Categories
Archives
Author Archives: Mark
Booze Hacking: Three Fun and Easy Processes for Homemade Hooch
Back in November 2010, I made a presentation at Nerd Nite Toronto on alcohol fermentation and I demonstrated three fun and simple processes for brewing a 7% homemade apple cider. Almost a year later, I’m returning to Nerd Nite — this time to demonstrate how to process your homemade hooch into fuel for your car. [...]
Posted in Homebrew Leave a comment
Homemade Biodiesel
Sorry for another long brutal delay in posting here! I’ve been up to no good, although my recent projects have not been technically legal (thanks to some antiquated Prohibition-era bylaws) so I’m a little thin for content.
Back in December I met up with my friend Lee for an experiment in homemade biodiesel production. I never [...]
Scalable backup solutions with Rackspace Cloud Files
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged about code as recently I’ve been learning the joys of running a business. However, I recently had to come up with a backup solution for all our code. This turned into quite a project and I’m really happy with the result!
Background
I don’t like doing backups but obviously you [...]
Posted in Code Leave a comment
Defeating potassium sorbate, pt 1
It’s fall season here in Toronto and grocery stores are carrying delicious, high grade apple cider that is seasonally pressed at local Ontario farms. I wait every year for the stuff and this time I was determined to brew some delicious hard cider.
So I was extremely distraught to find out they use my nemisis, potassium [...]
Posted in Homebrew 4 Comments
MEADBEERWINE
In tribute to my favourite supervillain of all time I set out to brew a mighty batch of booze. MEADBEERWINE is the terrifying frankenbrau that resulted: one half mead, one half beer, and one half wine.
In order to achieve a five gallon batch of this stuff I obtained enough honey to produce a half-batch of [...]
DIY Cockroach Control
It’s been a long time since my last post but with damn good reason. I’ve spent the last two months on the greatest DIY experiment of my life — eliminating nature’s most resilient critter from my living space.
I live in a row house attached to Bloor Street in downtown Toronto. My home is directly connected [...]
Posted in DIY Leave a comment
Three Country Wines
Most of the wines I’ve done so far were made with grocery store ingredients. I’ve wanted to make wine using local flora — not easy in the middle of a big city — but certainly possible nonetheless.
When I was gathering ingredients for my Ontario Spruce Pale Ale I also picked some Northern White Pine branches, [...]
Posted in DIY Leave a comment
Apple Mead
I swear at some point soon I’ll get back to blogging about code and computer programming! At the moment however I’m still finalizing some contracts, so I’ve been killing time by running more crazy homebrew experiments in my kitchen.
Fiesta Farms has a sale on gallon jugs of 100% pure apple cider, with zero additives or [...]
Posted in Homebrew Leave a comment
Black Cherry Wine
My local supermarket, Fiesta Farms, specializes in organic and natural food and they often have good deals on high grade fruit juice. One day I stumbled on an amazing sale for pure black cherry juice ($2.99/L!) and I couldn’t pass it up…
I’ve never made wine from cherry juice before so I wasn’t sure how to [...]
Posted in Homebrew 2 Comments
Make Your Own E85 Biofuel