Monday 8 March 2010

For business purposes.

A handy tip for those incubating cultures of bacteria.

Bruichladdich comes in a tin that Petri dishes fit into. It's a cheap and efficient candle-jar for those low-oxygen beasties and it's narrower than a commercial anaerobic jar. (By cheap, I mean it's effectively free because I buy the whisky anyway. If you don't like whisky but need such a container, I'm sure I can find a way to dispose of the contents for you.)

If you work for someone else, you might need to be able to rapidly explain why your incubators appear to be full of whisky. You might also need to be prepared to prove that you're not.


Don't forget to stock up before Eyebrows hikes the duty.

5 comments:

Leg-iron said...

THE Kate Bush.

The babooshka one, but without all that excessive clothing.

I'm sure she looks much older now, but then so do I.

Melted chocolate covers a multitude of sins and (I hope) causes a multitude more.

I think I'll have a lie-in tomorrow. Dreams of this calibre take time.

Kevyn Bodman said...

Kate Bush,OK.

What about Suzi Quatro?

Dave H said...

Handy tip for making yoghurt: use a Driblock DB3 heater. A Tesco litre carton of milk fits perfectly into the cavity after you've taken out the inserts.

My own example was lovingly rescued from a skip (the electricans had declared it 'uneconomical for the company to repair' yet a few minutes spent replacing the 35p thermal fuse made it happy again)

Set it to 44°C (they're called thermophilus for a reason). If you use UHT milk preparation consists of simply adding starter culture when the milk is up to temp. Bingo, a litre of live yoghurt in a few hours for a few pence.

Then again, the blog author already knows a thing or two about such matters, and at college I was never even competent enough to get so much as a bloody Gram stain right. I was told they were either meant to be A) purple from the crystal violet (positive) or B) the red colour (negative) from the counterstain. And every sodding time I squinted down the bloody microscope, they were invariably reddish-purple. Gram Indeterminate then. Yet again. Shit.

Leg-iron said...

Suzi Quatro - very nice, but I'd need ear defenders.

Leg-iron said...

Dave H - that Gram stain is a difficult one to get right. The solvent wash between the stains is a good way to clean everything off the slide if you get too zealous.

Nice tip on the yoghourt - but I wouldn't eat anything I'd made in the lab!

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