Bier ist hier

"You know, Tim", the Baron said to me the other day, "You might have made enough beer for now".

The funny thing is, around that time I'd just started feeling rather lonely after having bottled some of the brews that had been in my study for the past few months. You can get into personal relationships with your brews, indeed at some point you'll start to wonder if the brews aren't looking over your shoulder as you type, or if they're feeling a bit standoffish today because they haven't been blooping as rapidly as they were yesterday, or if they haven't been shouting at you all the morning because they want to go out into the fields and play cricket. Don't tell me other brewers don't feel the same way.

I have to admit "too much" isn't what I habitually think about my brews. I'm too busy thinking about "what will I make next" or "when will I make some more" or "we don't have enough of that one left". Taking a shower a day or so after the Baron mentioned the (supposedly) immoderate amount of beer, I puzzled over this as I looked over the bottles of dark juniper porter and wondered whether I should refrigerate the rest. Clambering over a few bottles of herbal altbier, I absent-mindedly clanged the shower door into the bottles of Scottish light with floral tagetes aroma as I retrieved the towel from where it had been hanging over the beetroot beer bottles and continued to ponder this idea. Could there possibly be too much beer in the house? Is "too much beer" even a sentence that makes any sense?

 No wonder the Baron is a Doctor of Professorism, or some such, at university, because that suggestion of hers was a real poser. The more I thought about it, the less it made sense. I thought about it as I scrubbed my teeth that night, narrowly avoiding stubbing my toe on the box of rosemary porter. I thought about it as I dodged around the spruce beer balancing on top of the box of mead that I'd bottled a few days prior (which box I'd squeezed in between the door, and the bottles of wheat beer and peppercorn ale, about ten bottles apiece). It is true that it was becoming increasingly difficult to find space in the house for the bottles of beer, but I can't really build a bigger house now, can I? (Or can I? I haven't thought much about that possibility yet....)

I suppose thinking about whether I have too much beer is a little like the 'how long is a piece of string' question. We can never know, really; it may indeed be one of those fundamental universal conundrums, like the square root of two, or how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

Anyway; this summer I expect there'll be a few combustions amongst the bottles anyway, as the yeast becomes more agitated in the summer heat, so that'll help to keep the numbers down. And, in that case, I'd better redouble my efforts to keep household supplies high).