#streamship

Waterfront Walk Mora (No. 2)

The government-owned power company Vattenfall drilled a deep well in search of natural gas. The project began as a deep commercial wildcat well, and its unusual location in fractured granite attracted scientific attention (e.g., as potentially significant in the context of theory of abiogenic petroleum origin).

The Gravberg-1 well location, in the north-northeast section of the ring, was chosen because a gravity anomaly indicates less dense rock below, and four seismic reflectors may represent cap rock above a natural gas reservoir. Electrical resistance is lower in the ring than outside it, suggesting the rocks contain fluid. Soil in the area showed clear traces of methane and heavy hydrocarbons, with a halo around the ring coincident with vanadium and nickel trace elements; the sediment was shown to not be the source of the hydrocarbons due to their location, ice movement pattern, and low level of maturity. Although the greatest gas leakage was in the north-northwestern corner, the lack of leakage in the central area suggested an underlying cap.

Drilling began on 1 July 1986. By September 1989 it reached 6,957 m (22,825 ft) in depth.

Four seismic reflectors were detected at 1,440 m (4,720 ft), 2,800 m (9,200 ft), 4,740 m (15,550 ft) and 7,400 m (24,300 ft). The first three were penetrated and found to be dolerite sills, but the fourth had been identified before drilling as having the best potential for gas production. The dolerite is believed to have existed as much as 1/2 billion years before the meteorite impact. The granite is extensively fractured, with calcite as the principal cement down to the 3,200 m (10,500 ft) depth, with lesser amounts to 5,000 m (16,000 ft).

What Was Porter?

Over the centuries, porter has gone through several transformations. Martyn Cornell broke it down a the recent Recreating Old Beer Styles conference. Hat tip to Ed’s Beer Site for actually attending the conference.

In the beginning, porter was brewed with brown malt and tasted quite sweet fresh and downright sour with age. By the mid-eighteenth century, brewers were adding more hops and aging the beer longer to mellow out the acidic bite. It also became a little smoky. 

To keep the product consistent, breweries installed larger and larger maturation tanks. The thick walled, oaken tanks kept oxygen out of the finished beer, making it less sour, but introduced Brettanomyces and other bacteria that gave a beer a rich, dry flavor. 

In the early nineteenth century, brewers using new saccharometers realized they could extract more sugar from pale malt than the traditional brown malt porter was brewed with. To save money, brewers switched to pale malt and added all sorts of illegal adjuncts to make the beer look right. Everything from black licorice to coal dust was added to porter.

But with the introduction of black patent malt, brewers could legally darken their porter and still use the more efficient pale malts. The beer was more bitter than sour, and some people began to yearn for the old strong stuff. Over time porter got weaker and weaker, from a peak of seven percent to something closer to three percent.

Of course, all these porter developments took place in Britain, but across the globe, people developed a taste for the stuff. Carrie Ladd from Double Mountain is a recreation of a steamship porter, a beer brewed with lager yeast but fermented like an ale.