Since post­ing the res­o­lu­tions I’ve not so much attacked them as I’ve taken a few cau­tious side­ways glances at them.

This changed when Mike gave me a chance to tackle num­ber 5: Home brew beer. For Xmas Jus­tine had given him a voucher for Bar­l­ey­corn Brew­ery, a small brew-your-own ware­house in Oakleigh.

Our group of four (myself, Mike,Stephan and Chris) met up on Sat­ur­day to cre­ate the unap­petis­ingly named Mike Juice. We spent the first few min­utes try­ing beers to deter­mine what we’d be mak­ing (prob­a­bly too long as the “assis­tant” kept com­ing up and ask­ing if we’d made a deci­sion yet). The win­ner of that lit­tle con­test was a Stella Artois knock-off called Stella! Strangely enough Mar­lon Brando imper­son­ations were kept to a minimum.

The process itself was idiot proof: Mea­sure out ingre­di­ents into coloured bowls, add con­tents to large vat of boil­ing water at spec­i­fied inter­vals. While we tended to the heady brew Chris — being the only one smart enough to bring a cam­era — snapped off a tonne of pho­tos, which will hope­fully be avail­able on his Flickr account soon (hint hint!)

Once the brew­ing was com­plete and Mike had emp­tied the con­tents of the vat into it’s new plas­tic drum home we zig-zagged across town to the cen­tre of Oak­leigh for some well deserved lunch. We go back Feb­ru­ary 2nd for The Offi­cial Bottling.

The whole thing was hell of a lot eas­ier than what I thought it would be. When I go it on my own (note use of ‘when’, not ‘if’) I’ll be a lot more con­fi­dent. Sure it’ll be a lot more inten­sive with­out a mas­sive boiler or mechan­i­cal mixer, but there’s very lit­tle chance of me com­pletely balls­ing it up. And now that I’ve said that there’s a very good chance that I’ll com­pletely balls it up.

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