Saturday felt like the first proper spring day of the year. We walked through the woods and up to the ridge and it was a glorious still, warm and sunny day. With spring in the air I’m feeling optimistic and it seems like a good weekend to start the project.

I had a long run on Sunday so my wife picked the first flowers of the project. We started with gorse flowers and hazel catkins. While gorse is always in season and, I think, peaks slightly later in the year, it’s put on a bit of a spurt recently so now seems a good time to try it. I love the spot they came from. We live in Kipling country and the hill where the gorse is is Pook’s Hill in my mind. I like to think I’m bringing a little old world magic into my beer!

Once the flowers had been collected small bugs, such as thunder bugs, started emerging from the flowers. Next time I’ll collect the flowers into a small sanitised Tupperware and decant the flowers from there into the centrifuge tubes, having given time for the bugs to leave the flowers. This will also save carrying multiple tubes out for a walk.

Once cooled the wort was aerated by swirl/shaking the Erlenmeyer flask. Initially I used a pipette to transfer the wort but it wasn’t necessary – pouring worked fine.

The detail of my process is under the method tab.