1541 IPA

Being a rather eclectic chap I'm always looking for new activities and interests.  The latest is beer making.  This has been prompted not only by my creative urges but also the exasperation that a pint of decent beer in the pub in Edinburgh (Deuchar's IPA, for example) currently costs £3.30.  Yes children I can remember when beer was less than a pound and in fact recall fondly the days (c.1986) when a pint (of McEwan's lager, admittedly) cost 64p in the Queen Margaret Union Bar at Glasgow University.

The exasperation comes in when you consider that, even with blatant profiteering by the oil companies a pint of beer is still four and a half times more expensive than a pint of petrol (at £1.35 a litre say, or approximately 78p a pint)

The point here is that petrol is the finite resource, not the beer, unless there are whole bunch of beer wells in the North Sea or (crivens!) Saudi Arabia running dry that we weren't told about. Anyway, once you've collected the kit and the empty beer bottles, making beer is not only cheaper (it works out at about 50p a pint) but it also allows one to be creative, as mentioned above.

In preparation for bottling my first batch of India Pale Ale (IPA) I decided to make up some labels in GIMP and as an added wheeze I'm going to use them as light-hearted marketing for my partner's new business (mentioned below).  So here are the labels I've designed using the banners from her website (which I designed), the company name (well, I am a Director, you know) and even the fonts we use (Georgia and Lucida Sans Console, if you must know).

You can see how they link to the 1541 banners I posted about earlier and also the heading of this very blog.  I'm intending to bottle it tonight so here's hoping that once conditioned (takes about two weeks) that the beer tastes as good as I think the labels look....