joshbrews.com
Linux and Beer Brews

Just checked the brew this morning. Yeast is beginning to multiply like crazy. There is a visable colony of yeast forming at the top of the carboy. It is beginning to clump together and fall.

I have decided to go with the following recipe and hops schedule for this brew.

3 lbs. Maris Otter Pale Malt
.5 lbs. 10°L Crystal Malt
.5 lbs Munich 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
1 lb Hawaiian Turbinado Sugar (sugar in the raw)

1 oz Chinook Hops 60 mins
.5 oz Styrian Goldings (whole) 30 mins
.5 oz Styrian Goldings (whole) 15 mins
1 tsp irish moss 15 mins
1/2 tsp Wyeast nutrient 15 mins (per nutirent directions)
1 oz Cascade (whole) 10 mins
Add Turbinado Sugar @ 10 mins
.5 oz Styrian Goldings (whole) 5 mins
.5 oz Styrian Goldings (whole) 1 min

I was planning on a double decoction mash as detailed at www.strangebrewers.org, But I decided to go with a single infusion mash. I just don’t have the time this evening to spend on a decoction mash.

with 4.25 lbs of grain, dough in the mash with 5.625 quarts of water at 175 F (1.3 qt/lb of grist 175°F). Rest 60 mins.

I wrapped the Mash tun in two towels. Temperature drop for my small mash tun was 7 deg F over one hour.

Heat 8.5 quarts of water to 175° F (2 quarts of sparge water per pound of dry grist). Batch Sparge into boiling pot.

SG from mash was 1.032 @ 88.7 F with 9.5 quarts of wort collected. Effieiency was 53%. Terrible I know. (The grind on my grain from the LHBS sucks)

I used a grain bag wrapped around the manifold for the mash tun to help filter things out. This worked really well. I only had to run a quart and the wort was clear.

I topped up to 11 quarts total before boiling. I boiled as noted in the achedule above. I placed the pot in the sink after the boil and dumped in 20lbs of Ice around the pot. It was down to about 110 F in 20 mins. I sparged as normal into the carboy and topped it up with Cold spring water from the fridge. I piched the yeast started and aeriated the wort for 40 mins with my airstone. I then topped up the carboy with spring water to the 6 gallon mark. Carboy was placed in my fermentation freezer and temperature was set to 65.

SG for wort after pitching yeast and topped up with water was 1.053 @ 71.5F(1.054 corrected)

This brew was really delicious. I only have a few left of this batch. Of All the bitters I have brewed so far, this is my favorite.

The starter wort has been made. I have about 1.5L after the boiling the malt sugar and a few whole cascade hops flowers for 15 mins.

I forgot to add the Wyeast yeast nutrient (I only use it in Beer, because I bought a bunch by mistake at the wall stocked, but VErry VerY very unhelpful LHBS (side side note. If anyone needs a business idea…open a CLEAN homebrew store with friendly and helpful staff in Orlando), but It should be ok.

I dialed in the air pump with hepa filter and 2 micron airstone to supply oxygen to the young yeast. I also boiled the airstone in a small pot of water for 10 mins and sanitized the air hose in idophor solution.

I activated yeast for my next batch of ale a couple of days ago (Last Friday night to be exact). The yeast is from March, so I figured that I should give a couple of days to wake up. I am trying a different variety this time. Wyeast 1098 British Ale Yeast (1123067) MFG 13 MAR 07.

I am going with a similar recipe from Bitter 4. I really liked Bitter 4

3 lbs. Maris Otter Pale Malt
.5 lbs. 10°L Crystal Malt
.5 lbs Munich Malt
.25 lbs Cara-Pils
3.3 lbs. Briess Amber liquid malt extract
1lb Turbano sugar in the raw

Cascade and Chinook hops tbd…I still have to think a bit on the hops, I have enough for the next three batches.

I did a lot with the server over the weekend. I cleaned up a lot of old rc scripts from debian 3 and 3.1 which made bootup a cleaner (less useless crap scrolling on the screen). The main thing that was bugging me was seeing messages during boot from modprobe not being able to read modules.dep. I got hunted down any scripts that use it and commeneted it out (If I don’t need it, Why have it). The main thing that bugged me is that I kept seeing messages stating (multiple times) Module already loaded.

I setup fetchmail / courier-imap / squirrel mail to read my e-mail through a web browser. I also uninstalled and reinstalled apache several times, thinking that I had broken something in jinzora. After an hour, I discovered that I just needed to clear by browser cache.

I changed the priority of the swap files when they get mounted at boot, I think this is what was causing the server to hang when I was importing media into jinzora. I also added mount options to the root and boot partitions to help speed them up.

/dev/md1 / reiserfs noatime,nodiratime,notail,data=writeback,defaults 0 0
/dev/md0 /boot reiserfs noatime,nodiratime,notail,data=writeback,defaults 0 0
/dev/hde3 none swap pri=1,sw 0 0
/dev/hdg3 none swap pri=1,sw 0 0

I updated a few things on the router. Mainly setting static ip addresses for all the machines on the network in the dhcp, and creating an entry in the hosts file for the internal interface on the router. The dhcp entries in the leases file and the hosts file get used by dnsmasq (running on the router) to resolve ip’s on the local network.

In my quest for faster jinzora performance, I udpated to the 2.6 kernel with the last debian 4.0 release a few months ago, but I was slightly peeved because the stock 2.6.8 kernel in etch seemed a little pokey. I updated to 2.6.18 last week (along with system and filesystem tweaks), but I was left with still wanting a bit more performance.

Today, I downloaded the 2.6.22 kernel and the 2.6.23-rc3 prepatch for the stable tree and compiled my kernel from source. I was a little overwhelmed at the config options in the 2.6.x kernel versus the 2.4 kernel that I had become so familiar with over the last few years. Previously with 2.4 I had figured out all the options that I really needed and had a .config file that I really did not pay attention to besides making sure the options that I wanted were selected.

It took me a couple of hours to go through the help text to check each kernel option in the 2.6 config, but I am happy with what I ended up with. I compiled a kernel with everything I use statically linked in and was able to disable loadable module support. I am a purist at heart, and I do not compile anything unless I will use it. If I evern need usb suport I can easily compile it in. My new kernel is happily running away and jinzora is running as fast as ever.

Not much today… I updated the version of the sun jdk installed on my server. I downloaded the last version of the sun jdk that is compatible with the etch make-jpkg build scripts. It happens to be jdk-1_5_0_11-linux-i586.bin. Making the debian package is as simple. Ensure that fakeroot, make-jpkg, and Java-common packages are installed, then issue the following command;

xxxxx@xxxxx:~$ fakeroot make-jpkg jdk-1_5_0_11-linux-i586.bin

Go through the license agreement and wait for the package to finish building. I purged out the old version of the jdk;

xxxxx@xxxxx:~$ sudo dpkg –purge sun-j2sdk1.5

After the package is completed install it.

xxxxx@xxxxx:~$ sudo dpkg –install sun-j2sdk1.5_1.5.0+update11_i386.deb

fin~

I was importing some MP3’s into jinzora when one of the disks in the root filesystem mirrored disk array dropped out of the array. I was forced to to a hard reboot as i could not shutdown gracefully. Upon rebooting, I upgraded the kernel to the latest debian stable version which is 2.6.18+6, then added the disk back to the array by using the following commands

Use the –examine switch to check the status of the array on the drive (if mdadm can not print the contents of the md superblock in this partition we know it is badly broken.)

mdadm –examine /dev/hdg2

Use the following command to hot-add the partition back to the array.

mdadm /dev/md1 -a /dev/hdg2

Use the following command to check the status of the array rebuild.

cat /proc/mdstat

It took over an hour to rebuild the array, but it has been fine since. I will keep an eye on it.

I also did some tweaking on the OS based on the information in the following post from forums.debian.net

I updated debian on my server today. I have done an update for a few months. There was a new PHP5 package that agt-get installed which broke my apache install. I found that eaccelerator needed to be recompiled to make apache work again and to make eaccelerator work with the new version of php5. I ended up downloading the newest version of eaccelerator and recompiling. Jinzora now is running quickly again. during this process I also found that the /tmp/eaccelerator/ directory was missing (this causes eaccelerator to not run), Probably because of a previous update. I have noticed that jinzora has been slow lately. I am suprised that I just noticed that it was not running correctly today. Anyway, everything is back to the way it was before.