It’s one of those things… brewers, like many hobbyists have a tendency to at least seem like they’re doing less during the long hot days of Summer. I’ve been doing less too, but for a lot longer than the hot months. Between rather unexpectedly purchasing a house, being absolutely slammed with the real life job, and working on Baltibrew stuff, I’ve slacked on SYD. To my shame. My Twitter account spent about six months broken, and I just plain didn’t have time to devote to keeping things very well updated, much less upgraded as I promised back around Christmas.
That said, with things calming down at work, Baltibrew running at least a little bit more smoothly, and the house… well the house is probably never going stop being interesting, I’m back to thinking more about beer, back to working on upgrades, and back to brewing more.
I’ve finally got my own fermentation space, and I spent Saturday and Sunday working on upgrading my rig from batch sparge only to a fly sparging rig with a copper manifold in one of my mash tuns. The result was a Roggenbier which will be my first solo entry into a competition. The tun worked well, and the sparge seemed to go off almost too well, perhaps maybe even a little bit fast. All of this got me back to thinking about the mash series I’ve been working on, and the importance of detailing mash efficiency, etc. (more…)
Max’s recently had its grand re-opening and featured a beer I had the good luck to try last September at the German Beer Fest — and it’s a weird one. I took a fellow Baltibrewer with me late on the grand opening evening and shoved a mug of it into his hand and asked him to tell me what the weird ingredients were.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Dave Parker, the creator of BrewPal — a bit of software for the iPhone that I’ve posted about before. I’ve raved pretty extensively both on this site and to people in person about how awesome this app is. There’s definitely some geek speak going on in the interview — discussion of operating systems, user interfaces, etc. — but there’s also plenty of brew talk as well. What’s really amazing is that Dave built this software on his own time, and he’s only charging $0.99 for it. If you have an iPhone and you brew, there’s really no reason not to have a copy.
In the last installment of “How do I do that?” I described what’s happening chemically during the mash.
Well, I got three entries which isn’t too bad. A number of blogger friends warned me that I’d be lucky to get one response based on their past experiences. Three seems like an acceptable enough number to me. First Stater’s mild, Ben’s Kitchen Sink beer, and Stefin’s Surfer Kitten —two of which are posted to the comments, and Stefin’s will get put into a new section along with the other two specifically for recipes.