Flying to Scotland tomorrow with my 6 year old daughter. My folks were supposed to arrive for a 3 month visit a few weeks ago but two days before they were due to fly my dad had a heart-attack. As such, we are heading over to help his recovery.

Whilst there I will be taking the opportunity to do as much “research” on Scottish pubs as possible and will hopefully squeeze in some brewery visits.

On my return to Kochi, I am very sad to say that I will be giving up my veganism. I will still be mainly plant-based where possible and am not reverting to full on omnivore, but my health has suffered since moving over here.

Being a vegan in Scotland was exciting and easy, being a vegan in this part of rural Japan is exceptionally challenging and my quality of life as well as my health has suffered.

It is unfortunate but in my opinion, currently a vegan lifestyle is not feasible here just now, if that changes and I can thrive as a vegan then I will be back on team plant-based. However, I have kids to think about and I can no longer allow my health to deteriorate simply to maintain my principles.

I am stubborn, very stubborn but I can find a way to adapt to improve my health and quality of life.

Now that I have less than a year left on my initial 3 year spouse visa, we have started thinking about the renewal process. However, we just discovered that, in theory at least, I qualify for permanent residency.

My wife and I have been married for way longer than the required 3 years and I have been living in Japan for longer than the required 1 year.

So, we will start preparing for that application instead, but soon, as I read the processing time can be very long for PR applications.

There are no guarantees of course, I am in my final year of a part-time, minimum wage contract. My wife has a little over a year left of the same contract. We still have some funds from selling our house in Scotland though so we should hopefully be covered there. Aside from their potential concerns about our financial stability though, I cannot see any other areas where they might be concerned.

There will be paperwork involved of course, but most of it is evidence based document collating, unlike a UK permanent residency application which has an enormous amount of form-filling. The main application form seems to be just 2 A4 pages in size.. unless I am missing something.

Whilst this is the first visa renewal or PR application for me, I have was obviously very involved in (the far more laborious) renewals and PR applications for my wife in Scotland, I would be very happy if this was the last one I had to do.

Spent the morning building a DIY hop trellis as last year my first hops grew higher than expected. This year looks even better so have set up an under (frosted glass) car port trellis and we’ll see how it goes.

I am not the handiest so will it handle the wait? No idea!

Will it even be necessary or just an over -engineered waste of string? No idea!

Was it a fun project that made me feel a bit closer to my rural environment? It sure was!

Dreich

Video description: A somewhat rainy scene, water streams down the car windscreen whilst the occasional car passes, in an otherwise quiet village.

As we’ve decided to be a brewery specialising in (but not limited to) Scottish beers, I focused on that today. I read Scotch Ales by Greg Noonan in its entirety and then honed the flavour profiles that I want from each beer style.

Then I wrote 3 new recipes for a 60 /-, 70/- and a “Scottish IPA” based loosely on the traditional brewing techniques and their impacts on bitterness etc. as well as modifying my existing recipe for an 80 /-, tamed my wee heavy recipe to be a dark and smokey 90 /- and modified my reluctant lager recipe to be more interesting.. don’t need to modify my porage stout recipe, it’s good as it is.

All theoretical of course as I can’t homebrew here but they look good and I think they will hit the flavour profiles I have in mind.

Pretty productive day.

Our youngest kid is 2 now and as such we are encouraging her to make choices on her own as often as we can. Choices such as what clothes do you want to wear today? what book do you want to read? etc.

Somehow this has recently been extended to asking her to choose who changes her nappy after she has pooed.. I did not introduce this.. and yet, for some reason she ALWAYS chooses me.. I do not approve of this branch of the game.

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.