AHA Big Brew Day 2017
In 1988, May 7 was announced before Congress as National Homebrew Day. The American Homebrewers Association (AHA) created AHA Big Brew as an annual event to celebrate National Homebrew Day…
Elbow Beach Blonde
When the temperature hit’s 80F in Bermuda it’s time to reach for a much lighter beer to take to the beach. This beer is best defined as an American Blonde Ale and it comes out a wonderful golden for color. This beer is well attenuated with a lightly malty palate and a subdued fruitiness. Hop character is of the noble variety which leaves a light to medium bitterness. All in all this is a well balanced beer, light bodied and sometimes lager like.
This beer is named after the famous Elbow Bear Resort here I Bermuda where the crew and I hang out at for some great sunsets and music. This is a great beach beer for the summer with only 5.4% ABV and very easy drinking. Truth be told this is my father-in-laws favorite beer and I always try to have some on hand when he’s visiting.
The No Code Way to Setup Selective VPN Routing
Living outside the United States sometimes we need to get creative to access the great internet services back home like SlingTV, Spotify, YouTube, Pandora, etc… Most the time a DNS Redirection service works well but for some services only a VPN will work. Now I don’t want to run everything over the VPN as they can be slow at times, so setting us some simple rules on our router will take care of everything.
For this example I’m going to have my AppleTV use the VPN while other traffic does not. I’ll be using the latest build of Advance Tomato on my ASUS router and OpenVPN service from Smart DNS Proxy but this will work with most routers and VPNs though the setup might be different or manual.
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On The Go – Ireland
Every so often it’s good to get off the rock and visit someplace else and when we do this we like to seek out the best places for beer!
I recently visited Ireland with the family. While it’s not a direct flight from Bermuda it is a most amazing place that of course includes lots of great beer, great pubs, and amazing beer history! Ireland is most famous for one beer brand, Guinness, which is located in the capital city of Dublin. Dublin is modern modern big city with some great dining and bars but in this adventure started when we trekked all over the Emerald Isle from East, West, North, and South!
Beer in Bermuda
Bermuda is a tiny island all alone in the Atlantic Ocean, 665 miles off the east coast of the United States. The culture of Bermuda is heavily influenced by it’s ties to England, the United States, Portugal, and the Caribbean. A big part of that culture here in the consumption of alcohol, in fact it’s often said that Bermuda is 60,000 drunks clinging to a rock in the middle of the ocean.
Being such a tiny place, almost everything that we have is shipped on container ships. While I often try to use as many local ingredients when I can when brewing, such as our Bermuda Loquat Wheat and Bermuda Honey Porter, almost all our all of our beer and the ingredients we use for making beer are imported. Given this it’s no surprise that the big macro brews are found pretty much everywhere with Heineken and Carlsberg being the two most popular beers in Bermuda. Thankfully in recent times several companies are making inroads to introducing craft beer to Bermuda and you can find locally produced beer at two local breweries.
Bermuda Loquat Wheat
I’m always on the hunt for a way to brew a locally inspired beer! The first local beer brewed was a Honey Porter using local Bermuda Honey. This beer turned out amazing and has been brewed many time since. Next we did a awful Hibiscus IPA, this was the first beer I’ve ever dumped out! I might revisit one day as it taught me a lot about brewing with flowers. So next the committee of beer drinkers decided to try an American Wheat beer flavored with local Bermuda Loquats.