March 29, 2008

Brewing this again

Category: PB Brown Ale — Josh @ 12:52 pm

I am brewing this one again today. Pretty much as an experiment to see how my harvested yeast from the last batch works out. I am planning to follow the same recipe, except mashing with 1.25 quarts of water/lb which will hopefully allow me to hit my mash temps. I am also saying no to any corn sugar this time.

Brown Ale: Big Update

Category: PB Brown Ale — Josh @ 12:45 pm

Sorry for the belated update. I have been busy with clearing a spot in the yard to plant some Hops. This beer was initially brewed on 03/12/2008. This brown ale was intended to be a New Castle clone. The final beer came out a little low on the ABV side, but overall is turned out great. The recipe that I used for this Brown ale is as follows:

Mash
2.00 lb Maris Otter
1.00 lb Pale Malt, Muntons
0.50 lb Caramel Malt – 20L (Briess)
0.50 lb Caramel Malt – 40L 6-Row (Briess)
0.50 lb Carapils (Briess)
0.45 lb Special B (Dingemans)
0.30 lb Caramel Malt – 60L 6-Row (Briess)
0.25 lb Chocolate Malt (Muntons)

Begin Boil (75 min)
3.30 lb LME Pilsen Light (Briess)(72 min)
1.75 oz Goldings, East Kent (70 min)
0.50 oz Fuggles (70 min)
0.50 oz Goldings, East Kent (15 min)
1.00 lb Corn Sugar (15 min)

1 Pkgs British Ale (White Labs #WLP005) (1500 ml Starter cultured on stir plate)

Initial mash was done at 1 quart/lb of grain (1.5 quarts of water @ 174F). The mash settled in at 150F. I missed my target mash-in temp by 5 degrees I ended up adding 2 – 2 quart infusions of boiling water to keep the mash temp up to 153 over the 90 min mash period. I batch sparged with 2 – 4 quart batches of water @ 175F. I forgot to record the mash final SG. Volume of the run off was 13.5 quarts.

After boiling, sparging and topping up to the 5.5 gallon mark in the carboy, the initial gravity of the wort was 1.049 @ 72.3F (1.050 corrected). The wort was aerated by shaking the carboy for 5 mins. SG on 03/14/2008 (48 hours after pitching the yeast) was 1.025 @ 67F. FG after fermentation was 1.015 @ 72F (1.016 corrected).

This beer was allowed to ferment for 12 days, and was bottled on 03/24/2008. Fermentation on this beer was a little different, in that I had forgotten to plug in the temp controller on the freezer, and the temp inside during the first 20 hours reached 91 F. Freezer was plugged in at this point and the temp was gradually brough down to 67F in increments of 4F over about 6 hours. Priming solution at bottling was 2 quarts of boiled water and 5.5 ounces of corn sugar. Beer temp was 72F which should yield a carbonation level of 2.7 vols. I estimate final SG after priming solution was at (1.015 Corrected). and final actual ABV was reduced by .1% to 4.3% ABV. Bottling yielded 57 12 ounce bottles.

I also left behind about 1500 ml of beer in the carboy so that I could harvest some yeast to repitch in another batch which I am brewing today. I harvested 18 ounces of yeast slurry from this batch of beer (3 – 6 ounce samples). Samples were poured into cleaned and sanitized 12 ounce bottles. Care was taken to clean the mouth and outside of the bottles and carboy with 91% rubbing alcohol, then flame the mouth of th carboy and bottles with a lighter.

Overall this beer tastes very good when I sampled it during bottling, but I have not tried any since I bottled it.

March 16, 2008

Brown Ale

Category: PB Brown Ale — Josh @ 8:08 pm

I brewed a Brown ale last Wednesday that is a sort of New Castle clone. I intended to get the details of the brew session and the recipe posted this weekend, but I ran out of steam. I check the gravity on it Friday, and it does taste a lot like New Castle, but not exactly the same. The beginning SG was 1.050 @ 60F and on Friday it was already down to 1.026 @ 60F.

Cyser Progress

Category: Cyser — Josh @ 8:05 pm

Well The cyser is still bubbling very slowly. One bubble every 40-50 seconds. I checked the SG and the Current reading is 0.0993 @ 78 F (0.0995 corrected). It tastes very dry and a has an alcohol hotness that is normally associated with young wines. The aftertaste is quite acidic but with an apple flavor. It has an odor of spiciness (which Miftik describes as like a beer but not the same and a hint of apple). The color is about 4.5 ish SRM. I plan on it age until the end of may then bottling it.

March 9, 2008

Jinzora fiddling

Category: Jinzora — Josh @ 8:19 am

I am twiddling and fiddling with Jinzora again today. I have a new server and am moving everything over to it. During my jinzora installation and setup I noticed that the Metadata retreival was not going to well. I found the site that I has a nice addon for metadata retreival http://www.darkhart.net/projects/33-jinzora/44-jinzora-addons

I used the jz_custom_metadata-1.2.0b1 version on my previous install of Jinzora. It works well.

Note: Ensure that ./jinzora2/services/settings.php is 0777, otherwise you can not update the metadata search settings through the GUI to use the custom metadata search. This is in lieu of setting entire jinzora directory to 0777 as seen here

I also ran into the page caching problem again detailed here. I was frustrated for about an hour until I went back and read my notes.

Notes for installing eaccelerator on Debian:
Ensure that php5-dev and make packages are installed (possibly others I did not need to install anything else)

Execute the following commands
# export PHP_PREFIX=”/usr”
# $PHP_PREFIX/bin/phpize
# ./configure –enable-eaccelerator=shared –with-php-config=$PHP_PREFIX/bin/php-config
# make
# make install
——
copy eaccelerator.ini from source directory to /etc/php5/conf.d/eaccelerator.ini and modify default value if you need.

extension=”eaccelerator.so”
eaccelerator.shm_size=”16″
eaccelerator.cache_dir=”/var/cache/eaccelerator”
eaccelerator.log_file = “/var/log/apache2/eaccelerator_log”
eaccelerator.enable=”1″
eaccelerator.optimizer=”1″
eaccelerator.check_mtime=”1″
eaccelerator.debug=”0″
eaccelerator.filter=””
eaccelerator.shm_max=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_ttl=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_prune_period=”0″
eaccelerator.shm_only=”0″
eaccelerator.compress=”1″
eaccelerator.compress_level=”9″
——

# mkdir /var/cache/eaccelerator
# chmod 0777 /var/cache/eaccelerator
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
# ls -al /var/cache/eaccelerator

You should see directories [0-9] and [a-f] in /var/cache/eaccelerator
after browsing around in jinzora execute the following to check if accelerator is creating cache files.

# find /var/cache/eaccelerator -type f -exec ls -l {} \+

additionally (or eventually) you should see information being logged to /var/log/apache2/eaccelerator.log
I have my shared memory size set to 128M so it may just be keeping everything in memory and not pulling it from cache.

March 2, 2008

Yeast Pitching Calculator

Category: General Brewing — Josh @ 10:11 am

http://www.mrmalty.com/calc/calc.html

Krausen fallen

Category: Cyser — Josh @ 10:04 am

The krausen has completely fallen. Airlock still bubbling at a rate of 1 per second.

WW Update

Category: Winter Warmer — Josh @ 9:41 am

Just a note on this one wince I have not posted about it. It has been three months since bottling, and this brew tastes really good now. I will brew this one again in the middle of September. I will probably back off on some of the spices just a touch.

Taste update

Category: FSS Bitter — Josh @ 9:35 am

This beer is definitely one of the best ones that I have brewed. The bitterness is nice and not too sharp, but seems to finish a little too strong. Once the beer warms to room temp, the bitterness does not seems to fade away. I am hoping that the bitterness characteristics will blend some with age. I like the subtle fruity flavors from the Nottingham yeast. It allows the malty profile to shine through. It could be a bit more malty though.