Dry Irish Stout

Michelle and I stopped by Hillsdale pub for a pint of Dry Irish Stout. The beer was phenomenal, and as luck would have it, a strolling bag-piper stopped by for a few songs. Now 4 feet is not what I would call “optimum listening distance” for bag-pipes, but it was a nice touch, and the piper knew when enough was enough.

Also, a belated congrats to the Hillsdale Brewer Greg Balch for his victory at the Battle of the Belt this year. We enjoy your beer.

Meaty IPA

I moved my Yakima IPA 3 from secondary into the keg today. I’m quite concerned because it tastes pretty bad. I think maybe it got a bug in it. The final gravity was perfect, 1.011, but tastes is meaty, but not it an ammerilo hop kind of way. Damn. I haven’t brewed a bad batch for a long time. We don’t count that cider, of course 🙂

ABV Calculator, Tools Page

I finished and ABV calculator over the weekend, and added it and the IBU calculator to the Tools page, which you can get to from the top and side navigation links.

It should work with Specific Gravity and Plato, and do temperature corrections for Celcius and Fahrenheit. I didn’t add support for Potential Alcohol because, well, its pretty obvious.

IBU Calculator Finished

The IBU Calculator is now finished! It took a while to decide upon which formula to use. Ultimately, I decided upon Jackie Rager’s Formula since most brewing isn’t full wort. It also seemed like it would be easier to program.

There is still the option to code a second calculator that uses Glenn Tinseth’s Formula, but we’ll see how this one works. So far I’m pretty happy with the numbers its gets. I’ll probably work on improving the layout, but since I’m working over the command line right now, I’ll wait until I get home.

What tool should I add next? ABV calculator? A second IBU calculator?

Yakima IPA 3

I reformulated my Yakima IPA for a 3rd time this weekend. I’m taking advantage of my abundant hop supply to experiment with different boil times and post boil techniques. This time I used 2oz of Centennials for 60 minutes, 1.5 oz of Cascade at 15 minutes, and .5 ounces more at 5 minutes. Then I used .5 ounces of Cascades in a pseudo-hop-back, by putting the hops into a strainer and pouring the warm wort over them into the carboy. We’ll see what happens. Here’s the Recipe.

Changes to page, looking at different content manager

While I was sick, I validated the entire site for XHTML compliance. At the time, it passed.
Valid XHTML 1.0!
Also, I’m looking at a different content management system to replace Moveable type. Hopefully something in PHP. You’ll probably notice that this page doesn’t validate correctly. I’m not sure how that happened. I’m getting tired of MT.