How do you keep your beer cold?
March 2nd 2007 22:44
.How do you keep the beer cold on your boat?
One of our most ancient traditions has been trying to keep the beer (and wine) cold on board. I remember rowing along in an old timber, clinker row boat that I hired for a few hours with the express purpose of putting the virtue of a young lady of my acquaintance at hazard. I had a couple of bottles of Dinner Ale with me and tied them by the neck with a piece of string and dangled them over the side in the water.
It was a murky brown river with banks overgrown with bright green foliaged weeping willows. She was wearing a colourful sunhat and a paisley printed frock. She did look delightful and I was in a bit of a state as my imagination started to get ahead of my ability. Suddenly there was a burst of laughter and a cheer from the bank as a young dare devil had swum under my proud craft and with a pocket knife, snipped the string and retrieved the two bottles of chilled beer for his mates.
As it turned out I didn’t really need the beer after all and the afternoon ended much better than I could have wished for in my widest dreams. “Where are you now Laura?”
As a beach fisherman I once in my youth buried a couple of bottles of beer by the edge of the tide in the sand where I was fishing. I hoped to have this beer with my dinner which I was slowly but surely catching with my trusty beach rod. Well the tide came in and the tide went out and somehow there was no sign of my beer. Not even a half a cupful to make a beer batter for my flathead fillets!
I remember as a child, my dad and his mates when they went on family pic-nics, again in hired row boats, in the years just after the second world war when there was still a ration for beer. They would take the beer reverently from the ice chest and wrap each bottle in thick folds of newspaper, sprinkle this with water and pack it deep in the pic-nic basket under a towel. It looked delicious when they finally unwrapped it, the dew was still dripping from the brown bottles and it effervesced into the glass with a muddy coloured froth that stuck to dad’s top lip like and ancient mustachio.
What do you do to keep your beer cold on board? Is it an esky packed to the gunnels with party ice, or do you have a fridge on board? I must confess to being pretty hard up at times and drinking beer that has just been in the shade for a few minutes. Pretty desperate stuff but I am a desperate man when it comes to my grog. I have been playing around with the idea of a “Coolgardie” safe. This is an old bush fridge that works on the principle of water dripping down a hessian wall and breeze blowing across and through this coming out cool on the other side. Imagine something akin to a cockies cage with a door that opens to give access. Around the outside of the cage is a good wrap of burlap and on top is a container of water that slowly drips out over the burlap. This keeps it wet and the motion of the boat through the water keeps up a steady breeze which blows across and through the cage to cool the beer. Would this be too simple?
One of our most ancient traditions has been trying to keep the beer (and wine) cold on board. I remember rowing along in an old timber, clinker row boat that I hired for a few hours with the express purpose of putting the virtue of a young lady of my acquaintance at hazard. I had a couple of bottles of Dinner Ale with me and tied them by the neck with a piece of string and dangled them over the side in the water.
It was a murky brown river with banks overgrown with bright green foliaged weeping willows. She was wearing a colourful sunhat and a paisley printed frock. She did look delightful and I was in a bit of a state as my imagination started to get ahead of my ability. Suddenly there was a burst of laughter and a cheer from the bank as a young dare devil had swum under my proud craft and with a pocket knife, snipped the string and retrieved the two bottles of chilled beer for his mates.
As it turned out I didn’t really need the beer after all and the afternoon ended much better than I could have wished for in my widest dreams. “Where are you now Laura?”
As a beach fisherman I once in my youth buried a couple of bottles of beer by the edge of the tide in the sand where I was fishing. I hoped to have this beer with my dinner which I was slowly but surely catching with my trusty beach rod. Well the tide came in and the tide went out and somehow there was no sign of my beer. Not even a half a cupful to make a beer batter for my flathead fillets!
I remember as a child, my dad and his mates when they went on family pic-nics, again in hired row boats, in the years just after the second world war when there was still a ration for beer. They would take the beer reverently from the ice chest and wrap each bottle in thick folds of newspaper, sprinkle this with water and pack it deep in the pic-nic basket under a towel. It looked delicious when they finally unwrapped it, the dew was still dripping from the brown bottles and it effervesced into the glass with a muddy coloured froth that stuck to dad’s top lip like and ancient mustachio.
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