Brewery build progress

The can filling and seaming area of the brewery will require tiling, so while I was down in Inverness I picked up some that that were suitable for this area as well as for use around the main sink and brew-kettle area. As I’ve said before, brewing should really be called cleaning. The plain white tiles will ensure that these areas are kept as sanitary as possible.

More 3D printing

The brewery floor was given another coat of paint. I designed and ran off some 3D prints in PLA or Poly Lactic Acid. PLA is a bio-plastic made from renewable sources such as sugar cane and corn starch. There’s a short description of PLA here on BioPak’s site.

I printed them on my Creality FDM (Fused Deposition Modelling) printer to cover the old workshop wall brackets which had proved very difficult to remove. Some of the prints ended up being multicoloured as I was using up filament reels that just had a few metres left on them. It’s possible to change the filament mid print if you are quite dexterous.

My angle grinder came in handy to reduce some of the protruding metal work, prior to fitting the covers. I’m not a fan of angle grinders. All the ones I have used do not have a dead man’s switch and frankly scare the hell out of me.

These are some of the biggest prints I’ve done. They took a few days to produce, but I’m pretty happy with the results. They don’t have the most uniform of looks, but they’ll serve the purpose they were designed for.

I completed the brewery loft floor, filling in some gaps. It was a well built workshop and this loft space will come in very handy for light storage of lids, labels and the like.

I also spent quite a few days drilling through the wall concrete blocks to install trickle ventilation vents as specified on the plans that had been drawn up.

I already have a CO2 monitor installed so I can keep an eye on levels in the brewery whilst I’m working.

The Mirrie Dancers

We are very fortunate here in Orkney to be north enough to see the Northern Lights or Aurora Borealis.

We were treated to a few displays in September, easier to see as the evenings are darker now, however light pollution from ships and rigs moored in Scapa Flow can be pretty bad and spoil the display as for us the Aurora are normally quite low in the sky to the North where for us, Scapa Flow lies.

In 1755 extensive recording of sunspot activity began. We are now in the 25th Solar cycle since records began of the sun’s 11 year cycle.

The sunspot cycle peaked in July 2025 and is now starting to decline, but 2026 should still offer some opportunities to watch the Mirrie Dancers. Mirrie means to shimmer, tremble or vibrate.

The camera on your phone is a great way to view them as the sensor can detect the greens and reds that the naked eye normally cannot see unless the display is particularly energetic. If you need some tips, try this guide to photographing the aurora on the Visit Norway site.

When the auroral display is intense, they can be seen with the naked eye, usually as a grey haze or ribbon, but the colours do come through if there’s enough intensity.

Heading South

The month of September also saw a trip South to Oban on the West coast of Scotland to see family.

We have three car ferry options for connections to the Scottish mainland in Orkney. Two are run by Northlink which operates routes from Scrabster to Stromness and Aberdeen to Kirkwall. The other option is to take Pentland Ferries from Gill’s Bay to Saint Margaret’s Hope in South Ronaldsay.

Northlink’s website has a blog which always has some interesting articles. It’s a great source of information alongside Orkney.com‘s brilliant site.

Once across the Pentland Firth and on the Scottish mainland it usually takes me between 6 to 7 hours driving to get down to Oban, not including driving breaks.

I pass through Inverness on the way and it’s a great opportunity pick up items that are not easily obtained here in Orkney, such as Asian cooking ingredients from the brilliant Matthew’s Foods Chinese supermarket on the Longman Industrial estate.

Other mandatory stops are at the Marks & Spencer’s foodhalls in both Oban and Fort William.

M&S is a great treat these days to stock up on what we now consider exotic foodstuffs.

More southward moves

I was sorry and more than a bit annoyed to read that Orkney will be losing its Tourist Information Centre in Kirkwall. This is part of a closure programme for all Visit Scotland’s iCentres which has been going on since 2024. I was completely unaware of this closure programme until last week.

On the face of it this seems an incredibly short sighted move. Not all visitors do all their research and planning online and in the peak of the visitor season, the town is full of folk looking for information on how to get from A to B. They are most definitely not all on their phones all the time when they are here.

For some of the visitors from overseas, mobile phone access whilst here may be quite difficult. Often visitors will come up to you in town clutching a slightly damp paper map that they have been given here, looking for directions.

I don’t think it paints a great picture of Scotland if we just leave folks on their own when they initially get here. We will now no longer have that clearly identifiable hub as a first port of call. Visitors to Orkney use the Tourist Information Centre as a jumping off point to get further, more detailed and local on the ground information and knowledge about things to see and do locally.

Nothing can beat talking to a person, the reassurance of a friendly face to help you in a place you are unfamiliar with. This move may have a further impact on local businesses that may not now get the visibility that they would have had from a staff mention or other information being available at the Tourist Information Centre in Kirkwall.

From VisitScotland’s 2024 blog article (link: – https://www.visitscotland.org/news/2024/icentre-closure-programme)

“As part of our strategy to grow the visitor economy, in March we announced changes to the way we would provide visitor information. This included a decision to close our iCentre network.

After considering a wide range of research and insights, which looked at how visitors plan and book their holidays, we found that most visitors plan all aspects of their holiday before they leave home, gaining inspiration from online sources or tour operators and travel agents.”

You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone

On the face of it, I think this decision reeks a lot of the Beeching Axe kind of deep research that was carried out in the sixties on the UK’s rail networks. This research was then acted on to devastating effect. The Beeching Cuts hobbled the five nation’s rail transport infrastructure. The cuts isolated smaller communities and destroyed a very well established, highly connected and efficient network.

This was relatively low polluting freight and passenger network infrastructure that we will never get back. It fell victim to short term visions of cost, financial efficiency, flawed statistical analysis and a blinkered view of alternative strategies short of outright closure and abandonment.

As is often the case, the long term societal benefits of an established in-place infrastructure were ignored in the name of the current bottom line.