in Japan is that if you miss a courier (normally Yamato) or even a normal postal delivery attempt, you can scan a QR code and request re-delivery the same day.. even if you only just miss them in the evening, they will still come out later in the same evening! I presume this service is time limited but so far we’ve not had to wait until the next day for missed deliveries.

Ordered some more piney boards this morning, one to replace the SBC hosting my GtS instance as it’s turning off on a daily basis now.. and the other to upgrade my nextcloud instance to a whopping 8GB.. I probably could have just used the existing nextcloud SBC to home GtS post-upgrade but where is the fun in that?

Currently living in a house full of boxes now that our stuff arrived from Scotland! Noticed that an inconsequential part of the electric piano I bought for my wife is damaged.. now going to have to check everything, especially my brewing kit.. they ramped the price up on us after they had our stuff so I guess we’ll be claiming some of that back!

It’s hard to accurately convey just how much I have learned in this past week but a fuck tonne is a pretty close estimate!

The more I work at the brewery the guiltier I feel for leaving before jobs are done!

I left today at the agreed time and shouldn’t really work more than necessary but the brewer still had another 4 or 5 hours of work ahead of him.

Would love to stay and help but I have to get home at a reasonable time just now to help look after the kids and house etc.

Visited location in the village today where I could well envision my future brewery being.. going to make casual enquiries..

Back home safely again after a very tiring shift at the event. But it was awesome! One of the other established brewers who also has two restaurants in the city very kindly offered to help me in any way that he could and I met someone from a craft beer pub in the city who likewise was very kind.

Tired, thirsty and once again humbled.

Just home (safely!) from the food and drink market event and enjoying a beer from one of the brewers I met today.

Was a hot, humid and long day and the hardest I’ve worked for quite a while but it was also fun and I am very grateful to Ken (Mukai) for inviting me along to help out.

I will never be able to explain why this introvert loves tending bar so much but I really do and despite some language challenges today I loved pouring beers again.

Same again tomorrow when it will be hotter! So for now going to enjoy this beer, have a shower, have some food then grab some sleep.

Thunder and lightning storms all morning, yet I’m still looking forward to today’s outdoor event, despite my absolute lack of suitable clothing (rainwear is in the boxes coming from Scotland).

Ooh it seems that our stuff shipped from Scotland will finally be arriving at our house in Japan next Saturday! Clothes!

.. and, our Dog should arrive during the following week, finally!

Well, I guess I should go and set the sofa up for sleeping.. whilst we recently acquired both a bed frame and a mattress, the room which they are to be located lacks air conditioning and I can’t sleep in sun degrees celsius, so until Autumn, I sleep on the sofa.

There are two other craft brewers at the 50ish stall market food & drink event over the next two days, whom I’ve not yet met in person and our stalls are pretty close together!

There is live music all evening too so whilst it’s going to be busy and hard work, I think it’s going to be a lot of fun and looking forward to it!

The big day is finally here! Today I become a 45 year old intern at a craft beer brewery in rural Japan!

Most of today is likely to be planning for the big event in the city which I’m helping with over the next couple of days, possibly with some bottling (of beer not nerves) and almost certainly lots of cleaning.

Got a couple of hours to slowly get ready and prepare lunch before the 1 hour long drive up windy narrow roads into the mountains!

My wife got a message last night saying that one of the kids in my daughter’s nursery school class tested positive and so not to send her in for the next few days..

.. tomorrow is my first day as a brewing intern..

I do not enjoy this aspect of my luck or apparent lack thereof.. I got through all of the nonsensical barriers to getting here.. now that I am here (still without our shipped belongings or dog), I could really do with less shit being thrown in my way.

Translated my 3 “move to Japan” related blog articles into Japanese on my site and posted the initial one to note.com

I’m not sure if it’ll get any engagement at all there, I’m not the biggest fan of the platform but I feel like I need to try and promote any writing about the 地域おこし協力隊 programme in order to justify the time I spend writing about it (over say, reading about and researching brewing science)..

for my own site, I don’t really care if I’m the only person reading my articles (to find the litany of typos I undoubtedly missed) but I need to justify my minimum wage efforts elsewhere.. though I don’t know of a similar platform for English blogs which aren’t built into or upon FB.

Going to work a bit on my website today and try to backfill some of the photo posts etc. from the past few months and now that it’s online again, I’m feeling more motivated to write again.

Also need to go out and buy whatever cheap cooling technology I can to stop me from spontaneously combusting at the weekend outdoor event.

After bathtime and bedtime for the kids I am going to go out for my first time driving at night and first time driving with no-one in the car.. will only be venturing as far as I can safely wall back.. just in case!

It’s donguri koro koro o’clock..

At 12pm each day this tune (just the tune) is piped through the village PA system.. I much prefer it to the unwelcome 6am tune!

https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=m2RpBNabpXo

I like pixelfed but I’m wondering if I actually need it..

I’ve had success getting friends and family to use matrix (and xmpp before then) for quick comms but I don’t know that I’m going to manage to get people on to pixelfed.. and am not sure that I am fussed to try any more.

Being without it for so long and then syndication failing with it on my return is making it feel like a little more work than my new life will permit me.

Conversely, I’m very happy with gotosocial, I can syndicate images here from my site and it just works..

.. on an unrelated note, I started typing this on my computer then when I switched to my phone it was available in the copy buffer.. KDE connect rocks!

Good morning world!

Just a quick syndication test before my coffee.

Still a bit peeved that I couldn’t get my self-hosted quill to work since the move but not wasting another day on it.. will manually start uploading the backlog of blog posts, soon.

Website should be back online and raring for some fresh content!

This website is just about to go offline until we are settled in Japan.

Had some Japanese friends (and their non-Japanese partners) visiting today and like with our first baby they were somewhat amazed at how much I as a dad do (I don’t think it’s especially amazing or even rare nowadays). Basically, aside from breastfeeding, I do everything, which is by choice and also because breastfeeding is exhausting and a near full-time job and my wife needs to recuperate.

Anyway, the visit reminded me of the challenge that lies ahead of me in rural Japan and the noses that I’ll be putting out of joint when we get there. Previous visits frustrated the hell out of me because my wife’s grandma wouldn’t let me be a parent, she would drag my wife out of bed rather than let me look after my own daughter. Unfortunately, her health has deteriorated and she is in full-time care but it is an opinion that is pervasive in the elder generations that live in rural villages in Japan (and probably beyond).

Thankfully, my mother-in-law is 100% on board with our parenting balance and my father-in-law knows better than to cross her 😆

So we’re rewatching MasterChef Australia 2019, currently episode 1 (after rewatching the previous season)..

.. it turns out I’m still inexplicably disgruntled about the final result of MasterChef Australia 2019 and it threatens to bleed into every one of the 60 episodes..

Been trying to troubleshoot a microsub issue on my site and have come to the conclusion it has nothing to do with my site..

I’ve subscribed to a bunch of feeds and created channels in aperture (https://aperture.p3k.io ) and the feeds FROM my site appear in monocle/indigenous but none of the other feeds at all are being retrieved by readers.. aperture shows that there are entries for various sources but nothing is showing up..

I guess something needs restarted somewhere.. but it’s not my issue (I think)

On the way home from nursery today my 3 y.o. asked “Papa, when will I get homework?”

There are times that I don’t see me in my daughter (very rare times) - most notably when she is eating and enjoying natto.. but times like these are re-affirming.

I responded, “not normally until you start school which isn’t until you are 7 y.o. in Japan. Why do you ask? Do you want homework?”

She replied in the affirmative so I’ll have a new task as homework setter once we’ve moved.. she then said she’d need a toy computer to do the homework..

So I told her I’ll make her a real computer when we move to Japan.. which made her very happy.. awww a wee geek bud is starting to grow.

Walking home from another miniature disaster yesterday and was thinking more on writing when in Japan. I’m unlikely to nab a writing side-gig without any portfolio of sorts.. so I’ll probably create a new blog to document my upcoming experience on the rural rejuvenation programme.

I thought of resuscitating my previous Japan related blog (Bushido Dreams) but that was a different time, focussing mainly around my exchange year in Okayama. I’ll still pop random Japan related posts there but for the journalling of our new lives I think a new blog is best.

.. anyway, as I was walking home the name of said blog popped into my head.. it merits explanation (so that you find it just as hilarious-ish as I).. The programme name (地域お越し協力隊) in Roman characters would be something like ‘chiiki okoshi kyōryokutai’ .. so.. the blog name will be ..

Drumroll

.. The KyōryokuTimes

.. BOOM!

.. no I will not get my jacket, I am absurdly pleases with this name.

After hours on the phone queue and a looooong chat with JAL, they were super helpful, and provisionally booked flights.. they mentioned that the kennel size for the dog was a little too big for the domestic leg in Japan so we’d need to get a smaller kennel.. her only query was what size was permissible for the first flight (Edinburgh to Heathrow, operated by British Airways).. so we called BA and they basically can’t transport any medium or larger dogs from Scotland to Heathrow.. FFS

So now we’re having to try and work out how to transport all of our luggage, a dog, a toddler and newborn to fucking London.. uggghh!

Hopefully by the end of the day we’ll have the required documents for our daughter’s registration into the Japanese family records expressly making their way to Japan.

It would be nice to have a little more clarity on how we and our dog are actually getting to Japan too, after KLM fucked us over.

The heat in this maternity room is turning my baby girl into some sort of super heater and no amount of red bull is able to fend off the rush of tiredness.. less than an hour until I’m ejected .. I hope I make it home before I pass out as the bushes around here look a little spiky..

As of about 2 hours ago our second daughter entered into the world! She is a little smaller than her big sister was but is ravenously feeding so that won’t last long. Mother and baby are both well and Papa is delighted!

Oh joy, my single purpose FB account seems to have made its way to the recommendations feeds of friends and family so I now have a steady stream of invites to reject.. I guess no-one reads profiles nowadays.

I need to focus on very regular updates to my site once we’re in Japan and maybe try to improve it’s discoverability.. not that I expect many friends will look at my site rather than perpetually send invites to an account which explicitly requests no invites, but it’ll be nice to make it more active just in case.

After a short bidding war between the first two viewers of our house, we’ve accepted a verbal offer. House went on the market on Thursday morning and hopefully we’ll have the written offer on Monday or Tuesday.

Still awaiting the arrival of our new baby, I was pretty sure she would arrive before we received an offer on the house.

First house viewings today! I really hope we get a quick offer as cleaning this big house with a 39 week pregnant wife is tough!

Thankfully, this should be the first and last house we sell. Next house is a rental then after that we’re hopefully building the last house we’ll ever live in.

Flat in Edinburgh booked for our final week in Scotland!

This makes life easier as we can get the tram with the weans to the airport whilst my folks bring the luggage and dig in their car. Also means we can say goodbye to friends and get our pre-flight tests done with much less hassle.

I am very much not an expert but it seems that approximately one fifth of an insulation roll is actually destined for inhalation.. and yet funnily enough after laying three rolls I’m feeling somewhat cold.. insulation is confusing.. glad I’ve a 2 day wait for the next 4 rolls.

Also, waiting for a home report is super tedious.

Today is the first day that I’ve actually felt like I am no longer working, which is nice. Walked to the supermarket testing my noise cancelling headphones, listening to INXS and taking my time.. it felt good to not be frantically rushing around finding something to fecking clean.

After going to the cinema to see Sing 2 for the first time with her mama last week, my daughter is going to see it again tomorrow with her granny and cousin..the difference is she now knows the songs and has been practising.. This thought is going to keep me happy and motivated all throughout tomorrow’s mammoth house cleaning session!

Three minutes to check documents and I can pick up my visa next week.. a further 5 minutes or so comprehensively answering our questions about covid testing, quarantine and our impending family addition (with regards to updating family record and getting passport) and we’re done..

Fuck the home office getting a visa doesn’t need to be a visit to the pits of hell.

In Edinburgh today for lunch and to apply for my Japanese visa. A nice break from cleaning! Tomorrow is going to be back to the grind though as the surveyor and building photographer are coming on Thursday. Hopefully stress levels will recede after that as I’m cooking for my new (to me) sister for the first time on Friday.

First day of “Freedom” and I’m a bit achey after a very busy, very physical weekend of joinery and cleaning, but there is much more to do so muscle pain be damned!

Morning coffee thought: It’s amazing just how much more relaxed we are about the impending baby than first time round (amazing might be a bit of a stretch).. my wife is 36 weeks pregnant and we’re starting to pack the labour bag but last time round I was attending dad to be classes, reading so many books and we had everything planned out (not that anything went to plan)..this time even filling out the birth plan, most sections are “no particular preference or concern”.. we are excited but even that seems low key compared to last the highly strung quasi-fear excitement from first time.

Anyway, can’t wait to meet her despite my somewhat relaxed exterior.

Now that things are starting to wind down at work and I’ve brewed my last brew before the big move, I’m able to think on the progress that I’ve made over the past 18 months or so on my quest to become a small batch craft beer brewer in rural Japan..

What a wild ride it has been trying to fast-track the usually slow-paces and natural learning curve that homebrewers go through as hobbyists.. During the 29 brew days I squeezed in, I have made mistakes a-plenty and there will certainly be more going forward, but I have also made tremendous progress..

On tap I have two original recipe beers and a third is fermenting.. as an enthusiastic amateur cook that astonishes me (way more than it should). I still cook largely from recipes albeit I may throw my own spin on a dish or play about with ingredients.. and sure, beer is, on paper, relatively straightforward.. but yeast and bacteria are wee divils who like spanner throwing .. the two beers that I have on tap, I could easily envisage pouring in my future breweries tap room with only minor adjustments as well as versions incorporating tea.. the quality astounds me, but that feeds back into the simplicity of beer-making, whilst I’ve put thought and love into my brews, I can only initiate the alchemy..

I am beyond excited to hopefully turn this into a modest, wee, local, sustainable, rural lifestyle and that the hard work of the past few years finds its feet in Japan.

I’m creating a monster! I did very little planning for today’s brew other than hastily buying ingredients.. not a practice that I recommend but it has probably led me to going a bit crazy with it.. it’s my last brew day after all.. so I’m making a flavour bomb, hopefully.. using 300g of hops for a 20L brew (Punk IPA uses 320g for an equivalent batch)..

I’m not generally as excited about IPAs as other beer styles but I’m kinda lookin forward to how this is going to work out 🤔

Doing my last pre-brew sanitisation routine on Scottish soil, tomorrow I’ll pack some of my kit away for transit.. bittersweet.. though hopefully the beer will be neither overly bitter nor overly sweet.

We contacted the airline to ask them to confirm that the travel kennel that we found meets their guidelines and they replied with a link to approved kennels.. all manufactured by the same company and handily available to pre-order and pay for at Schiphol airport..

.. I say handily but of course we are flying from Edinburgh, so… Is our dog meant to swim to Amsterdam?

Flights to Japan tentatively booked, can’t book for unborn children (fairly obvious) so will need adding later and need to call back in a day or two to see if they are going to permit my dog in the hold.

Of course what Japan seems to require in pre-flight covid testing doesn’t seem to align with what is in offer at the airport’s here so will need to search for somewhere that presumably still uses a fax machine..

Just asked my daughter if I could remove some of the nine love heart stickers she put on my phone some weeks ago.. now I have ten.. lesson learned.

My wife is on maternity leave now and removal boxes have already arrived (ahead of mid-April removal..) so packing has already begun and soon she will sell everything not for packing from under our feet.

Meanwhile, I’m teaching my daughter to Pas-de-basque so that I’ve a wee helper when we bring ceilidh dancing to rural Japan! Also need to try and find some DRM-free ceilidh music at some point.

Just had a selection of draft logos (for future brewery) sent to me from our graphic designer friend and they are awesome! I might be 3 years or so out from establishing the brewery but it’s really exciting to have the logo almost done! Especially since I threw together the base design idea in October 2019 :)

Once the logo is done I can work on developing the website whilst I continue my studies and work on building industry experience once in Japan.

Just realised that cactus comments could be used for guestbook (or slow chat) purposes (not a self-realisation, prompted by comments in their matrix room)..

.. does my website need a guestbook that pretty much no-one will ever sign? Probably not.. am I going to add one anyway? Almost certainly!

I’ve finally met my match! A replacement watch strap which just refuses to align the pin correctly.. I am near defeated..

Anytime my daughter sees the hay-haired fuckwit in the UK’s prime ministerial seat appear on my phone she asks who it is (presumably due to his cartoon-esque appearance).. I always give the same answer..

She is at her granny’s house and just saw a photo of him on the computer and asked “Is that the clown? 🤡” .. bursting with pride 😆

I need to write up my 2022 plans blog post as per my tradition of the past few years, probably with a separate but linked sustainability related post this time.. but feeling very sleep deprived so doubt it will be done today. Even a quadruple espresso has failed to boost my levels.

Happy Hogmanay folks, hope your 2022 is exactly what you need it to be.

I now have an approved ‘Certificate of Eligibility’ (well my mother-in-law does, it will be mailed to me soon) which is the most difficult part of the spousal visa application process. I’ll just need to fill in a short form and take it to the Japanese consulate and within a few weeks of that date I’ll have my visa!

Will wait until we’re a bit closer to our moving date before that happens though. Another weight off my shoulders!

Currently explaining surveillance capitalism to a cynical three year old who doesn’t believe that Santa can see her.

After today’s work day is finished, I’ve a break if almost two weeks and then back for my final ever eight weeks of working in IT (hopefully!), I am so ready with my tech tinkerings to be a hobby and nothing more.

Wow photo driving licence arrived just 5 days after the test.. seems like someone at DVSA didn’t get the memo about how long these things are meant to be delayed..

One more burden lifted regarding our move to Japan, I managed to get another driving test on short notice and this time managed to pass.. though I don’t anticipate doing much, if any, driving before I absolutely have to in Japan. It was a requirement of the contract offer I have so I’m happy to have ticked that box!

I can’t believe that netflix managed to snap up ‘Dune’ so soon after release.. very impressed at how young they made Jean Luc Picard look.. makes sense that Mr quantum leap is involved.. I feel a little uneasy about Scotland’s cloning technology being used to produce a young, confusingly English Kyle MacLachlan..

Just found out that Japan is closing its borders to foreigners from December due to Omicron.. hopefully they will be open again by April or at least situational enough to allow us to move over..

I also have to decline a contract extension offer this week, which I had been looking forward to but if our move ends up being delayed then the joy of handing my notice is likely to be overshadowed by concerns over being unemployed for longer than anticipated.

Today’s brew day is my 2nd experiment with imparting chestnut flavour into beer.. this time with 1lb of chopped roasted chestnuts. Last time was with chestnut flour and I’m still a few weeks out from tasting how that went.

I’m also taking an alternative approach to my use of cacao nibs this time.. in previous stout brews I used raw cacao nibs and was very happy with the results but I think they might be imparting an undesired bitterness in this beer style. So I’m going to try roasting them and along with a vanilla bean, make a tincture using vodka and will add post-fermentation.

I’ve used neither of these processes before so I’m excited to see how they turn out.

Very disappointed to have failed my driving test yesterday. I’m far from the most enthusiastic of drivers and wasn’t particularly excited to attain a driving licence but I was hoping to pass so that there would be a little less pressure on my shoulders regarding the planned move to Japan.

I hope that I can get another test soon and get a better handle on my nerves during it, I don’t need this burden carrying into the new year.

Thinking about self-hosting gotify but it seems that to do so, at least to support gotify-up, I’ll need to recompile nginx to include the lua module.. I’ve not done this since I built my proxy server a few years back, so now wondering what other modules I should add in if I’m going to recompile anyway..

We’re off for another sex scan of our incoming baby today as the sonographer wasn’t 100% sure when she said we’re likely having a girl.

As it isn’t NHS this time they are a little less strict on how many folk can come along so our daughter and my mum are coming.. which gives us a 50-50 split on preference.. (although that would also be the case if it were just the two of us).

There will be a few disappointed people around these parts a little later..

Has anyone seen my manual lying about? I seem to have forgotten how to engage study mode and have to work on an assignment today..

Just tapped my first original recipe stout whilst waiting on the current brew stage to complete.

I am sipping it with a big smile on my face. It should be conditioned and poured with a nitrogen mix or just nitrogen and I have neither but it is very tasty and very definitely a stout. Chuffed!

Just before I started my brew kit cleaning and sanitisation routine tonight, I started cold brewing some cacao nibs and chestnut flour..

This may or may not be a standard practice in brewing for one of those ingredients (not being coy, I genuinely don’t know) but for the other shrug .. it seems to me to be a likely step in nut milk creation so makes sense (again, no nut milk recipes were consulted).. I quite probably have the liquid to solid ratios completely askew..

..but this is the type of brewer I want to become, somewhat experimental but with these leaps being grounded in my understanding of many years of cooking.. I can’t believe that my nervous, unprepared answer in Japanese in my recent interview regarding why I want to make beer and not whisky (asked because you know, I’m Scottish) is actually a guiding principle..

It’s going to be interesting one way or the other..

In my Beer52 box yesterday there was a Raspberry Stout, which made me very happy, a pairing of my favourite beer style with my favourite fruit!

Whilst reading the can I spotted that the brewers also used molasses which raised an eyebrow.. not that molasses are very unusual in beer just that they aren’t normally a featured or highlighted ingredient..

Needless to say that it was the first beer I drank from the box.. now I am starting to question whether or not I was reading too much into the word raspberry.. as the beer tasted exactly like molasses and the raspberry was imperceptible.

If you name an ingredient in the presented style of your beer, it really should be a detectable flavour.

Kegged my first original stout yesterday, it’s meant to be a vegan sweet stout and it hit a final gravity of 1.024 which I think qualifies it as a sweet stout, though certainly not cloyingly so.

Pre-conditioning it tastes quite nice but I wish I had nitrogen to enhance the beer, will stick with CO2 though and am sure that I’m going to enjoy drinking this beer.

If it does drink as well as I suspect it will then I’ll be delighted to have nailed it on first go. I applied a lot of my learning to the recipe and brew day design so it will be testament to me moving in the right direction. Also, I have soooo many recipe ideas based on a stout so fun times lie ahead!

Today, as a 44 year old adult, I met a 20 year old adult who was recently introduced to me by letter from her mum as my sister. That wasn’t the primary reason for the letter but certainly, as far as I am concerned, the most important part.

We’ve been lightly chatting via email and matrix since then but today we both overcame our anxiety and met for the first time.

Aside from an early morning covid scare and the torrential rain in Edinburgh, today was a fantastic day.

I’ve made a start on assignment number 2 (just organising thoughts etc.) and despite the odds I’m feeling pretty confident about this one.. it involves statistics 💤 and sensory analysis 🤨.. requires tables, various charts and scientific reporting as well as assessing brew sheets and making recommendations in regards to adjustments to recipe and process in order to more closely match a control beer.. That’s a whole lot of work for just 25% of the course mark..

.. however, even though I have zero experience in statistics or analysis and am not particularly excited by either.. I still feel like this assignment is one which I can nail.. if I can find the enthusiasm to learn about calculating standard deviations and figuring out what the feck ANOVA is..

So apparently due to covid it’ll take about 5-6 months for our stuff to get from Scotland to Japan when we move.. which is a shade longer than expected.. I guess I’ll be sending my SBCs separately by airmail..

Still elated over today’s news especially as it coincidentally happened the day before we have a Japanese removal company coming to give us a quote for moving our stuff over next year.

Definitely having a celebratory drink this evening, flu be damned.

Woke up to the news that the local government of our future village in Japan, has just finished renovating a house in the village and are going to keep it vacant for us if we want it.

Hell yes! I love my wife’s family and am grateful that they are making space for us but delighted that it will just be temporary whilst we set the new house up.

Switched off my dendrite instance and am now dual-synapsing.. within minutes I was able to get cactus chat set up for my site.. I love the idea of dendrite, but the development is too slow for me.. will check in from time to time if two synapses on one SBC is a bit much but I think it should be fine.

Right then, results for first assignment of the current course received the run of A’s continues.. yeah, I’m somewhat surprised about that too.

Just been for our 20 week scan and it seems that our new family addition will be devoid of Y chromosomes and despite thinking that I didn’t have a preference for the sex of our baby, it turns out I am delighted that we’ll (likely) be having another wee girl.

I added 150g of houjicha (ほうじ茶), a roasted green tea into the 20L of brown ale in my fermenter this evening.. when I wrote the recipe I didn’t appreciate just how much tea that was :) just shy of two full packets.. I guess I’d better order larger quantities from the in-laws next time!

Today marks my 25th brew day and should be pretty chill, making a stout and it’s one which I’ve created the recipe for from scratch, trying to apply some knowledge that I’ve acquired through previous brews and through my course to properly design the recipe and brew schedule for it.

I love stouts and I feel that they are very forgiving of mistakes (can handle undesirable flavour compounds a little better than lighter beers etc.) but it is so damned tempting to throw in cacao nibs and coffee beans.. must resist! This is to be a beer upon which future stout recipes can be developed.

Scottish Beer Awards tonight. Whilst I’ll never get a chance to participate I am considering establishing an annual Shikoku Beer Awards event.. which I think would be a lot of fun.

Having a quick look at some open source software for my in-laws’ online tea shop etc. as I try to wake up this morning.. opencart looks pretty nice.. looking at plausible for analytics and wondering how well they play together.. I can feel additional strain being added to one of my SBCs soon..

Just made a very spicy tofu dish and sat down in front of the TV with some very tasty home-brewed beer.. noticed a Danish detective programme and we immediately decided to watch it.. The Chestnut Man..

.. noticed some similarities with The Killing (original not US one) and figured that it’s the same writer.. according to themoviedb.org it is.. woohoo, result.. looking forward to this and subsequent series..

So, as it happens I am a big fan of Flight of the Conchords, I saw them in Edinburgh in 2003 when they were shortlisted as finalists for the Perrier award (still not sure how they didn’t win)..

..they scratch an entirely different itch than Tim Minchin, or The Scared Weird Little Guys for that matter..

..anyway, I always struggled to pick one of their songs as my favourite, though probably “The most beautiful girl in the room”, but I recently caught up with their reunion tour and I think, for now at least it is “Father and Son”

https://piped.kavin.rocks/watch?v=i8iK1rhfYpI

Somewhat predictably the insomniac insomnia’d but coffee consumed, suited up and under no pressure can recall most of the prepared interview answers from memory..

T-36minutes..

Driving lesson done, time for a beer and feet up before an evening of interview preparation.. life is tiring just now..

What I want to be doing today: trying to memorise prepared answers and focus on prep for the interview which is now less than 24 hours away..

What I will be doing today: Learning to drive a car for 6+ hours..

Well, at least I’ve got the day off work..

Now that my assignment is submitted, my wife has wasted no time in presenting me with 10 potential interview questions to prepare for ahead of Wednesday’s early interview.

I’ve answered them as best I can, so awaiting corrections then I have a day and a bit to commit them to memory and hope that they don’t ask me something else randomly!

With a rare evening free we started watching Squid Game.. as the intro was playing I said..

.. it’s basically like an adult battle royale, right?

My wife: well, it’s more like… and.. so and so watched it and said … and before they mentioned it I looked it up and …

A few minutes later.. Blue Danube plays..

Me: .. that’s a reference to Battle Royale..

My wife literally falls asleep..

Let’s call that one a draw.

Assignment submitted.. at least I think it is.. the uni moved to a new Microsoft platform this semester and no confirmation email..

.. also as a result odt files aren’t accepted.. awesome..

Today is my 15th brew day of the year and is a minor celebration as I set myself a target of 15 brews for this year! Should manage 20 which seemed impossible when I set the target.

Having a bit of fun with this one, my own experimental recipe and trying out some alternative processes .. will also be my first attempt at brewing with a tea grown by my in-laws so I hope it’s at least drinkable!

Need to pepper some assignment work in throughout the day to try and get it submitted this evening.

My assignment is shaping up reasonably well, once again the word limit is far too small to address the various requirements of the brief in any sort of depth whatsoever.. but I’m doing OK, currently on around 2300 words with a bit more padding required around one of the sections.. probably ending up on about 2500-2600 words for the initial draft.. probably about 100 of those are just citations, so will need to trim another few hundred off before submission.. limit is 2000 words, but previously 10-15% above has been acceptable, I’ll just have to make some wordy images that side-step the word count functions ;)

However, I’m taking a break now before I make dinner and spend a few hours sanitising my brewing equipment for tomorrow.

House to myself for the weekend!

Been robbed of sleep for several days by my 3 year old so tonight will be some beers and repeatedly trying and failing to get past the first few days of apocalypse difficulty on project zomboid.

Tomorrow will be a relatively long lie followed by a day of assignment writing, editing and hopefully submitting.

Sunday is brew day, and back to trying to refine my first original recipe, this time including tea in the mix!

My spouse will return on Sunday evening but daughter will still be with grandparents for a few days so..

Monday: (work) brush up on highway code for 6 hour driving lesson and try to fit some 日本語 preparation in for our interview on Wednesday.

Tuesday: a 6 hour driving lesson hopefully followed by a beer and some further 日本語 interview prep.

Wednesday: interview day, should be finished before work and hopefully will get a vocal contract offer, at which point the huge amount of pressure on my shoulders bounces over to the impending driving test. (work) catching up on weeks 2, 3 and 4 of my course work after the ludicrously early assignment. Then hopefully, giving my daughter a big cuddle on her return home.

Trying to inject some enthusiasm into the morning. I have my “first” driving lesson in a little over an hour and I’m not feeling it today.. Attaining a driving license is of course a pre-requisite to being offered a contract and being able to move to Japan.. so I need to find reserves of enthusiasm from somewhere.. but.. cars.. meh..

Working on my assignment that is due on Monday with a view to finishing it before the weekend.. I have to critically analyse a technical patent and explain the potential benefits (or lack thereof) with regards to implementing it in a fictional brewery.. the only issue is that the only papers that I’ve found that vaguely contradict some of the claims in the patent are over 30 years old and not peer reviewed..

Modern, peer reviewed papers on the topic generally agree with the claims in the patent.. which is fine and I’ve plenty of references\citations to get the assignment done.. however, its not going to be overly critical which is a concern.

Coffee consumed, £2.40 won on last night’s Euromillions.. and sitting in front of Zotero looking at a slew of research materials I need to read and annotate.. let’s do this!

Took the day off to look after my daughter and just took delivery of a wee mushroom foraging tool that I had ordered.. now patiently waiting for a plumber to arrive (just said he’d be here in pm…) so that we can go out exploring in some unexplored (by us) woods nearby. Hoping for a little more fungi activity than our normal walking routes.

I have my morning coffee sat at the dining table in the kitchen (most days), sitting in front of my two fermentation vessels (for now). There is something about the bubbling of a active fermentation that really helps me to focus on our future plans.

Which is just as well because we have our interview date! A couple of days after my assignment due date and almost exactly a month before the driving test that it all hinges upon. Hopefully, the pressure will ease after that (not that there is any guarantee I’ll pass)..

Awesome, clearly I wasn’t busy enough that’s the intensive driving course which I had booked for the week before my test just fallen through..

I am not loving this concept of an early assignment that my course has introduced. I’ve barely finished reading week one’s coursework, have yet to start on this week’s and have only 13 days to complete and achieve my first assignment.. and it isn’t a checkbox exercise, its somewhat dependent on knowledge that we’ve not yet learned.. 25% of the course marks..

With this course, work, driving lessons (hopefully), interview with Mayor of future home village in Japan (hopefully), multiple vet appointments, and a brew schedule to adhere to, I’m not going to see the light of day for a few months! (probably as well, I burn way too easily!)

Japanese requirements for importing a pet dog are 2 rabies vaccinations..

Our (very helpful) vet says.. rabies vaccinations are given once and last for 3 years..

Email sent to DEFRA and expecting to have retired in Japan with a new generation of pets before I get a useful response..

My sister’s boyfriend built a PC for my mum, which presumably worked for a while but not doesn’t so it’s come to me to fix..

I like the chap in question and don’t for a second suspect anything untoward with regards to the amount he charged my mum and the specs of this desktop, rather I suspect he was just a little inexperienced and may have made some dubious choices with how he spent the money.

Trying to run a windows 10 recovery from usb on this device is chronically slow, I’ve been waiting for it to move to the next screen for over 30 minutes.. it’ll get there but will it be today?

(Before any fossbros jump in, I will be installing Linux (mint in this case) and have already talked to my mum about it, but I need to recover data from the seemingly fucked M2 drive which for now requires me to continue through this arduous tedious process)

I set a target to try and achieve 15 brew days in 2021 which at the time looked pretty hit or miss in regards to attainability.. today is my 14th brew day of the year, and 23rd in total.

I received a nice, unprompted email from a brewer friend in Japan this morning just asking how we’re going etc. and it’s given me a wee lift.

It seems that his brewery is doing well and he is looking forward to me joining the community. I too am very much looking forward to joining the community!

Apparently there will be another brewery opening soon in the prefecture with an Australian brewer, the Shikoku brewing community is becoming a very international affair.

For now though I may need a second giant mug of coffee and try to get stuck in to my studies.

I wonder if there will be a clothing return amnesty at any point at my daughter’s nursery school. It’s like some kind of laundry swapshop..

Time to crank up zotero for the first time in a while and get this semester started!

I have so much to learn to make this a reality but I had an idea, which I’ve mentioned sort of before..

relating to future life in Japan and what I want my eventual meishi (business card) to say..

Small Batch Brewer - Mushroom Grower - Vegan Pie-maker

Spent grains from brewing used for growing mushrooms in, mushrooms (and sometimes beer) made into pies and pies eaten with my beer.. If I can split my working life between these pursuits, I will be an exceptionally happy soul.

We had a chat this morning with the village govt. (of our future home in Japan hopefully) with regards to our application and timelines.

They were initially planning to interview us in January or February but we explained the timelines around applying for my visa and needing to no well ahead of that for putting our house on the market etc. and they are going to try and arrange interview(s) with the mayor and deputy mayor early to mid-October instead..

My next course started today and first assignment will be due around then.. and hopefully I’ll have some intensive driving lessons next month too..

October looking very busy but hopefully some pressure will be relieved with an official contract offer.

I made my favourite tofu dish this evening (Vegan Richa’s Black Pepper Tofu) and I think it might be the first time that I ate it with non-oxidated, home-brewed beer on draught.. it was a pretty special experience. Added sugar snap peas into the tofu dish for the first time and they turned out to be little jewels of sweetness in a fairly relentlessly spicy dish.. big props the the kale too, very pleasant cameo!

Geez, I wish my fingers and thumbs would stop “autocorrecting” what I’m trying to type when I’ve been drinking..

Thinking of rejigging my micropub endpoint so that I can post articles using an indieweb writer.. relatively straightforward change, just need to search categories for blog name and assign to the relevant custom property for Hugo to correctly sort. Should probably have done this a long time ago..

I’ll also update my syndication script to post articles to GtS too.. not that I have or expect to have a large readership but I wondered what people would prefer..

1. Full article but collapsed behind a content warning\subject, or
2. A summary and link to blog post

Not sure which is the preferred etiquette.. I quite like reading full blog posts directly in my timeline but I have previously (manually) posted summaries with links before.. thoughts?

Today so far I’ve transferred my last brew ( a dry-hopped Amarillo single malt and single hop IPA) to keg and the aroma that filled the room was exquisite 👌. I’ve tapped my previous (mosaic) SMaSH and samples it (tasty) and am part way through brewing a Citra dry-hopped SMaSH.. good times!

Development of GoToSocial is powering on, I really should try to find the time to write the “pull” scripts to syndicate fediverse posts back to my site.. soooon. I think there are still a few API dependencies which aren’t yet in place but at this place it won’t be long until I’m out of excuses :)

Explaining to our 3 year old daughter that she is going to be a big sister was a very satisfying experience! She asked lots of questions and aside from a strange fascination with using the word “hatched” she seemed to take most of the answers in.. she has demanded a sister so the eight weeks or so until the next scan is going to be fraught with stress ;)

What a tiring day.. my wife’s graduation at Edinburgh castle with our 3 year old in tow, so took the buggy.. too hot for a full kilt outfit but that’s what the ladies of the house wanted me to wear.. little did I know I’d be pushing the fecking buggy the entire way up to the top of the castle, cobbles all the way, of course. Then went to a vegan Roman pasta and pizza restaurant for dinner and just back home now..

.. I’m away peched!

That (Fantastic Fungi) was perhaps the best documentary that I’ve watched in years.. Amongst other things I took the following from it..

1. Lion’s mane mushrooms have potential qualities which MAY be able to assist in combatting conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease.. but they are rare and at least here, picking them is apparently illegal.. they can be grown though.
2. I really need to experience psilocybin (magic mushrooms), as soon as possible, please.
3. I need to read, Mycelium Running - and will purchase before I go to bed..

.. I also then answered my own question of what to do with spent grain when I become a brewer (not going to give it to cattle farmers.. as most people suggest..).. I’m going to grow a fuck tonne of mushrooms!

Sitting down to watch a documentary called “Fantastic Fungi” whilst drinking a beer I made, with much help from fungi.. I’m already sold.

I wish a bit more of the massive swathes of cash being granted to matrix went towards hiring an additional dev or two for dendrite.. it’s meant to be their next generation server after all.. development is slooooow.. not really carping it’s basically functional but I want to align my dendrite instance with my website via cactus comments and it doesn’t work at all with dendrite as of yet.. it’ll get there.. that’s what I get for backing new(er) projects.. though GoToSocial development is flying!

I’ve just heard that Japanese actor Sonny Chiba has died of covid-19.. he was apparently an anti-vaxxer ..

Sitting in a coffee shop opposite the corn exchange preparing for the craft beer festival.. toastie consumed.. I think I’ll take on the crazy chilli beer right at the start.. like jumping into a freezing loch.. building up to it will only allow doubts to takeover..

My favourite brewery will be in attendance at tomorrow’s craft beer festival in Edinburgh and they are bringing a sour chilli beer made with purple naga viper chillies .. I am looking forward to this!

The Edinburgh Craft Beer festival is on Saturday and I’ve just had to do a lateral flow test to prove covid-19 negativity before I can get my ticket..

It was the first time I’ve done a test and I did not enjoy it.. 20 minutes to go until we find out if the bug that Islay brought how from her first nursery session is going to derail my weekend plans..

It was Islay’s first (introductory) day at nursery school today and she settled in within minutes. I’m very grateful that she is not of a nervous disposition!

She loved it and is excited to go back which is great because the next day is a full day! Was happy to see the class was very multi-cultural as she’ll not have the same opportunity to play with as varied a collection of kids when we move to rural Japan.

My 3 year old daughter, Islay, is going through a very experimental stage right now.

Unfortunately for us, she is once again experimenting with acting like a teenager.

For the first time in a while, I looked up vegan restaurants in Edinburgh in order to book a table for after my wife’s graduation and damn! Edinburgh has upped it’s game!

Booked a table at Sora Lella - not normally overly excited by Italian restaurants but I am this time!

Real Talk: I think Jock and Mel are the best hosts of all of the many seasons of MasterChef Australia (as much love as I had for the previous hosts).. but Andy.. he’s the C3PO of this saga.. and a barely intelligible one at that.

Phase one complete! Posting to my site now syndicates to a new activitypub account I have on my new GoToSocial instance.

What works:

• Notes (short form text posts like this)
• Media + Media Descriptions (primarily photos)
• Likes, Shares and Comments (made from this site to activitypub accounts)
• Visibility scopes (public, un-listed, follower only)
• Content warnings

Basically the writing or push phase is done, the reading or pull phase is next and I have a plan but have worked hard enough this week so chilling!

Probable site redesign at some point whenever I can find the time (it’ll likely take me less time to work out than I expect) will hopefully do the following:

Integrate activitypub interactivity by hooking up to an account using GoToSocial which I’m following the development of closely but haven’t yet experimented with.

Write scripts to poll the GtS API and pull new posts/interactions and write to JSON or yaml files for Hugo to convert to static pages. This might require me to completely rewrite the webmentions endpoint.. I need to think about multiple process flows and make sure that existing functionality isn’t broken.

Properly integrate cactus comments (using my dendrite instance) to relevant posts, which requires clarification from the devs on how to install the appservice without docker. This should enable comments via matrix, webmentions and activitypub which for the first two includes guest commenting.

Redesign how media is displayed, particularly photo albums. Also categorisation via hashtags will need a rejig.. not sure if it is viable to add search to a static site but also an option for investigation.

I currently use the Indigenous app for posting to this site and my semi-anonymous social media facing site (to be retired on completion of the work on this site) which I’d like to continue, which would mean that I’m primarily syndicating to and pulling from activitypub.. I tend to use Tusky for activitypub reading and occasional posting, so I need to also ensure that replies, likes, shares etc. are correctly recorded regardless of the app I use.

Write a script (or do it manually) to pull all of my pixelfed posts and save them to this site.. as I really don’t think that I need to host a single person instance of pixelfed any more.. at the very least if family show an interest I can build another instance using this tld.

A lot of work but it will be transferrable to other future sites for other folks or future brewery purposes.. so worthwhile.. now, where can I find the time?

Driving theory test passed again.

Now need to try to book an intensive driving course and practical test as soon as I can.

Also, will try to rebook rebook another theory test for Sakino as she was unable to attend today.

Progress..

I’ve spent a few days creating a web site for a new beer related database that I created last week. I still need to add a search facility but looking good so far.

The primarily function is a quick reference for ingredient profiles and recipes to aid with studies and recipe development but it could continue to grow and be useful for future brewery purposes.

I called it Leann, which is Gàidhlig for beer.

Just a wee geek X brewing student collaboration!

Sakino and I finally managed to book our driving theory tests, both on the same day, but in two different cities!

We’ve both passed before so hopefully will again and then we’ll try and get intensive courses booked asap afterwards.

I’m not a fan of cars or driving but a licence is a prerequisite to our application to move to Japan so, we’ll do what we have to do.

Just completed my second of a seven day beginner’s yoga course.. Today’s focus was around side and shoulder mobility and was much more painful than yesterday’s session.

The pain being due to the tension in my shoulders and neck rather than the probably pretty light stretching in the course.

I’ll complete all 7 days before concluding if its for me but the warm burn in my shoulder muscles right now isn’t unpleasant.. So, the mind remains open.

I received my first covid-19 vaccination yesterday, feeling a shade tired and have slightly sore muscles but generally grand.

When the world inevitably falls apart and we all break into our vaccination-based factions (vacsfacs), I’ll be in the AstraZeneca tribe.. I suggest we strive for alliances with younger tribes as most of us are middle-aged.. I can either be a diplomat/strategist or make us beer..

Managed to get my final assignment submitted in time today despite a surprise letter arriving yesterday advising me that I have a sister that I didn’t know about until now (via my mum’s ex-husband who was the y chromosome contributor to my conception).

Focus levels were somewhat low but it should be a decent pass, and I’ve registered for my next course on wort boiling and fermentation, which will hopefully bring the bioscience knowledge to the table after its absence from my last course.

Another sister though.. 24 years my junior.. mind blown!

Today was Islay’s 3rd birthday, and I am bursting with pride. Watching this, often frustrating, little girl grow into the beautiful creature that she has become has been he greatest pleasure of my life. Also, it is entirely down to her that our current, exciting plans are being realised.

So much love for my wee girl! Happy birthday poppet!

Had an impromptu, unscheduled and unexpected video chat with Ken and Masako from Mukai Craft Brewing (whom I wrote a letter of introduction too back in December). Kai, the fellow future brewer in Hidaka-mura, was also there. It was a little hectic and far from a real chat and it seems my Scottish accent presented a challenge (it becomes less Scottish outside of Scotland..) but it was nice to put voices to faces.

If only I had time to look a little less “mid-lockdown” before the intro, but hey ho! Glad to have finally me them, would like a proper chat when time allows (preferably when I’m not working!)

We have decided to add an additional conical fermenter and a glycol chiller to our home brewery!

It is being considered as an investment in our future brewery as the same kit will be used for recipe development and small batch experimentation.

Exciting!

Just received my second assignment mark for the Filtration and Packaging course and was awarded an A which is equally as surprising as just falling short of an A for the first assignment.

Combined these two assignments count for 50% of the course mark and averaged, I’m currently sitting on an A, but I don’t expect to end up there after my final assignment, which is released next week.

I’ve found the content of the course to be uninspiring and the method of teaching to be poor so, whilst I’ll put in more effort than the first two assignments as an A is seemingly within reach, I’ll struggle with enthusiasm if the question isn’t a lot more interesting than I expect it will be.

Brew day! Making a SMaSH (single malt and single hop) IPA in order to explore the Motueka hop. It smells excellent, fresh and vibrant!

Day progressing very smoothly thus far.

The first of my two original recipe 80/- brews has been poured after 6 weeks of patiently waiting!

I wish I hadn’t drank 4 Brewdog beers before sampling this but it seems to have a surprisingly dominant caramel flavour, which fits the style and is pretty tasty! Before I get too carried away, I’ll have to taste without external influences but for a first attempt at an original recipe, I am tentatively calling it a success.

It isn’t suitable for infusion with tea, at least I don’t think so, but it might be useful for other purposes in the future.. might need to look into “pastry” beers as I suspect a caramel & hazelnut tart ale might be interesting.

Somewhat surprisingly, I just missed out on an ‘A’ for my first assignment of the current course. Indeed, had I checked the converted file post-submission and noticed the three missing explanatory formula in the submitted version, it is pretty likely that I’d have crossed the line.

Ach well, ne’er mind.

Today, I wrote two emails to other craft brewers in Kochi prefecture..

• Email 1, I had been planning to send since 2018.. but I wanted some brewing experience and knowledge first. It was to Setoguchi-san @ Tosaco and before sending the email, I asked Sakino to proof-read and suggest corrections. When the document was returned I didn’t see comments so thought that corrections had been made. It turns out that as I had the previous version of the email open, it didn’t update with the comments.. so the email I sent has several mistakes :( I really hope that they aren’t too bad and that Setoguchi-san isn’t offended!

• Email 2, was to two brewing brothers from Yamamoto Bakushu.. This time I did see the comments from Sakino and made the suggested corrections before sending.. as the email address on their website seems to be non-functional so the email was rejected.

Just been that kind of a day.

Both of my “mid-semester” assignments are now submitted and hopefully sufficient for passing grades. I have a break until 26th of April when the final assignment for this course is released, then two weeks to research and complete it.

In the meantime, I am going to try and:

• Write introduction emails to some Japanese brewers in Kochi and other neighbouring prefectures in Shikoku
• Reach out to Scottish brewers to arrange post-lockdown brewery visits
• Book and study for my driving theory test
• Contact driving instructors to try and arrange an intensive, automatic driving course
• Try and improve my Japanese by reading and posting to note.com (despite my apprehensions about the platform)
• Brew more beer! Next will be the first of a single malt and single hop (SMaSH) IPA series

I have a new icon under my photo on the right, it is for my note.com profile.. note.com is a Japanese social sharing site, I guess, I’m still navigating it.

It does represent something that I have been avoiding for several years, that is a big centralised site potentially data harvesting me but I’m making an exception as it may be a useful tool for connecting to Japanese craft beer enthusiasts and brewers.

Sakino thinks I am OK to post in English (even though I don’t see any non-Japanese posts) but I feel that I’ll need to pepper some Japanese in as I go, though not to the extent where it becomes a deterrent to posting.

I’m treating this as an experiment and a way to read a bit more Japanese, even if just scanning initially.

5 brew days in the first quarter of the year (even though the first one was a failure)! Target of 15 beers in 2021 looking very attainable!

Had a taste of the wort before adding yeast and if I’ve done the right thing with the mash, then hopefully some of the sweetness will carry through to the beer.

Had a nice caramel aroma but that is likely to dissipate through fermentation.. probably about 6 weeks before this one is tastes as the style appears to benefit from a longer maturation period..

TODO list for this evening:

• Clean and sanitise keg

• Clean and sanitise beer line

• Transfer beer from fermenter to keg

• Clean and sanitise fermenter

• Clean and sanitise mash tun

• Write up brew day plan for tomorrow

• Stop giggling at the rugby scores

Filtration and Packaging Assignment 1 done! I’ll proofread and submit later today and then move on to assignment 2 on Monday.

It wasn’t the most exhilarating experience and I don’t expect that I’ll hit the lofty heights of my semester 1 grades but it should be good enough for a pass.

The next assignment involves completing 6 industry safety courses and writing a reflective essay on how I would apply this to the whisky packaging industry..

I hope the final assignment is a bit more relevant to my future brewery plans. Looking forward to September’s course already.. it’ll either be on cereals and mashing or on yeast and fermentation.. at the moment, I’m not sure which I should prioritise.

I’ve been wanting to watch Borgen for years but don’t watch terrestrial TV and could never find the first season online. I was recently advises that it is now all on Netflix and have watched the first episode. What a cracking start, I think I’m going to like this!

I developed a neat script which pulls a bunch of data from a GPX file, and with the help of a few free tools, namely gpxinfo and gpx2png, it calculates a few things, creates route maps and posts a summary to my site. I noticed today that the logic for pace was a little askew, so sorted it and am happy with the results..

It’s a simple enough process that I even got Sakino to switch to the free and open source FitoTrack app! We just need to record our exercise, save the GPX file to nextcloud and then run a script and about 5-10 seconds later the session is live on our sites!

From the mouths of babes..

After a 10km walk today I was standing at the door waiting for our dog to come in, I had a bag of spicy peanuts from Lidl in hand and was looking forward to a beer..

My almost 3 year old daughter, Islay launched an inquisitive line of questioning about the bag in my hand, were they for the dog? what were they? etc. Culminating in the (genuine) question, ”Does mama not love Papa’s nuts?”

.. to which, after confirming the question, I merely responded “not as much as she used to”

Just checked the temperature of my beer fridge before bed and it was down to -0.5°C, so definitely possible to use for cold-crashing.. however, given the green beer will be in kegs rather than the fermenter and they currently feed from the bottom, I might want to wait until I’ve bought the floating inlet pipe kits for the kegs before testing this.

Just kegged my Alice Porter attempt after a record 18 days in the fermenter. After my recent intestinal adventures I was very much on top of the yeast dumps this time, the beer looked very clear as it transferred to keg. Had a nice aroma and I had a taste when taking the final gravity measure.. so long as it remains non-oxidates and conditions well this is going to be good!

TODO list over the next few days:

• Fix the slight CO2 leak that still exists in my kegerator set up - may require shaving a little of the end of the pipes to ensure they are completely flat against the back of the John Guest fittings and possibly even drilling into the wall of the kegerator to fix the gas splitter in place.
• Identify why gas doesn’t seem to be filling the kegs (beers are pouring flatter than before, but still quickly) and fix, may be resolved by above step.
• Clean line and keg in preparation for conditioning the porter which is patiently waiting in the fermenter
• Keg and condition the porter
• Replace thermometer batteries and test the beer fridge’s capabilities for imminent cold crashing use.

It seems my eagerness to replace the barb and clasp system of connecting the gas and beer lines with John Guest push-lock fittings might have been premature, with little space to play with in the kegerator ensuring the lines connect flush with the JG connectors is pretty tricky. In a cellar environment the fittings are generally fixed in place so movement is minimal and the risk of gas leak also low but we are where we are and I will make it work!

Brew day number 12 is this Sunday and I’m thinking of going full Sorachi Ace with the 80 shilling.. for science!

Learning first hand what it is like to be a fermentation vessel this weekend.. too much live yeast still in the small sample of newest beer that has been fermenting and conditioning for four weeks.. will give it longer and also look into conversion kits for my Cornelius kegs to draw the beer from the top, rather than the bottom and avoid the sediment.. This is a lesson that I could have done without!

I replaced the gas regulator for my kegerator set up this evening s the last (cheap) one was leaky despite much tightening.. also started phase one of swapping over from barb and clasp connections over to john guest push lock connections.. the clasps were probably fine but I prefer the push locks as that’s what I’m used to from almost two decades in beer cellars. That said, the pushlock connectors are more sensitive to movement so I’m going to have to see if I can somehow connect the gas splitter to a wall of the fridge..

Spent a few hours cooking for pleasure today, it’s a bit of a rarity as I try to compress as much brewing into the year as I can but happy with results so far!

Made a Scotch broth inspired soup to go with the rye bread that Sakino is baking and a batch of chili non carne for nachos later.. will make guacamole and salsa once Islay is asleep.. first time cooking with chillies since Islay started eating the same food as us and am very excited about eating it! All #vegan of course.

Will post some photos later when the remainder of the dish is made and nachos constructed!

Replaced by continuous integration process flow, which automatically updates the website when I post, with a very simple script. It seems to work well on my other site so testing here.. fingers crossed

Something keeps breaking my website.. when I delete a post the site doesn’t appear to rebuild correctly. Hoping that this post will fix it again.

My next brew day is Sunday and for the first time I’ll be kegging a beer on the same day as making the next one! Going to try and focus on reducing potential oxygen uptake during kegging.. thinking of doing a CO2 purge of the keg before pouring and then do a gas release and refill after sealing to push out any stowaway oxygen.

Learned a bit about barrel-aging and environmental issues and factors relating to packaging, today.. Both very important to our future plans but I don’t think the course will go into any more depth about the former, so I’ll need to focus on it after I get through the mid-course assignments relating to filtration, pasteurisation and sedimentation.. Somewhat drier and less relevant to someone who doesn’t plan to filter or pasteurise their beers..

I’m not really enjoying this semester’s course so far, it was always going to be the least interesting of the brewing related courses, but the 3+ hour lectures and dearth of links to further reading are taking a toll.. Hopefully, it’ll improve in the coming weeks. Just a shame that the first assignment doesn’t interest me at all.. Low enthusiasm but will do what needs to be done!

I decided that for my next brew day which is on my birthday weekend to change it up a bit and try a recipe from a major brewer which I have both tasted and enjoyed and as they open source their recipes, that brewer is Brewdog and the beer is Alice Porter.

Normal 80/- focussed service will return afterwards.

Brew day #10 today! A re-run of last week’s 80/- brew based loosely on ‘Williams Bros’ grain bill but timings, hops and yeast chosen from other similar style beer recipes.

Hopefully nothing wil sabotage this brew!

Just cooked a roasted butternut squash, brussel sprouts and mushroom dish based on the recipe at the bottom but I used chestnut mushrooms, had only (slightly insufficient) fresh flat leaf parsley and cooked freekeh (for the first time) rather than hard red wheat.

It was very tasty! I love freekeh it turns out, have eaten bulgur wheat many times in then past and freekeh is very similar just a better texture.

One issue was the cooking time.. Converted the fahrenheit oven temperature to celcius and thought this must be too high.. But went with it.. After 30 minutes (15 early) I took the tray out and the sprouts were overcooked and had lost their bite.

Didn’t take pictures but Sakino wants me to make it again for lunch tomorrow so will try to remember to take a few snaps.

https://industryeats.com/brussels-sprouts-butternut-squash-mushroom-veggie-bowl-recipe/

Currently (virtually) attending a guest lecture by Dr. Daniel Kerruish, group microbiologist at Diageo, on pasteurisation.

He is suggesting that pasteurisation for small craft breweries is very much ‘a cherry on top’ and due to the volume of hops used and relative high ABV of craft beers, so long as hygiene practices are properly maintained then pasteurisation isn’t really required.

Pasteurisation tends to be restrictively expensive for small breweries and the technology tends to be power hungry so not great for a sustainability focussed brewery.

First lecture of new semester today, up to 2.5 hours long.. Not sure how likely it will be that I can watch and work every Monday afternoon but we’ll see.

On the plus side, hopefully I’ll find out details about both of the mid-semester assignments today and make a start on researching them.

My first attempt at an 80 shilling type beer has been a bit disappointing, possibly due to the replacement malts that I had to use.. and it seems to be a beer that really needs mixed gas.. not doing so well on CO2..

.. it’s drinkable, there are the sort of caramel notes you might expect but they are far too subtle.. might have been better with marris otter but there was none in stock at the brewstore..

..deciding whether or not to switch recipes before I place my order this evening for the first brew of 2021.

明けましておめでとうございます.. when the time comes for you.

Happy Hogmanay until then.

Been playing in the snow with Islay a fair bit today which has been fun but despite being somewhat Nordic, I really can’t stand the cold!

I’m not great with too much heat either (like Japanese summers) which is less than ideal.

Give me a lukewarm, dreich, rainy, Autumnal day any day.. yes, I am Scottish and also yes, that does describe the vast majority of Scottish days!

Last night Islay told her mum, “it’s OK, I’m a big girl, night night” enabling Sakino to leave the bedroom before she fell asleep. After months of coaching by myself, this was a breakthrough moment.

When she woke up this morning, I gave her a big hug and told her how proud I was of her for being a brave girl as she recounted the story.

.. then spent 35 minutes trying to convince her to eat some breakfast to no avail!

Rollercoaster!

After a shockingly exhausting four mile trek, pulling a trolley carrying a reasonably heavy gas canister.. I now have my CO2 bottle refilled and at a bargain price!

I wish I had known about Lothian Supply Co. before as it would have cost me £50 less for the initial purchase of the same gas bottle as compared to the brewstore in Edinburgh! The top up was only £5!

Once feeling has returned toy wrists, I’ll hook it up to my kegerator and hopefully, so long as I didn’t completely decompress the keg before noticing my lack of gas, I’ll be pouring a glass of delicious Imperial stout in a few hours time!

Cyberpunk 2077 purchased.. but will not be downloaded before I submit my final assignment of my beverage microbiology and biochemistry course..

For my first recipe based homebrew I’m going for a Scottish Export type beer.. ordering each of the ingredients is far more fun than ordering a premade mystery box!

I received my mark for the second assignment of my first course and whilst I didn’t quite reach the lofty heights of my first mark, I’m happy with a 2nd tier ‘A’!

So, for anyone interested in how kōji is used in the production of saké, here is my poster on the topic .

It is somewhat wordy for a poster and not a gleaming example of topnotch graphical design, and I was marked down for this, but I like words.. so…

Special thanks go to my friend ‘on the inside’ and 後輩, Andrew Russell who works at Imada Shuzō saké brewery (今田酒造) in Akitsu (安芸津), Hiroshima and who owns the Origin Sake blog .

OK, final assignment is now open. I have 10 days to complete it which seems a lot but I think I’m going to need all of the time, I’m not predicting an early submission for this one.

4 questions all relating to DNA, microbial genetics and manipulation or engineering of yeast cells.

I had hoped for a somewhat more practically relevant topic to sink my teeth into but we are where we are.. and for me it is the only topic in the course that I didn’t study at all.. ah well, so be it.

3 of the questions have a max. word count of 500 and are worth either 10% or 20% of the total mark and the other has a max. count of 1500 and is worth 50% of the mark. The whole assignment makes up 60% of the course total.

I’m still awaiting the result of my 2nd assignment which I’m hoping will be shared soon.. but regardless, IF I can catch up on lost sleep from the past week then I can nail this final assignment.

I’ll need to register for next semester’s course which will be related to filtration and packaging.. I think.

I just received my mark and “feedback” for my first postgraduate assignment and I exceeded my expectations by some way.. 90%

Context: (from assignment mark return announcement) “40% is the pass mark, >60% is good and >70% is excellent.”

I was worried as I’ve never written a science-y report (I got a B in higher physics in 1993 and didn’t study since..) but feeling much less apprehensive now.. though I’m not going to rest on my haunches, it’s going to take considerable effort to achieve anything close to this again.

I was planning to upload my assignments to my website (unless humiliating failures) for anyone interested in the topic so am glad the first one is presentable.

Assignment 2, a poster about koji, done and dusted and shortly to be submitted (5 days early!).. don’t think I’ll be making any plans for a career in graphic design but it’ll do.

I’v just added my Session ID to my contact details at the side of the page. Hovering over the green S logo will display a QR code which can be scanned from within the Session messenger app to add me.

Session is a VERY secure and private end to ended encrypted messenger. Based on signal but without a reliance on ANY personal data, including telephone number. It also doesn’t collect any data!

Session is available for mobile or desktop and more information can be found on their site: https://getsession.org

I may be encouraging those that I convinced to join my xmpp server that this might be a better option..

First assignment of my PgDip course submitted several days early.. taking a day off from studying before I start researching my next assignment.

I need to find time to write up a blog post on my last two brews as well, but not today.. just biding time until the working day finishes and I can pour myself a nicely chilled imperial stout! Tick tock..

Learning about cellular chemistry this week and already (just finished watching lecture video 1 of 2) it is considerably more interesting than the previous section on cellular structure.

Last week was a breakdown of the names and high level functional overview of the component parts of cells from different groups and whilst undoubtedly important, was incredibly difficult to read about whilst trying to maintain even a minimal level of consciousness.

On the flip side, learning about carbohydrates, saccharides, linked carbon chains and rings etc. is actually helping me wake up this morning..

I feel like I may be naturally aligning more to the biochemistry elements of the programme over the microbiology elements.. or at least these elements are making more sense at this early stage.

Day 2 fermentation sounds more active than previous brews, a lot more rapid bubbling in the airlock! I have a good feeling about this, I’m expecting progress with regards to closing in on the elusive Final Gravity target but will it be enough to satisfy my ’exit’ criteria?

Delaying yeast dump 1 until tomorrow, then I’ll get the first glimpse of how it’s going.. fingers crossed that its 1.030 or lower (previous best at end of fermentation is 1.041 with this beer).

Today’s brew was (potentially) my best yet, which in all fairness is what you would expect in an iterative learning process.

I made some adjustments to make some of the processes more efficient but unlike earlier attempts they were a direct result of previous lessons learned.

This brew was perhaps my last before the lessons of my brewing & distilling programme settle in so it was personally important for me to use my previous message experiences and adjust accordingly before the bedrock of understanding the scientific processes was formed.

My original gravity target was 1.083, according to my hydrometer I hit about 1.0823 and my refractometer 1.083.. the latter may require tuning.. but if you’ll permit a slightly emotion fed response ‘ya fuckin dancer’

The big test however is the final gravity, the target is 1.016 and my last 3 brews of this same beer haven’t breached 1.041.. so whilst I’m happy with today’s brew and I did my best to oxygenate the shit out of the wort.. I’ll not be satisfies unless the FG is lower than 1.020

I don’t know what these numbers mean either, other than a measure of sugar to water density.

Another very smooth brew day is approaching the final quarter.. decided on a distinct lautering/sparging process separation today and shortened the latter process considerably.. will have to wait and see if this decision impacts my original gravity figure.

Slowly approaching boil, about an hour ahead of my last brew.. and 3 ahead of the brew previous to that.

Equipment all re-cleaned and re-sanitised in preparation for brew day #7 tomorrow!

If all goes well then I’m hoping this will be the last brew where I use a grain kit and will move on to actual recipes and ordering specific grains, hops & yeast.

The only criteria I have to satisfy is to hit or be very close to my final gravity target.. if I can do that then the brew will have gone well. In order to achieve that I’ll be utilising some kitchen implements (sieve and whisk) to try and increase the oxygenation of the wort before pitching the yeast.

First brew with my wife assisting, should be fun.

Islay is off to spend 8 days with her grandparents from Thursday.

Very anxious about this, aside from the huge uplift in covid cases here (which is very unsettling), she hasn’t been away from us before for so long and I’m not sure she’ll cope well as the realisation that we aren’t there settles in.

Also, handing a mini-vegan to non-vegans for any length of time is a concern because nutritional balance is super important.

She’ll probably have a blast and it’ll just be me wracked with worry.

My first course relating to the microbiology and biochemistry of brewing starts “gently” next week!

I already know what my two assignments will be and am excited to get started.. tomorrow!

A bit less of a focus on study than I’d hoped for today, more on induction to the new programme, watching lots of intro videos, signing up to the various websites and installed MS Teams on my linux desktop (ugh) .. also prepped Sakino’s boox for my purposes and became a member of the Institute of Brewing & Distilling.

A little saddened to see facebook and google groups promoted (definitely won’t be joining those) but have had to hold my nose and request access to a couple of linkedin groups.. As a contractor I can’t really risk deleting that account unfortunately.

Productive day though and I did fit in a chapter of the audiobook for ‘Beer’ by Charles Bamforth so there was almost a study element in there too..

Only a few weeks until my first PgDip course begins. From Monday, I’ll be getting back into the swing of studying by reading and understanding the pre-reading book suggested by the university to prepare me for my first microbiology course!

I’ve not studied science since higher Physics which was in 5th year of high school some 28 years ago.. and I’m playing a little bit loose with the definition of study here..

Challenging but fascinating times await!

Day 1 of my anxiety riddled few days at the caravan park near Kirriemuir with my parents, their motorhome, my wife, daughter and 3 dogs.

Put the foot down before arrival that we would not be visiting the onsite restaurant and bar under any conditions.. otherwise been keeping to ourselves and I almost felt sort of relaxed a few times..

.. I’m to sleep in the awning.. with midges so I’m sure tomorrow won’t be unnecessarily awkward.

We had a visit from two of my closest friends today and it was so great to see them!

It was also the first time that I’ve struggled with the physical distancing restrictions.

As we heard stories of loss I really wanted to be able to hug my friends and also to be able to share a beer, that I made an am proud of with them but neither of these things were possible.

There were moments of awkward silence that wouldn’t have existed but for our disparate proximities.. and to top it all off, Islay got tired just before they left so my hope that our hugs could be transferred to them via her were not realised.

We’re doing the right thing but today was particularly difficult.

Been playing Oxygen Not Included recently, having previously avoided it as I not a big fan of Klei’s art style (really didn’t like Don’t Starve) but finding it a lot of fun.

There is a surprising amount of depth to the game and a lot to learn.

I doubt that it’ll present a challenge to the best base-builder game of all time (Rimworld) but it is keeping me entertained for now.

OK, had a decent night’s sleep, the gout is only a minor niggle today and have a 13,192 word masters degree dissertation on “Chinese and Japanese language teachers’ attitudes towards inclusion in a Scottish university” to proofread for my Sakino!

Large coffee consumed, glass of water at hand and a full keg of delicious stout on tap waiting for me at the end. Let’s do this!

The Sunday afternoon popcorn and movie ritual that Islay and I share is definitely the highlight of my week.

Not only is home-popped corn awesome, pretty healthy and a great vehicle for nutritious yeast, but Sakino isn’t a fan so it’s an activity for just the two of us.. even if Sakino did like popcorn, Islay wouldn’t let her near the bowl anyway.

Tasty, not too unhealthy snack with the added fun of trying to identify popcorn art!

On the other hand, trying to make it to the end of a movie with a 2 year old is still somewhat of a pipe dream!

I have my first engagement with Heriot Watt with regards to my PGDip programme in the form of a distance learning info webinar on 25th of August!

It seems ages ago that I applied and excited to get started.

I need to make start on studying the suggested book (‘BREWING’ second edition - Lewis & Young) soon, hopefully once Sakino submits her dissertation in a few weeks I’ll be able to find some me time.