Beach Brew

I have not done much brewing for a while. Been busy with other things. The BDG is now lagering after about three and a half weeks in primary and a short secondary fermentation. After primary there was still a little action. I decided to go for a little open fermentation at this point. This was only for a couple of days and was not completely open so may have no impact and to be honest I have not done it without the open part so I may never know. I just kept reading about it being nearly impossible to get that unique mustiness of a Biere De Garde. So this is my attempt to try and capture that. How well it works remains to be seen. It was tasting very nice but in need of some conditioning when I transferred it for lagering.

Hopefully I can get another brew one in the next couple of weeks. I have a American Pal and American Brown planned. I would also like to get a Saison done over summer. Hopefully I will be scoring a culture of the Saison yeast from Kai and working one up from there.

This a perfect example of what is going to be a plauge in the future. As soon as the company stops supporting the product it won’t matter if you want to keep using it. You will be pushed into an “Upgrade”. Have a look at the linkage>

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/10/24/sony_moviestudio_ant.html

It’s 2006 so please say hello to “1984″. What is the world coming to when you have to be finger printed to enter a pub? On top of that pubs that fail to comply have onerous condition placed on them. I just can’t fathom this kind of thing.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/pub_fingerprints/

I have not tried this out yet but it sure sounds like a cool idea. From what I have read I should be able to get the whole of wikipedia into about 1.1G and thus fit it onto my 30G 5G ipod. Have a look at the link this is a really cool hack particularly as it does not require you to put any extra software on your ipod or alter then device in any way. Check the link:

http://swannman.wordpress.com/2006/10/01/howto-read-wikipedia-on-an-ipod/

Time for an update. The Biere De Garde is fermenting very well. It jumped out of the fermenter a couple of times during fermentation. It has settled down now and the ferment is starting to wind down. I have not had a taste yet. I will probably take a measurement and give it a taste tomorrow when I have more time. My hopes for this beer are high but tempered by the fact that the brew day did not go exactly as planned. If I can come up with anything close to the two commercial Biere De Garde I have had I will be very happy. The recipe will be up shortly so check the recipe page.

More judging going on at the moment too. We are in the middle of ANAWBS. I judged on Friday and am judging again today. As they don’t release the results until a week later at the presentation I can’t really mention anything much about the beers I have judged at this point. The competition has been very well organised and run. This is mostly thanks on the beer side to stu (wee stu on ahb), I have attempted to aid him with this but have really not been much use due to work commitments. However, plenty of credit goes to the rest of the organising committee too. The judging has run very smoothly and the calibre of judges has been great. We have had BJCP certified judges from Sydney over for it. We have also had many professional brewers from Gulf Brewery, Mildura Brewery, Grumpy’s and Lion Nathan. There could be more but those are the ones I know of. At least one person from the breweries and another that works at the Waite Institute are sensory perception professionals too which all adds up for a high class of judge. There is certainly no shortage of judging quality this year. I am really looking forward to seeing my results. With this calibre of judges I expect to get some great feedback.

Zune vs. iPod – Engadget
Wow, Microsoft really have made something that looks like a clunky pile of crap. I obviously have no idea what it is like to use but if it’s that much bigger than an 80GB ipod I won’t be finding out either. I am also not interested in the wifi and sharing if it breaks the licences of my music and attaches drm to it. It will probably be wildly successful though. Click through to the Engadget story for a bigger image.