. Favourite Beer of the Week

In which country do you think the windmill was invented?  It wasn’t Holland.  Holland’s not even a country.  I’m pretty sure we were taught that it is a country, but it’s not.  It’s a province in the Netherlands.  Actually, it’s two provinces - North Holland and South Holland.  Neither place invented the windmill, but they do have a lot of them.  

Tsarina Esra is brewed in this windmill in South Holland by Brouwerij De Molen (Brewery of the Mill).  It's an Imperial Porter, which is like an Imperial Stout, but slightly less so.  It's sweet, but not too sweet.  And not too boozy for an 11% beer.  I like that there is no picture on the label, just a list of ingredients and storage instructions.  

Some of their labels don’t even tell you what kind of beer is in the bottle.  You have to figure it out for yourself from the nerdy beer statistics like EBC (colour),  EBU (bitterness), and Plato (density).    Or you can just grab a few and hope for the best like me.  My favourite so far is Bloed, Zweet & Tranen (Blood, Sweat & Tears).

At the beginning of the 19th century there were about 9000 windmills in the Netherlands.  The Dutch had so much wind power that they didn’t feel the need to convert to steam, so they were a bit late in joining the Industrial Revolution.  

The British steam-powered everything they could get their hands on, including windmills.  

No one steam-powered Windy Miller’s windmill.  Unlike his neighbour, Jonathan Bell, Windy resisted the mass-industrialisation of modern farming methods.

So when the wind died in Camberick Green, Windy was left with nothing to do but sit down by his shed and drink himself into a stupor.  

Camberwick Green was the first season of Gordon Murray's Trumptonshire Trilogy.  It was inspired by the village of Wivelsfield Green in Sussex.  The second season, Trumpton, was inspired by the nearby village of Plumpton.  

The Lord of the Manor of Plumpton lived in a fancy house called Plumpton Place, until 1972 when he sold it to Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin.

In Led Zeppelin's 1976 movie The Song Remains The Same, Page can be seen sitting in the grounds of Plumpton Place, playing his hurdy gurdy.

In the same movie, the band’s singer Robert Plant can be seen relaxing on his Welsh country farm with his wife and children, before getting on a horse and doing battle for a fair maiden, a symbolic representation of his vision of the ideal and his personal search for the Holy Grail.  Plant later described the film as, “A load of bollocks.”

Plant is a big fan of beer.  His son Logan owns Beavertown Brewery, one of several new craft breweries that have taken off in London over the last few years.   

Beavertown was the old cockney name for De Beauvoir, the area of east London where the brewery is located.  Beavertown was also the home of the Mole Man of Hackney.

In the early 1960s, an electrical engineer called William Lyttle began digging tunnels under his 20 room Victorian house with a shovel and a homemade pulley.  No one knows why he did it, or how far he went, but an ultrasound scan by the council revealed a deep web of passages and caverns spreading up to 60 feet in every direction from his house.   

In 2001, his tunnelling caused an 8 ft hole to appear in the pavement on Stamford Road.  In 2006, Lyttle was evicted from his home, and two years later he was was ordered to pay £293,000 to cover the costs of scaffolding and new foundations. More than 30 tonnes of debris and waste, including three cars and a boat, were removed by contractors.  Lyttle died in 2010.  His derelict house was auctioned in 2012 and sold for £1.12 million  ($1.88 million).

Around the same time that the Mole Man of Hackney began his tunnelling, Czech film-maker Zdeněk Miler began animating Krtek - The Little Mole.

Krtek was a worldwide hit, starring in 50 short films through the 60s and 70s and again in the mid 90s, but he never made it big in America.  In an effort to gain popularity in the U.S. he recently accompanied American astronaut Andrew Feustel on a mission to the International Space Station.  

The International Space Station is the most expensive thing ever made.  As of 2010 its cost was estimated to be $150 billion.  It is a joint project between America, Russia, Japan, Europe and Canada.  If flights to the station are not fully booked, any non-astronaut who passes the medical exam can buy a seat for $40 million.  

The Space Station has funding for about another 10 years.  America would like it to stay in orbit for longer than that, but the Russians are not co-operating because of U.S. sanctions against Russia over the current conflict in Crimea.

There is a back-up plan to move the Space Station into orbit around Mars, and use it as a staging post for future colonisation.   NASA is hoping to send a team to Mars by 2030.

Not wanting to be left behind like they were during the Industrial Revolution, the Dutch intend to get to Mars by 2024.  The Mars One project is the brainchild of Dutch Entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp.  So far the project has been entirely self-funded, but Lansdorp plans to bankroll the mission by turning it into a reality TV show.  The show will follow the successful contestants through years of simulation training, and then on their 7-month trip through space, and subsequent colonisation of Mars.

When asked how his crew can possibly hope to beat NASA to the red planet by 6 years, Lansdorp replied, “Well it's simple. We're not going to bring them back. This is a one-way ticket."  Over 200,000 people have applied so far.

Bas Lansdorp amassed his personal fortune in the Dutch windmill industry.  But who invented the windmill?  It was the Ancient Greeks.