I love coffee just as much as I love beer. Combine the two, and I can’t help but love it more.
You can sleep when you're dead!
After a night tasting Real Ale’s Coffee Porter at Ginger Man, Rick, Ethan and I decided we had to give it a go on our own. We found a recipe online for an Espresso Imperial Stout and started brewing…..coffee. Lots of coffee. 1.5 gallons of coffee, to be exact! With a 12 cup coffee maker, that’s almost 3 pots of coffee!
The results: pretty tasty! We finished brewing back in early November, and the flavor is really starting to come out of it now.
Hops, the little flowers that help make beer so tasty
After weeks of not-so-subtle hints, Rick convinced Ethan and I to do an IPA next. While the overall process was similar, the dry-hopping stage was a fun addition. The conditioning is far longer than the other beers we did, and it’s just now to the drinking phase. In the past, I haven’t been an IPA fan – it gave me headaches and I didn’t enjoy the extra hoppiness. However, after acclimating ourselves with some very tasty IPAs prior to trying ours, I’m a convert!
During beer nights, we’ve also started the tradition of playing Settlers and having beer tastings. Angela and Brittany avoid our craziness by watching Doctor Who (which is an amazing show, by the way!).
I’ll be starting a new series of postings where I write about our beer night tastings (what?!? Andy is going to post on a regular basis again?) I also added a new page for our Brewing Log so you can see what beers are coming up.
Just a quick post today. I’ll continue to update it throughout the week as the 2nd fermentation continues.
Last night, we transferred our baby beer into the carboy where it will live until next Monday, when we bottle.
I love beer. That’s really the only motivating factor to this endeavor.
My friends Dave and Kent have been homebrewing for years, but I have only been talking about it and enjoying their tasty brews. Last weekend, Ethan and Rick finally kicked my butt into gear and we actually acted on one of the many crazy schemes we’ve concocted.
The Supplies
Saturday was shopping day. We went to Fort Worth Homebrew, on the east side of Fort Worth. It’s a fun, family-run establishment, and the folks there are very helpful. We even got to sample some of their homebrews (the smoked beer was delicious!). After stocking up on a mid-sized brewing kit, we selected a recipe for Belgium Pale Ale. We opted for the malt extract since it’s our first time. After this, we patted ourselves on the backs and capped the afternoon off by watching District 9 – an excellent film full of most of the Half-life 2 weapons.
Brew Day
We met up Monday night to start brewing. Suffice it to say, it was a very easy process. After hearing lots of warnings, we decided to overly sterilize everything. Since I was with Ethan and Rick, but bio-sciences guys, we stuck to the protocol, erm.. recipe to the very last detail. In fact, our specific gravity was only 1/1000th off from the baseline.
Below are the images from the brewing. You can see the full gallery here.
The supplies
The fermentation bucket
Boiling the wort
Cooling it back down
Adding the yeast
The Result?
We aren’t sure yet! We’re transferring over to the carboy next Monday for the 2nd fermentation, and then over to bottles a week after that. Finally, we’ll let it age for three weeks before we get to see how we did.
However, we at least know it’s bubbling away in the bucket right now!
My (boo urns) work Dell D630 was recently upgraded to a whopping 2GB RAM, which is paltry by today’s standards, but what are you going to do?
Anyway, ever since then, XP has refused to hibernate or suspend, which is painfully annoying when all you want to do is head out the door. After a couple of weeks just dealing with it, I finally did what I was supposed to do and found this site which let me know that MSFT, in their infinite wisdom, didn’t account for >2GB of RAM. Here’s the link to the hotfix.
Finally, I can tell my laptop to hibernate, and not find out 4 hours later that the strange whirring sound coming from my car is in fact the Dell, all tightly wrapped up in my work bag.
I’ve largely abandoned my blog over the past six months, but I haven’t neglected twitter, so I don’t feel too terrible.
With that said, I found something cool I wanted to share.
The new Palm pre has a cool feature that aggregates all of your online profiles into one mobile view, agnostic of where it really came from. I found a way to create a similar experience on my Blackberry Storm that worked out quite well.
The glue to all of this is Google Sync. My Storm is connected to our work Exchange server, so I get all of my email, contacts, and calendar entries from work instantly on my phone.
However, I also have all my non-work contacts in Gmail, and I use Google Calendar a ton to keep track of non-work events. Using Google Sync, I now have all of my work and personal contacts merged on my phone. I also get a combined view of my calendar.
The icing on the cake comes from the new Facebook app for Blackberry. Although, I really don’t like the new 1.6 version. The 1.5 version syncs my FB contacts with contacts I already have. It also syncs their profile photo over for instant picture caller ID, and creates a new Birthday calendar.
Other than fiddling with my phone, I’ve been working on our intranet and document management project to migrate to SharePoint. I’ll post some more on this as we get a bit closer to release.
