Third Time Lucky!
After two days of novelty nonsense, the vase of fate finally served up a half-litre of 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 (pendula?) to swing away from the vertical, he was able to estimate the mountain’s mass and extrapolate from this to calculate our planet’s mass at 5,000 million million tonnes—which is a pretty reasonable estimate, if you ask me. Based on that work, it then became possible to determine the mass of all the other planets, their moons, and even the Sun itself. All of which rather puts my own summer’s evening stroll up Schiehallion in 1998 into perspective, enjoyable though it was.
Oh, and 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 even won gold medals at CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival.