The mash tun can wait

Time for a brew. Have to have something to drink to celebrate getting the mash tun made after all, so I put as much of my old kit back into service as I needed. This brew was a beer called “Wee Bee”, posted on the Jim’s Beer Kit forum. Quoted from the original posting there, the details are:

Quantities shown are for making 23l or 5 imp gallons.

Pale Malt 4300g – 87.4%
Dingemans Special B – 500g – 10.2%
Torrefied Wheat 120g – 2.5%

CHINOOK hops (quantities shown are for 13% aa)

35g for 60 mins – 47 IBUs
25g for 20 mins – 20 IBUs
20g for 10 mins – 10 IBUs
20g at flame out – 0 IBUs

OG 1.048, FG 1.010, ABV 4.9% (@ 75% brewhouse efficiency)

IBUs = 77

Colour – 56 EBCs

Your choice of yeast, but this Works well with Nottingham/Gervin

Here’s all the (pre-milled) grain in the mash tun:

And to keep the heat in for the mash, it all gets wrapped up:

After 90 minutes mashing I bodged my sparging arm onto the tube connected to the HLT:

I take the first litre or two from the mash tun tap and return it to the top just to allow the wort to run clear into a bin:

I’ve never been able to get this sort of rolling boil going with five gallons in my previous boiler as it would just have overflowed.

And with the lid on, all the steam is piped nicely out of the window so the beer shack doesn’t fill up with condensation.

I had a little more than planned when the boil was finished and the wort run off to cool, so I transferred a little to a demijohn to ferment (and I couldn’t resist a little taste, for quality control, obviously).

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Swimming, 3rd February 2017

Course all done, things can get back to normal now. And first session of the month. I’ll restart the Swimfit sessions next week, but for today I decided I’d just do front crawl and some turn practice.

Total distance for the month: 2,000m
Total distance for this year: 34,200m

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Swimming, 30th January 2017

First session for a week because of the training course. Just swam 2.5km front crawl to keep my hand in.

Total distance for January: 32,200m
Total distance for this year: 32,200m

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And relax…

I’m done. Well, sort of. The face-to-face sessions of my Swimming Coach qualification are now complete, though I still have coursework to complete and session planning and delivery to do at my own club that must be submitted for assessment as part of the qualification.

It’s been a tough course. There was a huge amount of material to get through in the time and in the compressed timescale it turned out to be impossible for me to get through all of the work in time. I think the coaches living closer and those who stayed near the venue may have found it easier, but doing the latter does turn it into a very expensive qualification.

Overall however I’m really pleased with how it has gone and I’m looking forward to applying it in my coaching.

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Ok, so that’s not quite going to plan…

It was my plan to spend a little time writing up how I was finding the Swimming Coach course. As it turns out I’ve had little free time to that. Adding the travelling time on top of the eight hours at the course and all the homework is not leaving very much for anything else. In fact I’m struggling to get all the homework done.

Which explains why I’ve not got anywhere with posting about the course, so I’ll have to do some catching up once things calm down a bit.

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I think I’m all set

About as organised as I’m ever likely to get, I think I’m all set to trog off up to Bristol tomorrow for the first day of my Swimming Coach (what was the Level 2 Coach) course.

Looks like it’s going to be pretty busy — eight days including seven sessions actually coaching swimmers in the evenings. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow I’ll know a lot more about how it is going to pan out.

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And the winner is… Screwfix!

In the competition to deliver the items ordered online in the most ridiculously-sized box, that is. This one knocks anything I’ve had from Amazon into a cocked hat (which you can probably get Amazon to deliver, in an oversize box, no doubt).

The box:

The contents, making up the entire order:

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Upside down rainbow

No, not an Australian one 🙂

I’m aware these can happen due to (I think) ice crystals floating in the sky, but it’s the first time I’ve seen one.

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Swimming, 23rd January 2017

Another Swimfit session today:

6 x 1 length backstroke, 1 length breaststroke, 1 length front crawl, easy pace.
One minute rest
6 x 1 length front crawl, average pace, 20 seconds rest
20 lengths quick front crawl
Rest until breathing returns to normal
4 x 1 length breaststroke kick, 15 seconds rest
8 x 1 length breaststroke pull, 15 seconds rest
4 x 2 lengths breaststroke, 30 seconds rest
1 length front crawl, 2 lengths breaststroke, 2 lengths backstroke, 1 length front crawl, 30 seconds rest every two lengths
4 lengths front crawl easy pace

After that I made the distance up to 2km doing reps of 2 lengths front crawl with a tumble turn at the deep end.

I found this a very tough session. I don’t particularly struggle with backstroke though I know I could do with more body rotation and my pull isn’t really that great, but I find it exhausting to swim so the first set (the warm-up!) became quite hard towards the end. Breaststroke I also find very demanding.

On the plus side, I think my breaststroke is improving thanks to the pull and kick sets. (In fact I did the pull sets with a small dolphin kick just to keep the momentum up, otherwise my legs sink.) I made more effort to shoot my hands forward at speed during the arm recovery and realised I was exhaling explosively during the in-scull. Getting the breathing more controlled really helped. What my legs are doing in the kick is still something of a mystery, but I’m trying to get my heels up to my bum, knees about hip-width apart and then kicking backwards rather than outwards. And to get legs and feet nicely streamlined at full extension.

No swimming tomorrow as I’m out on the “Swimming Coach” training course all day, but for the rest of the week the course starts at 1pm so I’ll try to get some pool time in first.

Total distance this month: 29,700m
Total distance this year: 29,700m

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Mobile phone connectivity is not yet ubiquitous

If it ever will be 🙁 So you really shouldn’t design systems that assume it is.

A couple of examples…

The bank I use for my business recently “improved security” for setting up transactions over the internet so that any new payees or changes in payment amounts and references (and a few other account details changes too) require a confirmation code to be entered. The confirmation code is sent to your phone as a text message. But mobile network coverage from our home and my office is so poor that I don’t get text messages, meaning I can no longer make payments using internet banking. I have to phone them up to set up the payments instead which takes considerably longer and means I can’t cut’n’paste details from emails or electronic invoices.

And today we were visited by a chap from the AA who is working for Volkswagen, updating the EMU firmware for their cars, presumably as a result of the emission-fixing scandal. He got out of his van holding his phone, saying “I can’t get any network coverage”.

“No”, I replied, “you won’t.”

“Oh. We’ll I can’t do the software update without mobile phone access.”

Fortunately he managed to do it a different way once I’d allowed his phone to connect to our wifi network, but that was only possible because I have a wifi network deliberately set up to provide access outdoors.

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