Krispy, Web Guru

Home brew shop

I’ve created a small home brew shop (in association with Amazon) to help you find those essentials – especially useful if you’re new to brewing. Just click on the link in the menu above (or here to save you time) and you will see I’ve collected together as much useful equipment and ingredients (and starter kits) as I think you might need.

If you are brand new to brewing, and want to try your hand without spending much, I’d recommend getting the minimal equipment for now, and a ‘off the shelf’ extract kit.  Some of the more modern kits give some surprisingly good results – and they are EASY to make.  Before you know it you’ll have 40 pints of your very own beer to drink, often at about 50-60 pence a pint! (ignoring initial set-up costs obviously).

What you need at a minimum…

• Cleaner/steraliser! (you must steralise everything!)
• Fermenting bucket (start with one .. go to secondary once you’re used it it!)
• Kit (contains hopped malt extract, instructions and yeast)
• 1kg of brewing sugar (most kits need a top up, but is needed for when you barrel the beer to add fizz)
• Barrel (OR bottles – better for ‘fizzy’ beers)
• Syphon (to get the beer out of fermenter to the barrel)

Or if you want a starter kit of equipment – go for something like this, and add a beer kit.

Once you’ve tried your first kit with that sort of equipment, you can try some other kits, and add to your gear.. until you’re ready to try your own recipes (I use cans of high quality malt extract, with speciality grains, and hops, and boil the lot up.. look at my posts which shows you how).

Spinal Tap – gig tomorrow

I’m getting excited! It’s not only a holiday this week, but also I’m off to see Spinal Tap at Wembley arena tomorrow

Spinal Tap 25th Anniversary Blue ray!

If you don’t know who I’m talking about – you need to see the film “This is Spinal Tap” – one of the greatest comedy films ever made (In my opinion). The film was made using a method of improvisation – and is the story of ‘British’ heavy metal band ‘Spinal Tap’. The band is actually made up of American comedy actors (one of whom is the voices of many of the characters in the Simpsons!), and the story of the film is long and interesting (there’s a book all about it). They actually played as a band for some time before making the film, to get the ‘feel’ of being a loud metal band. Unlike some parody ‘bands’, Spinal Tap can really play!

The film is a ‘mockumentory’ – following the band tour America, at what feels to be the end of their careers (although ironically, I’m going to a sold out gig here in the UK tomorrow, over 25 years later!). Just watch it and prepare to laugh and cringe.. but also, ROCK!

Anyway – I’m really looking forward to tomorrow, and I’m not 100% sure what to expect – how much will it be a ‘normal’ music gig.. and how much a comedy show? The actors are even supporting themselves – as the ‘Folksmen’ – another (folk) band they created for film.

“Tonight I’m going to rock you… TONIGHT!

Cooling my wort – brewing tips

While I’ve stopped brewing for now as it’s the heat of summer and I’ve no way to keep temps down, I’ve noticed a few people coming to my site looking for tips/facts on home brewing.  While I don’t claim to be an expert at all!! (I’ve just ordered a couple of books from Amazon to help learn more), I’m happy to share anything I know/have found. [ book links; Homebrew Recipes for 150 Commercial Beers
, Brew Your Own British Real Ale (Camra) ]

Copper wort chiller

I know that once I decided to make the move to my own extract brewing and using a boiler and such,  the one thing I was unsure of was how to chill the wort quickly once boiled, and if it was required when doing extract brew rather than full mash?  After doing a lot of reading, I thought that YES, you do need to cool the wort as quickly as possible – for two reasons; 1) you don’t want the wort hanging about while warm – it could get infected by airbourne bacteria, and the longer it takes, the longer it’s at risk!  I’m not sure how long 22 litres of very sugary water would take to cool from 100c to 23c – but I expect it would be several hours if left to natural cooling.

So I looked to by an immersion wort cooler, as the external fancy ones looked too expensive, and needed too much clever plumbing.  Just dunking the boiler in a cold bath of water and ice didn’t seem practical either (and dangerous!).

Attaching wort chiller to tap

So I purchased an immersion cooler – which is really a lot of copper pipe bent round and round in coil.  Just over £40 seems quite a lot, but then again copper is really expensive these days, so probably the going rate.  It comes with a couple of lengths of ‘plastic’ tubing, which fit over the in/out copper tubes.  What it doesn’t come with, is either clips to really attach the plastic tubing tightly – so go out and buy some 10-15mil hose clips (can be ones for home hosepipes or similar such clips – the ones you tighten with a screwdriver).  I then used those clips to really tighten the plastic hose onto the coppper chiller.  sorted.

Then the hard bit – what isn’t mentioned is that the wort chiller obviously needs a flow of good cold water, at pressure enough to keep the water flowing extracting the heat from the wort.  Tap water is fine – but how to attach the plastic tubing to the tap??  I went into Wilkinsons and bought a £9.99 hose pipe / tap adaptor – one which was suitable for a mixer tap (such as mine in the kitchen).  You can get cheaper ones – but I went for one which looked a bit more solid.

Now the tricky part was the plastic tube is slightly smaller bore than standard hosepipe – so it didn’t look like it would attach.  But remembering a hint I’d read somewhere else, I boiled some water, and held the tube in it for about 20 seconds, which did soften it up enough to kinda screw it onto the tap adaptor.  Tightening it all up, I tried it on my mixer tap – turned it on… and it worked like a dream.  No leaks AT ALL, and I was amazed to see condensation form on the copper tubing almost immediately – and it felt really cold to the touch.

Chilling the wort

The proof is in the pudding – while boiling your wort for the hour or so you area meant to, about 15 minutes from the end of the boil – carefully lower the copper wort chiller into the boiling mixture, until it is fully immersed.  The copper bends in a U at the top, which sits nicely over the top of the boiler bucket – all very snug and solid feeling.  That means the plastic tubing is kept safely away from the hot wort, outside the boiler.  By being in the boiling wort for 15 minutes, any germs/bacteria that may have been on the copper tubing is killed off  (100c is fine to kill all bacteria).

Once the boil is done, turn on the tap.. slowly at first checking for leaks, then onto FULL!  Obviously put the ‘out’ plastic tube from the chiller somewhere safe – I put mine back into the sink, making sure it wouldn’t flap around – the water comes out close to boiling for the first few seconds!  It actually steams – showing how much heat it extracts.

During the cool, which takes about 30-35 minutes, keep checking the temp with a thermometer (I bought a digital one with a metal probe – which is actualy a cooks one) – remembering that the colder wort will fall to the bottom, the hotter on top.  Be careful if you are tempted to stir it – don’t bring the stuff off the bottom of the boiler back up into the mix – you’re trying to get proteins to drop down out of the beer in this phase!

Only drain the wort from the boiler once it’s down to 25-20c – I put my fermenter underneath the tap, and just open it up – letting the wort fall naturally down the entire height of the fermenter – that way it gets LOTS of oxygen into it, which is what you need for the yeast to start its work.  If you do that when the wort his hotter, you’ll oxydyse it, which is not what you want – it makes the beer taste a bit cardboardy – which I think has been a problem of mine upto now (until I read about leaving the wort to cool!).

World news…?

So the one time musical ‘god’ (yeah he had a couple of great albums) Michael Jackson has died – and possibly it’s something to do with his ‘personal doctor’ (is that another name for drug dealer?) giving him a ton of pain killers (then disappearing).

Yeah all well and good – but isn’t there any other news in the world?  Something actually important?  It’s the Princess Diana effect all over again – she was hardly very popular with the press and most of the UK when she died, and suddenly she’s the “peoples princess” – feck was she.  But the media would not let it lie.. we were told we were ALL mourning.

So again, Michael ‘wacko’ Jackson dies – and suddenly we are told “the world mourns”.  Not in our house.. nor anyone I actually know (work or otherwise).  Two great albums does not make you a great person – and to be honest, it’s one less mentalist paedophile in the world – hardly a loss. It was another case of someone famous and rich (not any more mind you) getting away with anything he wanted due to that fame/fortune.  I could just imagine a single dad off a council estate getting away with dangling his baby over a hotel balcony… or having a lots of local kids round to sleep in his bed…  yeah right.

And now.. some Micheal Jackson jokes;

Out of respect,
McDonalds has released the McJackson burger,
50 year old meat between 10 year old buns.

I dont feel any emotion after MJ’s death… He never really touched me when I was younger…

When Farrah Fawcett arrived at heaven, God granted her one wish. She wished for all the children to be safe.
So God killed Michael Jackson.

We really shouldn’t joke about MJ, think of all the people he touched, especially the children.

Did you hear that Gary Glitter has agreed to pick up some of Micheal Jackson’s dates? They were named James(aged 9) and Thomas(aged 11)

Madonna has paid her respects to the jackson family and wants to know how much they want for the kids.

Travian; Online web game I’m playing

I’ve never really spent any time playing web browser games – as they are usually 5 minute arcade jobs written in flash.  But there’s one I’ve found (OK a friend pointed me towards it) which is far deeper and addictive than I’d ever expect from a web browser game.  The game in question is called Travian, and while appears to be  German written game, has servers for players all round the world.  The UK servers can be found at http://www.travian.co.uk – but there’s also ones for the USA, and most of europe (if not the world!).

Travian screenshot

It’s a form of resources management, strategic planning, army sending, complex game of risk where literally thousands of people play on the same map.  The server I’m on UK1 has had about 30,000 people register since the ’round’ started – and has probably a regular 15,000 playing.

I would suggest Travian is only for those who want to invest a lot of time (although it’s small bits of time over a long period really) – you’ll need to be able to check your game several times a day (and if you are an early riser, or late to bed person, that probably helps!).  On a normal server, I believe a full game lasts for about 300 days!

While you can play solo, defending your empire of villages, the only way to win is to join up with (or form your own) alliances.  Alliances add the teamwork and social dimension to the game – and are just like Guilds/Clans/Kinships in more conventional MMO style games.  I’m in the alliance Noein on the S1 server – and they seem a jolly good group of people   When you’re in a Travian alliance, you have people who can help defend your villages from the other 15,000 players.. and you can return the favour.

It’s definately a fun and deep game – amazingly so for a web game!  It’s free to play – but you can purchase ‘gold’ to help you get a small advantage over non gold buying players.  It’s not like in MMO’s where buying gold from chinese gold farmers is frowned upon as cheating – in Travian you can only buy the ‘gold’ from the game hosts (it’s how they pay for the servers – and with multiple servers all with 10’s of thousands of players hitting their PHP and MySQL database through the day, they NEED some income!).  It’s not cheating – it’s just a gaming choice.  Gold is used to hurry production, and to boost attack/defense stats.  Oh and to get some free gold (and to help me), join up using my reference link; http://www.travian.co.uk/?uc=uk1_4303

Anyway – plug over – have a look if you like the idea of a game which needs 10-20 minutes of play a day, but over 300 days!

My “Blog style” websites upgraded

For my sites which are more ‘blog style’, such as this one, I use the fantastic open source WordPress software.  If you think running your own site like this would be tough, think again.  While I do have the skills to hand code websites, I am a pragmatic programmer – so if there’s already a bit of software that does 90% of what I want, and works well, why re-invent the wheel?

To be honest WordPress really is the dogs danglies – and once installed, is really easy to admin, and a really smooth experience.  I run it on my own servers, but anyone can get a wordpress hosted blog for free (here).  If you are thinking of installing your own blogging software (it does more than that too – lots of free 3rd party plugins for galleries and the like), you’ll need a web host running MySQL and PHP.  It does run on windows servers, there’s just a limitation on how ‘nice’ the urls can look (you need linux/Unix to get proper url re-writing unfortunately).  Most webhosts provide mysql and php as part of the hosting package, it’s the simple and free web dev of choice.

Today v2.8 arrived, with some nice enhancements, so I thought I better upgrade.  Even that was very simple and pain free (amazing in itself).  The software admin panel told me that there was an upgrade available, and asked me to click to upgrade.  Page asked if I wanted to download or automatically upgrade – I chose automatic (after backing up my database and files as suggested).  Within… 10 seconds…. site upgraded, job done.  That was it – it went and ftp’d the zip file off the Wordpress server, unzipped it, copied and patched the files, and ran a database upgrade script – with one click.  Even me, a dedicated techie, enjoy that sort of upgrade path

So that’s this site, my wife’s LotrO Blog site (http://www.lordoftheringsonline.net/blog/), and her new crafts and writing blog site (http://www.craftywriter.co.uk) upgraded in 10 minutes between them.  If only all upgrades were so simple!

New entries on Bellin’s Blog

Bellin, hobbit alter ego

Mrs Krispy has posted quite a few new entries on her Lord Of the Rings Online inspired ‘diary’ (blog) – which can be found at http://www.lordoftheringsonline.net/blog/

It’s on offshoot of my main LotrO fansite – but using Wordpress to power a separate blog (the main site uses PHP-Fusion), which my wife writes lots of original funny content for.  It’s the diary of one hobbit of the shire, and her adventures within the LotrO gameworld (as if it’s real rather than a game), and has been featured on the Codemasters website several times.  Codemasters Online have been a great friend to me in recent years, helping with my fansites, and giving me some interesting and juicy days out.  Free beer and playing games, doesn’t get much better does it?

New brew – Krispy IPA

I’m in the process of brewing another ale, probably the last of this batch (due to it getting to warm to brew in my kitchen!).

It’s all my own recipe this time, so fingers crossed!  I’ve gone for an IPA style ale – and a proper one, rather than some of the beers which use IPA in the name and end up nothing like the style should be (Green King IPA for starters – what makes that an IPA?).

So into the boiler went;

• 90g of crystal malt grains (crushed) – steeped at 65c for 30 mins (for colour and body)
• 3 x 1.5 kg of light malt extract (to give the ale a good strength.. 6.5-7% probably)
• 80g of Northern Brewers hops, 60 min boil
• 20g of Northern Brewers hops, 40 min boil
• 50g of East Kent Goldings 5 min boil (for the hop aroma)

Once boiled and chilled down using my wort chilller, I transferred to my fermenter, with the air pump on getting loads of oxygen in (make sure the wort is 25-20c during this process).  The wort definitely had a much stronger hop smell than any ale I’ve made so far – it really did smell good (I LOVE hoppy beer).

Then pitched in two 11g packets of Nottingham yeast (double up to make sure.. as this is going to be an expensive beer to make.. nearly £40!).  From what I’ve read, the Danstar Nottingham yeast is a real beast – has a high attenuation (can turn more sugar to alcohol than a lot of other yeasts), and is very good at its job.  I’ve read it’s pretty neutral, and won’t add much personality of its own to the ale, but I’m not too worried at this stage in my brewing.  Anyway it’s fermenting fairly warm, which will add a little bit of a ‘fruity’ note, which might be welcome in such a strong and hoppy beer.

The first 24 hours saw an explosive ferment – I had to swap from normal airlock to a blow off tube (some tubing stuck in the rubber bung to a container of water) – as the head was blowing through the airlock, and it looked like a scene from a horror movie   Airlock re-fitted about 36 hours in.. and its calming down now, only 3 days in.  Seems a little early, for so much sugar to get through, but it might be ok, as this yeast does its thing pretty quick I’ve read.  I’ll take a gravity reading tonight, and if needed, stir up the yeast from the bottom to wake it up a bit.

I’m thinking about dry hopping the beer when I transfer to the secondary fermenter (adding a small bag of hops to the ale ‘dry’), to add even more hop aroma… but I’m worried I could introduce some external bacteria and spoil the beer.. tough call!

EDIT: Well I’ve transfered to the secondary fermenter.. I mis-calculated on the darkness (or lack of) of the crystal malt, so the beer is a lot lighter in colour than I expected, looks like it will be quite a golden IPA rather than a dark colour.  The beer transfered looking like toffee – which should change as the yeast falls out (it better!).  I did add a small bag of aroma hops to the fermenter.. so fingers crossed that goes well, and just adds a nice hop aroma to the beer, rather than a bucket load of bacteria! 

New brew – half mash

My special bitter in 2nd fermenter

Well I’ve just made my third home brew of year, and this time I’ve upped the level from ‘kit’ to ‘half mash’ (or extract brewing). While it’s still not ‘full mash’ brewing (which is buying the grains and doing pretty much everything except growing the ingredients yourself), it still feels much more like making beer than making up a basic kit.

I’ve started my new level of brewing buy trying to make a London style bitter (higher hopped than Yorkshire bitter style), which should reach about 4.2% alcohol (about 21-22 litres of). I’ll know how it’s gone in about 4-5 weeks or so. Here with pictures is how you go about extract brewing.

1) Choose your recipe (you can find recipe’s online, in books, or even the simple 60p leaflet I bought has some basic starter recipes in different styles).  Extract brewing involves buying malt extract (either in 1.5 / 1.8kg tins in liquid form, or as spray dried malt), which is where your sugars, colour, and malt taste come from, and then selecting speciality grains (to add more flavour), and hops (which adds bitterness, and the hoppy aroma).  You also need some yeast of course, and it’s worth getting a good quality one, which goes with your beer style and strength (Belgium high alchohol yeasts when you need to go past 7%).

Beer equipment: Boiler

2) Buy your equipment – as I had been brewing kits, I already had a couple of fermentors (clear plastic ‘water bottle’ style one for secondary fermentation, and a screw top sealed one for primary), I’ve also got an older ‘bucket’ which I have kept for preparing my brewing liquor (that’s treated water in laymans terms).  I also aready had a good syphon, cleaning / sterilising stuff, and other bits n pieces, including the very important thermometer (I’ve gone digital as the old glass n mercury one really doesn’t cut it these days).  To brew extract, I had to also buy a boiler (a stronger heat resistant bucket with attached heating element and tap), and a wort chiller (spiral of copper tubing which you flow cold tap water through to cool the boiled ‘wort’ quickly).  I also bought an aerator – which is a fishkeeping air pump and ceramic stone – which isn’t essential but I thought I’d get to really get a lot of oxygen into the wort for the yeast to use (and I really got a strong fermentation – which might be linked to its use).

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New website created

I’ve been busy creating another website to add to my small empire, and while there’s more features to add, I favour an itterative approach – i.e. get something up there, with working features, and add in as you go.  With your own websites, I always advocate that appraoch, as if you try to write EVERYTHING before you put it up, you’ll often fail and never get there. Also don’t over engineer – don’t start writing huge amounts of backend code ‘in case’ you ever need it – write what you need when you need it.That might sound short sighted, but in reality, you hardly ever end up re-using as much code as you thought, and unless you are 100% sure of what you might need later, you will get it wrong anyway!

My new insult generator website

Not only can you generate insult after insult, but you can also contribute – thanks to a simple web form.  I have knocked up a basic admin page (password protected obviously!) where I can ‘ok’ contributions, and I intend to add to the functionality, allow ‘e-mail an insult’ to your friends.  To generate the insults, I make use of some of the MySQL magic to randomly generate numbers, to order, and to limit rows.

It’s all a bit of fun, only a few nights work, but it makes me laugh