Below recounts the day we became men, brewing our very own beer.

****

6.35am: Phone alarm goes off. Quietly curse Hillsy for booking us into the brewery for an early start.

6.36am: Kick toe on way to kitchen where phone is plugged in. Hop for a few minutes to wake up.

6.44am: Toast pops up, burnt. Turn dial down on toaster in preparation for next toasting tomorrow, which will inevitably simply warm up the bread, necessitating another toasting, which will almost certainly go for too long and burn it. Toasters… who can figure ‘em, eh?

7.15am: Kiss sleeping girlfriend goodbye. She’s sleeping with a faint smile on her face, because Bed is so damn comfortable. Silently curse Hillsy for the second time today.

7.32am: Get on train into the city.

7.33am: Why do kids insist on wearing those caps with the ruler-straight peaks, turned slightly to the side? Don’t the realise how silly they look?

10 seconds later: Realise I’m nearing 30. When did that happen? Damn those kids and their fashion.

7.52am: Pull into station. Walk down to meeting point, meeting Andrew and DT.

7.59am: See the Pajero careening around corner… Hillsy’s on time? Catch breath after shock.

7.59am: Russ walks up. Can’t believe the guy’s timing.

8.20am: Stop off at Macca’s drive through to ease Mini’s complaining stomach. Everyone gets coffee. Obviously they’re “Macca’s coffee” rookies.

8.27am: First complaint about coffee.

Classy... BRU4U

8.40am: Walk through BRU4U’s doors. See barrels and barrels of beers. Feel pang of jealousy, knowing that ours will still need to ferment for weeks after today.

8.44am: Hear more than I ever needed to about Canadian beers from our host.

8.46am: Am told that I can’t be from South Africa by host. Smile, but generations of Saffa ancestors rattle their bones in indignation in their graves.

8.59am: Finally agree on two types of beers: One, a “Corona-ish blend”, and Two, a “Asahi-ish blend”. My suggestion of a low-carb beer is met with shaking heads, projected derision and suspicious eyes.

9.10am: We’re off! Following our recipes, we begin pouring litres of light and dark lager malt mix into tubs.

9.12am: Fight first urge to simply dunk head in tub… malt. Is there anything better?

9.16am: Attempting to get measurements right to the very gram. This causes problem for those with a lack of patience, as the scale seems to take a second or two to catch up with what’s actually on it.

9.20am: Discussion about yeast and how it’s actually bacteria. Start daydreaming about dunking head in malt.

9.27am: Put in about 20g too much glucose. Isn’t it the glucose that makes the alcohol percentage increase in the end? Silently make mental note to take it slow when these beers are in hand.

Steam Kettles

9.30am: First lot (the Corona-ish mix) goes into the steam kettles.

9.35am: Repeat process with the Asahi-ish mix. Watch as DT measures grams like a surgeon. Watch Mini throw the ingredients into the bowl like it’s an all-you-can-eat.

9.43am: Second lot goes into another steam kettle. We’re seasoned professionals by now, and the mixing only took 8 minutes.

9.44am: Realise that we now have nothing to do while we wait until we need to add next ingredients. Sit down around barrel-bar table, which apparently could be ours for the low low price of $1750.

9.45am: Host brings us complimentary beer. It’s a dark ale, courtesy of someone named Ron.

9.46am: Thank Ron in his absence, begin downing drink.

9.47am: Smacking of lips and looks of approval. I’m not the biggest fan.

9.59am: Halfway through the drink, realise that I could get into this.

10.02am: Finish beer. Laugh at myself for questioning Ron. I mean, it’s Ron, right? Good beer that.

10.03am: Begin looking around, hoping that we’ll be offered more free beer.

10.04am: Curses. No free beer, just an alarm reminding us to add more barley.

10.06am: Watch a couple bring in their empties, clean them, and begin filling and sealing their bottles. Am reminded that we now need to find 288 empty beer bottles for our 12 cases. Sigh. Silently say sorry to my liver.

10.20am: Watch a father bring his two young daughters in. They’ve been trained well… the girls, who are probably 8 and 10 respectively, put the empties on the bottle cleaner like pros, and start the spinning. Horrified, yet impressed at the same time.

10.30am: We’re offered an “experimental” sarsaparilla. Watch DT fight his inner demons the whole way towards the tap.

10.31am: Watch DT drink said sarsaparilla, acknowledging that he can never turn down a free drink.

Russel pours in some barley. Hillsy supervises.

10.35am: Alarm goes off again, reminding us to do… well, something. I’m comfy on this chair though.

10.38am: Those two girls are helping bottle and seal the father’s beer now. Seriously, how long has he been bringing them here?

10.42am: Offered another free beer… this time, a cream ale. It’s not bad; fairly crisp, and quite a clean taste.

10.47am: The mixtures are done! Watch as they’re piped from the kettles to respective barrels. Good god, that looks good.

10.55am: Pay the friendly lady. After these beers, I’m prepared to forgive her the “you can’t be South African” remark. Lock in a date to come in for bottling: 14 August.

10.56am: Realise that the couple are still busy bottling their 6 cases. Realise that we have 12 cases between us. Mark down to keep the entire day on the 14th open.

10.59am: We’re out the door. We came in mere drinkers, we leave… well, slightly more educated beer drinkers.

****

And that’s it. Of course, on the way home we stopped off for various other adventures, but that’s a tale for another time…

Conversation Media... what's the deal?

I’m currently employed full-time as an SEO Executive for a fairly large online travel group. This is an in-house position, and from Monday – Friday, 8am – 5pm, I’m there. That’s my focus, and that hasn’t changed.

I feel that there’s a lot more that I can offer to SMBs though, and I’m really keen to share my knowledge with businesses looking to engage and communicate with their customers online. Which is where Conversation Media comes into it.

Conversation Media was really just a name that popped into my head one day. I’d been feeling slightly… well, unsettled. I knew that there was something more out there for me, something more that I could offer. I’ve been through this once before, when I launched Elite SEO.

The problem with Elite SEO, as I see it, is that SEO is changing.

While there will always be a need for good search engine optimisation, I feel that straight SEO as a standalone service is on its way out. Simply put, a lot of what most people would call “SEO” is now becoming a process that can mostly be automated. And I’m watching that happen, right in front of my eyes.

So I took a step back, and took another look at exactly what had got me interested in SEO in the first place. And from that objective distance, I managed to realise that it wasn’t strictly “SEO” that I’d fallen for, back in the day… it was the marketing side of things. Online Marketing. I mean, it’s right there in the name, isn’t it?

And the bit about marketing that I love? Communicating. Establishing that connection between a brand and its customers. Helping them grow closer together, and form a relationship.

Entering into conversations.

And there it was. Conversation Media.

So Conversation Media is now my freelance venture, where I offer my SEO copywriting and social media marketing services to SMBs, or – quite frankly – anyone who needs help engaging their customers online. And while I’d one day love for this to be my sole employment, for now it’s an additional source of income supplementing my current in-house SEO position. After all, there’s 24 hours in a day. I intend to use each and every one.

So, if this sounds like something you’d be interested in… why not get in touch?

Just watched the trailer for the “Lemonade” movie, and damned if the things doesn’t look inspiring. According to the official site:

“More than 130,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this Great Recession. Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.”

Yeah. It doesn’t read like much until you watch the trailer. Which is, as I say, totally inspiring. Oh, that, and there’s some seriously “Explosions in the Sky”-influenced music in the background. Which pretty much equals cool for me.

Trailer embedded below…

First 3 people who leave a comment on this post requesting one get ‘em… I have more than I know what to do with!

… and seeing as I want to test out the new, upgraded NextGen Gallery plugin for image showcasing, looks like you all will have to put up with the proverbial slideshow night!

 

… to Oswald, aka Ozzie… the best dog in the world. Somewhere up in heaven tonight, a little sausage dog is chasing a large squeaky bone up and down endless fields.

You’ll be missed Oz.

This probably won’t make sense to anyone else reading this. While blogging is all about sharing, if we’re honest, it’s also often a selfish act… recording thoughts to reaffirm our own existence and own memories to ourselves, if not others.

This is probably one of those posts. Like I say, it’s not likely that it will make sense to anyone else. But, to me, I want to put this down in case I ever forget it again. Because this memory, for whatever reason, popped into my head the other day, and it’s making me smile like I haven’t in quite some time.

A good few years back… ooh, I guess we’d be saying at least 6 or so… Rita Marley and the I-Threes came out to tour South Africa. At the time, things in South Africa were changing. If I’m right when I say this was 6 years ago, that would make it 2003, which would have been 9 years after the ANC, and with it, South Africa’s first black president, Nelson Mandela, came into power. While it had nearly been a decade, South Africa was still struggling with integration.

All this is a preamble to saying that when my mother, her partner, my sister, myself and my girlfriend at the time went to the Bat Centre at Durban Harbour to watch Rita and the I-Threes, we were the only white faces there.

Now, to set the scene… the Bat Centre at the harbour was one of my favourite places. You wouldn’t know it, going by the surroundings. The harbour was dirty as hell, rubbish littered the parking lots, used condoms and mountains of cigarette butts were everywhere, there was the pungent stench of urine from pretty much every corner where a human body could sleep the night away… and then there was the Bat Centre. Amidst all the squalor, was this Centre where the arts thrived. There were art workshops every weekend, and throughout the week you could see artists like Syd Kitchen (whom I’ve mentioned here and here before) expanding your mind.

In short, I loved the place. But it wasn’t exactly a place where you could forget the issues in your country’s past.

The Bat Centre in Durban

So, we’ve gone along to watch Rita. She was performing an outside show for National Woman’s Day, and the car parking lot for the Bat Centre was chock-full with patrons coming along to watch.
Now, at that time in my life, I was slightly unsure of myself. Not so my girlfriend at the time. It seems, looking back throughout my life, I’ve always been attracted to strong, confident women. Perhaps that says something, but that’s for another post. Getting back to the point, my girlfriend at the time was a swedish girl called Teddie. The typical Swedish stereotype… aryan looks, long blonde hair, crystal blue eyes and tanned year round, no matter what. And as Rita and the I-Threes kicked into their first tune, Teddie jumped right into it, and dragged me along into the whirling masses of bodies. Within a few seconds, we were jiving around hundreds of rastas to the sounds of some of Bob’s best tunes.

And soon, Teddie and I were separated. And there I was, this slightly uncomfortable white kid, dancing in amongst a sea of black faces. And I don’t say that for any kind of shock value (gasp! mentioning race?!), I mention it to give some context to the time. It might be hard to understand for those of you who weren’t in South Africa at the tail end of Apartheid, but the fact is that even if you yourself weren’t a “racist”, the history of racism had bred an uncomfortable “difference” between South Africans.

But music, man… music was different. Exceptions could be made for music.

At that time, Teddie had been carried away, and I was slightly worried. Would she be ok? And then this rasta came over to me, and said, “You’re doing it wrong man”. To which I shyly asked, “What are you talking about bru?”. The rasta smiled at me and said, “Your dancing. You’re doing it wrong. You’re thinking. Stop it mlungu” (side note: mlungu is the zulu word for “white person”). “Stop thinking. Don’t care. Just move”.

And for the first time in my life, I managed to. I stopped thinking, and just bounced. I was a madman, limbs flying everywhere, grabbing hands with random strangers and we whirled around in ecstasy, losing ourselves in the music. And throughout it all, this random rasta who had come out of nowhere was laughing. And not laughing at me – although there was some teasing at first – rather he was laughing with me.

It was one of the happiest times in my life, and I’m still not sure why… but it was some of the purest, most unfettered joy I’d ever felt.

The next thing I knew, these arms wrapped around me, and I looked back into Teddie’s eyes. “All ok?”, she asked, with that accent of hers.

“Fine,” I replied. “I think I’m going to be just fine.”

This isn’t a story about Teddie. In fact, looking back at it now, I think that day was the last day Teddie and I were truly happy together… or the last happy memory I can remember sharing with her, at any rate. It’s not a story about racism. In fact, I’m not even sure this is a story at all. But it is a memory, of me being happy. And it means a lot to me.

I said it wouldn’t make sense to you.

It’s coming on to rain, with perfect timing. The first drops running down my face so that from a distance you could mistake them for tears. Don’t you believe it, mate. Don’t you fucking believe it.

- John Constantine, “RSVP Part II” by Mike Carey.

Sometimes we just balls things up, you know? Sod it.

… ie. possibly the cutest thing ever.

Quite possibly the coolest thing I have ever read. Or, quite possibly the most heart-breaking, depending upon your point of view. It’s always hard to tell, with Bill Murray.

At around 3:30 on the morning after Halloween, two dozen twentysomething hipsters linger at a loft party in East Williamsburg. The kegs are dry, but die-hard stragglers are still dancing drunkenly in the main room. Dave Summers, a 29-year-old grad student at the Bank Street College of Education and one of the party’s hosts, has dressed as a cloud for the night—his baby-blue T-shirt and baseball cap covered in dozens of white cotton balls. While several guests have come as Sarah Palin, one is in a furry yellow duck costume. Another is Bill Murray’s character from the 1980 film Caddyshack.

Suddenly, one of Dave’s guests runs over to tell him: “The real Bill Murray just walked in the door.”

“You’re joking,” Dave scoffs.

“No, really, he’s here.”

Still not entirely convinced, but worried the actor might leave if there’s no booze, Dave runs to a nearby bodega to grab some beer. When he returns, the shopping bag breaks in the hallway. As errant bottles roll across the floor, suddenly there’s Bill Murray—leaning down to help collect the beer and even sticking one in his shirt pocket.

Soon the 58-year-old actor—dressed as himself, Dave and his friends presume—is trading quips with fresh-faced Ivy League grads in the loft’s hallway, while drinking a bottle of Modelo Especial. Eventually Bill even hits the dance floor and displays some decent moves. “It wasn’t like he was John Travolta or something,” said one observer afterwards, “but it wasn’t embarrassing.”

The whole scene is kind of goofy and light-hearted until a young male guest approaches Bill, who is probably his dad’s age, and says, “I think you’re making bad life choices.” It is as if someone has told the emperor he isn’t wearing any clothes. After the dancing, and the beers, and a weird conversation with Dave about the joys of sweet potato casserole topped with marshmallows (inspired by the cotton ball cloud costume), the Oscar-nominated star cordially thanks his hosts and slips away into the night.

Read the whole article here. For some reason, this seems like some kind of beautiful fairytale to me.