This is my street in Hanoi. It’s pretty typical.

Everyday I watch an embassy staff neighbour struggle to reverse their SUV and round the corners into a garage.

It’s highly entertaining.

Sure the US will sell a ton of SUVs here. 🤡

Merry Christmas to all from Hanoi.

Lovely round trip yesterday between Krabi and Koh Lanta. The limestone landscapes interspersed with mangroves are stunning. I couldn’t stop for photos so only have this snap. But trust me it was stunning.

A few sunsets from this week from West Bali. Long black sand beaches with a good breeze and heavy surf. Very relaxing

All numbers - visually it's getting a bit boring.

I played around with graphs and after a few prompts I got this one.

It fixed the data and gave me an updated table. I then decided I'd like a column with litres of absolute alcohol.

"Add a column after Volume (L) called LAA. LAA stands for Litres of Absolute Alcohol. Calculate the LAA for each line by multiplying ABV% as a fraction with Volume (L). "

No problem.

So I fed it the image above and gave it the prompt:
"Extract the data from the bottom table"

Not bad. A couple of errors which I asked it to fix.

"The data for ABV% for readings 1, 2, and 3 are 85.2, 85.0, and 85.0 respectively. Update the table"

In the distillery we take hand written records throughout the distillation and then enter them by hand in our database (built in Airtable). The production crew don't like the data entry and it is error prone.

Today I decided to give ChatGPT a crack at it.

Some of the lilly ponds in Hanoi are showing signs of getting to the end of the season. Still very pretty.

I enjoyed a side car tour of some villages just outside Hanoi yesterday. Most of the morning it was hot and sunny (I have a red nose to prove it) but at the end it did cloud over.

Fascinating mixture of modern life and old historical sites.

There’s a lot of depth to Vietnam.

And finally late this afternoon, after macerating the botanicals for a few hours, I distilled two gins.

Where we discovered dried sour orange. Not sure how to use this in a gin yet, but I bought some anyway.

After the limes we stopped to get some fish for the cats.

And some dried fish to snack on ourselves.

But this is what I really came for: Makrut limes.

Kaffir lime leaves are much better known, but over the summer I had a cocktail in London with a slice of the lime in, and it was stunning. Since then I’ve been itching to include them in a gin.

I picked up some basics Thai basil, galangal, Makrut (kaffir) lime lea, and lemongrass.

I am developing a new gin recipe for a customer, a signature gin for a hotel.

The brief was “Thai Herbal”.

We’ve made about 20+ gins so far and before I present the next six this week, I have a couple more to make.

7am I went to the morning market in Krabi to get some botanicals.

For today I’m going to leave you with a couple of pictures from Krabi.