Home Brewing Log
February 1st, 2013
Just a quick post to link to my Home Brewing log at beer.apeman.org. Head on over for recipes and the trials and tribulations of home brewing.
Brewing Beer at Home, the first of many brew days
November 12th, 2012
Its been a long time since I have posted anything here, so I thought I should write about an early homebrewing session, and explain some of it as I go.
For this brew I decided on an all grain kit from hopdawgs.ca, the Garage Floor IPA. It was a very tasty beer, and its too bad I don’t have any left. I will have to brew it again soon.
Heating the strike water to mash in.
Heating up 10 gallons of water takes a bit of time, but the Blichmann burner works really well for this, and its easy on propane too. I get about 4-5 brew days out of a tank.
Mashing in.
Once the strike water is heated to the correct temperatue, we mash in, and then walk away for an hour. This converts the starches in the malted barley into simple sugars for the yeast to eat, and create beer.
Vorlauf’ng. Basically filtering the wort back through the grain bed for clearer beer.
Boiling the wort.
Next up we boil for an hour and add hops at 60mins and at 15,10,5 mins.
Racking to carboy. Yes that is way too much hose…
Once were done, we cool the wort down to 68c, and then rack (transfer) into the carboy. Once we have the beer we toss in the yeast, and leave it for a couple of weeks before we bottle. 5 days before bottling I dry hopped the beer with 1.5oz of whole leaf Cascade hops for added hop aroma.
The details on the Beer:
- OG: 1.056
- FG: 1.010
- ABV: 5.9%
Grist:
- 85% domestic 2 row
- 5.4% Crystal 80
- 5.4% honey malt
- 4.2% munich
Hops:
- 1oz Chinook 60mins
- .5oz Simcoe (15 mins)
- .5oz Amarillo (10 mins)
- .5oz Amarillo (5 mins)
- 1oz Amarillo (0 mins, flame out)
- 1.5 oz Cascade dry hop for 5 days
Telus Optik TV Hard reset procedure
July 12th, 2011
Since I switched to Optik TV a few months ago, I have had one glitch with the PVR that required a hard reset (which formats the hard drive). I’m posting the steps here in order to start building a repository of user documentation for Telus’ Optik TV platform.
1) Pull your set-top-box out so that you can see the connections on the back of it.
2) Unplug the power (small black round connection) so that all of the lights on the set-top-box go off.
3) In about 5 seconds, reconnect the power.
4) On the front of the set-top-box, press and hold down the OK button as well as the down arrow button at the same time. When you see the “LINK”, “HD”, “RECORD” lights on the front of the set-top-box blink rapidly, then you can release the two buttons.
5) If done properly, on your TV screen you should see a grey single gear.After a couple of moments, the screen should advance to display 2 gears and a loading bar near the bottom of the screen. This indicates that your set-top-box is re-downloading the software necessary to perform the reboot. This stage will take quite a while to complete (approximately 30 minutes). Once that is done, you should see a screen with 3 dots which means the software is installed and your set-top-box is finalizing the settings and initializing.
Once complete, you will have a factory default configuration on your Optik TV set top PVR. Any recorded programs will be erased. The nice part of the Optik TV platform is that you will retain your PVR timers and series timers, and if you have configured remote recording control from the iPhone or website, it will still work.
Photo Friday
March 5th, 2011
Its Friday, and I don’t have a post, so please enjoy a photo!
Crescent Beach, Surrey, BC.
Surrey BC has it all, even nice sunsets over the beach
February 17th, 2011
Think Tank Urban Disguise 50 Review
January 24th, 2011
If you are looking for a shoulder bag for a 15″ laptop and a lot of camera gear, look no further than the Thinktank Photo Urban disquise 50. The bag comfortably fits my 15″ Macbook Pro (spring 2010 model), two f2.8 zooms, two camera bodies, a flash, poceket wizards, and a ton of accessories. The best feature of the Urban Disguise 50 is all of the little pockets, and in my opinion, this is a major failing of other camera bags. Within a couple of days of getting the bag, I was on a plane off to Saskatchewan for a couple of days, and this bag handled my needs with ease. I was able to work out of the Urban Disguise 50 as if it was my portable office.
A Holiday Photo
January 3rd, 2011
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