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Oops – bit of a time since I last posted! Things to report:

Brewed a dunkelweizen – Jamil Z’s recipe which came out at OG1059, FG1010. Just conditioning now…

Tonight brewed a ordinary bitter – 87% Pale, 7% Crystal, 3% Flaked barley and Torrified Wheat. Also, 200g of dark brown sugar. Fuggles 4.4% 60g, 75min; 22g 15min. Eventually got 22L @ 1038.

Plus, Twitter & Blistered lasted a weekend between 8 of us on a narrowboat – good beer indeed (though not quite like the Harviestoun beer though – hey ho, never mind). If anyone happens to find my Sat night/Sun morning, please can they let me have it back as I seemed to lose it at the time…

Wednesday night brew! Here we go – BBQ time is coming – the hefeweizen will be at its prime, and the pale ale hopefully ready by then:

4.25kg Maris Otter
200g Caramalt
200g Flaked Barley
40g Flaked Maize (chucked in to use it up!)

Mash 90min at 66C or so.

Challenger 7.1%, 90min 22g
Hallertauer Hersbrucker 2.1%, 90min 40g
Hallertauer Hersbrucker 2.1%, 15min 20g
Styrian Goldings 3.9%, 15min 35g
Styrian Goldings 0min 40g

Yeast US-05

Went fairly smoothly – though lost a pile to the hops – got 21-22L at 1045 or so. I wonder if US05 is going to do it’s usual massive attenuation here….

Tonight I am running a whisky tasting at my cricket club.

Looking forward to 5 large measures each of some unfiltered single cask – even the one that I have no idea what the tasting notes were… (OK – it’s an Ardmore – a speyside – and it’s 14 years old. I know nothing more that…)

Last Friday, I managed to get a batch of Bavarian style Weizen on the go. Since I won’t filter it, or let it settle out, it’ll most likely be a hefeweizen (hefe = yeast) as opposed to a kristallweizen (or “Champagne Weizen” as a mate of mine also told me they are called) which are, ahem, clear…

The recipe is fairly simple – maybe slightly out of style with the Munich malt and using normal pale rather than pilsner malt, but I’m not doing a decoction mash so maybe it’ll help it all out with a bit more of that malty flavour.

2.5kg Wheat Malt
1.9kg Maris Otter
500g Munich Malt

Mash at 67C – use 34L of Asda bottled water with 1.5 tsp CaCl2. Target OG ~1050.

Hops:
45g Hallertau Hersbrucker (2.1%) bittering hop
20g Hallertau Hersbrucker (2.1%) last 15min

Yeast – WLP300; pitch at 13C and allow to rise to 17C.

Efficiency was a bit on the low side (20L at 1049) – it’s been going a few days now, and this yeast is going potty – it filled the gallon and a half of headspace in about 24 hours, and hasn’t quite died down yet. Eventually, I’ll try and reuse the slurry for making a dunkelweizen – this will have wheat and Munich or Vienna and a bit of chocolate and much the same for hops. I may even do a brief decoction, but that seems like a technique that’s prone to cock-ups…

Meanwhile, the last porter (which did get cocked up!) is smelling amazing and slowly creeping down in gravity – it’s currently 1019 (which makes for 63% attenuation – a bit lower than I’d expect, but then I did have to rack it into another fermenter to make way for the hefe – perhaps that was a bit early to do it (though the krausen had pretty much disappeared by that point. Maybe I’ll repitch and see if it’ll come down further or not).

On Saturday morning, I started off a brew for a batch of porter with the following grist based on Jamil Zs brown porter:

3.9kg Pale malt
500g Munich malt
500g Brown malt
500g Crystal malt
280g Chocolate malt

Mashed it at 67C for a few hours and then sparged it all down. However, at this point, one of the elements in my boiler decided to stop working leaving me with one element to heat 30L of liquid. Eventually got a (not very vigorous) boil and chucked in 60g of some old Bramling Cross hops I had in the freezer. After 45 minutes, that element also pegged out.

Putting the boiler on the hob to try to get it going again, I chucked in the remaining 35g of hops and Irish moss, and I managed to get the brew back up to 95C for another 20 minutes or so, but no boil. Anyhow cooled it and landed up with loads of wort (27L or so…) at 1051.

Of course, to top it all off, I found my immersion heater was also smashed, and so I had to cover the hole in the lid of the fermenter with a saucer. Needless to say, the SO4 has now gone potty and is spewing foam all over the place in the fermenting fridge – it’ll be a minor miracle if this isn’t infected…

Sod.

Still, it smells amazing (think chocolate factory!), and new kettles (+ spares!) are on order with Tesco awaiting some butchering to allow me to replace the elements prior to my next brew, when I am aiming to do a Hefeweizen with some WLP300 that I need to grow up in a starter beforehand.

For those of you who don’t know me, you almost certainly won’t know what I do. Of course, there are probably a load of people who do know me, who still don’t know what I do (and, no, “Nothing” is not the answer). I work as a software tester and I have done for the last 7+ years now in a few different places.

Generally, this job involves a fair bit of evangalism – sometimes it’s quite successful (eg Promoting the use of Bugzilla as a defect tracking tool). One of my favourite diagrams is that shown in this post – I like this graph a lot. It is a graph showing the rough relationship between the cost of fixing a bug or defect, and what stage of the development process that bug or defect was found.

It’s fairly clear from the graph that, the later you realise there is a problem, the more it costs you to go back and unravel what is wrong and sort it. The reasons are fairly clear – if you find a problem at a later stage, you often have to go right back to the beginning of the process of development, testing and so on.

Some notes I like to make relating to this:

1. Even if you are already employed by a company, you are not “free”. Having someone fix a problem, and work repeated costs money – “we already pay their wages” is not an argument! Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust – take heed (Quote from the Reg article: The trust argued that the consequences of its decision making had not cost public money, “just time and effort by the IT teams”.).
2. Accurate. timely requirements are essential. Finding out that you have mis-specified something as it is nearing the release date is a Bad Thing™.
3. Not having requirements before coding is asking for even more trouble.
4. Changing requirements part way through the process (or, worse, finding out during testing that your requirements were duff!) is much along the lines of 2 and 3 with similar outcomes (moving goalposts anyone?).
5. Doing unit testing is much better than sending code straight to the testers – it saves a lot of heartache on both sides…
6. Actually having enough time to perform a sufficient level of testing can save you an enormous amount of hassle and cost.
7. Squishing bugs as you go at the earliest possible opportunity is much advised – multiple bugs can quickly make a system unusable and costly to fix up. (There is another similarly shaped graph – see it as The Law Of Bugterial Infection)
8. No one is perfect… not even me

Feel free to use the graph above if you want and evangelise away…

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