Slake a thirst on board
July 23rd 2007 18:47
Slake a thirst on board.
I have spent some time telling people how to cook on pot meals on board to make life simple and avoid a lot of hassle and washing up. It is a great way to give yourself time to do the important things in life like sit back with a fishing rod or grab a sanding block and get some more wood ready to varnish. (ha, ha.) Well one of my friends who has lived on board his yacht for over thirty years reckons what he like to do best is sit back after a hard day of deciding what to do with his spare time and drink a cold beer. However he likes his beer a lot and doesn’t have a lot of money so he makes his own. Yes on board and he chills it as well without a fridge.
What my mate does is to make up forty litres of home made beer at a time in a forty litre drum. He then decants into soft drink bottles. He uses one point five litre plastic screw top bottles as they are just the right size. One after lunch and one after dinner seems to be just enough to satisfy him. Now he has a fairly long but skinny timber boat in which he keeps all three of his model planes with wings spans of two metres or more so imagine that he doesn’t have a lot of room for a brewery. By just making forty litres at a time he keeps well within the space available on board and that way he makes enough to drink and keep on hand for guests. He ends up with two dozen bottles which is enough to last him half a month and as he finishes one batch his next batch is ready for drinking.
The bottles don’t weigh a lot being plastic so they stack easily under the floor boards in the cool bilge. To chill, he just wraps a bottle in a very wet towel and hangs it in the shade of the boom tent in the wind. Don’t think you are going to chill your beer by hanging it in the water, not in Australia. If the water temperature gets cold enough to chill beer the outside temperature will be enough to chill it anyway. I remember when my mate offered me the first taste of his beer. I had just anchored a boat I was delivering to Sydney in the bay at Middle Percy Island. I rowed ashore with my crew hoping to bum a few litres of fuel off the yachties gathered for “after fives” on the beach. Nobody was prepared to sell or swap fuel but out of the crowd on the beach steps my mate and he offers me a cold frosty homemade beer to drink out a Vegemite jar! A frothing schooner on the verandah of a country pub couldn’t have tasted better or have been more welcome.
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