Neomantra.org

No, that’s not a drunken call for more alcohol…it’s just my way of telling you to go check out the beer pages because I’ve added some new stuff once again.  Mainly some tidbits about my first foray into using whole hops vs pellets, my first run at brewing my potential “house brew” recipe, and some post-bottling musings about my dunkelweizen. Last but not least, keep an eye out for my next project…an attempt at cloning Troegs Nugget Nectar.  I bought a 22oz bottle of this stuff last weekend and it was great, but cost me almost 9 dollars!  Sorry but unless I’m at a bar I can’t tolerate 4+ dollars per beer, that’s just insane.  But relax, homebrewing to the rescue!  If I can produce something that tastes pretty close I’ll be saving a little over 3 dollars per bottle compared to retail.  That’s a happy thought.

Oh no!  The out of town visitor beat me to posting the follow up blog entry on our party. Damn you Jonathan! Stop making me look like a slacker!

So unfortunately this past week or two I’ve been rather bogged down with working on my master’s degree and working my day job and brewing beer, etc.    But on the note of beer we had some very good ones at our 4.4 SC party and I think everyone that came had a nice time.

View from our balcony after the storm

We started out at Fuddruckers for some good American style burgers and fries (with drunken locals who swore they knew Scottish people that they’d never seen in their lives) and lots of KDE talk.  I had the opportunity to show off some new features to some of the Kubuntu LoCo folks.  I think we’d have had a better turn out but unfortunately due to SNOWPACALYPSE 2010 in DC we had lots of people whose cars were too buried to make it to the party.  The other bad news was that I forgot all the sweet KDE swag that Claudia sent me.  Though really that was mostly for the CALUG talk I was going to give this month (which was canceled and subsequently moved to next month due to the storms).  Despite the circumstances we still made Jonathan give a really in depth speech about KDE and Kubuntu before we moved on to the bar.  Ask him about it…it was quite grueling and official.

After that we headed off to Victoria Gastropub where many more fancy beers were to be had.  We lost half of our Fuddruckers crew on the way there due to age limits and what not, but fortunately we picked up another 6 people after we arrived so all in all we had a pretty steady group of 10-12 people the entire evening.  2 of those folks were completely new to KDE so I gave them my sales pitch about how absolutely amazing it was.  Here are a couple more photos from the evening:

The last standing at Fuddruckers

Late night at Victoria's

Just a quick note to say that I’ve made a TON of updates in my beer brewing section.  This week I cracked open the first couple testers of my blueberry chocolate stout.  A couple days ago I brewed up a batch of Dunkelweizen.  Then this afternoon I finally bottled my Tripel IPA.

Last but not least I’ve decided on the initial direction I want to take for my “house beer“, which will be a Belgian-American IPA.  Should be a lot less potent than the Tripel IPA and more fitting towards having around on a regular basis (since it would be kind of absurd to always have a belgian tripel on hand haha).

With relative calm finally approaching after spending the chaos filled month of December finishing last minute work deadlines, attending conferences and trying to find free time to buy presents for friends and family in between, I’ve now found some time to do some things I wanted to get done.  Mostly that means I had time to do home brewed beer things, fix up my blog a bit and work on KDE stuff.   I’ll start with the KDE work since there’s likely some of you who may not care about my brewing adventures.  That’ll be at the bottom if anyone is interested though.

The promo team has been quite busy this month.  We’ve been doing a wide variety of things, most of this can be seen via the updates we’ve made on the Promo section on the Community wiki.  One of the things that we’re trying to get off the ground is a section for art work.  The idea is that this could be a common place where anyone could go and easily find cool designs and logos relating to KDE things.  There is a little bit there right now but if you have any other images we could use please do feel free to add them or email them to the promo team.

Along the same lines we are still looking for anyone who can do some design work for potential use on KDE t-shirts/hats/coffee mugs/etc.  This is a great way to earn instant fame and glory among your KDE peers as we will all think of you when we look at your design in the mirror or as we drink our morning coffee every day  If you are interested please let us know!  Ideally I would like to have some cool things available before Camp KDE so we can raise awareness of the store while we’re there (which we can’t really do if nothing is for sale yet).

Also, in case you’re living under a rock and missed the Dot story, the Camp KDE speaker schedule was released last week and I’ve got to say it looks jam packed full of really interesting talks.  Coming from a bioinformatics day job I’m especially interested in Phillip Bourne’s keynote on open access to data.  And somehow I tricked the rest of the organizers into letting me speak there so hopefully that goes well too  I’ll be discussing how people who don’t know anything at all about programming can still get involved and be contributors in the KDE community.  I hope that developers will find this interesting as well because part of this discussion is meant to teach you how to find opportunities for your friends who normally say “yeah I’d help you with KDE things but I don’t know how to write code” to get involved.

One quick thing I’d like to mention is that I put some of the ideas I’ll be discussing in my Camp KDE talk into practice in my own life recently and managed to convince a friend of mine to give KDE a whirl.  Not only did he install openSUSE with the KDE Plasma workspace he also decided to start learning QT (he’s historically been a Windows user/programmer), and has started a blog to document his learning experiences along the way.  It should turn into a great resource for other new KDE/openSUSE users as time goes on.

Last, but certainly not least I just wanted to give a quick update on my beer making activities.  Here is our kitchen, where I spent most of my day yesterday:

My kitchen on a normal brew day

For those wondering what the heck all this stuff is, on the far left there is the malt/hops/etc, aka the “wort”, boiling in the gigantic pot.  Next to that are some more ingredients that I was weighing out to be added later in the boiling process.  Then there is the cooling coil and some other random tools and a thermometer, etc.

Anyways I’ve done some work on the beer brewing section of my blog and it’s much prettier now thanks to a few pictures like this one.  I also added the Belgian White beer I brewed yesterday in the status section and history, and added a more detailed sub page about the Holiday Ale I made in October.  Eventually I’ll get around to doing that for the other beers on the list too.  But for now, it’s time to go bottle my IPA!

Just a quick post to let you know that I’ve setup a page dedicated to tracking the home brewed beer I make.  The link to view it is in the page navigation at the top of my blog.  I plan to add in sub pages for each beer I brew that provides more detailed information including recipes and ingredients, etc as I have time so be sure to check back for updates.

Not too long ago I wrote a blog entry about brewing beer, more precisely, about making extreme beer.  The book I discussed in this entry was written by Sam Calagione, owner of the very popular Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, and goes into great detail about how to take the centuries old boring beer recipes out there and give them a twist to make something much more unique and interesting.

Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery (right)

One of the cool things about the book is that he gives away the recipes for several of their most popular beers to let home brewers could try their hand at making them…so for once we’re talking about “free as in speech” as it relates to beer

Last night I was out with some friends grabbing dinner before going to a concert and we stopped at a craft beer bar in DC.  You’d never guess who happened to be there…. (ok actually you probably know already).  Sure enough Sam was there promoting a new beer from Dogfish Head called “Black Thai”.  Talk about an extreme beer…this is an Imperial Stout flavored with Thai basil, edamame and blackberries that clocks in at a 9% ABV.  I think I caught him right as he was delivering a round to his friends and family but he was kind enough to stop for a quick picture anyways.

Last night I finished a book called “Extreme Brewing: An Enthusiast’s Guide to Brewing Craft Beer at Home” by Sam Calagione.  Sam is the owner of the Dogfish Head Craft Brewery.  They have a couple different restaurant/brewpubs around our area and I’ve tried many of their beers so I am quite sure the guy knows what he’s talking about.

Anyhow, “extreme brewing” is the idea of taking standard types of recipes for making beer and then twisting them in some direction that deviates from tradition.  In most cases it seems to be adding massive amounts of additional malts or sugars to increase the ABV or dryhopping your beer with insane amounts of hops but the book also suggests experimenting with non-traditional ingredients to add new flavors as well.  Anything from adding cinnamon to kiwis to lemongrass and well…you get the idea.  The more unusual and extreme the better!

I feel like even before I read the book I had an itch for this type of thing.  I’ve always been interested in high gravity beers ever since I tasted my first Belgian beer and even back when I was getting in trouble for sneaking beers from my parents basement during high school I never really did care for the taste of mainstream American beers like Coors, Miller, etc.

So now finally I get to start to experiment for myself.  The process is already underway in one of my recent brews.  I bought a Black Ale Kit from Austin Homebrew Supply and then added a whiskey soaked vanilla bean to it.  The whiskey helps pull out the vanilla flavor from the bean and also adds a smokey flavor of its own.  It’s aging in the secondary fermenter as I type this and should be ready to bottle in a week or so.  I also just ordered AHS’s American IPA kit, but purchased an extra ounce of Yakima Golding hops for dryhopping and am also going to try adding in an extra half pound of brown sugar to up the gravity a bit.  On the less extreme side of things I’ve also got a holiday spiced ale that’s almost ready.  Or maybe it was kind of extreme by default?  It’s got spices like orange peels and cinnamon in it.

I sense an awesome winter season of tasty home brews ahead…if only I had a fire place to hang out in front of or something.  Or maybe I can achieve that by sharing the beer with friends who have one?  Any takers?

Wedding Fireworks taken by Katie B.

Well after an absolutely amazing wedding and honeymoon it’s now time to return to reality and get back to the grind.  Here’s what’s on my plate.

Regarding KDE activities my next tasks are to draft a notification email to send to KDE list admins/moderators to inform them of potentially inactive lists we’re considering shutting down.  I’m also investigating attending the upcoming Marketing/Promo sprint to be held somewhere in Germany, likely around mid-November.  That should be loads of fun and a great way to get to know that group of people better.

In the world of beer brewing I’ve got a lot going on right now.  I just started drinking a brown ale that I made.  Unfortuantely some corners that I cut while brewing that night seriously degraded the quality.  I will probably end up dumping most of this batch.  Fortunately I went to a brewing party not long after I made the brown ale so I now have 4 different varieties of beer nearly ready for consumption.  One is a german ale (which is what I contributed on brew day).  Then 3 other buddies of mine also brewed stuff…a scottish ale, a smoked porter, and a pumpkin ale.  We all mixed and matched after bottling so everyone has some of all 4 batches.  I’m excited to start trying them all out in the coming weeks.  Last but not least, my brother expressed some interest recently about brewing so for his birthday I am hooking him up with some equipment for brewing.  I think that brings the number of people that I’ve helped rope into taking up this hobby to 3 now