Sunday, February 28, 2010

It wasn’t acceptable in the 80s.

There's been a lot of action at Trouble headquarters of late, we're in the "prologue to brewing" stage, as I've taken to calling it, whereby we ask skilled craftsmen to "make stuff work" and they set about doing just that. There's the man who'll be fitting the steam generating boiler, which we've taken to calling a steamer; by this I mean the actual machine, rather than the man himself for that would be rude; to distinguish it from the kettle which we've been calling the boiler. Which is an unfortunate chain of events to have started off, as there's the potential to end up with a domino effect where everything gets renamed and eventually the conditioning tanks end up being called Joan Collins, Clive Sinclair or something equally unhelpful.

We've also been visited by our electrician who dances the merry dance of the currents, watts and amps of his trade and who, in my imagination at least, holds up cables in the style of cartoon hero He-man and shouts "I have the power!" before turning on mains switches and so forth. He's also been in close association with the man who made the transformer, who we've been referring to as Optimus, which nicely continues the cartoon theme. Though I'd say that joke is done to death in the world of transformer construction, in a similar way that when you tell someone that you're planning on opening a brewery, that everyone jokingly asks if there's a vacancy for a chief taster. I believe it was exactly this scenario that led big quiffed songsmith Morrissey to write "That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore". I know it doesn't mention brewing or beer in any way in the lyrics, but if you look at the subtext it becomes clear that's what he was on about. But I digress...

We've also taken delivery of some kegs, which apart from the fact that they are empty, seem perfect. This however has given us a slight headache as regards space in the brewery, it means that unoccupied space is at a premium. I would've liked to do a definitive test to see if I could legitimately use the old cliché about the swinging of a cat, but rather unhelpfully Thom has refused to lend me his cat Oscar for the task, citing animal cruelty as an excuse. Probably just as well though, since I suspect that if the test was to prove the remaining space was cliché verifying, I'd be complaining about having to clean up splattered cat brain.

Hopefully that satiates the appetite for Trouble Brewing related news for now, and we'll have more to report soon...