To understand the background to this task which was initially proposed by Skya (Yeatts-Walker) - just one of my (much loved) grand children - during one of many conversations using "whatsapp". Probably she became frustrated by my frequent absence from work - at "The Lock-Inn Brewery" not fifty yards upstream of Body and Soul, moored on the Canal de Ille et Rance at Quai NO: 6 in the town of Evran, France.
This hobby is firstly an indulgence of my friend Paul McDonnell who, having found a fellow enthusiastic brewer with some valuable experience like mine, decided to build a bespoke wooden cabin for a brewery in the grounds of his wife's lovely, recently acquired, cottage in the port of Evran. My role in this partnership idea was for him to learn from me how to make English Ale with the equipment he was to buy for his brewery and with my varied experience as a semi-professional brewer.
The whole project was off the ground within a few months of its inception. An amazing feat by any measure, and we are now, at the time of writing, in the process of brewing our 11th Brew ("Brew Eleven") in Paul's Lock-Inn brewery, situated at the bottom of his garden:
Our equipment is large enough to brew 57 litres at a time. (15 Gals ) The normal brew volume for home brewers is 40 pints or 5 gallons, for which you will need, for your first brew, a 5 + gallon, food-grade plastic dustbin preferably with a screw top airtight lid - easily available from your local hardwear store or, better still, your nearest home-brew shop who will sell you a 5 gallon container with a convenienient tap at its base. (recommended).
Most brewers will buy their malted barley from Maltsters, already milled to their specification - that's what Maltsers do in their Maltings which are special buildings designed and built for this purpose. Basically the maltster buys his barley from the farmer or from a grain market.
At the maltings
Barley kernels are uniquely suited for brewing because their structure and enzyme levels can quickly and easily break down starches into more fermentable sugars. Specific strains of cultivated barley have tended to stay in narrow geographic regions for thousands of years, and there is very little genetic change over time.
Raw barley grain is heat-treated on special floors where it is carefully turned over repeatedly for several days at the correct temperatures and humidity until the exact moment the grain has reached the point of maximum sugar content and any particular roast flavour and colouring. (ie each seed kernal is about to sprout)
Milling
The next stage is to separate the sweet flour. from the husks by milling it to the required mix of flour and husk which is slowly stirred into carefully prepared hot water starting at around 80 degrees in a large insulated container called a mashtun. The mash is allowed to settle at approx. 65 degrees for an hour. That is why the mashtun is well insulated.
In the Mashtun the brewer (or who-ever) is dissolving the sugar into liquid form as a syrup -The husks, an important part of the remainng mix, acts as a filter bed which removes the larger particles of the liquid before any further processes need take place. The resultant liquid from the mashtun is now called "Wort" - but this mashing process takes place for as long as it takes to dissolve out as much sugar as possible using techniques which circulate the hot liquor several times at 65 C - for at least an hour- this is called sparging.
The Boil.
From the mashtun the wort is boiled with hops, normally kept separated in a porous bag of muslin. The boil will last for about an hour with various quantities of hops added at various times according to recipe and the syle required. You will come to love the smell....keep up a rolling boil which converts your sugar (starch) to a more fermentable type. By boiling, you are inverting one type of sugar (starch) into another .
The Fermenter To avoid infection and to aid clarification the boiling liquid must be cooled as fast as possible - there are many ways to achieve this.
Crash cooling, the altimate in beer making, involves various ingenious methods to achieve nervana. But as long as the liquid is kept covered or airtight, even 12 hours should be safe enough. One hour would be much safer! The rule is that the faster the cooling, the clearer your resultant liquor (called "wort")
Pitching the Yeast
Fermentation will last for approximately 8/10 days at the high end of these temperatures above.
During fermentation the brewer can expect to measure the original specific gravity (the "sweetness" at the start OG) and after some ten days, the final gravity when fermentation has ceased FG.
OG minus FG say OG 1.063 - FG 1.019 = 0.044/0.0075 = 5.86 abv
The brewer, at this stage, may wish to lower the pre dicted abv by adding treated water. https://tillersandtastebuds.typepad.com/tillers_and _tastebuds/training-notes-for-real-ale-service-and-care.html
Maturation
https://tillersandtastebuds.typepad.com/tillers_and_tastebuds/training-notes-for-real-ale-service-and-care.html
The liquid that you have in your fermenter can now be called beer but it is immature and not ready for drinking before a period of maturation has taken place. A minimum of three weeks will see a remarkable change take place both in taste and mouth feel and its future depends upon what storage system is best suited for its purpose. It is ready for bottling or kegging, either way must ensure that air is not allowed to affect its storage life.
Corking, capping or spiling activity and the addition of sugar to encourage secondary fermentation and dry hopping become important actions, as does the cleaning and sterilisation of all vessels involved.
Serving/dispensing
So often left out of the whole process however, the importance of pouring beer into a glass properly can seriously affect the pleasure and reputation of those who serve it and the pleasure of those who are about to drink it.
The traditional hand-pull pump has the advantage of giving the server control over the speed that the beer enters a glass - this rightly assumes that the beer, being a live product, will vary from day to day in terms of the amount of CO2 dissolved within it, and to be knocked out of it as it enters the glass - creating what most people call "a head" or "condition."
And so it goes on. George will no doubt be helping me install my five new domestic batteries which will be arriving from the UK any day now. We had considerable difficulty in getting two faulty batteries out and temporarily wiring the remaining three in. After I accidentally cut a hole in one of them with my angle grinder whilst hacking off a badly designed front bit of the battery box ( releasing a fairly lethal amount of acid on to the engine room floor ) he will no doubt be offended if I tried to do the job by myself. Thank God for George say I, he’s a bloody good mate !
For me I worry about what I will find beneath the waterline which has been seen by no-one since we had the hull re-coated once with something black, just before leaving for France three years ago. “Body and Soul” was at that time, still under warranty. Then there are the anodes – ah yes, remember the anodes? will they be completely dissolved and obsolete after several months in brackish water and two days in the salty Etang De Thau? – and how long has this fatal electrolysis been going on? We dread finding the steel hull, once a proud and substantial 10mm thick, perhaps now only paper thin…. only a matter of time and down we go in a heap of rust and confusion. Then there’s my wobbly rudder which may, for all I know, be about to fall off. How will I fix it? Will there be someone available who can if I can’t? Of course it almost goes without saying - the new replacement “Erbespacher” central heating appliance has failed us. So hot water is going to be a problem and there is no agent in Castelnaudary to attend to it.
At 9am sharp on the 30th of April both “Body and Soul” and “Vertrouwen” hover nervously around in circles in the large “Bassin” (or lake) beside the dry dock, waiting like patients in a dentist’s waiting room, for their turn to go in, but with fate in their own hands.
The entrance gate to the dry dock is a curious black metal contraption which, on the face of it, could not possibly work, but we watch, fascinated as he shows us how it does. Imagine, if you will, a fifteen foot double feeding trough for cows, with large lugs on it at either end and a metal grid across it acting as a bridge upon which people can walk from either side. Firstly, the man must fill the empty dock, so he shuts the sluice gate at the far side of the dock to stop the egress of water. He then opens two “valves” on either side of the trough to let the water in to the dry dock. The dock slowly fills up and the water level rises. The trough remains empty and rises with it, like an empty teacup when in a washing-up bowl, until it floats out of its slots in which the lugs are positioned. Our Frenchman, having had the foresight to tie a rope on to one end of the trough, and with the aid of a colleague who has mysteriously arrived in time, leads the floating gate into the dock and beckons us to enter therein. Our man in a wet suit – “what is he doing” – I ask - “why is he wading in up to his armpits, into the gap left by the absent gate?” - George shrugs his shoulders unhelpfully. Then it clicks. He is shuffling across the gap using his feet to clear any debris that might have accumulated there and which may prevent the gate from being watertight when slotted back in to position behind us.
I slowly drive “Body and Soul” into place on the right-hand side, as arranged, and soon “Vertrouwen” is beside me on my left. We are nervously jostling for position and trying to stay still at the same time, using the white markers painted on the dock sides as a guide to the whereabouts of the unseen plinths beneath us. The gate is now back where it came from and they are about to sink it into place by pulling the plug within the troughs. The troughs fill and the gate sinks into its slots which makes it relatively water-tight. Lucie is shouting hastily translated orders but we cannot hear them because of engine noise. We turn off our engines and sink slowly, quietly and carefully, like a couple of swans on a nest full of eggs. The new man sees that we are nervous, he is smiling as Lucie is explaining that these are not just holiday vessels; these two beauties are our homes – and not to be messed with. (this picture shows the dry dock refilling after we had finished with it)
It is a dry dock alright but it is a very wet and muddy one. We make it worse with our pressure washers so we decide to spend an afternoon flushing and brushing the mud away into the small stream which leaks past us from the gate through a channel cut out for that purpose. This stream becomes very important to us, not just for this, but as the general conduit into which our domestic waste is piped. With great prudence and perspicacity, George has arranged for some waste pipes to be ready for this task, which we attach to the appropriate orifices on our stranded homes. Well, it’s one thing to be wading knee deep in mud but quite another to be knee deep in …. well you will have got my drift?
On “Body and Soul” there is no sign of there having been any paint whatever, there is therefore no old paint to remove but instead, once the surface crustaceans and weeds have been flushed away, there is a layer of what I can only describe as a hard calcium substance which clearly must be removed too. I decide to get it all back to the steel and then to stabilize it with an anti-rust product which the Dutch barge owners use and recommend called “Awatrol-Rustol”. George uses the same. We may yet live to regret it, but it seems to do the trick. More alarming is the uncomfortable number of rust “pock” marks on the sides of “Body and Soul”. I suspect some nasty electrolysis causes this through a lack of anodes. I later arrange for an excellent local “ferronier” to weld on four new ones which we bought in Agde as a precaution. So we now have four new and four old anodes which should be enough. I wish I had bought at least two more to be sure. 
We have been so lucky so far to have friends around us who are, by the very nature of boating, enthusiastic, practical and helpful. No sooner has the problem arisen, George volunteers his help and advice and we try hard to apply an “isopon” coating on to the hole, which we can only feel but not actually see - to at least stop the leak, temporarily. This is smartly followed by more help from another couple, Bill and Sylvia on the barge “Biesbosch” who had shared a winter in Briare 2006/7 with us. Bill actually ditches his plans for continuing their journey towards Toulouse and spends nearly two days plumbing the new tank in for us. I am left in awe of their kindness and skill. Plumbing has never been my strongest point but my role in all this was the ticklish problem of removing the three stairs into Body and Soul in order to gain access to the tank ready for its removal and replacement. It was all quite alarming and very messy, with the added inconvenience of having to get water from a hosepipe through the kitchen window and boiling kettles for hot water - Not something one would wish to happen to anyone but because of the camaraderie and goodwill, there is much learning, laughter and good times are had by all. (see above “not so dry” dock party!)
We roll on four coats of International Paint’s “Intertuff 16” on to our hull in addition to the anti-rust solution and we also prepare and repaint the blue stripe above the waterline. Then George shows me how to restore the red livery paintwork on our upper sides using “T-Cut” followed by polish. Both “Body and Soul” and “Vertrouwen” now look wonderful and attract many admiring comments from passers–bye. It has all turned out to be a great success and we both fervently hope for a good three or perhaps four years grace before having to do it all over again.
Tommy - a skilled engineer and boat owner– is a genius with a voltmeter and, like a doctor with his stethoscope, he carries his voltmeter around with him wherever he goes. Our alternators, our inverter, our battery bank -even my electric toothbrush is under threat of his probes. It becomes a joke and a great source of mirth between us as we set off from Capestang on a four day trip down the Canal de Jonction which links the Canal du Midi with the Canal de la Robine, through Narbonne to the Port la Nouvelle and the Mediterranean. His tall and elegant wife Katerina, a well known Swedish linguist and journalist, with a great sense of fun, is hungry for material to complete the closing chapters of their book on cruising the waterways of Europe. She doesn’t know it yet, but some great material is about to be handed to her on a plate.
We have become great friends, as one does with fellow boaters. Neither George nor Sue have had any previous boating experience other than the 46 kilometers lock free canal in either direction from Capestang. Sue seems unduly nervous about handling their first lock. We all try to allay her fears but our efforts are in vain. 
Lucie and I feel rather responsible, important and not a little paternal. My “admiral’s” hat is firmly on my head – I’m in charge and feeling slightly bossy – like a proud duck with only one duckling. I’m not quacking just yet but nearly. Lucie is demonstrating her hard won rope handling skills and somehow preparing lunch at the same time. I am being frightfully British and making silly jokes in the hope that nerves will be duly calmed. Sue is having none of it. Laughter is far from her lips as she struggles to lasso the bollards with wet and heavy ropes. Her knuckles are as white as her face is grim. George, who is trying his best not to shout at her, runs up and down the deck and, like a Jack-in-a-box, goes in and out of his wheelhouse. Vertrouwen’s bow thrusters dangerously "whurrr" as we jostle for position along side each other in the locks. 
Here we are in Venice, belatedly celebrating Lucie’s 60th birthday as promised. It rained on the first day but it didn't seem to matter at all. This is a truly magical place. Even if one is unencumbered by a classical education, it is never too late to be impressed by the odd Canaletto, Whistler or Ruskin in the books, even if you can’t afford to see a real one in the Guggenheim museum. We wallowed for three days in the atmosphere, the history, the architecture and the Venetian way of life. The markets, the food, the coffee and the wine and, being serious canal boat owners ourselves - with all this water about the place - immediately make plans to bring Body and Soul over for a year of Venetian indulgence. Dream on, they say, so we do.
Here I am, your tour leader, leading you through the junk and piles of stuff, through real Venice which has this strange mixture of glory and decay. Somehow, despite the huge number of tourists that are flown in by their thousands on cheap flights every hour of every day –it works and, somehow, without actually joining in, we become two of them. 
much more to come
It is in fact a rare and probably an escapee version of the moor-hen. I think, from my own rather vague recollection, an American Purple Gallinule. Porphyrula martinica according to my book on birds. We took several people to see it including Rob…
Our second Wintering has been a great success. We’ve had a very interesting and pleasant five months getting to know Briare and enjoying our surroundings since the first of November. The weather has been pretty dull and cold throughout and that was something of a surprise to me. Frankly, it was colder and more damp than the River Ouse in the UK. Thanks to our Jotul wood burner and an inexhaustable supply of free drift-wood, we have been kept warm and dry. Today is different. The sun is shining and the sky is blue, the forcythia is blooming and the willow trees are in spring mode. We are excited about our next adventure to the Southwest of France which starts on the first day in April after a farewell party at Beaurin with Lucie’s family. We start with the lock in the town centre.
My blogging skills are improving daily which is such fun. I hope soon to add audio to the blog so watch out for the commentary to go with the pictures – or even some music – Yeah! We are still awaiting the fixing of our “bimini” – which will give us much needed shade over our cruiser stern for our trip to the South and much better than the collapsable umbrellas we have had to date. The unexpected gusts of wind on the river Soane and Rhone can play havoc with them! 
