 So, it’s been a bit over a week since we really tapped our first batch of homebrew and it’s time to start reviewing what we came up with and how it seems to have worked out. Our first attempt was to be a German light lager and the outcome was basically a German light lager.
I was a bit concerned when we first started that the first batch we brewed would be good for only low end cooking and maybe degreasing engine parts. Turns out I was wrong. The beer itself was generally the right color (amber in color, around a Bass or a lighter Sam Adams) and with generally the right amount of carbonation. I did find the initial taste tests (2 bottles) to be a bit more flat than I would have preferred, but as the beer aged, it tended to pick up a bit more carbonation and more clarity. Which brings me to my second gripe: sediment. We don’t yet have the capabilities to filter beer, so whatever we make is unfiltered and therefore a bit cloudy. If fact, our first couple of bottles (before the aging process was further along) tended to taste more like a wheat beer than the lager I was hoping for. As the beer aged (especially aging in the refrigerator), the cloudiness tended to diminish and the carbonation seemed to increase a bit. I had one last night (5 weeks after brewing and a bit over 4 weeks since bottling) and it tasted about what I would have expected. Lessons Learned: In chatting with the people at the homebrew store, they first recommended that I do a two-stage fermentation, meaning I take the wort and let it sit for a week in the primary fermentation tank, then transfer it to the secondary tank. During the secondary, most of the sediment should settle out yielding a much more clear beer without the need for complicated filtering mechanisms. Second, I needed a better racking system. I was originally using a medical-grade plastic tube to do my racking from one vessel to another, however there were two problems with this. First, the tubing wasn’t stiff enough, so we had a hard time trying to keep the siphon going. Second, it was maybe a bit too small, meaning the time to move the beer was a bit too long and required too much patience. In the end, we ended up moving the beer and at the same time, much of the sediment we had wanted to remove. To solve both of these problems, I picked up a self-siphoning racking cane and better food-grade hose for doing my racking. I’ll have to record how much better this system works than the last. Things to Consider: I do still have a few problems to overcome: - How best to clean and sanitize the gear
- How to reduce the mess when bottling (though the second, bottling specific bucket I have may help)
- Where is the best place to hide and age the beer. We don’t have a large enough fridge to properly age and I’m not willing (yet) to pick up an aging specific refrigerator.
What’s Next? Our next brew is going to be a holiday ale that I picked up as a kit from the homebrew store. It should be a bit darker than our last with hints of cinnamon and other spices. My hope is to brew within the next two to three days and then have the beer ready for Christmas and New Years. I have to admit that I’m a bit curious as to how this will come out. The risks of a spiced brew like this are less that it’ll fail, but that I’ll end up brewing something no one else will like. Only time will tell, I guess.
So about 48 hours into our first beer brewing experience, some interesting things have happened. First, the feremting appeared to happen a bit quicker that I was expecting. The kit said to expect fermentation to start within 24-48 hours of introducing the yeast. For us, it turned out fermentation started within about 12 hours, so the morning after I added the yeast, we had major bubbling from the airlock (meaning one good blrup ever 5-10 seconds).
Now, about 24 hours later, the most violent gas expansion has stopped. Now, I see a bit of CO2 being pushed into the airlock (mostly as bubbles on the inside of the airlock before the water). I'm assuming this is normal, but I guess we won't konw until a bit longer.
One of the good points I've read about home brewing is that a good brewer takes notes on what he's done. For most, that would take the form of a notebook, but as a computer nerd, well, the obvious solution is to use my blog. Our first attempt worked a bit like this:
- The day before:
- Started by cleaning and attempting to sanitize our gear (including our fermenting bucket (an Ale Pail), spoon, measuring cup, thermometer and various other tools)
- We also boiled about 3 gallons of tap water in an attempt to kill the chlorine and any other weirdness in the DC water system
- Today:
- We took the cleaned and sanitized Ale Pail and added the 3 gallons of water prepped the day before.
- Added 1.5 gallons of fresh water to the stock pot and brought it to a boil, leaving it for about 10 minutes before adding any ingredients.
- Following the instructions in our True Brew German Light kit, we heated the malt extract (to make it easier to pour)
- We then took the pot off the heat and started pouring in the ingredients (malt, hops, rice syrup solids and sugar), mixing it properly
- Put the liquid back on the stove (perhaps not exactly following the instructions regarding what to do when the beer foams over -- take if off the heat, and repeat the process until it stops foaming)
- We then left the liquid on the heat for about 25 minutes (give or take)
At this point we were basically done with the mixing and brewing. Then it was time to start the fermenting: - We did so by pouring the hot liquid into the bucket with the already added 3 gallons of water.
- To bring the final quantity up to basically 5 gallons, I added 1 additional gallon of distilled water (as I didn't really want to add chlorinated tap water)
- We let it cool to about 84 degrees (not the 75 we were supposed to, but hey it was time for bed)
- At this point, we stirred in the yeast, sealed the container and are letting it ferment.
Now all we can do is wait and hope. But to recap, here are the ingredients we used
Unhopped Light Malt Extract | 1 can | | Corn sugar | 1 pound | | Rice syrup solids | 1 pound | | Hop pellets | 1 oz | | Boiled tap water | 4 gal | | Distilled water | 1 gal |
Original gravity readings (at about 140 deg as I didn't have a sanitized hydrometer as it got cool enough to be valid) were about 1.03(ish)
So, @felioland and I have decided to take a first stab at brewing our own beer. Back in May(ish) we tracked down and bought our first set of brewing supplies (buckets, carboys, etc), but have yet to actually get around to giving it a shot. Well, looks like today is the day we get ready and tomorrow we'll brew.
As I type, our gear is being sanitized and prepped. I'll be interested to see how this comes out.
Our first batch should be a German-style light beer from a kit. (Thanks to My Local Home Brew store out in Seven Corners for the suggestion). Anyone with specific experience and ideas, please let us know.
I'm going to try and blog about our experiments over the next few batches and as I learn new things about the process, we'll try and add it to the blog. But before I begin, I do have to put a shout out to the team at How to Brew for putting together a great online reference guide to doing this properly.
This is the first post in what I think may be a series of security snake oil e-mails and ideas that are forwarded my way. However, before reading this, know that the best way to handle your computer security is outlined here;
Just received this forward on how to "protect" your e-mail address book from worms:
How to protect your e-mail address book:
A computer repairman says this is like having gold. This is a good thing. I learned a computer trick today that's really ingenious in its simplicity.
First dead giveaway that this isn't real is that the fix is "simple". There's no panacea for computer security.
As you may know, when/if a worm virus gets into your computer it heads straight for your email address book, and sends itself to everyone in there, thus infecting all your friends and associates.
This trick won't keep the virus from getting into your computer, but it will stop it from using your address book to spread further, and it will alert you to the fact that the worm has gotten into your system.
Here's what you do:
First, open your address book and click on 'new contact,' just as you would do if you were adding a new friend to your list of email addresses. In the window where you would type your friend's first name, type in ' A'.
For the screen name or email address, type AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA
Now, here's what you've done and why it works:
The 'name 'A' will be placed at the top of your address book as entry #1..
First problem is that may not be the case. Just because you see it first does not mean that it'll be the first e-mail stored on the drive. Data is stored in the way that the computer can access it the quickest or perhaps as you've added it. Then when the computer goes to show you the details, it will sort that data into a human readable format. However for the worm, it'll get it in the quickest order the computer can hand it back.
This will be where the worm will start in an effort to send itself to all your friends.
When it tries to send itself to AAAAAAA@AAA.AAA, it will be undeliverable because of the phony email address you entered. If the first attempt fails (which it will because of the phony address), the worm goes no further and none of your friends will be infected.
Second place this breaks down is assuming the worm will stop on error. It won't for 2 reasons:
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Internet mail delivery doesn't work this way. It takes the e-mail and then tells the app it's received it. The app then moves on while the mail delivery system tries to deliver the message.
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No worm writer would stop on a bad e-mail address. Even if it did get immediate failure, it would just skip to the next address and keep going.
Here's the second great advantage of this method: If an email cannot be delivered, you will be notified of this in your In Box almost immediately. Hence, if you ever get an email telling you that an email addressed to AAAAAAA@AAA..AAA could not be delivered, you know right away that you have the worm virus in your system. You can then take steps to get rid of it!
This is the only valid point in this article. Having a bad e-mail address in your address book would guarantee a failure you may catch. However, it doesn't matter much as your computer already has a problem. And this problem could be stealing your identity, invading your privacy and generally causing problems. The best bet is not to try and catch the problem to fix it, but to keep it from happening in the first place.
I've seen a number of e-mails from friends and family talking about different ways to handle computer security and to ward off bad things. Almost every time what's recommended in these e-mails or articles won't help or are of at best dubious benefit. Instead of this snake oil, there are a number of things that you can do to keep your system safe. In fact, for the longest time, I didn't even use an anti-virus application and as of yet, I have not gotten a virus or malware on my system. (I've since started using one, just as a precaution ....)
The top 4 most important things your an do:
- Always patch your computer and keep your applications up-to-date. (Use Windows Update, Apple's SoftwareUpdate, or the appropriate updater for your system)
- Don't open attachments from someone you don't know
- Don't click on random links in e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, etc, especially if you don't know who it's from
- Use a hardware firewall (like a router, any router). This means you can reach out onto the Internet, but stuff outside the internet cannot reach back to you. (I generally like Linksys, but just about any company's router will do)
In addition to the above, here are a few more things you can do:
- Avoid pirated software and most music sharing sites as many of the files contain malware, viruses, worms, etc.
- Be aware that Windows by default hides the extension of a file, so the file you see as image.jpg may very well be image.jpg.exe (where .EXE is an executable file that could contain a worm, virus or some other bad thing)
This is not an exhaustive list by any stretch of the imagination, but these are the basics, like locking the doors on your house and car, keeping valuables out of sight, etc. They won't deter a determined intruder, but will save you from the drive-by and opportunistic attacks.
Keep this page bookmarked as I'll continue to add links and details as I have more.
So, about a two weeks ago now my server computer, named Mindy (named for the Animaniacs character), decided that it was too hot to work and died. Well, at least sort of died. When I got back from a trip, she was no longer responding to pings and when I tried to reboot her, she would power down after about 20-30 seconds. Best as I can tell, I have a temperature management failure on either the power supply or the motherboard, not sure which.
In thinking about how to approach fixing the problems, I was stuck with two basic paths: try and find the failing component or replace the core components and build a version 2.0 Mindy. If I had a good computer store handy, I would have tried replacing the individual components, but the closest real store I have access to is MicroCenter out in Fairfax or Rockville. (And no, BestBuy does not qualify as I need real parts, not the desktop/consumer parts they have). In addition, my hope was to get this back and running ASAP, so ordering a new power supply and then a new motherboard, etc, just seemed to be a slow process.
In the end, I decided to just replace her guts and upgrade the mainboard, power supply, CPU and memory. This was a good excuse for me to upgrade from the 18-month old Core2 CPU and desktop motherboard and move to a server-type board with a dedicated PCI-E slot for the RAID card I have and to target the new Intel Core i7 chip. So on the recommendation of a friend via Facebook/Twitter, I went with a SuperMicro C7x58 motherboard. In addition, I purchased 12Gb of RAM, a Corsair 630 watt modular power supply and 3 1TB hard disks.
The parts arrived from Newegg on Wednesday, but we had friends over for dinner that night, so I wasn't able to start working on the transplant until Thursday evening while watching Burn Notice and Royal Pains on USA (good shows, btw). I took my time and slowly moved the parts and completed the upgrade about 10:30, too late for me to want to try starting the system. But at least everything fit and looked like it was going to work well.
Friday morning came and I woke up a bit earlier than normal, so I thought I'd give it a quick run. When I went to hook the monitor up to try it, it was at that point I discovered that the motherboard I picked did not include on-board video.
Crap. I didn't even think to look at that. I assumed that it would include Intel integrated video, but alas I was wrong.
Friday came and went and I hadn't been able to get out to get a video card. I did take a few minutes to try and ID the right one both by online shopping and asking friends via Twitter/Facebook what they recommend. Saturday came and went and I had ID'd the card I wanted to buy from BestBuy, a PCI-E 16x passively-cooled video card. Seemed like a good choice as it didn't draw much power and didn't need a cooling fan to work.
Only, it didn't fit. Turns out the card had a HUGE heatsink that spanned both sides of the card. Crap again. The two PCI-E 16x slots I have available surround the PCI-E 8x slot that holds my AMCC/3ware RAID card. I had planned on using the one furthest away from the CPU as it was clear on the non-RAID card side. Unfortunately, the heretofor unknown back-side heatsink wanted to take the same space as the RAID card's jumper pins. And if I tried the CPU-adjacent slot, it hit the humongo CPU fan that came with the i7 processor I purchased.
Sigh, so that meant my first attempt at a video card failed, so back online I went. This time, I decided to purchase a PCI-based inexpensive video card, since the area round my PCI slot is completely clear. As I type, it's being delivered from NJ, so hopefully it'll arrive tomorrow so I can give this whole thing another shot. In the meantime, thank goodness for the Lenovo S10 and Google Apps for domains as they can temporarily replace some of what I relied on Mindy 1.0 (or maybe 1.5) to do.
I've started playing with Google's Chrome bwser. At first, I thought it was mostly a toy and not a good replacement for my trusty Firefox. However, the funniest thing has happened. I've started to grow to like it.
Screenshot:
Why do I like it? Well, there's no one compelling reason that I can point to that makes me choose it. Instead, it's a small number of little things. I think the biggest reason may be that it's new and something for me to play with. As a nerd, that's definitely one of the things I like is to play with new things.
But in addition to that, I do find it oddly compelling. The UI is simple and on my Lenovo S10's small screen it tends to stay out of the way. And that's never a bad thing. In addition, it feels rather fast (faster than Firefox), but that could just be my perseption and not reality. Will it completely replace Firefox for me? No. But is it a great 2nd browser? Yah, you betcha. (sorry, I'm writing this while sitting in a bar in St. Paul, Minnesota).
There are a couple of things that will drive you nuts at first. For starters, the tabs are not under the menu and control bars, but are instead part of the title bar. Supposedly Safari 4.0 does it the same way, but I haven't really tried it yet to be able to say for sure. In addition, the location bar and the search bar are the same thing. Now, this isn't as big a deal as it seems because now you can just type in what you're looking for and Chrome will just try and sort it out. Finally, there's no menu bar, and in its place, the menu items are all pushed into two submenus on the right hand side (the wrench and gear icons in the screenshot above).
None of these things are major, but just something to be aware of before trying it.
So, something really interesting happened to me the other day. My wife and I were pondering which fridge to get to replace our then dead Frigidare. A couple of trips to Home Depot and Best Buy, plus plenty of web surfing later, I had settled on two: a Kenmore (Whirlpool/Frigidare/whatever) and an LG side-by-side. Both were about the same price and both were comparable in size. However, on sears.com (where I was looking to buy because they could get it to us before my family arrive in DC), the LG was lower rated than the Kenmore.
My problem was the LG looked better and (for some reason) was more appealing to me than the Kenmore. Maybe part of the problem was the Kenmore was a direct replacement for the one that just died on me. And by direct replacement, I mean everything was identical, so it felt like the same fridge. Plus the LG just plain looked better.
As the decision time drew near, I ended up tweeting about my dilema. Now, I've heard the digerati talking about how they ask questions of their Twitter minions and getting good answers, but I've never found that to work for me. Maybe I have too few followers (46 at last count) or maybe they just ignore me (and based on my occasional inane tweets, I can understand why).
But apparently, my friends on Facebook do pay attention because by the morning I already had a few people telling me to go with the LG. And the best part is it was based on their personal experiences.
So, we now have a new LG side-by-side refrigerator and it seems to be working well. The ice maker is a bit sub-par, but that was the common refrain from the web and my Facebook friends, but no product's perfect, right?
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So, it’s been a bit over a week since we really tapped our first batch of homebrew and it’s time to start reviewing what we came up with and how it seems to have worked out. Our first attempt was to be a German light lager and the outcome was basically a German light lager.
