chromosphere

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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No – not a typo but Ollorson’s recipe called “Bitter Bitter” which I brewed yesterday. All Challenger hops in this one and using Nottingham to ferment with. The usual water treatment (CRS, 2 tsp Gypsum, a smidge of CaCl2 and a tsp of NaCl) and then the following recipe:

3.86kg Pale malt
230g Crystal
455g Wheat Malt

Mash 2.5+ hours (was hanging a gate in the garden…) at 66C or so.

Challenger 7.1% 50g – 90min
Challenger 5.5% (but old) 20g – 15min

Turned out with 24L at 1041 (pretty much bang on really) – it’s sitting in the fermenter but no apparent action as yet – though Nottingham can take a time to kick off I seem to remember – it’s been a while since I used it last.

This was going to be a short old post – I have the lurgy and generally feeling naff – so a quick catchup. Though before I contracted this head cold, I did a mild which is currently sitting in the beer fridge (and looks to have not quite finished yet).

Recipe based on Ollorson’s “Hoddesdon Dark” but replacing torrefied wheat with wheat malt, and omitting the late hops.

3.16kg Maris Otter
0.32kg Wheat malt
0.32kg Crystal
0.16kg Roasted barley

60-odd min mash at 64C

Challenger 7.1% 30g 60min (~23IBU Tinseth)

Fermenting this with recultured Fullers 1845 yeast – trying for the second time with this one – let’s hope it turns out better than the last one I used this yeast in…! Landed with 23L at 1036 so almost bang on.

Also, today, I received a big parcel containing (almost all) the malt I’ve been waiting for, as well as Hersbrucker hops and some liquid yeasties. I have some Weissbier and Begian style ales to make in the next month or two – and I must get round to sorting out the lager I have been meaning to brew – I have all the stuff, but don’t want to tie up the fridge for the minute!

Also, I have enough stuff to make two large batches of 7:2:1 stout to try and use up some old Northern Brewer hops I found in the freezer.  Plus there’s the issue of an old packet of Brambling Cross that must go soon – a made up brew called “BX Porter” is my plan there. Double brew days are going to have to be in order – especially since I need to keep “normal drinking stocks” up in the meantime…and I’m already getting low!

The Queen’s new website was released today – even Sir Tim Berners-Lee helped her out at the official launch.

I think she could maybe do with a new calendar too… Their current one (see screenshot on left in case they fix it) seems to be a day out. It’s Friday the 13th Feb tomorrow – there’s no Saturday the 13th Feb, well, at least not this year…

My guess is that there’s a developer somewhere that doesn’t realise that the day of the week returned by the function that retrieves the royal appointments is for weeks that start on a Sunday and not a Monday…

(PS – Oooh, Friday the 13th – do the Hogs Back Brewery still do their special brew on such dates?)

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Brewed up a barley wine yesterday evening with another mash-tun busting effort. This one has been brewed as a celebration ale for the 100th monthly “handicap run” by my running club – I was tempted to try for an OG of 1.100, but even I can’t squeeze that much into a 24l mashtun without taking the outturn right down to less than 4 gallons!

So here’s the deal:

7kg Maris Otter
140g Black malt
100g Torrefied Wheat

Mash 66C for 2hrs

320g Brown Sugar
180g Amber Candi Sugar

Hops:
Target (9% slightly old 2006 crop) – 32g, 90min
Fuggles (4.4%) – 20g, 90min
Fuggles (4%) – 50g, 90min

Fuggles (4%) – 50g, 15min

Irish moss at 15min

Pitch 2 packets S04

All went very well and hit 20.5litres at 1.086, and should have a bitterness about 60IBU or so – lost a load of wort to the 150g of hops in there, but a decent enough outturn nevertheless. The yeast has really kicked off too – big fluffy merangue top just 16 hours after pitching.

Not bothering with temperature control on this one as the large 6G fermenter doesn’t actually fit in the fridge…

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