Brewing gear

Today I put together a box in which to ferment my first brew. I plan to place frozen bottles of water into the box to keep the temperature down and keep a constant 20 degrees Celsius.

The box is made from two plastic crates and it is lined with foam and then covered with bubble wrap which our sofa came wrapped in. I have gaffer tapes it all together to try and ensure that it stays relatively water tight as I expect there to be a fair amount of water condensed off the frozen water bottles.

The photos I am including in this post show:
A) the boiler placed on a work bench with a rope and pulley above for use with the 'Brew In A Bag' method - this will be used to hang the grain in the bag to drain the wort out after it has mashed.
B) the fermenting box
C) the fermenting box open with the fermenter sitting inside the box
D) the boiler

Since I am posting from my phone the order of the photos may get a bit mixed up so apologies for that.

Second archery session and beer making moves closer

I had my second session of archery at the weekend and shot for about 3-4 hours. I was shooting 30m for a good while and probably had on average one shot in 10 go awry and miss the target but was consistently hitting with the rest and normally within the red although to be honest they didn't group very well.

I then moved up to 40m and 50m and bizarrely got better at the long distance than I was at the shorter distances! Next move is to try and figure out what type of now I should buy and then work out where to get it from. I'm currently contemplating importing one from the UK or somewhere else because they are pretty expensive over here.

On the beer front - I now have pretty much all the kit I need to brew my first beer. I still don't have a fridge for total temperature control but I shall experiment with the cardboard box an frozen water bottle method for now as the homebrew shop guy said he made a really good beer in summer using that method - got him a 4th place In a beer comp.

So I shall first practise by just boiling up some water - work out how to hold it at the right temps and then put into my fermenter to be kept as close as possible to 20 degrees for about 5-6 days. I will also experiment with agitating the water two or three times a day as I would with a Ringwood type yeast.

Archery

Yesterday I went along to a session at the local archery club for a 'have a go' evening. I really enjoyed it and soon started getting pretty good groupings of my arrows and even think I got around 50-60% golds which I was very happy with. Admittedly it wasn't a vast distance, probably 25 metres or so.

I shall be continuing and think I'll try and get into it properly, and possibly buy my own gear in a few months if things are going well.