joshbrews.com
Linux and Beer Brews

I renamed this one an ESB.. it fits this style better.

I bottled this beer tonight. I primed with 5.5 ounces of Sucrose (actually a combination of leftover brown sugar and raw sugar). The beer came out a little more bitter than I would have liked. I am hoping that the bitterness will fade with a few weeks aging. The FG was 1.012 @ 70 F (1.013 corrected). ABV calculates out to 3.7%

I was thinking about this brew a little today and really think it falls more into the ESB category. The only thing that moves it out of the ESB category is the yeast that I used. I wil think about it a bit more. I should brew this again except with Wyeast 1968 yeast.

I finished bottling today. The FG was 1.013 @ 69 F. (1.014 Corrected). This calculates out to 4.4 ABV. I ended up with 60 bottles which is not too bad. This beer definately tastes good. I really like the clove and banana flavors combined with the wheat and yeast flavors. We will see how it tastes in a few weeks. I bottled with 9 oz of priming sugar, so it definitely should have some fizz. I am not so confident about how long the head will last in a glass when poured. It did not seem to foam much when I attempted to shake a little between a couple of glasses.

byo.com priming chart
A Primer on Priming

3 lbs. Maris Otter Pale Malt
.5 lbs. 40°L Crystal Malt
.25 lbs Cara-Pils
3.3 lbs. Briess Pilsen light liquid malt extract
1 lb Crosby and Baker Muntons light Dried Malt Extract 8 EBC/Lovibond 3.5
2 oz Cascade 60 min
1 oz Kent Goldings 30 min
1/2oz Kent Goldings 15 min
Irish moss 15 min
Yeast nutrient 15 min
3/4 oz Cascade 10 min
1/2 oz Kent 5 min
1/2 Fuggle 0 min – steep 5 min

Finished brewing this evening. Mash in with 4.875 quarts @ 175 F. Mash was too hot @ 163 once stabilized. I added water to cool down to 156 F. 20 mins Later the mash was too cold @ 146 F. I added about 1 quart of boiling water to get it up to 156 F. Batch Sparged with 7 quarts. Total boil 2.5 gallons. Total mash time 1 hour.

I used 3 quarts of filtered tap water and 8 quarts of distilled water for mashing since the local water is so high in carbonates. I used 1 tsp of gypsum in the mash water and 1 tsp in the sparge water to get the ph down.

I wrapped the Mash tun in two towels. Temperature drop was 5 deg F over one hour. This mash was different because I cracked all the grains a little extra with a rolling pin.

SG of the mash was 1.032 @ 90F (1.036 corrected) with 10 Quarts collected. This translates out to an efficiency of 68%

1.036 maris 36 pts x 3.0lbs = 108
1.033 crystal 33 pts x .5lbs = 16.5
1.033 cara pils 33 pts x .25lbs = 8.25
132.75pts / 2.5 gallons = 53pts/gal (1.053 sg max yeild)
actual mash sg 1.036
36pts/53pts = 67.9 % efficiency

The boil was normal a 60 min boil with hop / nutrient / irish moss additions at the intervals listed above. the wort was cooled in an ice bath and sparged into the carboy. I then topped up the carboy to the 5 gallon mark, pitch the yeast, aerated with an airstone for 35 mins then finished topping up to the 6 gallon mark with spring water. I attached a blow off tube and placed it in the freezer to ferment at 65 F.

SG in carboy 1.039 @ 78 (1.041) Corrected

I made the starter for an ESB tonight. I have about 1.75L After boiling for 15 mins with a few cascade hops flowers. I added a teaspoon of Yeast nutrient with this starter. As usual, I am using my air pump with the 2 micron airstone and the Hepa filter as I did with Bitter V.

I will have to remember to shake up the yeast pack better next time. After pouring into my 2L starter bottle there was some yeast clumps left stuck at the bottom of the yeast pack.

I installed an airlock tonight on the Dunkelweizen. The SG ready that I took was 1.014 @ 74 F (1.015 corrected). Tastes pretty good.

I decided to start a new ESB. I activated a Wyeast Propagator pack of 1968 London ESB ale yeast. Lot # is 0817172. Manufactured on July 10th 2007. I haven’t made up my mind on the recipe yet, but I will pick it out tomorrow before I brew.

I have made several changes to my jinzora server to make it faster when I am browsing and re-tagging mp3’s over samba.

First I added a mount options to tell linux not to track when a file was last accessed. This speeds up jinzora when re-indexing mp3’s and samba when re-tagging tracks with ID3-Tag-IT . The notail option disables the packing of small files into the file system tree. File system performance is reported to be faster with this option disabled, but increases disk usage by 5%.

/dev/md1 / reiserfs noatime,notail,nodiratime,data=writeback,defaults 0 0
/dev/md0 /boot reiserfs noatime,notail,nodiratime,data=writeback,defaults 0 0

Next I made the following changes to samba which increased the speeds of file writes and reads by over 1Mbyte/sec.

log level = 1
socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY SO_RCVBUF=513920 SO_SNDBUF=513920
read raw = yes
write raw = yes
oplocks = yes
max xmit = 65535
dead time = 15
getwd cache = yes
lpq cache = 30
interfaces = 192.168.0.0/24 127.0.0.1
bind interfaces only = Yes
restrict anonymous = no
domain master = yes
preferred master = yes
local master = yes
os level = 65
max protocol = NT
ldap ssl = No
server signing = Auto

Next I recompiled the kernel with 2.6.22 source. I took the time time to only enable the options that I actually use, and compiled them into the kernel. I was then able to disable loadable module support.

Lastly, I tweaked the bios settings to enable faster communication on the PCI bus, and teaked the memory settings to allow for faster ram communications. I had neglected doing this because I had no need to bother with it in the past.

I attempted to compile mysql and the kernel with gcc CFLAGS to optimize them for the processor, but was unable to because the CFLAGS were getting reset by the options that were chosen by the Debian package maintainer. I found where I could manually tweak the package files before I compile, but I felt that this would make things too messy and difficult to support when performing upgrades in the future. I may decide to install Slackware or Gentoo in the future, just so I can see what kind of difference I would see from it.