Beer

Sated (and slightly stiff) thanks to my outings in recent days, I stayed in and worked properly almost all day today, even though it was another sunny day in Borðoy. 

After finishing the first half of my overdue marking, I went out to stretch my legs, and visited the alcohol store (Rúsdrekkasøla Landsins), since the output of the Føroya Bjór brewery (across the fjord) isn't great. As with other places in northern latitudes, you can't get alcohol from a supermarket. It was mostly given over to wine, and then spirits, but there was a separate room for beer - are beer drinkers too uncouth to be seen by wine and spirit drinkers? I picked up four cans from the local Oy microbrewery ("Oy" is Faroese for "Island" - hence Faroe Islands being the translation of Føroyar): the only two cans they had of the cutely-labelled Gullhornið American Pale Ale (see extra), and two cans of Kusturin. I've drunk Oy beer before: it's reasonable, and the Gullhornið continues the trend. Kusturin has a neon pink label featuring a puffin - that will doubtless appear here when I drink a can - but I'm not moving onto 7.4% milk stout tonight... I also bought a couple of bottles of 11.5% Icelandic dark stout that looked too interesting to miss. I've enjoyed strong Icelandic craft beer in Tórshavn...

Sheep are naturally important in the Faroe Islands (see extra): there's a woollen clothing shop in Klaksvík called "Sheep", and it's the icon of the Føroya Bjór (pictured). This was my next port of call - it's 100m away - because six 33cl beers from Rúsdrekkasøla Landsins set me back £22, and the beer from the Føroya Bjór shop is very much cheaper. The Slupp I bought there last week was disappointing, but I spotted the Páskabryggj that they were selling as a "North Atlantic Pale Ale", so I got six bottles for £11. It's not brilliant...

Back in the apartment, after my meeting with research assistant J, I got stuck into trying to understand why we get different results when solving the same mathematical problem with our respective solvers. After a fairly intense couple of hours - fuelled by the sweet filled wafers that I've discovered here - I found a couple of highly non-obvious reasons for the differences. After writing up my observations as comments in J's Python source file, and sending them an email, I decided that I deserved a beer....