joshbrews.com
Linux and Beer Brews

I made my starter wort in the same way that I did all my previous starters. I used 2 quarts of water but with 7 ounces of dried malt extract this time and a little hops. I did have some issues with a boil over, and with spilling some when funneling into my sanitized 2 liter soda bottle. Besides all that, I made my starter with about 1 quart of wort because of all the loss. The big thing that I did differently this time with my starter is to aerate the wort with a stainless steel airstone (2 micron), a hepa filter (to make the air sterile), and an aquarium pump.

I activated the yeast for another attempt at a bitter. Yeast is Wyeast 1028 London ale yeast from March 15.

I discovered this evening that Jinzora is only playing the first few minutes of a song (5 mins?), then going to the next. It can wait until tomorrow.

I received a box from NorthernBrewer containing 4 ounces of Whole Styrian Goldings hops (vaccum packed), an in line hepa filter and a 2 micron stainless steel diffusion stone for wort aeration. (I still need to purchase an air pump. I can’t wait to brew another batch.

I change upped the memory_limit to 128M in /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini . This has fixed it so that I can run the metadata script from a web browser. I was suprised that I needed to set it this high, but it seems to work ok.

I changed the memory settings in my /etc/php5/cli/php.ini (upped it to 64m) and was able to execute the metadata script by executing the following command as root. I still can not execute it through the GUI.
>php index.php search_metadata

I was having issues with Jinzora not displaying a few buttons on some of the menus. I found that I had to chmod -R 0777 the jinzora directory on my webserver (it was 0755). I hate doing that. BTW the buttons display just fine now. The metadata download still does not work.. it just spins and the page completes loading in about 10 seconds.. whatever script is running in the background is not picking up and actually fetching metadata.

While I was bottling on Friday, a few bottle caps really did not crimp well onto some bottles. Investigation this afternoon revealed that the capper that I am using does not work well with Guiness, Harp, and Bass bottles because the thick part at the top of the bottle is not long enough. The capper does not have anything it can grab onto while it is trying to crimp the cap. If I can find time tomorrow I will post pictures of a good bottle and a bad bottle side by side.

I tried one of these tonght. It was very slightly carbonated, but I did get a little “ffhhtt” when I uncapped it. It is delicious without being too bitter. The hop flavor lingers on a bit, I really like it. I am thinking about the next batch I brew of this one, I will use only 1/2 lb of 10L crystal malt, and make up the difference with Maris Otter. I can really only mash about 4 lbs of grain in my little 9 quart cooler masher. I wish I could go all grain, but that will have to wait a while.

Well… I did a dist-upgrade on my linux box (was running debian stable 3.1), and upgraded to 4.0. After the upgrade Jinzora would not work. I uninstalled all apache, apache2, php4 and mysql5 packages with the –purge option and reinstalled php5, mysql5, and apache2. I then installed php-dev and compiled/installed eaccelerator to help out my ancient celeron. After I got Jinzora setup I enabled all the previously mentioned tweaks, but started receiving an error after I enabling page caching. I found the following fix on the Jinzora forums posted by
Quasimodo on April 11 2007
In frontend/display.php line 158 change

Code:
$signature .= $moreargs[$i];

to

Code:
if(!is_object($moreargs[$i])) {
$signature .= $moreargs[$i];
}

This code change fixed the caching problem. With the upgrade to php5, mysql5, and all the tweaks, jinzora is night and day…way way way … Way faster on this old celeron. My cross my fingers that the new kernel and modules will play well with my raided /boot and /root partitions.