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I’ve being drinking far too much wine as of late so time for a pint of Mild.

A rather nice Hungarian White wine while the water for the pasta and pesto boils.

While tempted to go for a Stout given the date, ultimately decided Red Wine would be better with Lasagna, so a very reasonably priced bottle of Bordeaux from M&S rich, fruity and fairly smooth honestly I’ve paid a lot more for a lot worse.

A Highland Park (also to confirm no Bitters where added it just happened to be on the sideboard). Also it’s scary how much Single Malt has gone up in price I’m sure I can remember Twelve Year Old Whisky being in the £25-£30 a bottle range not £35-£50 range not that long ago.

Glass cleanliness aside I am drinking Marzen, and it’s delicious nothing more to say really.

A pint of Dark Mild seems the way to start an evening.

Bought on a whim because I liked the bottle, and while not my first choice it’s still quite drinkable.

Honestly the Ooni recipe is pretty decent, it’s about 60% hydration which is still fairly easy to work with, also if you have a sour dough starter on hand it does make really good pizza (but not worth the hassle if you don’t also make bread with it in my view)...

Finally a dry Friday so fired up the pizza oven, alongside a suprisingly good for the price New Zealand Pinot Noir from Aldi.

Purely from a practical standpoint mead assuming you are just using Honey is mostly simple sugars glucose and fructose so you will get pretty close to 100% of the sugars being converted to alcohol. If you want a sweet mead you will either need to use a stabiliser to stop the fermentation, or...

Beers brewed and in the fermentor, boiler is washed and kitchen floor is mopped time for a pint of Mild.

At long last a weekend day which is dry (and I’ve not got something else planned) just mashed on for a batch of Archer Bitter (using the Graham Wheeler recipe) which had become my go to Bitter.

I’m having roast duck so it has to be Bordeaux (well Burgundy or Rhone, Rioja okay a lot of red wines would go nicely with duck). This is a nice reasonably priced wine, very rich, a little heavy and honestly far too easy to drink for a 15% wine.

Well since it has left me sober I suppose I better have a glass of Highland Park to correct that (and to horrify Whisky fans yes I am drinking it over ice.

A nice glass of Red Rhône wine (Aldi still does some pretty decent sub £10 bottles) while I wait for the burgers to cook.

A bottle of my Marzen.

My first attempt at making a Marzen and I’m pretty pleased with it, (and feel it’s a good sign when I try one of my own beers and my first thought is I need to make another batch of this).

Forgot I had this (I kegged most of the batch but had just enough for a couple of bottles) bitter made with DME and hopped with Fuggles a nice if not particularly remarkable beer.

My keg of mild kicked so I have tapped a new keg of ‘Stoutly Mild’ (original recopie from the CML site), basically a standard mild but uses about 2.5% roasted barley, and a fair bit less crystal than I normally use in Mild giving a much dryer finish with a nice flavour from the roasted barley...

The nice thing about winter is my utility room is just the right temperature for storing Mild (and other English beer styles) without refrigeration. This batch of Mild is 3.7%, lightly carbonated, with the flavour primarily coming from the malt. Cheers and happy Friday all.