Getting ready for Christmas

Now some of F3 have a bit of time on their hands coming up to Christmas, so it was only right that one of our oldest members, Santa, asked us to help out.

Normally, his elves are about in late November to help with this stuff, but for some reason they had decided to fly Qantas and that meant they were stuck at the airport for the foreseeable future.

Santa had asked us to come up with some new Christmas decorations for all the boys and girls out there, so we happily obliged. Here's what we had to offer, and step by step instructions in case you want to make them yourself.

Step 1 - Buy some shotgun shells, then empty some of them:



Step 2 - Ribbon:
Taking a length of ribbon, cut a small hole in the empty shell and tie the ribbon up so it will hang on a tree branch.


Step 3 - Add the glue and decorate:
Apply some glue around the shell in an even spread, then drop glitter, tinsel or any other Christmassy-type decoration to it.


Once you're done, simply allow the glue to dry then you are ready to hang them on your Christmas tree, or give them out as gifts to your loved ones.

Breaking News live from F3 Breweries

At this stage, the police have the area cordoned off, speculating that a murder-suicide pact was carried out. All but 3 remaining bottles are dead, with those 3 being in critical condition.

The scene is being described by a police spokesperson as "the worst thing I've seen since MC Hammer's parachute pants" and forensics are in now examining the scene.

RIP some beer

Poor little things, only had a week of life before the accident. I only turn my back for 1 minute, well, I drank half a bottle of Jim Beam then went to bed oblivious to the massacre about to begin.

I can only assume that 1 rogue bottle went postal, causing a panic in the crate and the other 7 didn't know what to do but follow suit and explode also.

There was about 5 hours of cleaning up, removing shards of glass firmly embedded in the walls, ceiling and powered all over the coats hanging up. Naturally I wore my safety jandals and because of the specialist Health and Safety equipment used, managed to only cut my hands and feet in 12 or 13 different places - it could have been a lot worse!

So as we mourn our losses and close the lid on the mass grave, let us give thanks to Ninkasi the Sumerian Goddess of Brewing and Beer for sparing the remaining 24x 750ml bottles of magic liquid awesomeness, and we will honour her with mass consumption in around 3 weeks.

Explosive start to life.

Shotgun Beer is living up to the name. Eight of our beers self exploded in Mikes laundry yesterday. Looks like its going to be a volatile little number. (If any survive).

Bottle it baby!

It's safe to say the F3 brewery takes its brewing seriously. Having had the master brewer mermaids do their stuff, it's handed over to the little yellow people to get ready for the bottling and storage process.

Now please don't take that as a racial slur, we actually do employ little yellow people to do the bottling and quality control tests...

Once the quality control sample was tested, we handed the capping over to Doris, the BOTTLE-CAP 3000 robot from the future. She loves her job so much!

We'll be having the sampling closer to Christmas and if successful will look to start a full production chain and go global.

The next step

Now that our first batch of Shotgun Ale has almost completed fermentation, we're getting ready to bottle. As you can see, our complex sterilisation technique is revolutionary in the brewing industry and puts us years ahead of our competition.


Every brewery needs a gimmick, like Tui for example might say their beer is made by women in bikinis but we know it's not true. Our beer however is made by mermaids, and to prove it, here's a photo of one of the mermaids taking a power nap by the sterilisation tank.

Beer named after a firearm, made in NZ by mermaids... does it get any better than this?

Marketing Strategy

The Rocks boys are spreading the word to all their friends so F3's "Shotgun" Ale should be a major hit in the 8-14 year old section of the market. I feel this is crucial for us because my research shows that it is the one market that no other breweries have a large foot-hold of.

Here we go again

Now I don't know how many attempts we've had to relaunch F3 since the original crew kind of stopped doing what we were doing, but this is another, and it might fail, and we might not get very far, but as the great F3 motto goes:

"It's better to start something and get distracted by pie or beer and not finish than to never start something at all."

F3 now has a new direction, and I have the feeling our good friends at the clinic of Betty Ford may be involved at some point. F3 has opened it's own nano-brewery. When I say nano, I actually mean yocto, as we're that far down the metric scale when it comes to the size of our brewery.

We have 1 barrel and a shit load of empty bottles to fill, and here is attempt #1 to provoke a feeling of response from our already dried up livers...

It's a start, and Thursday will see the bottling of batch #1 of F3's latest attempt to take something someone else can do, and make a somewhat less special version of it.

It's name? What is the name given to this 'potentially' tasty beverage? Well, allow me to formally announce:

F3's Shotgun Ale

Yeah Well...

So that didn't work did it? Fancy website, forums full of spammers and a blog that those who have hit their head hard coming off a mountain bike couldn't work out... So, back to basics, beers, pies and bike rides.

2010 marks the return of F3. That's what we said about 2009, but what the hell - this time it's for real! :-)

Stay Tuned!

Yes, F3 has been a bit slack recently. With having to remove our bikes from the usual secret Bat Cave, we've had a rest, had some pies and built up some insulation for the winter.

Don't fear however, F3 will be back soon with a new site, new blog and updated forums!

Watch this space...

Impact!

From time to time, people here at F3 fall off. Sometimes it's a slip down a bank, other times it's a front flip into Wellington traffic. One thing we can say about our falls is they are entertaining.

#1 rule when falling off - stay down long enough for someone to take a photo.

Anyway, a friend of Plaster has managed to capture his fall on camera for us to share. Here's Bob taking one for the team...



Bob walked away from that one, and after a cold beer and a hot pie, was out riding the next day.

A bit more stuff!

From time to time we like to branch out, do something different. Not today, today we've released a web forum. Just like any other forum you can register, post stuff and read stuff. You can also organise rides, drinks and general stuff there too...

Here you go: http://forum.f3nz.com/

Extra Extra

We also gave our Sarcasm Consultant (and bike barn) one hell of a shrooming. Oh how we laughed.

Oh Snap!

That was the noise heard as we were only a few hundred metres down. The Mole stopped to catch his breath just after he binned it in a mild manner, probably damaging a single nut in the process.


Mole pushed his bike along and hopped on as he gathered speed towards another set of runners, selfishly using the tracks and not in single file. Luckily he missed them all, and I can only presume the one that waved happily had been in an accident, as he only appeared to have 2 fingers...

We headed back past Bike Barn where the Mole managed to get himself the replacement parts and at a very competitive price. Always a good deal to be had in there!

Oh, and it was cold today . . .

Making the most of it!

It's been a busy few days, some of F3 have been off doing the Karapoti, some riding around the bays, and others recovering from a weekend of binge drinking.

With that said, we take advantage of the weather and get out when we can.

Today, the Mole, Badger and I powered up Mt Vic in what could only have been described as a blur. In no time at all we were at the top and after a short recovery period, we were ready to go. Badger has damaged his back escaping from a fox one morning, so opted for the road on the way down. We waived our carnivorous mammal friend good bye and went from the car park into the forest at warp factor 8. We would have gone to warp factor 9 but I couldn't get the gear up on the next cog...

It's also the time of year for the Shrooms! Remember how much fun we had last year with shrooms? Well, that time is upon us again and when the Mole stopped to see if I was ok he got one square in the mid-section.

Let's hope the sun keeps going for a while longer and the shrooms keep on flying!