Monday, August 24, 2009

Free as in Beer Kits

I won a beer ingredient kit from the Brew Bubbas podcast. They had a contest for contest ideas and I submitted several. My idea of a beer with local ingredient won! I just heard they are sending me a California Common Kit from their brew log Craig and Jerry are great guys and their podcast is great for every level of brewer. They are real down to earth guys with lots of respect for the craft and life in general.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

BeerXML SDK Project

BeerXML is a standard for storing beer recipes. Some applications and sites can read and export recipes in this format however the compliance to the standard varies WIDELY. A while back I wrote a BeerXML parser for our club web site so we can post recipes. Doing so I said wow there should be some tools to help developers out. So I asked around and posted some messages on blogs asking if anyone wants to form an open source project. After getting two replies I decided to create this Google group. BeerXML SDK to aid in the groups communication and planning.

Current languages represented:
ColdFusion
C#
Java
Ruby

Anyone is welcome to join. The main goal is to make some SDK's to help import BeerXML into native objects and data types. Other goals are exporting and other tools to work with the objects.
However this is all up for discussion.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Model-Glue 3 is here!

The long awaited release of Model-Glue 3 (Gesture) is here. http://model-glue.com/coldfusion.cfm
Some of the features I like are helpers, formats and event types. We've been using concepts similar to some of these features and had Joe on sight a few times and he was the inspiration for a few. What a great MVC framework. We use MG across several of out applications both as the entire site or several MG apps nested within another framework. Model-Glue helps use split up the view and model tasks very nicely.

Friday, August 7, 2009

Thank You Boston Beer Company


I entered a raspberry wheat beer in to the Samuel Adams LongShot 2009 competition a while back. Its a free competition to enter and you get BJCP score sheets back. I placed 4th out of 10 in the fruit beer category for my region. Not to bad. An average of 32 for score. I have to say this was not my best version of the raspberry wheat in the first place. I was brew at someone elses house at the same time we where and mistakes were made. But not a bad placement.

So I received my score sheets and one thing I totally did not expect. A free hat, almost as good as free beer. This is a very nice hat with embroidery on the back that says LongShot and on the side that says 2009 homebrewer. There were 1500+ entries nation wide so the Boston Beer Company put some real dollars behind.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

The Belgianish Ale Project - Update

Fermentation is going strong at day 11 since the first feeding. I ramped up to 72F over several days and its been there for the last several days.

Feedings #?
Well as always time got away from me and I was not able to brew a 3rd batch of wort to feed it and since its so far along I'd rather not expose it to any O2.

Just for review I went from a week old starter to the first wort feeding of a 1051 OG wort. After 3 days I added a 1095 OG wort and ramped the fermentation temp up from 68 to 72. Might bump to 73 here since its still going.