Piscatorial Quagswagging

...the diary of a specialist angler in around the Warwickshire Avon and its tributaries.

Wednesday 24 January 2018

Warwickshire Avon - Livers and Leviathans

As someone apparently emotionally devoid (The Wife) if only she knew about the tears I've shed over trying to get that monkey off my back in pursuit of a 5lb Chub. Not any old Chevin either, one from my patch, my stomping ground, not one far afield. Well more than half an hour away anyway. It ain't getting easier, but recently there has been a glimmer of hope I'm clinging on to.

Maybe I should start bottling ones blubbering and do something useful with it, nothing wrong with using a waste product, others use it successfully without an issue. 

You see next time you hear someone say that their drink tastes like pee, you might want to have them check the label, because Gilpin Family Whisky actually is. The completely drinkable, single-malt alcohol is distilled from the urine of elderly diabetics. Yum?


In a world where homebrew beer is all the rage, and home distilleries are starting to take off, James Gilpin decided to take DIY alcohol to a whole new, much weirder level. You could call him a pee-pee pioneer. Propelled by an urban legend and his own type 1 diabetes, Gilpin began to wonder if diabetic’s sugar-rich urine could be used to create a high-end whisky. Gilpin, a designer who finds himself drawn to biomedical tech, recruited his grandmother and built a homemade distillery. Turns out, it works, and the whisky ain’t bad either.

First Gilpin purifies the urine into water, removes the excess sugar molecules from Granny’s pee, then adds it to the mash to help speed up the fermentation process. The end result is a clear white alcohol that Gilpin blends with another whisky to give it the proper color and barrel-aged taste. The final step involves bottling the pissky and labeling it with the name and age of the diabetic its derived from. The result is Gilpin Family Whisky, which, believe it or not, is suitable for export.


Initially, Gilpin hoped he could start a conversation with healthcare professionals by proposing the idea as an art project, but then he heard an urban legend that led him to actually produce the product.

A pharmaceutical factory based in a community of elderly people would send representatives door to door exchanging cushions and soft toys for tubs of urine. The factory would then take the urine and process it to remove all of the chemicals that they had originally been selling their customers on the shelves of pharmacies. "I took this model and adapted it for my own purpose.”

I'd rather not go down the recycling route I need to catch the Leviathan to get that bleeding Monkey Hanger off'a from my back otherwise I may well be talking to the recycled urine, and in big doses most probably.As a dry January, participator, now 23 days down, that probably isn't a wise idea.


The last trip to this stretch I couple of 4lb Chub came to the net pretty quickly, not only that but they were quite active up till dusk where a couple broke surface in what seemed like a feeding frenzy and they also seemed a decent stamp of fish. Maybe they were amazed at the feast they were being offered, it was steak and mince after all which for a bloody thirsty and greedy Chevin, it must have felt like a second Christmas dinner, and we all cannot get enough of them can we.

For this stupidly short after work smash and grab it was out with the ruby port and cheese afters for this session though, so some festering mouldy cheesepaste on one rod and the other with lobworms which would be swapped with a whitebait come isotope watching as a potential bigger fish tempter.


45 minutes past civil twilight and no more was the plan, more often than not the bites dry up anyway, and to be honest anymore I could feel my shackles being pulled from afar.

So anyway, to the session.

A drive over the bridge, the river was high and looked over it's banks in places and a couple or three miles further down the road I eventually was at the venue.

A short walk luckily because I could have always turned back, but yes, the river had been over it's banks here too, lots of standing water but I could get to the river. I could only fish the first few pegs though as the footpath was blocked with the river being so high.


So two rods out an hour before dusk and wait....

There was plenty of rubbish coming down the river during the session and both rods had to be cast every fifteen minutes or so. A few plucks and nibbles and a few line hits from the odd bat, "yes, they must have woken up" the session which ended an hour past dusk was uneventful.

With more rain on the way and the rivers likely to rise, I might put some baits out for Barbel in an area where I know they are in numbers during most of the season, the colour chocolate brown looked ideal as would likely water temperature rises because of the mild weather.

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