Last weekend I visited the Occasional Brewer and dry-hopped the two brews me and my mates had made the week before.

Then it rolled around that we had to put the stuff into bottles. This proved a wet and humid and slippery business, only made palatable by a palatable IPA and a Scotch Ale I enjoyed during and after the process. We finished up with 13L of beer each – an mix of an American Pale Ale and a New Zealand India Pale Ale. The beer looked quite cloudy going into bottle, but I was assured this would clear up in the two weeks I have to wait before I can knock the top off the first bottle.

Some work colleagues made a few brews themselves around the same time, so we have a taste-off planned for the 14th. I’ll let you know how it goes.

BTW the Brown Bottle was a drunken superhero from the pages of Viz magazine. By day a mild-mannered reporter, he would rush to a phonebox to drink a bottle of beer and change into the Brown Bottle whenever he saw crime to fight. But he would get really pissed in the process. And become next to useless. And vile and obnoxious. Which kinda defeated the whole point really….