To crosspost or not to crosspost, that is the question. At the moment, current thoughts I've seen around are putting me in favour of 'not', which is unexpected to me. But, you see, I'd like all discussion to be in one place. So perhaps I'll have one journal as fannish, one as RL, or something. I don't know. I'll wait and see what seems to work once the "Ooh, shiny!' has worn off a little.

So, anyhow, not crossposted for the moment. Also, because the cuts thing doesn't go through, and I can't access LJ to correct posts until I get home.

This weekend I went to the Wychwood brewery. "Hi, welcome, come in and have a beer," is a good way to start a tour. I learnt all about the brewing process, smelled hops, tasted malt in the various stages of roasting, and figured out that I don't particularly like stout for the same reasons I don't like burnt toast. The malt for stout is basically roasted until burnt (then soaked in water and turned into mash, etc etc) – it's the acrid, burnt flavour that I've never liked. They had some lovely old equipment – a gigantic, wood and shiny brass mash tun, a red-painted cast-iron... thingy, some huge, smelly fermentation tanks with yeast happily bubbling out...

We had a beer testing, and it was all very lovely stuff. English beer – the sort that I always used to avoid because I thought room-temperature beer was a disgusting concept. But it's really not! It's a lot more real, and individual – you can identify the ingredients. It's very... wholesome. Gives you a hellacious hangover, though.

So I came out smelling like a brewery, natch. And having tasted, I inevitably ended up buying a fair amount of it. And a T-shirt. And a bottle-opener shaped like a goblin. Then we went to a pub – for the very sensible reason of getting my dad some lunch and a coffee so he would be okay to drive us home. (He'd only had the testers, which equated to maybe a pint, so he'd probably have been legal, but he prefers to be cautious, for which I'm grateful.) I had a risotto with asparagus, a pint of cider, and some sticky toffee pudding. Mmm. And then I went home and slept like I was concussed. Oof.

Question: can you see the pictures on my journal? I can see them on my home computer, and not on my work one. Navigation is very difficult when they're not there. The most obvious one to check is the dotted banner all along the top.