chromosphere

Saw this circumzenithal arc on Friday 15th from Abingdon. Looks much like an upside down rainbow above the sun (which needs to be lower than 33 degrees or so for this to occur) - it occurs due to horizontally orientated ice crystals high in the upper atmosphere.

Only had the camera on my phone so the image is a bit ropey, but hopefully clear enough…

Whilst the girls had a marathon Prime Suspect watching session, I hid away and got another brew on to start building up the stocks again. The Hobgoblin is very good to drink now, but not a session beer as such. I’m hoping to get back to some good results after the unknown quantity that is the London Pride clone I brewed a few weeks back (more later).

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In the past I have used (many times) Photobox to get prints from digital photos, and they have been very good - the prints are generally very good, even given my lack of photographic ability.

However, recently (June ish?) they have “upgraded” their website, and all seems to have gone to pot for me since. It started off last Friday (25th July) when I was trying to get some pictures from my albums like this: Read the rest of this entry »

Had a successful (I think!) effort at recovering the yeast from a bottle of Fuller’s 1845 - so now to use it in a version of London Pride from Wheeler and Protz’s “Brew Your Own British Real Ale”:

3.65kg Maris Otter
290g flaked maize
130g crystal malt
25g black malt

Hops:

Target 19g (9% - 2006 crop) - 90min
Challenger 25g (5.6% - 2006 crop) - 90min
EKG 20g (3.9%) - 15min

Yeast: From Fuller’s 1845 @ ~19C

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…then it means that Apache is back to normal. On the server (I run it), we had a little bit of fun with a post ranking quite highly on Reddit. The corresponding traffic saturated Apache’s processes meaning that the whole server started to run slowly, and became apparently unresponsive.

Of course, increasing MaxClients doesn’t help if you start to be RAM/CPU limited, and it helps even less when the kernel starts sending out syncookies in light of the barrage of requests.

Anyhow, back to normal for the minute, but we need to move to a better front end… (at least sometimes) we are:

Ok - things I now have:

• An ATC800 (temperature controller)
• Fridge
• Beer in a fermenter in said fridge with said controller

The brew is much like Orfy’s Hobgoblin but since I had no carapils I used caramalt instead (less body, probably more sweetness). I used Nottingham, which decided (though it’s not that warm here, it’s warm enough!) that it’s going to try to make it’s way out of the fermenter by pushing it off the top.

It was running at 20C, which is on the warm side, but probably OK, and maybe could give some fruityness (though it’s Nottingham, so it could be very clean still…) - so i chucked the FV into the fridge, whacked it on the ATC800 and have left it too it - I set the temperature to 19C but it overshot slightly overnight to 17.6C - fine, and there’s no heater in there at the minute so the daytime temps will have to do their work on it to bring it back up a bit.

On the subject of yeast, I found Fuller’s 1845 in the shops the other day, and I’m gonna have a go at reviving the yeast from it for future use. John has a good guide to reviving yeast from an 1845 and I’ll follow his lead…

Here’s the Hob Gobbler type thing I brewed up (got 22L@1049 with Nottingham):

4.80 kg Maris Otter
0.25 kg Crystal Malt
0.20 kg Caramalt
0.15 kg Chocolate Malt

Mashed at 65°C for 90min; Add first wort hops to boiler (well - collection bucket…) at start of sparge.

Boil for 75 min
20g Styrian Goldings 3.9% (75 min) (First Wort Hop)
15g Fuggles 4.5% (75 min) (First Wort Hop)
20g Styrian Goldings 3.9% (30 min)
15g Fuggles 4.5% (30 min)
Irish Moss (15 min)
15g Fuggles 4.5% (15 min)
18g Styrian Goldings 3.9% (15 min )