Brewing Progress

Today I have transferred Castlegate Brewery’s sixth brew from fermentation vessel to conditioning tank.  A bitter-style of beer based on a recipe for “Everard’s Beacon”, the beer is almost clear, looks and tastes like beer already.  Totally flat, of course, but will receive two weeks conditioning before bottling. 

If all the Brewery products end up like those tasted so far, the directors will be

well-satisfied at the results.  My main aim was to brew beer that does not taste like home brew and so far this is the case.    

We now have five beers ranging from golden summer beer to a sort-of barley wine at the conditioning stage.  The first is three weeks in the bottle and my share is down to its last eight pints.  The kitchen is now free from brew clutter and I can’t any longer lift vessel lids to sniff the eye-watering intensity of good-quality yeast getting on with what it does best.  Tomorrow I start brew seven, with another later in the week at the Harrogate premises and then brewing will start again the following week at Newcastle.  

It is fair to say the first-brewed beer is probably at its best and has now been tasted in accordance with my own criteria:   

St. Arbeck’s Gold 5.0% (recipe based on Hopback Summer Lightning)

Appearance:  Dark gold, no head unless poured from great height. Few bubbles.    

Smell:          Beer + hint of flowers (best I can do)

Taste:          Beer (this happens a lot!)    

Impressions:

Quaffable and refreshing cold or at cellar temperature.  Very similar to the shop-bought product, but less fizzy.  Worth repeating and an ideal base for experimenting with dry hopping, heather, lavender, herbs, etc. and degrees of bottle-priming.       

Bitter:          1

Sweetness:   2/3 (thus a 5-point scale becomes 10, showcasing my indecision)   

Score:          4 (seek out, ergo “brew more of same”)

Writing Progress – non-fiction

The more I want to write about, the less time I have for each item/project/subject. 

My recent shelved or dumped writing projects are non-fictional.  Having researched the world of beer blogging for my beer tasting notes and reports on micro-breweries and pubs I found very large number of people doing that already, equipped either with much better taste buds or olfactory imagination than mine.  Where I get “malty” and “hoppy”, they find a range of flavours that would do credit to the most creative wine buff.  I have well-developed receptors for bitterness, but since that taste dominates all else for me in beer brewed with high alpha acid-content hops (check out the jargon.  I can talk the talk at least), I tend to get “beer” or “strong Espresso aftertaste, or “quinine”. 

Olfactory shortcomings notwithstanding, a new beer blogger on the block is probably as necessary as a mayor in most cities, another over-the-counter analgesic or more romantic television portrayals of sexy vampires, so I have withdrawn from the field with good grace.  Instead, I shall concentrate on blogging about Castlegate Brewery products in the certain knowledge that there is no competition.   

The glossy regional mags have proved resistant to my pieces on micro-breweries.  Perhaps because most already have food and drink writers on the staff who guard their fiefdoms as vigorously as anyone else with a living to earn.  Also, I find magazine “styles” to be restrictive and don’t enjoy writing to suit them.  So, no more visits to said breweries in the guise of a “writer”.  At least for now.  A project on Victoria Cross winners similarly crashed and burned and as for my planned “Morris Traveller in Festival England”, the less said the better.  

The problem I find is somebody has done everything and everybody has done something so my potential markets are saturated .

So, for the time being, my non-fiction concerns the progress and products of Castlegate Brewery and researching history, crime and folklore for “Ester” and other fictional projects. 

Writing Progress – Fiction

“Ester and the Boggarts” is running along nicely (fiction, fantasy, child/teen/YA) with my research of settings (what filmics call “location”) working for me in terms of personal motivation and familiarity with place. 

I imagine the story being very filmable – perhaps for a tv series to occupy a slot much earlier than “Game of Thrones”, but on a proper channel – or a film franchise.  The UK-based theme park may follow a little later, so long as it’s in the north.  Book signings will take place in the east coast towns where “Ester” is set – Robin Hood’s Bay, Ravenscar, Whitby, Saltburn and others on the Yorkshire Riviera – together with smuggling-themed treasure hunts for traditional contraband.  No drugs, but lace, tea, Dutch geneva and brandy will be available. 

Such are the writing ambitions of my enthusiasm, untempered by reality or recent failure.  Good, aren’t they?  I mean no arrogance by this.  It is a form of

light-hearted self-motivation that works for me and attracts the Muses.   

Fiction is what I like writing the most. When the Muses are in Harrogate I love the process and I can type almost properly.  A thousand words in under an hour is easily achieved, even with a certain amount of backtracking for corrections.  Without the Greek ladies – who are fickle friends at best  – the words are ground out one at a time and none look right on the screen in any order.  My mood is variable, fickle as the Muses and swings to extremes rather more often than I would choose, so I know I have to get the words down as fast as possible and worry not at all about editing and re-drafting until it is finished.  The “first-draft”, as we writers call it.    

          

Novels suit me more than short stories and it will come as no surprise to those who know me that I have started several magnum opuses, but finished just one.  That France-set nonsense was rejected by several agents, as it deserved to be, but may work as a re-write with a different setting, younger characters, and a more definite origin and back story for the antagonist.  It may become incorporated into “Ester”. 

The other started works all have potential for resurrection and since all have by accident or design included fantasy elements, this appears to be my default writing genre.

The choice makes sense.  I flit from genre to genre for my reading and tend to concentrate on a current chosen favourite at the exclusion of all others.  These have alternated back-and-forth from adolescence until now in no definite order between science-fiction, fantasy (yes, they are separate), historical, crime, war, western (a long time ago, but thanks, Dad), horror and the loose collection under the label of “thriller”.  I have tried to write all bar two of the foregoing and for “Ester” and beyond my writing is likely to be historical crime fantasy.  A new sub-genre of my own. 

At about 12,000 words, Ester is well and truly started and stuff is happening.      

I am not the eponymous Ester, of course.  I am just writing her story.  Ester is an adult and has her own identities on social media.  he will be posting about her life before much longer, but not just yet.