Would you tell us a little about how you became recognized for popularizing batch sparging?...

How/who you got into homebrewing?

Did you start off fly sparging?

I started about 10 years ago this month after my wife bought me a kit at Costco. I brewed extract for maybe 6 months. At the time I started, the internet was just becoming a homebrewing resource, although the main ways to share info were the rec.crafts.brewing Usenet group and the HBD listserve. No forums like this. I became active in rec.cratfs.brewing. The first question I ever posted was about the low OG of a partial mash BW. You guessed it....not enough mixing! I read about batch sparging on HBD, where George Fix and others had discussed it. IIRC, it was also there that I first heard about using SS hose braid, although I don't recall if someone had actually used it or was just hypothesizing about its use. I decided to get into AG because I'd heard of altbier and wanted to make one, so I had to be able to use Munich malt. I started with a 3 gal. cooler, set up according to Keen Schwartz;s website (that I'd stumbled across), using a Sure Screen in the cooler. My first 3 AG batches were made using a fly sparge on my stovetop. The beer was incredible, but the process was a drag. Because Ken was also a batch sparge advocate and his other advice had served me well, I decided to give it a try. It was so much easier than the fly sparging I'd been doing, I was hooked. In addition, I didn't have to deal with the equipment or expense of a fly sparge system. I began extolling batch sparging on rcb and other discussion forums as they became available. And that's probably more than you ever wanted to know....

WOW Denny, I didn't realize that coolers had been invented when you started brewing.

Yeah, but they were made out of stone back then.....not to mention that the computers were steam powered, so you had to kep feeding wood into the boiler!

Bet Denny remembers the times when there were no compliers for computers. You had to write your data base tools in machine language. Those were the days when programmers were programmers. And paper tape readers and punches. IBM 29 anyone?

I started programmimg on an IBM 360 (punch cards) in 7th grade. Must've been about 1965ish....

I feel so young. I had the Apple II GS (Green Screen as we called it) with the 5.25" floppy in 7th grade. No hard drive, just a boot disk and Apple Basic. Serious power.

Commodore64, baby. 7 or 8th grade. Soemwhere around there.
I remember our "final" for the computer class was to make a square box with a blinking ball in the middle.
All in DOS, IIRC.
Was pretty useless.

My first program was written for a SDS 910. I then was trained to maintain a SDS 920 and 930 machines. Magnetic core memory, schmoo plots to align the circuits around the memory. You could pick the machine up 4 miles away on a shortwave radio. Think the 920 ran around 2Mhz main clock rate. It was an all discrete transistor computer. 24 bits. Had magnetic tape, paper tape puch and readers. Oh it did have a fortran compiler. And no video console, operator console was a teletype.
No SDS doesn't stand for Students for Democratic Society, it was Scientific Data Systems.

I remember the IBM cards. We would punch out our programs (in Fortran) and not get the results back until the next day. Computers were too expensive, so they bought time, in the evenings, from a computer center. We were threatened with our lives if we created a loop that made the computer run too long.

I remember those cards( mid 70's),




and to show how times have changed.

My daughter is in 6th grade and her last report was due either on poster board ............................. or done on powerpoint and e-mailed to the school

I remember designing cars with light pens, pushing it on the monitor then the tablet back in the early 80's.....sigh.....

I guess I never applied myself like Denny has, been doing it for 15yrs and never took to it like that. Kudos to you my brewing friend. I never heard of Denny til about three years ago. He sure has influenced a lot of brewers. He put the cheap in cheap and easy brewing.

TimO

Firstly let me say to Denny that your OP Re: was probably one of the best summaries of personal homebrew history and a great example of humility so often forgotten in brewing in general now adays. It sums up the ingenuity and inquisitive nature that should be instilled in every new homebrewer. Cheers. Secondly sorry this post spun off into a horrible datadork downward spiral. ;D

"I had the Apple II GS"

I had one of those upgraded with a 'ROSE' chip board. That thing was super pimp. Like you said, no HD just floppies..... Real floppies. I hate trying to explain to people, younger or older than myself, why they are called floppy disks (and disk with a K not a C mind you, but thats a whole different story).

I do remember using GOPHER though and thinking that was the rad-est thing ever at the time. Nothing like the internet before '**The interNET!**'. Never did any punch cards though... Although I can't imagine that being that much of a bad thing.

My first computer (professional) would not have fit into your house. You never shut the power off because you would have to reprogram the boot program in with toggle switches, yes, bit by bit. enough so you could get the console accept typing (no output) so don't make a mistake or you will have to start over.

Upgraded to (for a time) match the largest computers in the country with 256MB of memory, yes, core memory. We did have a couple of pizza oven's, They threw off enough heat to cook pizzas and were big enough to be a pizza oven but were 10+ 14 inch platters for a total of a monsterous 10MB of disk storage.

Then they had the gall to say that all that would fit into a briefcase in 20 years.

First personal computer, a TRaSh 80 model 1, Level 1, My only other choice was from a 6 month old company that started in a garage, and they named themselves after a fruit!!!

Fred

FWIW, I had the first commercial studio in the US to record digitally. I needed to get the biggest hard drive I could find. I searched all over and finally found a 212 MB drive for $1500.

What the hell is a computer?....

I was in the pilot Computer Science Curriculum at Bunker Hill Community College(Good Will Hunting movie) back in '78. We programmed using punch card decks on a IBM Model 3-15D mainframe. Damn, I feel like a dinosaur!

Here's a pointless computer punch card story while we're at it:

At Tulane (where I went) there's a fairly long building where some of the science departments are housed. The exterior is a drab gray (think boring 60s university architecture) with a seemingly random and irregular distribution of narrow rectangular windows.

On tours, they tell everyone the facade, with the windows, represents a computer punch card program that's supposed to spell out "Beat LSU" or something like that.

Never mind the fact that the building would have to be many, many blocks longer to accomplish this.

OK, end pointless anecdote.

off the computer subject...i can't find the recipe for the rye pa. i got to sample some made by timo and mr coffee this last weekend, and i sure would like to take a stab at it. denny, con you post this for me? thanks...

http://www.brew-monkey.com/recipes/html/connsryeipa.htm

Not sure if it's current.

here ya go Jeff

http://beerdujour.com/DennyConnRecipes.html

Fred

thanks fellers. thinking about making that for national homebrew day, along with the cheswick bitter in honor of mj.

Good luck finding Columbus/Tomahawk hops

Mmmm Columbus... Thank god we have a contract ;D

Austinhomebrew has Columbus and Cascade pellets for$4.49 an oz. Ouch!

"Austinhomebrew has Columbus and Cascade pellets for$4.49 an oz. "

Nothing like a little price gouging. I wonder when Exxon will get into the hop business.

I just used the last of my 2 oz's of Columbus Tuesday, luckily our LHBS has plenty more.. 3.00 an ounce

I think it's funny how we are starting to look at $3.00 an ounce like it is not a bad price. (I suppose under the circumstances, it's not). It was only about 7-8 months ago that you could get what ever you want for $8.00 a pound.

CLB

Last I looked there was something amiss with that Brewmonkey recipe...I'll have to check again.

Jeff, the rye IPA recipe was one of the official Big Brew recipes a few years back....this time around, you'll even be able to get the "official" yeast for it from Wyeast.

Denny, what yeast would that be? I have used 1056 and US-56 to brew RYEPA.

One of Wyeast's April VSS releases is WY2450 "Denny's Favorite". It's THE yeast for Rye IPA. Works great in APA, porters, stouts, and AM. BW, too.

yeah, CL-50 lives again. I'll get myself a few packs.

Denny, how many bits was that recorder? On my Yamaha 16 track I can easily use a gig of space for a 5 minute song + I play stripped down rock nroll. 212mb for $1500, wow. I think I woulda stuck to reels. They sound better anyhow.

It was 16 bit, 44.1 or 48 K. I know what you mean, though. I've been a beta tester for Digidesign for 15 years, and I've got 2 full blown ProTools systems in my studio these days! And you'll never get me to say analog sounds better. All you have to do is roll the high end off a digital signal and add some distortion, and you've got analog!

I've got some RTR recorders to get rid of if ya like that stuff....anybody want a free 3/4" video recorder with SMPTE?