JustTheSam

Beer Review: Clausthaler Low Alcohol Lager

01. June 2010 · 3 comments · Categories: Beer, Food and Drink, Me

It's been a while – sorry about that. I've been posting very nearly every day on my other site UKNatureBlog so check that out for wildlife including lots from my own garden.

I've also been busy preparing for the imminent arrival of my first child, which is exciting and already life-changing. For instance I've now joined my wife in not drinking alcohol as I may be required to rush her off to hospital at a moment's notice. Hence I have entered the murky world of low alcohol beer! So far we've sampled Becks Blue (zero alcohol), Cobra Zero (zero alcohol) and Clausthaler Classic (< 0.5% alcohol). And I must say that Clausthaler has been a revelation that wins out over the others. It doesn't taste watery and overly bitter (like the Becks) but it's not cloying and overly malty (like the Cobra). In fact it actually tastes like a fairly normal weakish French bottled lager to me, which is a fair feat when it leaves your head clear. I know it's German but it reminds me of Kronenbourg or St Omer in stubbies when camping in France for some reason.

Actually it's truly quite wondrous stuff as you can savour a cold beer or two on a summer's afternoon and not be in the slightest bit muddled or woozy for the rest of the day. It's just refreshing, tasty and beery. I picked it up in Waitrose on a whim, but I now know that it's actually the most popular alcohol-free brand in Europe and I can see why.

I learnt a lot about it from this very good and fact-filled review by a beer-craving pregnant lady, a few notables from which I'll expound upon here. Apparently they brew it in the same manner as other German purity-law beers, but with a special yeast that doesn't generate nearly so much alcohol. This sets it apart from most other low alcohol brews that pass normal strength beer through an osmosis process that knackers the flavour. Clausthaler claim that the small amount of alcohol in their beer is just enough to make it properly 'beery' compared to those with none. Anyway – Clausthaler is thoroughly recommended, though I'm still hoping to find some low-alcohol bitter in the supermarkets. The 30p a can 2% generic value bitter you see in the low-end supermarkets doesn't count as the alcohol content is clearly just the result of penny-pinching.

A thought strikes me…

20. May 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Food and Drink

Imagine how good Billionaires shortbread must be!

Hot air balloon near miss

17. April 2010 · 2 comments · Categories: Photography, Travel

A Virgin hot air balloon slowly lumbered over our house this evening before nearly landing in the allotments behind our garden. It seemed to come within a few tens of feet of touching down before wisely thinking better of it. There are lots of greenhouses, poly-tunnels, huts, etc. not to mention a row of houses on the other side.

I don't know if the pilot was seriously considering landing there, as it seems like a really poor spot that would have ended in disaster. You might get the basket down safely if you were lucky but the balloon envelope would be a nightmare to deal with amongst the allotments. Perhaps as dusk drew in on a fairly still night the pilot was getting a bit nervous about losing light and further opportunities. Or maybe it was just for fun, buzzing low over the houses. It rose quickly with a big burst of flame and then headed off to the fields just North of St Albans where I think it must have landed.

Groovy and Grails

16. March 2010 · 3 comments · Categories: Programming, Ruby, Web/Tech

Overview

I've spent the past couple of weeks reading up on Grails, a web application framework inspired by Ruby on Rails. It takes advantage of Groovy, a dynamic programming language that runs on the JVM and is best described as a cross between Java and Ruby. Groovy has support for most existing Java syntax, but also a lot of Ruby-style syntax and dynamic features. To be honest I find that the Java aspects of Groovy (and Grails) drag the whole experience down a bit compared to writing Ruby, but it should be significantly nicer to work with than pure Java.

The big selling point of Groovy and Grails over Ruby on Rails comes from the compatibility with the whole Java ecosystem. You can have your clever dynamic language without giving up the Java libraries and deployment environments that your projects and customers may demand. This is clearly quite a compelling idea if like me you've got a long history of doing big Java web apps but have recently been converted to the dynamic cause.

One thing that is very important to realise is that Grails is not a port of Rails. It is in fact built on top of the Spring stack, including Spring MVC, REST support, dependency injection, transactionality and Hibernate amongst others. If you're already familiar with Spring this is probably a good thing, though I do worry that the framework on top of framework approach could lead to having more to learn (and mess up) overall.

Practical findings

My initial experiments showed an interesting result that rather worried me. I set up a domain class and a controller with def scaffold = true to provide built-in CRUD for my domain class. However the CRUD pages this presented were noticeably sluggish in the browser and benchmarking confirmed it could only manage about 2 requests per second. This is lamentably poor and even now I can't figure out how it's managing to spend so much time achieving not very much.

After a bit of experimentation I determined that if I use grails generate-all to put the scaffolding code in place in my classes (rather than using the dynamic scaffolding) then things speed up enormously. In fact I can now get about 200 requests per second. It's hard to see how there can be such a massive performance gulf between the two scenarios as I would have thought that the only extra overhead for dynamic scaffolding is the initial dynamic intercept of the missing action method and calling into the scaffolding code. Hopefully a Grails expert can explain this, or I will eventually figure it out myself. At least now I have determined that for real-world scenarios there isn't going to be a performance issue, though I am surprised that the Grails docs don't have a massive "Warning – dynamic scaffolding is really slow" box.

For now I haven't done much but read the docs and try a few things. I hope to get deeper into it soon.

RSPB Rye Meads

14. February 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Nature, Photography

A cold, grey day walking around the RSPB's reserve at Rye Meads today. I thought that the photo above captured the place well, it being a mix of watery channels amidst reed beds, and massive electricity pylons. In the background is a Coot, of which there are plenty, along with more exotic birds on the larger lakes. See my post about Teal on UKNatureBlog for instance.

Not enough Minstrels!

06. January 2010 · Write a comment · Categories: Food and Drink

Ah Christmas (I know that's now a fading memory, humour me). An excuse to gorge to excess on rich food and drink, and an opportunity to slip extras into the supermarket trolley without the wife putting them back on the shelf! Hence a big tube of Minstrels was craftily snuck amongst the shopping and made it through the till and home. Mmmmm Minstrels.

However glee turned to disappointment when opening the tube to find that it wasn't rammed full of giant brown Smarties, but instead contained three plastic bags of Minstrels. Bah! I emptied out the bags into the tube, which was then not quite half full. A complete swizz if you ask me. They've cunningly put them in bags so the tube doesn't rattle to give away the short-filling. I imagine I'm not the only shopper who assumed the tube was full but was disappointed, and I am willing to go out on a limb and suggest that the good people at Mars/Galaxy did this cynically to con the good British public. Even if it wasn't deliberate (and I bet they've got an 'official' reason for using the bags) I suspect they were perfectly aware of the fact that they were selling half the amount of chocolate that the buyer would intuitively assume. Grrrr.

Insulating my house

06. December 2009 · 3 comments · Categories: DIY, Environment

Living as I do in a 1920s house with solid brick walls (no cavity, no insulation) the recent cold snap made it really clear just what a difference insulation makes. The modern flat I was in previously was bordered on most sides by other flats, and its exterior walls were no doubt well insulated. The heating didn't have to work very hard, but in the new house it had a struggle on its hands and ran nearly continuously through the freezing weather, whilst only very slowly raising the internal temperature. You could almost feel the heat (and the money, and my eco credentials) draining away through those cold solid walls.

I've been on a mission to improve the odds in my favour since I moved in, having done the following.

Improve sealing around the front door, which was quite draughty, by adding self-adhesive strips of V-profile sealant tape. Did the same for a draughty window.
Improve sealing around the back UPVC doors by adding shims to the closing mechanism and adjusting the locking system to get it to close more tightly and cut out the draught.
Put some clear tape (literally just ordinary Sellotape) on the frame of a UPVC window that was allowing a tiny draught. This wasn't the gap between window and frame but an imperceptible gap in the frame itself!
Installed secondary double glazing on the few single glazed windows in the house. This is a clear film that you stick up on the inside with double sided tape then shrink smooth with a hairdryer. The air gap that you trap acts just the same as normal double glazing and is not immediately noticeable.
Improved loft insulation by adding 150mm space blankets in most of the eaves. These are great – easy to handle because they're wrapped in thin plastic and crazy cheap at most hardware stores because they're heavily subsidised. I had to be careful not to lay them over wires though (they might overheat) which is tricky as most of the rooms below have a light in the middle of them and hence wires going to those lights from the loft. I'd love to know how everyone else solves this wiry problem, given pretty much everyone must have it.
Added 50mm slab insulation (glass fibre insulation bought in flat semi-rigid slabs, rather than in rolls) to the backs of the plasterboard walls in the converted loft. This stuff is great as you just cut it with a knife to slightly larger than the size required and jam it into the spaces, where it stays. I got a single pack from Wickes, which covers over 7 square metres and only cost me £15 because the pack was damaged and they gave me a discount. I reckon that's £15 well spent and I hope it will make the loft noticeably warmer. The pictures show this stuff being cut (above) and installed (below) with the left-most bit of wall still to do, showing just the shiny back of the plasterboard – so you can see before and after in one shot.

Cadbury: nuts vs peanuts

28. November 2009 · Write a comment · Categories: Food and Drink, Me

I like a bit of chocolate, but my peanut allergy means I have to read the labels very carefully. One major annoyance is when I find the text "may contain nuts" or similar. The dilemma I face is that peanuts are not technically nuts – they are a legume, more like actual peas than nuts. Honest, it's true. So, when I read "may contain nuts" does the manufacturer appreciate this distinction (in which case I am safe) or are they including peanuts as nuts, as the common man on the street would most likely expect (in which case I am not safe)?

I asked Cadbury what their position on this is. Here's what I sent them:

As anyone in your industry likely knows, peanuts are not technically nuts – they are a legume. Can you clarify whether Cadbury labelling (e.g. on Cadbury Clusters) that says "May contain nuts" includes peanuts in its remit or not? On a technicality I would think not and that I (as a peanut allergy sufferer) could eat the product with impunity. However it might be that you interpret "nuts" to include peanuts. Some companies specifically say "tree nuts" to be clear when they means nuts but not peanuts. I'm keen to understand Cadbury's position here so I know what's safe to eat and what's not. Thanks in advance. Either way, it would be helpful to all nut and peanut allergy sufferers if the labelling could be made unambiguous and I'd appreciate a comment on that more generally.

The response from Cadbury (over a month later, after me chasing them):

Thanks for your email

Our Technical area advise Cadbury labels Nuts when referring to Tree nuts. We would label Peanuts separately as they are not a Tree nut as correctly pointed out.

So, there's your answer, for Cadbury at least. It's a shame they didn't see fit to comment on perhaps using "tree nuts" in their labelling in order to be unambiguous.

Kitchen shelves

19. November 2009 · 3 comments · Categories: Books, Design, DIY, Food and Drink, Me

Our kitchen had one patch of bare wall but nowhere to put cookbooks other than in a pile on a worktop. A perfect opportunity for some bookshelves! I planned a custom construction made from pine, comprising two uprights resting on the floor with four cross pieces (for three shelves and a top) with the whole thing screwed to the wall for rock solidness.

I originally expected to use 18mm thick sawn pine timber, but in B&Q it was clear that these were actually quite warped end to end – the top of a 2.4m plank was about 30 degrees twisted compared to the bottom so that it would have messed up the result something chronic. Instead I bought pine "furniture board" which is engineered from multiple pieces of pine glued together (edge to edge, not ply) which gives a much less lively result with hardly any warp whilst looking quite attractive. It's quite a lot more expensive mind you, and having waited 30 minutes for the timber cutting service to re-open after lunch I was told my 20cm wide boards were not suitable for the machine. At 2.4m long they weren't going to fit in the car so a hasty re-planning was required, resulting in the purchase of a number of smaller 25cm wide pre-cut pieces. I'm glad I went for that width actually as many of the books are 22cm and there's room to accommodate that depth from the wall even though I was worried there wouldn't be.

I had been keen to get all the lengths cut in store for a perfectly square, straight cut with identical lengths for all the shelves. I don't have a table saw so I was going to struggle to do this easily myself, but I was forced to saw the boards down to the right length with a hand saw. It was tough to get a good result here and to get them all the exact same length, but the flex in the uprights accommodated the differences. I simply put two number 8 screws into the end of each shelf to hold it in place, with carefully drilled countersunk screw holes, and that seems to have done the job. The countersink bit I bought recently is a godsend – it really makes the results look so much more professional.

A couple of simple metal angle brackets off the peg from B&Q allowed me to screw the whole ensemble firmly to the wall and it really is very rigid. Also note in the picture (click for bigger version) the 45 degree cut off on the tops of the side pieces and the cut-outs at the bottom to allow it to sit flush against the wall above the skirting.

Overall I'm extremely pleased with the result apart from one thing. I slightly lost track of of the height of my biggest books between start and end of the project, the result being that they don't quite fit on the shelves by a few millimetres. I'm kicking myself about this, but I'm a novice and I'll learn from these mistakes.

My own Grape plant

12. November 2009 · 2 comments · Categories: Food and Drink, Garden, Nature

With a big expanse of South (ish) facing fence and an empty patch of soil I decided to plant a grape. It will be interesting to see how it does in our English climes, though global warming may be on my side. With any luck I'll be reporting back in a few years with pictures of lush bunches and even bottles of the finest home-produced wine. I can but hope. The variety is Pinot Blanc, which is apparently fast growing.

And yes, I know that weeding is urgently required (and in fact has been done since this picture was taken).