The Dark Days Aren't Over.

The tap font to look out for!

So things have settled into something of a routine at Trouble HQ, the crisises that we stumble our way through have become less crisisesier and the time between them has increased. Which is all well and good for keeping stress levels in check but less good for writing blogs where people are expecting to hear about exciting and interesting stuff. Honestly, apart from the car crashes, and the fighting zombies it's been general routine mundanity. Filling up, and emptying, various sized stainless steel containers seems to be the order of almost every day. That, and wondering why they're called "stainless" when they need constant cleaning. I'm going to give the good people of Sheffield the benefit of the doubt and presume there was some kind of typographic error when the original name was conceived, and that somewhere the space between the "n" and "l" got lost in translation. Those being days when the correction of misspellings was a considerably more difficult operation.

Kegged, labeled and ready to go.

Though as a result of this constant cleaning, we noticed that we had several clean fermenters to spare, that would be eminently suitable to use to ferment beer, the hint for their use being in the name. So we made a dramatic and momentous decision that we'd double the range of beer that we produced. Overnight we'd increase our range by a massive 100%. Although I might be overselling the drama or momentousness of the decision, I'm sure I'm spot on about the accuracy of my figures. Our previous range of one beer would be increased to two beers; a 100% increase, ask any mathematician, I'm sure they'll tell you the same, before berating you for the elementariness of the question. Thereby reinforcing my long held opinion that there are stupid questions, despite academia's reassurances otherwise.

Dark Beer, Dark Logo, Shiny Fermenter.

So with the mathematics of increasing production taken care of, we moved on to the thornier issue of the form that this new beer would take; that it would be a dark beer for some contrast had been the consensus view. However some said stout, others said porter, yet others said they're both the bleedin' same anyway, as a rose by any other name would still taste as sweet, assuming you were in the habit of eating rose bushes. (or Rose's bush, as a to-remain-anonymous friend of mine did for a while, well before they split up anyway.) We settled on the porter option, to be called Dark Arts, and the bleedin' difference between it and stout is one that I'll leave to be judged by anyone with a pint of it on front of them. The pub being the ideal location for the airing of such generally inconclusive debates, and doublely so when it comes to the vexed question of beer categorisation.

We also went with a more complex grain recipe, with chocolate malt and black malt thrown into the mix, in addition to some flaked barley, the idea being that it would be a more malt driven beer, with the hops being cast in the supporting actor role this time.

• Dark Arts Porter is currently on sale in L. Mulligan Grocer, Stoneybatter and Glennons, Allenwood.