This is the second ever batch brewed by Circle Bar Brewery, which is a fancy way of saying me and my compatriots. Special thanks to Dan, Doug, and Gavin who stopped by and helped while away the hours. The day was a bit warmer than the first ever batch, which helps explain why we were accidentally smart enough to keep the lid off the kettle.

Nutter is an extract recipe for a nut brown ale and the first that used LME. The full recipe:

• 1/2 lbs UK Dark Crystal — steeped
• 3/8 lbs US Dark Chocolate Malt — steeped
• 1/8 lbs Weyerman Crisp Roasted 2-Row — steeped
• 3.3 lbs Hopped Light Liquid Malt Extract — in boil
• 1 lb Light Dried Malt Extract — in boil
• 1 lb Sparkling Amber Dried Malt Extract — in boil
• 1 lb Muscovado — in boil
• 2 oz Fuggle Loose Pellet Hops at 10 minutes to flame out
• 1 pkg Coopers Ale Yeast

Specialty grains in muslin bag at flame on, heated to 160F. Rest for 30 minutes and then removed bag and squeezed into wort. Boil for 60 minutes with hops addition at 10 minutes to flame out.

Of note: No boil overs this time! Kit called for a partial boil of 3 gallons and then a top off. Since I have the kettle space I did full volume boil. I believe we used 6 gallons which after boil off and trub loss netted almost 5 gallons of beer. We did get to the 80F pitching temperature (yes, too hot) within 45 minutes. Pitched dry yeast on top of cooled wort (now beer) in a 6.5 gallon carboy. Airlocked and off to the fermenting chamber for three weeks. Ambient temps ranged from 58 – 64 over the period.

Bottle conditioned using 5oz DME (probably 1oz too much given carbonation) and rested at room temp for two weeks.

Tasting notes: Nice pour with possibly too much carbonation for the style. Head retention is passable but not great. Wonderful nutty taste with sweet/spicy finish. At 5.5% ABV, highly drinkable.

I’ll post the pour pictures and additional notes later. Would definitely do this kit beer again but am more interested in moving to all-grain doing BIAB so it may be a different path to nut brown goodness next time out.

Then there is the issue of instance transforms. Holy mother of god, these make vanilla installers look as attractive as your first crush. This is the way to kludge together support for upgrade installs of transformed installations that don’t unilaterally overwrite every other transformed installation on the target machine.

So—guess what I’ve been working on all day.

Dev: The value isn’t excessive. Some progress was made but we still need a long timeout.

EA: But if we need to change this value, we don’t have a UI to do that. Besides, isn’t it excessive? I thought we got this down to less than a minute.

CM: That value is a system value and should not be futzed with on a per install basis.

Dev: We still need a longer value. Progress has been made, but we aren’t in a position to support a shorter timeout.

EA: Okay. I’ll schedule a meeting to discuss why we need an interface to manage that value then.

One might come away with the impression that I am not an enthusiastic participant in this time suck masquerading as a guide to personal and professional growth. That would be a superficial understanding of the depth of feeling I have toward this activity. As a true team player, I am fully cognizant of the value this provides to the HR department. Generating fodder for various charts and graphs and glossy documents is a vital contribution I can make toward their livelihood. I always anticipate the needs of those around me and prioritize accordingly.

Especially gratifying are the spaces for comments on goals dealing with metrics that are to be provided to me by others. More so than that are those cases when my own self evaluation is flagged as late due to my priorities being driven not by HR or myself, but by my direct supervisor who at one point stated “don’t worry about being late, we have other priorities” and then followed that up with “we really need to get those evaluations in” the next day. Oddly, this coincides with a nastygram we received from HR.

So it is with modest pride that I present this request for metrics for a goal common to everyone in the organization which I am a member of, an organization that ostensibly has a very high completion rate given the tenor of the nastygram, yet cannot find any record of. The upshot being, I am under the impression that a large number of self evaluations were completed with a complete disregard for incident rates over the last year’s releases, and time to resolution for each of this issues. As an insightful, vigilant team player with an eye to continual, iterative optimization, I would like to point out that the review process might actually be completely fabricated by a large number of participants. As a team player who not only points out potential pitfalls but also proposes solutions, I suggest that perhaps we stop subscribing to this nifty personal development web service and just have managers provide continual feedback to their reports as to their job performance. This serves the dual objectives of cost cutting and empowering local decision makers.

I look forward to having the opportunity to make continued contributions in the coming year and striving to make $EMPLOYER the best organization in the known universe.

Verrrrrrry excited :D

Been racking up non-twist top empties all vacation. Still have a long way to go before I’ve got enough to bottle a whole run but this a good problem to have. In other news, the racked wine is on a clarifying binge. Looks like wine instead of a bottle conditioned wheat ale.

In other news, converting the garage into a neighborhood brewpub has jumped to the top of the to do list. Kind of funny that it wasn’t even on the to do list before yesterday afternoon. Reminds me of Grandpa Lehl’s basement bar, which was a totally awesome thing even to a 10 year old kid.

We do have to sort out yard implement storage and the like first…

Today was the day Elizabeth and I took the leap and began making wine at home. What started as an obsession over various homemade fruit brandies at a church auction has borne fruit, as they say. After a quick trip to Cornhusker Beverage & Bridal (no, not the world’s best web presence but you get used to that living in flyover country) we wandered home with supplies.

Supplies!

Hot to trot, we set out whipping up our first run as soon as the box was opened. We definitely wanted to start with a kit first time out. There’s just enough uncertainty about what we’re doing that having the extra help is nice. Don’t get me wrong, 2011W01, we have high expectations no matter your provenance. And because both of us prefer a nice white to a nice red, we selected a Riesling. The Grand Cru Johannisberg Riesling kit to be exact; Lot 20046, packaged June 6, 2011.

After the initial rush to sanitize the primary fermenter and mix up the must we had to find a place for the wine to sleep. Because we wanted the wine to know we cared very much for it—and we wanted to keep a close eye on its temperature—we decided on a nice chair with a view in the dining room. Extra bonus points for being near the thermostat so other than the basement, probably the place with the most consistent temperature in the house.

For now we watch and wait. Nothing burbles through the airlock. That should change in the next 24 hours. This will be the sign that something good is happening inside. In two weeks we’ll sample the must with a hydrometer to check on the progress. If we get a reading that most of the digestible sugar is gone, we’ll rack this into a carboy for a few more weeks of setting out.

Initial temperature: 73˚F
Initial specific gravity: 100.082
Potential alcohol: 11%
Born on date: 12 November, 2011

More updates to come!

Oh, wait, it’s now a paid application? But it’s open source.

So now we’re in dependency hell because there’s no Maven-like dependency management widget in Xcode. Also, knowing full well I’m behind the times, I still prefer SVN to either Git or Mercurial. I understand how both of these are more desirable in OSS development initiatives. I just don’t like them.

Oh, and so what is up with Google now running all of their search result links through their own proxy now? I really dislike the extraneous metadata they attach to their links now. It’s also a PITA to clean up because, bless their hearts, they are actually HTTP escaping their URLs. Now one right-clicks a search result link and gets http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&sqi=2&ved=0CDAQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fdictionary.reference.com%2Fbrowse%2Fstupid&ei=rge4TqGZDYnhsQKCndT_Aw&usg=AFQjCNGEqQexn968lheIsBKwJ37dIe1d9Q when all one really wants is http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/stupid.

For some reason this running all search results through their proxy really pisses me off. I’d expect this from Microsoft. Coming from Google, this feels icky and gamable. So, off to find some Greasemonkey or Firefox plugin that scrapes that metadata while I continue to try building Growl.

I don’t even know what is so desirable about this new version…. FML?