Third time lucky! After two days of novelty nonsense, the vase of fate served up a pint half-litre of the Harviestoun Brewery’s 4.8% masterpiece Schiehallion, named after my all-time favourite munro.
Here’s an interesting fact for you – the mass of the earth was first measured in 1774 when the Astronomer Royal, one Nevil Maskelyne, spent four months mucking about on Schiehallion with pendulums. By observing how the mountain’s bulk caused the pendulums (should that be pendulii?) to swing away from the vertical, he could estimate the mass of the mountain and extrapolate from this to estimate our planet’s mass at 5,000 million million tonnes – which is a pretty reasonable calculation, if you ask me. Based on that work, it was then possible to figure out the mass of all the other planets, their moons, and even the sun itself. All of which kind of brings my own summer’s evening stroll up Schiehallion in 1998 into context really, enjoyable though it was.
Oh, the beer’s great too, by the way. Cask-conditioned bohemian style, lovely and refreshing, with a taste evocative of Scottish moorland and heather – it’s won gold medals at CAMRAs Great British Beer Festival.