23 May

It Doesn’t Have To Be Craft To Be Good But It Helps

Posted by Steve in Beer. Tagged: , , , , , , .

It’s true. Or at least I believe it is. I’ve been using Untappd long enough to be able to see some basic trends in what I find to be quality beer. The overwhelming majority is craft beer (big craft, micro, nano, gypsy, brewpub, etc..) but, to my surprise, there were some macros which I legitimately enjoyed as well. The top three macros were:

Hacker-Pschorr Hefe Weisse Natürtrub
I didn’t know this was a macro brewery else I honestly would have passed on it. I’m glad I didn’t know as it’s one of my favorite hefe beers. It’s got nice, strong banana esters, good feel and easy to drink.

Guinness Stout
Probably the most obvious one and on many lists. It’s not my favorite dry stout ever but it is tasty on draft. In a can or bottle I will probably pass unless the list is all macros. I can never seem to shake that extra bitter taste that accompanies bottled Guinness.

Murphy’s Irish Stout
Also done by a macro. I’ve never seen it on tap but for a dry stout in a can it’s good. It does have a thinner mouth feel that can turn some away but, for me, it works well.

While it’s nothing earth shattering it does tell me to judge less on the maker and more on the brew. It’s possible for macro including MBC to release a well crafted beer. But probably less likely. I don’t believe that macro beers will shoot up on my list any time soon, but I welcome the few that hit the spot.

11 May

Second Homebrew: Great Success!

Posted by Steve in Beer. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

My first homebrew was an experience that taught me a lot but had poor taste results. My second attempt, an American IPA, turned out much, much better. As one would expect my IPA was full of hoppy goodness. Since I’m still new I decided to use a kit from the fine folks at American Brewmaster. The recipe I used called for Summit, Centennial, Cascade and Amarillo. I decided to add Columbus for a short dry hop as a way to make the recipe my own.

Hop Bill

After brewing I kept in primary for 10 days and then racked into a secondary for dry hoping. While I probably didn’t need to move to secondary to dry hop I decided it was worth doing due to my worry about keeping the beer on the trub too long (I know now it takes a lot longer than a few weeks to cause a problem ..). Next I dry hopped in secondary for 4 days. Why four days? Mainly because I really wanted to find out if my brew worked out this time and couldn’t wait. So after four days I racked to my bottle bucket with my carb sugar, filled the bottles and capped.

After 1 week of bottle conditioning I decided to see how well carbonation was coming along. This is what I saw after an aggressive pour.

Test Batch #2

I was happily shocked. I was not expecting so much carbonation so quickly! My first brew never got half that carb’d! Like my first try the aroma was amazing but I knew the kicker would come with a first taste. So I took a few bottles and threw them in the fridge for tasting later.

I pulled the bottle and shared it for a testing. Both of us agreed it was quite good. It cleared up a bit compared to the above picture but it still needed some time to settle. Here is my review (of my own beer so take it with a grain of salt…).

Sciential Ale Labs: Test Batch #2

Appearance

Hazy. Color similar to Lagunitas IPA. A finger and a half of slightly off white head which slowly dissipates into small layer of persistant head.

Smell

Slight pine with earthy/herbal notes. Nothing overpowering. Reminds me more of a pale ale.

Taste

Nice and bitter but balanced well with a malty backbone. There is also a very slight ester profile as well which surprisingly works in the brews favor adding a bit of fruit complexity. The hop profile is hard for me to really explain but the closest comercial beer I can equate the bitterness portion of flavor with would be Sierra Nevada‘s Torpedo. As the ale warmed up the bitterness came through even more. Even nearing room temperature the beer still was tasty!

Mouthfeel

Medium mouthfeel with consistant carbonation. Possibly a little creamier than should be due to things still not being settled.

Overall

Happily surprised. For me this is a pretty unique beer (though is probably pretty common in homebrew circles). My rating is 4/5 stars.

Others

I’ve gotten two pieces of feed back so far on my first successful homebrew. The first was simply “Oh, that’s good!” during the shared tasting. The other was an unsolicited text from a friend when he popped the cap and gave it a whirl: “Your beer is excellent.” That feedback made me feel pretty good.

On Deck

I’ve since brewed an Abbey Dubbel and a single hop American Pale Ale of my own design. Both are in primary. If both of these come through successfully I’ll feel pretty confident in my process.

25 Apr

Introducing Flask-Track-Usage

Posted by Steve in Development, Tech. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

A little while ago one of the guys on a project I work one was asking about how many people were using the projects public web service. My first thought was to go grepping through logs. After all, the requests are right there and pretty consumable with a bit of Unix command line magic. But after a little discussion it became clear that would get old after a while. What about a week from now? How about a month or year? Few people want to go run commands and then manually correlate them. This lead to us looking around for some common solutions. The most obvious one was Google Analytics. To be honest I don’t much care about those systems. While that one may not (or may be) intrusive on users I just don’t feel all that comfortable forcing people to be subjected to a third party of a third party unless there is no other good choice. Luckily, being that the metrics are service related, the javascript/cookie/pixel based transaction wouldn’t have worked very well anyway.

So it was off to look at what others have made with a heavy eye towards Flask based solutions so it matched the same framework we were already using. Flask-Analytics came up in a search. The simple design was something I liked but the extension was more so aimed at using cookies to track users through an application while we want to track overall usage. I figured it was time to roll something ourselves and provide it back out to the community if they could use it as well.

Here it is in all it’s simplistic glory: Flask-Track-Usage. It doesn’t use cookies nor javascript and can store the results into any system which you provide a callable or Storage object. There is also FreeGeoIP integration for those what want to track where users are coming from. The code comes with a MongoDB Storage object for those who want to store the content back into their MongoDB. Want to know a bit more of the technical details? Check out the README or the project page. Patches welcome!

21 Apr

That Darn First Homebrew

Posted by Steve in Tech. Tagged: , , , , .

While some people remember their first homebrew as something that brought great fun and great taste it’s not my story. My story is one that is far greater than the simple beer that started it all for a hobbyist. See, it was a comedy of errors that taught me much more than a simple yet tasty first batch could have.

My very first attempt at homebrewing was a hefeweizen. I chose a hefeweizen for a few reasons. First it’s one of my favorite styles of beer. There is something about the esters and light ody that draws me in. Then there was the temperature control factor. I believed, correctly I might add, it to be easier to keep my place warm than keep it cool even in winter. Since esters are wanted in the hefeweizen style and esters are more common in higher brewing tempature it seemed like the perfect fit.

What I didn’t think about was that my first try was going to be with such a delicate style. In fact Big Beard Brewconsin even noted this after I wrote my first Homebrew post. It’s not like attempting a hop bombed IPA or a malty stout where mistakes can be overpowered by the primary flavors. With a lighter beer hiding defects isn’t so easy and my beer was full of mistakes.

The first big mistake was in my boil. As I noted previously I let it boil over. Luckily it was only for a second and I was able to recover before losing too much. This was probably the most minor of all your mistakes.

Up next was a common rookie mistake. I didn’t know that the tempature in the primary could be 5 or more degrees warmer than the outside. I had my ambient temperature at 72F thinking that I was keeping the fermentation somewhere around there. In reality in was keeping things somewhere in the upper 70s! I’m sure this caused the yeast to be stressed and put out byproducts.

But the mistakes kept rolling and I let the beer stay in primary too long. The beer really was done after a week and half, maybe two but I kept it in primary for almost three weeks. Why? Because it seemed like that’s what many homebrewers were recommending on forums, blogs, etc.. Keeping that beer for a week and a half after fermentation was done is one of the causes for an infusion of extreme bitterness to not the back end. When it was time to dispose of the trub it had a very distinct smell which was present in the bitter aftertaste of the beer.

When it came time to bottle I misused the autosiphon. I should have had the primary higher and the bottle bucket lower but I put them on the same level. This caused me to more or less pump the beer from bucket to bucket causing a lot of aeration. The taste of cardboard that seeped in is likely from this error.

I believe the first process showed me what can happen when specific things go wrong. So far I’ve avoided all of the mistakes I made with my first try with my second homebrew: A partial grain American IPA. It’s currently in primary and resting inside a slightly larger water container (to help keep temperature). More to come soon, I’m sure!

12 Apr

Two Beers I Don’t Get

Posted by Steve in Beer, Review. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

I like very trying new beers. It’s no secret. But recently I had two beers, in a row, that I could not wrap my head around. Don’t misunderstand, these were not bad beers but beers that either fly over my head or I expected too much from.

312 is golden

Photo credit: swanksalot)

The first beer is Goose Island’s 312 Urban Wheat. What is an urban wheat? I don’t know either. According to Beer Advocate it’s an American Pale Wheat Ale. Now APWA’s are a style I enjoy – In fact Bell’s Oberon is way up there on my list – but I just could not figure out the beers concept. First off, it’s a very light APWA and clearer than I’d expect. The aroma was very faint grassy and maybe slight lemon. The taste was wheat and an extremely faint hint of lemon. Both fade away to a water like taste after a few sips reminiscent of a cheap light lager. Mouth feel was light carbonation and supper thin. It was after roughly an eighth if the pint I said enough and drained it. It was almost like a cream ale but with wheat malt. Not close to what I want out of an APWA. As a side note I learned that Goose Island is owned by a very large company with a poor reputation with craft beer lovers …

Petrus dubbel bruin

(Photo credit: Lec)

The second beer was from another of my beloved styles: the dubbel. I’ve enjoyed St. Bernardus Pater 6, Chimay Rouge and the Westmalle Trappist Dubbel and I I walk by Petrus bottles every time I’m in the Belgian isle. It was time to try Brouwerij Bavik’s take on the dubbel. After pouring into a goblet I noticed quickly the low carbonation. There was some very minor white off lacing but it didn’t look anything like what I expected. The aroma was carmel, brown sugar and spices. The taste initially was dominated by sweetness followed by an RC Cola like flavor. After that I couldn’t shake that, not only did it taste like half flat RC Cola, it even looked a bit like it as well. And it wasn’t the pleasant hint cola like taste of Foothills Peoples Porter. Maybe I got a dud bottle?

30 Mar

Sim City 5

Posted by Steve in Tech, Video Games. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .

Sim City was one of the first PC games I played when I was young. I remember enjoying the sequels I was able to get my hands on. EA recently released Sim City 5 to a largely upset audience of gamers who have turned very vocal in the last few weeks. For one, digital rights management (DRM) required single player games to still be online (or maybe it was a bad creative decision). Servers were overloaded on launch. AI pathing was more or less broken causing traffic pile ups. RCI didn’t seem to always work as expected. Zoning sizes are not as obvious as they should be. I could go on and on…

So, when a friend asked if I wanted to join and play I was understandably reluctant. Why spend money on something people seem to dislike so much? Reading reddit made the game sound worse than Duke Nukem Forever. For instance one person says the game is broken to the core. Another person noted that their legitimate copy was disabled. Even mainstream media was writing up negative articles. None of these things inspire confidence in a game which usually inspires positively rabid fans.

It took a little convincing but I eventually decided to give it a shot based on how much fun my friend was having playing the game. I figured I’d get a game session or two out of it before getting bored or frustrated from bugs. I was wrong. While I noticed some bugs (most of which were minor UI glitches) overall the game was fun and playable. In fact I spent five hours one night experimenting with industry. It’s fun! So why are so many people unhappy? There are a few reasons…

There is a simple theory that may explain why some people still rage about the game. Sim City 4 had a large modding community which expanded the game greatly. I’ve even heard some of the mods were done/inspired by people who deal in civic work making the sim even more realistic (I can not confirm this — I did not play Sim City 4 or any of it’s mods). If you try to take the young Sim City 5 and place it up against the older and more  worldly Sim City 4 then 5 won’t be much of a match.

As many people noted the game is far from perfect. While I initially noticed the minor UI bugs I later started to notice more and more wrong with the game. For instance the numbers didn’t always seem to add up which is a problem for a simulation game. Another problem was with destroying service vehicles accidentally. Or  setting up a bus station in a specific way that makes them disappear. The end result is useless mods to service buildings.

But even with these issues I still have had fun. Why? Because I believe the developers will fix the issues — at least most of them. No game is perfect. The more complex a game is the more likely there will be bugs at launch. Some of the bugs can even be fun or funny. However, if most of these bugs still exist in roughly a month I will be pretty upset. If by the end of April the game is not making big leaps forward in polish I’ll probably join in the frustration. If the game does make big movement forward then I’ll be continue to be a happy camper.

If you are thinking about buying the game I recommend waiting till at least the next patch is released. EA has offered a free game to people who bought Sim City 5 but this will be going away after today. While Amazon is selling the game far cheaper than EA I believe most players will want to wait for a more polished product even at that cheaper price point. If you already purchased this game don’t forget today is the last day you can redeem your free game as a Sim City 5 owner. If you have not done it yet, choose and download!

22 Mar

RSS Isn’t Dead

Posted by Steve in Social, Tech. Tagged: , , , , , , , , .

Google announced that they are discontinuing their popular Google Reader service. For those unaware Google Reader is a convenient way to read RSS feeds. For anyone who doesn’t know what RSS is it stands for Really Simple Syndication: a convenient way to bring customized web content to you all in one place. Google Reader was a very popular way to read RSS feeds which, upon it’s notification of closing, had large amounts of users searching the Internet for a replacement.

Apparently RSS is dead. Well, if you listen to some writers. Their thought is that “everyone” uses Twitter, G+ or Facebook to read or be notified of new content. This probably comes as a big shock to the large amount of people who use RSS readers and services everyday. The truth is that not everyone uses social media as a way to keep tabs on news and information outside of their own social life. I’d hazard to say most people use social media for social purposes with an added small amount of news/information usage. For instance, if someone is really in to Lenovo products they will probably follow or friend Lenovo to get updates from them. But following posts directly from a company or organization is not the same thing as reading feed from multiple sources. Even those social platforms that do offer the ability to mix general life with corporate/news generally lack the ability to separate the two well. Maybe I’m odd but I don’t like seeing pictures of everyone’s kids and family updates mixed with not-so-happy hard news.

Saying RSS is dead reminds me of how email is dead. It isn’t at all but people do like to state it. Maybe people should also say going to CNN.com to read CNN news is dead? News organizations have social media presence and if social media is where everyone reads content then shouldn’t these organizations post directly to the social applications and skip the overhead of running their own systems? Using social media as the location for news sounds like trading custom news and data for digital water cooler conversations with company PR women.

RSS is not dead. RSS services are evolving into different platforms where focused data is king. At least the smart ones are. As a prime example look at Newsblur. It’s a web based RSS reader with options to train the system on the kind of news you like from your subscriptions. Granted, it does add some social functions for those who want that but the reader alone is what makes the service great. When it comes to hanging out and sharing random bits of life the social media outlets are still, and will likely always be, the most attractive players.

In the end social media and RSS are not the same thing. Yes, there can be crossover but that does not mean RSS is dead or that social applications and RSS are truly competing  RSS services are just evolving.

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