Ontario Spruce Pale Ale

By Mark | Published: May 24, 2010

It’s been a long time since my last entry, I’ve been busy brewing and haven’t had much time for writing!

With spring in full bloom here in Ontario I decided to make use of some local flora for my first beer of the season. This is Simon’s recipe and I am unabashedly stealing it… but I don’t feel bad because it tastes so good.

ONTARIO SPRUCE PALE ALE (recipe for 18.9L batch):

  • 2x 1.7 Kg cans Beer Makers India Pale Ale malt extract (available in Toronto @ Leslie/Lakeshore Loblaws)
  • 1 L tightly packed fresh spruce branch tips (picked in late May)
  • Distilled water
  • Danstar Nottingham Yeast

This is a fairly typical homebrew “kit” recipe, however I changed several things. The instructions on the Beer Makers malt extract can tells me to use 1 can extract + 1 Kg dextrose sugar per 23L batch. Instead of dextrose sugar, I use a second can of malt extract. Instead of a 23L batch, I prepare a 19L batch. I use good distilled water instead of tapwater. Finally, instead of using the crappy yeast the comes with the malt extract kits, I use Danstar Nottingham which is great for ales and more tolerant of high alcohol levels

To start this process, I went to the park near my house and gathered spruce branches. In spring you’ll notice the tips of spruce branches are distinctly yellow — this is the fresh growth, which tastes better and is more tender. This is the stuff you want. Chop away at these until you have a tightly packed 1L container.

Back at home, take a big stockpot, dump in both cans of malt extract and 4L of distilled water. Heat the pot until it reaches a slow boil, then let it simmer for a few minutes. This helps dissipate the malt extract (which is very think) in water and release a bit of the flavour.

Now for the spruce branches. First, clean them by running cold water over them in a strainer. In a separate pot, bring some water (say 2L) to a boil. Once it reaches boiling, turn off the heat, then dump in the spruce branches. Let them steep for 15-20 minutes in the boiling water.

Add the spruce “tea” into the bigger stockpot with the malt extract. Stir them up a bit. Your kitchen should be smelling extremely good at this point.

Now take the stockpot and dump everything (including spruce branches) into your primary fermenter. Add distilled water until you reach the 19L mark. The distilled water should cool down the malt mix significantly — if you’re lucky you can pitch the yeast right away! Otherwise wait until the wort reaches proper temperature, then pitch your yeast.

From this point on it’s all standard homebrewing procedure. Wait 6-7 days, transfer wort to a secondary, leave it there for 10-14 days, then bottle it and enjoy!

Posted in Homebrew | 1 Comment

Viking Mead with Mandy

By Mark | Published: May 10, 2010

Many years ago I tried brewing a traditional honey mead. I made all kinds of calculation errors and used ghetto honey — the end result was watered down, tasteless and thoroughly unsatisfying.

Recently a shop around the corner had a good deal on bulk honey so I decided to have another go at it. I got together with Mandy one evening to brew the stuff into delicious mead. We split this into two batches so we could experiment with some different ingredients.

I looked up some recipes online but nobody bothers to specify if they’re measuring US or UK Gallons, which makes these recipes functionally useless. So we winged it, using 3 Kg honey (~6.6 lbs) per 11.3L batch, which should make for a light flavoured mead.

MEAD #1: Viking Mead (11.3L batch)

  • 3 Kg Meadowview Canada #1 Golden honey
  • 5 g Wyeast Nutrient
  • Lalvin 1118 yeast
  • ~11L distilled water

Original gravity: 1.110 (measured after first two days)

Process:

  • Dump the honey into a stock pot along with ~5L of distilled water. Heat this for a while (do not boil) to mix the honey in with the water. Let stand to cool.
  • Meanwhile, activate the yeast in a cup with warm water, 1 tsp sugar and yeast nutrient.
  • Wait 10 minutes for yeast mix to activate, then pour into the empty carboy.
  • Wait until the stockpot with the honey-water mix has reached a reasonable temperature (somewhere between lukewarm and warm) then add this to the carboy.
  • Pour in the remaining distilled water until the carboy is full.

This one was very straightforward, nothing went wrong and the yeast got started quickly. Within two days it was bubbling away like a well behaved child. We didn’t expect the initial fermentation to be overly vigorous, so we started it directly in a carboy instead of a primary fermenter. No problems at all.

MEAD #2: Mandy’s Spiced Mead (11.3L batch)

Original gravity: 1.070 (measured after first two days)

Mead #2 was the bratty, wretched, antagonistic younger sibling of Mead #1. First off we used an ale yeast — supposedly this is not a good idea, although some people have suggested that Danstar Nottingham works well for meads.

The other major difference was Mandy cooked up a mix of spices and teas which we added to the must. I’m not really sure what she used… I know that cloves and cinnamon were part of it. She boiled the mix for ~10 minutes or so. We didn’t want to pour this directly into the carboy to avoid heat shocking the yeast. So instead we mixed it with the stockpot mix and waited for everything to cool.

Once again we started the fermentation directly in a carboy because I didn’t expect it would bubble too vigorously. For Mead #1 this worked out well. Mead #2 however used an ale yeast, and the initial fermentation was explosive. Moreover the carboy mouth was choked by the bags of tea in the must. Within twelve hours there was far more bubbling than I could contain in the carboy — it was choking the airlock and spilling out the top. I tried using a ziplock bag to capture the CO2 instead of an airlock, but this just made a big mess. I used a pair of sanitized chopsticks to fish the tea bags out of the carboy. This helped the problem somewhat. Eventually fermentation slowed down to the point where it was contained by the airlock.

The “original” gravity here was unusually low. I’m assuming this is because I actually measured it after 48 hours, at which point lots of sugar had already burned. Given that we used the exact same amounts of honey, I’ll assume the starting gravity was closer to Mead #1: 1.110.

The meads will each take about six months and should be ready by December. I’m expecting that Mead #1 will be predictably tasty and enjoyable, whereas Mead #2 will be a helluva lot more crazy and interesting… assuming it didn’t get infected during the explosion. I’ll post a conclusion here later in the year!

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Pylons + FastCGI on Hostgator

By Mark | Published: April 18, 2010

This article can only be considered a work in progress; it took many tries to get it right and I don’t remember the exact steps. So I’ll explain the process as best possible, and please leave comments if I’m missing anything.

My plan was to get a Pylons app running on a simple shared hosting account. You could pay more for dedicated Python hosting or a cloud host… but that’s not why you’re reading this :) I’ve been using Hostgator for years and I love them — they deliver top notch hosting, unbeatable value (unlimited everything!!!) and expert technical proficiency. From looking around online I determined it was possible to set up Pylons on Hostgator, but the steps were unclear.

CAVEAT EMPTOR!!! This process is largely proof of concept. You CAN install a Pylons app on a shared Hostgator account. But there are lots of limitations, notably that you can’t install Unix system python packages so this may not be useful to you.

These instructions are partially stolen from here: http://www.bluehostforum.com/showthread.php?t=899

Start by setting up the Python environment. Hostgator servers have a basic Python environment, but you can’t add packages. So you need to set up a virtual environment in your home folder.

Create a bin folder in your home directory:

cd ~
mkdir bin

Add the following line to your ~/.bash_profile:

PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

Then:

source ~/.bash_profile

Download and extract the Python libraries:

cd ~/bin
wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.6/Python-2.6.tar.bz2
tar xvfj Python-2.6.tar.bz2
cd Python-2.6

Now we have to compile the Python library. Unfortunately, Hostgator doesn’t give us gcc — but they don’t expressly block us from using it. You just have to upload the binary yourself. On my local machine I installed CentOS 5.4 into a VM and uploaded the gcc binary into ~/bin. Next:

./configure --prefix=$HOME
make
make install

Download and compile setuptools. These instructions were tested in April 2010, you can always check for new versions of the egg file here: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools

cd ~/bin
wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/2.6/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg#md5=bfa92100bd772d5a213eedd356d64086
sh setuptools-0.6c11-py2.6.egg --prefix=~

Your Python environment is all set up! Start installing packages! It’s important to note at this point that you cannot install Unix python packages because it’s a shared hosting account. You can only install Python setuptools packages. Hopefully this is enough to get your app up and running.

Now it’s time to move on to the Pylons setup. This process is well documented on the Pylons site and there’s no point in repeating it.

http://pylonshq.com/docs/en/0.9.7/gettingstarted/

Once you have your Pylons app up and running, your last steps are to get FastCGI up and running. The first step is to set your .htaccess file to look for FastCGI. So let’s say your pylons app is called “pylonsapp” (to be original), browse to that folder:

cd ~/public_html/pylonsapp

Add the following two lines to the .htaccess file (or create the file if it doesn’t exist):

Options +ExecCGI
AddHandler fcgid-script .fcgi

Now create a server.fcgi file with the following contents (replace ‘username’ with your username and ‘pylonsapp’ with your pylons app name):

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#!/home/username/public_html/pylonsapp/bin/python

from paste.deploy import loadapp
from fcgi import WSGIServer
 
app = loadapp('config:/home/username/public_html/pylonsapp/pylonsapp/development.ini')
server = WSGIServer(app)
server.run()

That’s it! You should now be able to access your pylons app at the following address: http://www.yourdomain.com/pylonsapp/server.fcgi/

As a final step, if you don’t want the server.fcgi part to show, just add the following lines to the .htaccess file:

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<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
	RewriteEngine on
	RewriteRule ^(server\.fcgi/.*)$ - [L]
	RewriteRule ^(.*)$ server.fcgi/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

Like I said before this article is a work in progress, so please leave comments if you run into trouble and I’ll do my best to update it accordingly.

Posted in Code | 2 Comments

Modifying your shower head to increase water pressure

By Mark | Published: April 18, 2010

This information is NOT intended to maximize blast velocity of your shower head.

It’s meant for people who live in apartments on prehistoric water lines where shower pressure is a mere dribble. Here’s a quick trick to modify your shower head.

Most apartments in downtown Toronto (most rental apartments for that matter) use this ultra basic head:

They cost $6 at Home Hardware and maintain super low water pressure, which is a double win for landlords. However they’re very easy to modify. Remove the shower head and flip it upside down:

Notice that little hole in the top? That’s a simple mechanism that most shower heads use to restrict water flow.

Introduce this hole to your power drill. Use increasingly larger bits and test it in your shower until you reach a decent pressure. Enjoy!

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Quebec Maple Wine

By Mark | Published: April 8, 2010

I’ve always wanted to make a maple wine. It’s the Canadian spin on a traditional Viking mead — but using maple syrup instead of honey. Maple is full of sucrose and all ready to be fermented into delicious booze.

It’s also worth noting that when the zombie apocalypse drops and we’re all living in tree forts in northern Ontario, maple sap will be the most readily available base to make hooch. And goddamn we’re gonna need some hooch.

Ideally I would’ve liked to visit a local maple syrup producer and buy the stuff in bulk. Alas I live in downtown Toronto and don’t have a vehicle… for a future batch I’ll rent a car, but for this project I just bought it in cans. Fortunately I found a great deal for pure maple syrup, usually it costs around $26-30/US-Qt. (6-8 Qts to a batch) but I found some for half this price. Don’t use Aunt Jemima here, you need the 100% pure stuff, straight up, no preservatives!

I found a recipe online that seemed to be the internet favorite, John Gorman’s Maple Wine:

http://www.brewery.org/cm3/recs/10_25.html

Recipe for 23L batch:

  • 14x 540mL cans Quebec Pure Maple Syrup #1 Amber
  • 5g Yeastex-61 nutrient

  • Distilled non-chlorinated water
  • 1 packet EC-1118 yeast

Andrew and I convened on a school night to get this going. I didn’t see a point in doing a primary and decided to start it directly in the carboy.

We took the unusual step of hydrating the yeast and pitching it first. I hydrated it with 1/2 C lukewarm water and 2 tsp table sugar. Next we nuked the yeast nutrient with boiling water to dissolve it — then cooled it down with cold water so it wouldn’t kill the yeast — then added the hydrated yeast and poured everything into the empty carboy.

I have a 15L stockpot which we used to mix the must and then siphon it into the carboy. You could just pour it directly into the carboy but I don’t have a decent funnel. So we dumped the maple syrup cans into the pot, then rinsed the cans with water to get all the residual syrup too.

I tried to take a gravity reading directly in the carboy. Alas the top of the must was mostly water and we got a bogus reading (somewhere around ~1.07, it should’ve been closer to ~1.12). I’ll do another reading shortly.

One major fuck up: the carboy we used which I thought was 23L was actually only 19L. Fortunately this is the least harmful fuck up possible. The final result will probably be more viscous and higher ABV. Not a bad thing!

Fermentation was slow at first, the bubbles had trouble getting to the surface and a layer of gunk quickly developed. Two days later however it’s moving quite well, the gunk has dissipated and the bubbling is picking up steam.

I finally got an accurate starting gravity reading: 1.125

Here are some photos:

Posted in Homebrew | 3 Comments

Update your website via SMS

By Mark | Published: April 5, 2010

This is done with old technology, but it still has such a wow factor I want to write about it.

You can easily update a website via SMS.

The middleman is Twitter. Set up a Twitter account (make it private if you want, but better keep it open!)

Set up your Twitter account to receive SMS text messages. Tweets are limited to 140 characters, which is conveniently the limit for SMS messages. I won’t explain how to set this up since the information is easy to find. Once it’s ready, SMS your status updates to the number for your region. (In Canada, text to 21212)

Set up your website to show your Twitter feed via the API. If you’re using Wordpress, grab one of many Twitter plugins. Now whenever you send your SMS messages they’ll appear instantly on your site. Format the feed however you want.

Posted in Code | Leave a comment

No Name Berry Shine

By Mark | Published: April 4, 2010

For the first experiment in my newly founded Clinton Brewery, I turned to the lowest common denominator.

It’s been years since I last brewed and I wanted to re-familiarize myself with the process. I wanted to study the prowess of a common yeast strain (EC-1118) at various gravity levels. I wanted to assess the viability of fermenting low-grade concentrated juice sugars. Finally, I wanted to keep this all extremely cheap.

Ingredients

  • 18x 354mL No Name Berry Punch frozen juice cans
  • 5 lbs table sugar
  • 1 packet Lalvin EC-1118 yeast

Process: Primary (2010/3/25)

  • Thaw all frozen juice cans for 3-4 hours, or until they reach room temperature
  • Empty all juice cans into a standard 5 US Gallon wine bucket
  • Boil the sugar on a stove with ~3L water. This helps break down the sugars for smoother fermentation.
  • Alternate adding hot and cold water into the bucket until you have ~3.75 US Gallons of must at roughly 35 degrees Celsius. Later we will add more water to bring the batch to 5 US Gal. For now I want to leave extra space, in case we need to nuke the batch with more hot water and pitch more yeast.
  • Pitch the yeast!

Observations: Primary

  • Initial gravity: 1.105
  • Initial fermentation is extremely slow. It’s practically invisible to the naked eye — you actually have to listen closely to the wort for a fizzing noise.
  • Several people suggest the slow fermentation is probably because the sugar is too concentrated. Hopefully it will pick up when I add extra water and dilute the must

Process: Secondary (2010/4/1)

  • Add ~1.25 US Gal. water to an empty carboy, to bring the total batch to 5 US Gal.
  • Siphon the contents of the wine bucket into the carboy. There is hardly any visible sediment, so I dump the entire contents of the bucket into the carboy.

Observations: Secondary

  • Gravity reading: 1.092 (before adding extra water)
  • After the first six days of fermentation, the gravity has hardly changed. This is disheartening.
  • Immediately after transferring, I spent some time watching the bubbles in the carboy. They are definitely rising to the surface but so slowly I’m not sure I’m just imagining it.

Observations: 2010/4/2

  • Fermentation has increased rapidly since adding the extra water. There is a fast, regular flow of bubbles to the surface. It seems like the yeast is happy about the lower sugar concentration.
  • I should have measured the gravity again after adding extra water. About a day after transferring the batch, I do a reading.
  • Gravity reading: 1.052
  • 1.052 is very low, given that I only added ~1.25 US Gal. of water to an original batch of ~3.75 US Gal. It’s been almost a day since I added the water. This probably means the stuff is fermenting now!
Posted in Homebrew | Leave a comment

CakePHP + Wordpress

By Mark | Published: April 2, 2010

So this is a very common issue. You’re building a site in CakePHP. Client wants a blog. Why code a blog from scratch when you can just use Wordpress? But then you have them play nice together within the same environment.

There are already several articles online about how to accomplish this, but here’s my particular solution.

I wanted Wordpress to live outside the CakePHP environment so it wouldn’t be affected by all the mod_rewrite directives. But I also wanted it to live within the CakePHP structure so I could keep them both under the same SVN branch. This is how to make it happen.

1. In the root folder of your Cake application, create a new ‘modules’ folder. So you should now have three folders in here: app, cake, vendors and modules.

2. Inside the modules folder, create a ‘wordpress’ folder, and install Wordpress there.

3. Back in the root folder on your Cake app, edit the .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^blog$ modules/wordpress/ [L]
RewriteRule ^blog/(.*) modules/wordpress/$1 [L]
RewriteRule ^$ app/webroot/ [L]
RewriteRule (.*) app/webroot/$1 [L]
</IfModule>

4. Now go into your /modules/wordpress folder, and create an .htaccess file here:

RewriteEngine on

5. That’s it! Now your Wordpress install will be available at http://www.yourdomain.com/blog, whereas all other Cake functions will work normally.

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Homebrew Primer

By Mark | Published: March 30, 2010

I started my first batch of homebrew in 2002 in a big house on the Danforth. We were a poor students looking for cheap beer, with nothing but Google and our own resourcefulness to get us started. We bought some basic brewing equipment and it took a few tries, but within several weeks we were brewing excellent beer. Wine, mead and cider soon followed. At its heart, homebrewing is a simple science experiment — converting fermentable sugars into ethanol and CO2 — but one with infinite variables, variations and possible outcomes. When the final product is a tasty beverage, you’ve got a great project!

The purpose of this blog is to document the more experimental side of homebrewing. There are lots of great resources online for making beer and wine. I’m more interested in experimenting with unusual ingredients: honey, maple syrup, dandelion, heather, pine. In many cases you can make excellent wine from store-bought natural fruit juice. I’m also interested in working with different strains of yeast, their effectiveness at with specific sugars at specific gravities and later maintaining yeast cultures. Eventually I’d like to put all this knowledge to use to make some outstanding wines and meads.

Homebrew has a dubious reputation, and fair enough… lots of homemade booze is barely suitable for cleaning toilets. Every brewer make mistakes in their early batches as they figure out the technical process. But even once you’ve got the process down, you still can’t turn ghetto grape juice into decent wine. So here are three fundamental, but incredibly important rules to making good brew.

Mark’s Three Golden Rules to Quality Homebrew

  • 1. Quality Ingredients

    This rule is incredibly simply but criminally overlooked. It’s the #1 reason lots of homebrews taste terrible: they’re made with shite ingredients. The $45 wine kits sold at Loblaws (low grade concentrate grape juice) will ferment, but the end result will burn a hole in your gut. Spend $200 on fresh grapes imported from Chile, however, you’ll make the best wine you’ve ever tasted.

    It’s the same deal with beer. Most homebrew beer kits use standard 3.75lb malt extract cans (Coopers or Beer Makers are common). These kits tell you to use one can of malt extract, then add corn sugar to your batch… so the end result is basically half beer, half moonshine. Instead use two cans of malt extract per batch with no sugar. This costs twice as much, but the beer tastes twice as good.

  • 2. Quality water

    This is an extension of #1 but so important it deserves its own point. The vast majority of your homebooze is water. Don’t use shitty tapwater. Buy good distilled water from the store, or at least run your water through a Brita filter.

    At one point in 2003 I was working on two concurrent homebrew beers. One batch was at home, the other was at a friend’s house. They used the exact same ingredients and same process, but one used good distilled water whereas the other used tapwater. The difference in quality was enormous!

  • 3. Sterilization

    Fermentation is a delicate process. Keep your equipment clean. Use decent bleach (I use PC Green Active Oxygen bleach diluted 1:2) and spend extra time making sure your gear is sterile. Don’t let any unsterilized equipment touch your batch. This includes stir spoons, siphon tube, hydrometer and carboy stopper. The tiniest bit of bacteria can wreak havoc on your batch. Proper sterilization and proper aging go a long way in producing effective, tasty booze.

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PHP GD Library on Snow Leopard Macports

By Mark | Published: March 29, 2010

I recently went through a hellish upgrade to Snow Leopard and had to reinstall all my macports.

When I emerged all the graphic imaging functions in a PHP project had died… no warnings, no error messages. After experimenting a bit I realized that the standard GD library wasn’t installed.

Apparently in Snow Leopard macports, GD library doesn’t come along with php5 by default! I remember it did it Leopard (correct me if i’m wrong) so this was a confusing problem.

Very easy to fix:

sudo port install php5-gd

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