Uuurrghhh, I said as my mum spat a mouthful of home brew into a bucket.
Take it, she urged, passing me the siphon that streamed an arc of beer over us both before I could guide it into the mouth of one of the ranks of tall glass bottles, marshalled like skittles at our feet.
Along with the vacuuming and cleaning out the hamster cage, this was one of my childhood chores, decanting my mum’s home brew, which had sat gurgling away in a massive barrel on top of the boiler for the last 30 days.
How did she know when it was ready to bottle, I’d often wonder, watching as the milky-brown liquid churned and frothed its way into its waiting vessel.
There were about twenty, one-and-a-half litre bottles for me to fill. As soon as one bottle was full, I’d turn off the little plastic tap, screw a metal cap on the bottle and move on to the next one. One down, nineteen to go, I moaned to myself. Boooring!
The homebrew kit was not a staple of our weekly food shop. It merited its very own stop-off, once a month in the upstairs of the massive Boots in the town centre. The kit, which contained a bag of molasses-dense gloop and a plastic sachet of tiny beads of yeast, came in a gleaming tin cylinder that I helped her lug home like some volatile unexploded bomb from World War II.
Once all the bottles were full, my mum lined them up on a high shelf in the garage above my dad’s tool hooks. Occasionally, a bottle would explode in the night. Over-fermentation, my mum explained.
But over-fermentation was small beer compared the more heinous crime of disturbing the sediment; of allowing the end of the plastic siphon that swam in the opaque depths of the beer barrel, to churn up the yeast and protein particles that were essential to the brewing process but that should never make it into the bottle.
I think about that process a lot as I write this blog…as I decant streams of memory and experience into discreet vessels from the massive, bubbling barrel of my life.
But the point here is to disturb the sediment, to include in each post something of the waste material, the detritus, the by-products of a life thusly lived in order not end up with the same old brew I’ve been drinking my whole life.
To brew instead something new.
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