| « Older Journal Entries |
| By Rob Hudson on Mar 12th 2005, 3:38 am | Permalink |
Brewed up my Belgian Summer Wheat again last weekend with my friend Percy for his birthday. This is the 2nd year in a row so I guess it is now an annual tradition.  This beer has a slight tartness from a sour mash the night before by soaking 5% of the malt bill in 120F water over night. Last year it came out excellent. We decided to experiment a little with the yeast. Last year we used T-58. This year we're doing 5 gal with T-58 and 5 gal with 3787 Trappist yeast. It seemed the best fit from what was available at the homebrew store. We'll see how it turns out.Tomorrow I'm making my own recipe -- a sort of IPA but with a little added color. I'm attempting to come up with something similar to Sasquatch from the Wild Duck but not quite exactly. Just something along those lines. About 8% alcohol, big body and lots of hops, caramel or amber color. Yummm! We'll see how close I get. |
|
| By Rob Hudson on Dec 14th 2004, 5:59 am | Permalink |
|
It ain't much, but I made a few changes around here, so maybe it's a start... Added a View by BJCP category to the recipes. Added a prev/next link to the forum. Took a long look at the forum database and indexes and things to try to speed up the query. Read a little about how MySQL optimizes queries. It takes about 1.5 seconds to SELECT 50 threads order by last modified thread and grouping by threads. I played with the keys and it didn't help any. I tweaked the SQL and even with barebones columns it still takes that long. Maybe it's the 26000 messages in the forum. So I think it's as optimized as it can get without changing the underlying structure. I do notice some lag when you hit the forum so this might have to happen in the future. The query caching does seem to help -- if you hit the forum once, then do it again within a few seconds it's faster b/c it's pulling from the cache. -Rob |
|
| By Rob Hudson on Nov 22nd 2004, 9:30 pm | Permalink |
|
Brewed Sunday and made a Maibock. Recipe was a combination of Denny's Maibock as posted in the recipes and the Seven Barrel Brewery Maibock, plus a little change up of the hops and the Munich for what I had in stock. Made 6 gallons: 13 lb Pilsner 1 lb Munich Light 1.5 HBU Hallertau @ 90 2 HBU Fuggles @ 60 3.75 HBU Hallertau @ 45 2 HBU Fuggles @ 15 South German Lager yeast from White Labs Hit about 1.066 OG. Should be about 23 IBUs and about 6 SRM. Fermenting at about 50F in the garage right now. I've heard this is a hard one to make because of the balance and nothing to mask any imperfections. So I'm keeping my fingers crossed. |
|
| By Rob Hudson on Jun 21st 2004, 3:09 am | Permalink |
| Matt, we should compare brews. The difference between the two are that mine has about 8% Rye and used Rogue's pacman yeast. Yours used Am Ale II, right? | |
| By Rob Hudson on Jun 20th 2004, 3:51 am | Permalink |
| Just kegged my Caustic Bitter. Tastes great. It's funny how some beers taste pretty bad when they're not carbonated and at room temperature, but others taste good. Ended up at 1.016. Saved my yeast slurry to hopefully go through some yeast washing. Looking forwarded to the cool, carbonated version of the Caustic. Trying to decide if I want to keg hop it or not... I'll wait and see what kind of aroma comes off of it. Blew my keg of Belgian Summer Wheat tonight too. | |