Since bottling the honey bock last month, I've tried
a bottle last week and this week. While it is a very nice beer, the
honey flavour is not very noticeable. That said, the second bottle I
tried had a slightly stronger honey flavour than the first so it might
just need to mature for another month or so.
If I was to do this beer again, it would make sense to use a stronger
flavoured honey or just use more honey. Then again, perhaps it isn't
worth trying honey flavoured dark beers.
The only difference from the standard procedure was replacing part of
the brewing sugar with honey. Before being added, the honey needs to be
pasteurised, which involves heating it up to 80°C and keeping it at that
temperature for half an hour or so. This kills off any any wild yeasts
or other undesirables that might spoil the brew.
One of the novelties in the airport lounge at Narita was a beer pouring
machine. It manages to consistently pour a good glass of beer every
time. You start by placing the glass in the machine:
When you press the start button, it tilts the glass and pours the beer
down the side of the glass:
After filling the glass the machine tilts the glass upright again and
some extra foam comes out of the second nozzle:
Got around to tasting the latest batch of home-brew beer recently: a
chilli beer. It came out very nicely: very refreshing but with a chilli
aftertaste in the back of your throat. You can definitely taste the
chilli after drinking a pint :).
I used a beer kit as a base, since I haven't yet had the patience to do
a brew from scratch. The ingredients were:
I took half the chillis and cut off the stems and cut them up roughly
(in hind sight, it probably would have been enough to cut them
lengthwise). I then covered them with a small amount of water in a pot
and pasteurised them in the oven at 80°C for about half an hour. The
wort was then prepared as normal, but with the pasteurised chillis added
before the yeast.
Last week, one of the servers died because one of the sticks of memory
died. After pulling it out, the system booted fine. It would have been
a lot easier to test if I didn't have to open it up to plug a floppy
drive in. I now have Memtest86 in the
GRUB boot menu. Was pretty easy
to set up:
This is the second stick of DDR memory we have had that died; probably
due to overheating. As the server has 5 IDE ribbon cables, I might
look at getting rounded cables which
Jaycar is stocking these days.
There is also an HTML version on the website, but it
doesn't quite match the final version of the CFP (yet).
Beer
Bottled the honey ale today. It will be interesting to
see how it tastes in a few weeks. The sweetness was gone,
but I could definitely taste the honey still. It should be
very nice.
GNOME 2.0
Put out yet another beta of libglade for the GNOME 2.0
beta 5 release which should be comming out this week. I
should also make new releases of pygtk and gnome-python as
well. I have done a number of improvements to the code
generator, so pygtk is a bit more complete. The last
gnome-python release no longer compiles with the latest
GConf, so it also needs a new release.
Started another batch of beer yesterday. This time I
mixed in a kilogram of honey (replacing some of the sugar),
so it will be interesting to see how this turns out. The
bubbles coming out of the airlock smell fairly different, so
it will hopefully go okay.
Merged some patches from various people into my jhbuild
build scripts over the weekend. Thanks to jdahlin, it now
has support for getting things from other CVS trees. At the
moment, we have rules for thinice2, gstreamer and mrproject
using this feature.
