Chris Dwan

Tag: brewing

  • It has begun

    The fresh wine grapes arrived in Providence yesterday. Today, I got 12 gallons of juice. Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Grigio. It has been “stilled” with the trusty Campden tablets, and in 24 hours the Montrachet yeast goes in. This satisfies the desire to do *something* … but the concurrent requirement that we not mess up the whole house or break out all the brewing supplies. All the wine has to do is sit still in a corner for a couple of weeks. That’s not so bad, right?

    I figure that with the slower-than-expected consumption of last year’s vintage it’ll be no problem to let the Cab sit for a whole year (except, perhaps, for a bottle here and there).

    And now, continuing the “for your amusement” trend, a cheesy song by a guy with a cat that looks just like my cat:

  • Brewing day!

    I’m totally psyched about brewing day. capital_l and technolope are coming down this afternoon at a time to be determined by how late they stayed up “playing video games and drinking” last night. I’ve got my guess … but we’ll see what reality provides. Two batches, a stout and a west coast ale.

    Installed a new rack in the cage yesterday. Moved servers and power around to compensate. The goal was to collapse our two-cage presence down to a single one, thus freeing up several hundred dollars a month. I tried out the camera in my phone, and got these. The quality is pretty good, provided that I hold the damn thing very, very still and there’s plenty of light.

  • Fresh air

    I have no idea what the weather is like where you are, but here it’s 53 degrees and brilliantly sunny. I’ve got all the windows wide open, and I’m exchanging the slightly musty air in the house for clean, fresh, chilly air. Climbing around in the crawl space must have kicked up a bunch of dirt and junk, since my sinuses have been a little active ever since. Now I’m letting it all flow out the windows. Feels great. Plus, I can hear the outside world again … which for whatever reason fills me with energy and purpose.

    As a side benefit, the *ahem* odor of the sauerkraut has also been building up a bit … so the windows are open for that too. Huzzah!

    On an even more positive note, there was a little woodpecker on my suet feeder this afternoon. Little bastard likes to cling to the side of it that’s away from the house, and every time I try to sneak past him to get a picture, I startle him away. Soon, ah soon, I will snap a picture of him and draw him in my book … then he will be mine forever.

    On a slightly less psychotic note: I’m gonna brew beer this weekend. Anyone within the sound of my voice is welcome to come down and join in. Those who help out are entitled to a share of the batch. Brewing a batch of beer takes about 3 hours from clean up to tear down, and I plan to do two batches. We’ll probably start around 10am on Saturday, though I’m open to doing it on Sunday if that would bring friends over. Brewing consists of (a) doing dishes (b) boiling a pot for about an hour (c) doing dishes. Thus, there is plenty of time for watching movies, listening to music, and sampling from previous batches.

    Okay, back to typing things like serveradmin -verifyServerSerialNumber

  • Beer!

    My beer approaches! Come to me, beer!

    SHREWSBURY, MA, US 01/06/2006 11:08 A.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
    HODGKINS, IL, US 01/05/2006 2:38 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
    HODGKINS, IL, US 01/04/2006 6:39 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
    EAGAN, MN, US 01/04/2006 2:51 A.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
    EAGAN, MN, US 01/03/2006 11:01 P.M. ARRIVAL SCAN
    MINNEAPOLIS, MN, US 01/03/2006 10:22 P.M. DEPARTURE SCAN
    01/03/2006 9:03 P.M. ORIGIN SCAN
    US 01/03/2006 5:01 P.M. BILLING INFORMATION RECEIVED

  • Hoppity, hoppity…

    Cracked the first of the “Tongue splitter” west coast style IPA this evening. God DAMN that’s some hoppy beer. Admittedly, I knew what I was getting into. Instead of the standard two hop additions (one for bittering, and one for the hop aroma) this beast included SIX, of which two were “dry hops.” That means they go directly into the fermenter once most of the fermentation has died down. Clarity is excellent, almost no haze at all. This is a surprise to me, given how much crap was floating around in the fermenter at bottling time. I guess my technique is improving or something. I’m really pleased that I can now make a perfectly drinkable beer that’s as good (and interesting) as a commercial microbrew.

    Still waiting with no small amount of trepidation for the Imperial Bomber (an imperial stout) to age a bit more. The recipe recommends six months in the bottle. We’re about two months out from that. It seems that the higher alcohol brews (this one clocks in between 8 and 9 percent) really do need some serious time to settle out and lose that harsh edge that characterizes cheap, strong hooch.

    Where the Tongue splitter is a limit case for hops, the imperial is a limit case on the “dark” malt flavors. 12lbs of dark malt extract (average batch contains around 6lbs). The malt provides sugars for fermentation (thus the high alcohol). It’s the one that blew the lid right off the fermenter.

    In other news, other people’s code sucks. Spent most of the day chasing in a circle between CPAN, various open source repositories, and my very own pile of perl and C hacks to accomplish what, in hindsight, is a pretty simple task. All we want to do is align a pair of protein sequences for which we also have the genomic sequence. Then we want to generate a DNA alignment based on the protein alignment. With that in hand, we can calculate some interesting numbers. In order to do this right, you have to answer lots of piddling questions: Full length or partial alignments (full length), reciprocal best hits, a certain threshold, or hand curated (reciprocal best) and so on and so on. There is a bit of code in BioPerl which addresses this exact question, but it turns out to have comments like “this code is not guaranteed to produce correct answers!” in the docs. Gah!