The Steamtug Blog

Since returning from Bathurst, I’ve been like a lizard drinking (flat out) trying to catch up on the beer production before the Christmas thirst hits. Combining this with a new job, organising an underwater hockey tournament and helping John get his yacht seaworthy, you could say I’ve been under the pump!

Quick more beer!

My latest concoction of boiling barley is a recipe I found on the internet for “Mrs. Nesbit’s extra special bitter”. I was growing tired of the pale ale style I had been experimenting with for a while, and thought I would give it a try. It was expensive to make with a hefty grain bill, and lots of old English style hops. My mate Dean had been at me to try a new sparging technique. That is the rinsing of the wort out of the cooked grain. I had recently perfected a fly sparge which just rinses from top to bottom without any disturbance to the grain bed, but Dean recommended I try his batch method. So after a couple of goes my way, I shut the bottom valve, filled up some rinse water and gave it a good stir up, then recycled the liquid until clear and rinsed her off. Sorry for boring you with the details, but what happened is that I ended up with a nice clear beer, but alcohol content of 6.6%! A bit higher than expected! So look out for that one when it matures in a month or so. And my hops plant? It’s hiding in the veggie garden amongst the tomatoes and growing like a weed! But although it looks like some other weed, it is only hops…

New Job

Did I tell you about it? I am now the commissioning interface between our local water authority and my company in a project to build a new water treatment plant for the local community. I am mostly looking at how to hook the plant up to us so we can discharge waste water to them, and take back clean recycled water.

How did this all come about? Well our local authority were going to tighten the spec on the water we currently send to the sewer. This was going to be a problem for us, so the brains trust came up with a solution and a big bag of money. So we told them not to worry, we are going to build a big biotreater which will make the water we send to you squeaky clean. Then they came back with a proposal. With their mouths salivating at the sight of our money bag, they offered the following:

How about you give us your bag of money, and we will put another bag of money with it, and build a plant to handle all the domestic sewerage from the Northern suburbs which we are currently having trouble coping with and don’t have the money to fix, and we will take your crappy water, recycle it and give it back to replace the 1000’s of tons of drinking water you currently use. This will help our regions sewer problems and after the big drought we have just come through, where our reservoir became dangerously low, it will help to reduce the demand on our domestic water supply too!

So it’s a win – win situation for all! I am looking at building pipe to connect it all up, then develop training packages, operating procedures etc. Next week I have to escort the CEO of our water authority, and our big manager on a tour of the new plant being built.

It was lucky I was selected for this job, because this past week my telephone has been running hot with a company in Manchester England trying to convince me to take a job on an island off the north west coast of Australia to commission and start up a LNG loading jetty and terminal. I probably would have taken it out of boredom had it not been for this job.

Underwater Hockey Tournament

As mentioned, we have been training up and playing twice per week in readiness for an underwater hockey competition that we are staging. As you know, I am President of the club and with lots of new players who only started this year, plus a healthy bank balance we decided to put on a competition and invite clubs from across Victoria. It’s happening soon! Check out:

www.geelongunderwaterhockey.org.au

Seeeeeeeeeeya!