Brews you can use

I finally posted the notes for the Scottish 80/- I brewed three weeks ago, after racking it just yesterday. This was the first time I’d ever used “Golden Naked Oats” in a brew. They’re quite tasty, and appeare to have given the beer a slighly nutty whisky-ish character. It’s quite promising, and I can’t wait to get it online. It just needs a little time to carbonate.

The wheat beer, at least the half not currently languishing at Jess’s aunt’s house, blew a couple days ago. This was the half with American (Cascade) bittering hops, Belgian yeast (the very spicy Safbrew T-58), dry hopped with Czech (Saaz) hops. It was, for lack of a better term, interesting. It wasn’t my favorite beer, but it was tasty. I may need to experiment with combining these diverse flavors again, but probably not in a wheat beer: The experience/trauma of brewing and drinking 20 gallons of wheat beer in summer 2004 still hasn’t worn off, so I’m still not very fond of wheats.

The wheat was replaced by my latest Historical IPA, which is quite tasty if a bit cloudy. Like the last time, I put a metric ass-ton of hops in it, and they all disappeared leaving a flavorful, moderately-bitter beer. I even added gypsum to this batch, to try to get a harsher more assertive bitterness, but it insisted on coming out balanced and pleasant. Odd, that.

My latest Alt is turning out to be quite tasty. It’s starting to clear, becoming less harshly bitter, and generally getting closer to what I wanted out of this brew. I should pick up a bottle or two of the target of my cloning efforts to compare.

Yesterday morning, I got an e-mail from the author of the DCC (a collaborative anti-spam system) inquiring about this graph:

(click for bigger graph)

(original here, with some more context) asking if I had made any configuration changes recently. This graph corresponds to the number of messages being reported to the DCC as spam/bulk, and the uptick was mostly reports from the mail servers at work.

After a bit of digging, we figured out that this was a result of us enabling URL-based blocking with DCC, which results in each blocked message being reported as a spam message. This test is blocking and reporting a couple million spams per day to our users, but other graphs show a concurrent uptick in blocked/trapped spam corresponding to roughly 30-40 million more spams blocked per day, mostly (if not completely) due to our reports. Cool!

[#0: actually post -- done .... ]

I’ve been putting off the hobby stuff for way too long. Since my last update, I’ve brewed once (November 27, nearly three weeks ago) and have neither HTMLized the notes nor racked the beer. All I’ve done since pitching the yeast has been to move the bucket to the basement, where it’s currently sitting on top of another bucket saying “rack me!” everytime I walk by. I’ve meant to do it every day for the last week, but just can’t tear myself away from the computer, TV, kids, and Jess (not necessarily in that order) to get it done. I suppose this is what I get from a sealed primary fermenter. When I do open fermentation, I have an incentive to rack before the bugs get to the beer first…

Also, since last update, I’ve written off one of the batches of preservative-contaminated cider (there’s something growing in it, not yeast — I’m still debating whether it warrants a picture before I dump it). So, I’m batting about .500 on ciders this year. I still look for preservative-free cider everytime I go through a grocery store, just in case I get as lucky as with my first cider 2 years ago.

And, of course, I’ve been really busy procrastinating. Since last time, I’ve not:

• Bottled my maple wine,
• Bottled raspberry melomel (I even sprang for the fancy floor corker so I could package these in style, but haven’t gotten around to buying or gathering bottles and corks.)
• Racked/fined Orange blossom mead
• Racked my latest brew (a moderately-strong Scottish ale) to keg
• Bottled anything for the Upper Mississippi Mash-out. I’ve previously dug out whatever I had sitting in bottles, but now all of my bottled beer is the scarce, precious, well-aged stuff, or young stuff I eventually want to be precious and well-aged but not scarce

And, of course, the TOBREW list:

• Rehash some of that “old and precious” stuff, especially the barleywine and Imperial stout
• Oh, and more of the Rochefort 8 clone couldn’t hurt, either
• Attempt cloning Leinenkugel’s Apple Spice beer. (Jess loves the stuff, and I’m pretty fond of it too — very cider-like)

After playing around with nanoblogger for about a year of blogging, I’m ready for some gratuitous change. Brews you can use is now served by WordPress, a somewhat more complicated package than nanoblogger (not that it takes much — nanoblogger is an elegant little shell script), but with more features. The killer feature, of course, is a more user-friendly interface than vi in a shell window. I was personally OK with the vi interface (hell, I set EDITOR=ed when I’m in the right mood), but Jess wanted something nicer for her knitting blog.

I think I’ve got everything set up so that the already-indexed archives from the old blog will still work (no dangling googles), as will existing RSS/atom feeds. And I still don’t grok mod_rewrite….

There’s about a 40% chance that this meta-blogging activity (and the smoother interface — I can deal with erm… “interesting” UIs, I didn’t say I liked them…) will lead to more frequent updates. In other words, see you next year!