Weiss and Belgian
Saturday, July 19, 2008 - 11:26 AM
Last night I cracked open the Belgian Ale that I brewed a while back. This one’s really good. I’m very pleased with the way it turned out, it’s probably my best brew to date.
We also bottled a Weiss the other night that I brewed a couple weeks after the Belgian. I forgot to post the recipe at the time, so I’ll post it here. I’m doing the same recipe tonight (mostly because I harvested the yeast from that batch and really couldn’t think of anything else to do with weizen yeast). It’s a very simple recipe that I put together based on what I saw in other weiss recipes, and whatever hops that the home brew supply had on hand. Anyway, here’s the recipe:
Simple Summer Weiss
3.3 lbs. Muntons Wheat LME
1 lb. Muntons Wheat DME
1 lb. Bavarian Wheat malt
1 lb. Carapils malt
1 oz. Hersbrucker 2.4% @ 60 min.
.25 oz. Liberty 4.0% @ 60 min.
.75 oz. Liberty 4.0% @ 5 min.
WYeast #3068 Weizen Yeast
Steep grains in 1.75 gallons of water @ 152º for 35-40 min. Rinse with 1 gallon of 170º water and top off to 3 gallons. Add DME and half of LME and bring to a boil. Add hops according to schedule and add the rest of the LME with 20 minutes left in the boil. Cool and pitch yeast. Ferment at 77º for one week, then transfer to secondary for two weeks.
Dr. Horrible is Here.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008 - 09:16 AM
Go watch Act I at Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog.
(Each act will only be available until July 20, then you have to buy the DVD, or get it from iTunes.)
Comment Spam
Wednesday, July 09, 2008 - 07:02 AM
I’ve been getting some comment spam lately, so I’ve taken a few measures to try to counteract that. The changes really shouldn’t be noticeable (to the few people who actually comment here). I set a 60 day limit for comments on each entry, and I put a delay of 30 minutes between comments. Hopefully this will alleviate the problem.
Sorry to anyone who got spam emails through the comment notification system!
A Sled in New Orleans
Thursday, July 03, 2008 - 01:23 PM
I saw this and just couldn’t help but to pass it along. Enjoy:
Slightly Disappointed
Wednesday, July 02, 2008 - 08:13 AM
Well, I finally got my new (refurbished) iPod Classic. Yeah! My old one (a 2nd generation iPod Mini) was on its last legs. Don’t get me wrong, the Mini was a hell of a device. If it hadn’t been dropped countless times, and hadn’t had beer spilled on it (and subsequently taken apart to clean), it would probably still be in great working condition. But, it was time to replace it. (I have ordered a new battery, click wheel, and compact flash card (to replace the HD) to try to rebuild it. I might even give it a custom paint job.)
One thing I’ve really been looking forward to (for a long time) is having gapless playback. The Mini was introduced before iPods featured gapless playback. Since I listen to a lot (you have no idea) of live music, not having it has been a major annoyance. I do have some concerts as single, large chapterized AAC files, but that has its drawbacks. Now, it’s not a problem. (I may have to go back to those shows that I’ve “joined” to a single track and reconvert them from their original .flac or .shn into regular AAC or AppleLossless.)
Oh, also there was the issue of deciding which portion of my huge library to load onto the rather smallish 8GB iPod. That’s no longer an issue.
So, why am I disappointed? Well, I have an older iMac that only has FireWire and USB 1.1 ports on it (no USB 2.0). It turns out Apple dropped FireWire connectivity on the iPod a couple generations ago. D’oh! Do you have any idea how long it takes to sync a huge library over USB 1.1? You really don’t want to know. I started syncing sometime between 6:30 and 7:00 PM last night and just let it run. When I got up around 3:30 this morning (for the, ahem, usual nighttime business) I checked on it. It was only up to the L’s (Led Zeppelin) - about 15.9 GB had been transferred. Ouch.
I decided to shut things down and give it a rest. I guess I’ll just have to connect it each night and let it run for a few hours until the whole thing is synced! (Future syncs shouldn’t be too bad, once I get the initial library over.)