Traditional Bock

If you don’t know anything about the Bock beer style, here’s a briefing: It is a darker-bodied, high-alcohol lager style from Germany. It was originally brewed by 14th century Roman Catholic monks to be high in food-value and nutrients, as they pretty much survived on it during Lent. So, you see, not even monks gave up drinking for Lent.

This one is brewed by homebrewer Alex Drobshoff from California.

From the bottle packaging…

Alex’s brew is a bright copper German inspired bock with a complex, full bodied mouthfeel. Hints of rich plum and cherry aromas paired with its toasty, malt flavor make this the perfect beer to linger over on a cool evening.

1. Pouring the Beer

Poured into a fairly standard clear glass mug, the kind a bar gives you when you order a pitcher with your friends.

2. Appearance

The head was fairly large-sized bubbles, light beige in color, almost like a Coca-Cola. It dissipated quickly leaving some white lacing up the sides of the mug. Cloudiness was non-existent and the color was coppery-brown, similar in hue to a Dos Equis Ambar or Yuengling.

3. Aroma

It smells primarily of malt, with a bit caramel and toffee.

4. First Sip

This is a sweet beer. Unfermented sugars definitely take the lead right away, and then the mild peppery nice of the high alcohol content (6.8%) make their way across the tongue

5. Mouthfeel

Mouthfeel is fairly full; whereas it is low in carbonation it has significant body.

6. Finish

This beer starts sweet, followed by a bit of alcohol pep, and a lingering finish. Not very dry and for that reason, not exactly the kind of beer you would sit around drinking several of.

from my series of Samuel Adams Longshot 2008 Tasting notes:
Part I: Cranberry Wit
Part II: Traditional Bock

The Samuel Adams Longshot Competition is one of the coolest things happening in homebrewing. This competition occurs once a year and is open to anyone (including Samuel Adams employees, who are given a homebrewing kit upon hiring). The winner of the competition gets his or her beer brewed and distributed by Samuel Adams (Boston Brewing Company). They even put an illustration of the brewer on the label!

I received a 6 pack of this beer as an early birthday present (September 30th) and will be posting tasting notes from the 3-way tie winning beers from in the 2008 competition.

About the 2008 winners from the Samuel Adams website:

Congratulations to Alex Drobshoff of California for being crowned the 2008 Samuel Adams® American Homebrew Contest™ National Champion! Alex’s Traditional Bock will appear in the LongShot® mix 6-pack beginning in April alongside Mike McDole’s Double IPA.

The third brew in the Longshot package will be a Cranberry Wit created by Carissa Sweigart, winner of the Samuel Adams employee homebrew competition. Carissa’s beer was chosen by over 1,111 beer lovers at the 2008 Great American Beer Festival™ from among the 3 employee homebrew finalist. Congratulations Carissa!

This year’s LongShot competition yielded 1,367 entries from just under 1,000 homebrewers! This is proof positive that homebrewing is alive and well!

Cranberry Wit

This one is brewed by the Samuel Adams employee Carissa Sweigart from Massachusetts.

From the bottle packaging…

Brewed with ingredients signature to Carissa’s home of Massachusetts this Cranberry Wit is spiced with a blend of cinnamon, orange peel, coriander and grains of paradise, and finished with a touch of cranberry. This bright, fruity and refreshing brew is reminiscent of an autumn day in New England.

1. Pouring

I felt the closest proper glass I had for this witbier style was a Widmer Hefeweizen glass, which is a long almost champagne flute-like shape. The beer poured cloudy, typical for the style, and there was a bit of sediment in the bottom, which I assumed to be yeast but a dark magenta clump was stuck down there as well, most likely actual cranberry.

2. Appearance

The poured beer has a fairly dense white head, smooth but not creamy. The color is mild golden, darker than most lagers but not quite as much so as the Samuel Adams flagship, Boston Lager. A fair amount of cloudiness was present, typical for most wheat beer styles.

3. Aroma

The gentle, not overpowering, smell of cranberry and subtle spicing dominates over any hops or malt smell.

4. First Sip

The flavor is pretty common for wheat beer: a mild sweetness and full, almost bready taste. This beer does not have a tart or sour quality that you may expect from cranberry. Regarding the cranberry, this beer has a nice level of fruitiness. Conservative levels of fruit in beer usually appeal to me more than beer-flavored fruit juice. There are many fruit wheat beers out there, and usually I don’t go for a second bottle of any of them, but this one has just the right level. The spicing is also moderate and well-done: not quite as complex as say, a tripel, but enough to notice.

5. Mouthfeel

This beer is not super carbonated. It has a pretty full mouthful, but the flavors do not linger a long time.

6. Finish

The initial feel is the fullness of wheat, which quickly dissipates into a rolling cranberry sweetness with a bit of spice. Overall, no individual aspects of the beer jump out, but that is because it is very well-balanced and well-brewed, which is typical for Samuel Adams in my opinion; solid beers but nothing outrageous.

from my series of Samuel Adams Longshot 2008 Tasting notes:
Part I: Cranberry Wit
Part II: Traditional Bock

Once you have installed and ran these programs, you should notice a definite increase in your PC’s productivity.

• AVG – Anti-virus protection. It’s free, it works, and it can be configured to update automatically. Don’t be suckered into that Norton subscription pre-installed on your computer. Set it to auto-update and auto-scan and forget about it. Cost: FREE
• CCleaner – Temp file and registry cleaner. Everytime you visit a website or uninstall a program, bits of information are left all over your computer’s hard-drive. Clean them out with this program whenever your internet browsing gets too slow for you. Cost: Also FREE
• Spybot – Malware (adware & spyware) protection. The internet is full of malicious little scripts designed to do stuff that you don’t want and take you to sites where you don’t want to go. Spybot protects you from them. Scan your computer with it preferably weekly, at least monthly. Cost: NADA
• Auslogics Disk Defrag – You know how things tend to get scattered around your place the more you are there? Your computer does the same thing, with bytes of data. Get things orderly again with this program and you should be able to get at your data a bit quicker. Run it once a month. Cost: GRATIS

There you have it. Free & easy PC maintenance that should help you get back to the high-speed surfing of the questionable sites that slowed your computer down in the first place.

Here’s an eclectic little assortment of some web sites I stumbled across recently that I’ve found useful for my latest web development projects.. some of them are just entertaining or interesting:

Folders4Gmail for Greasemonkey – Keep your gmails organized. I like to build folders for individual web site projects and I also find it useful to maintain a “Follow-up” for mails that I cannot immediately respond to and “Bills” folder which I don’t like to look at.

Blog Link – Adds your blog feed to your LinkedIn profile.

DevTips, a site aiming to make you a better web developer one tip at a time, offers this css tip on how to design circles without images.

stock.xchng – a large (and free) stock photography site. Designers: Start putting some models with headsets on your web site now! (joke, but be sure to checkout Headset Hotties)

and for you twitter fiends..  27 Twitter Tools to Help You Find and Manage Followers. I found wefollow particularly useful; you enter categories you want to be listed under, and then watch the twitter notifications flood your emailbox Friendorfollow is pretty nice as well; see who among your followers and followings reciprocates.

Most of these links can also be found on my Delicious page.

Firefox Plugins which all work with the latest version of Firefox.

• Colorzilla – This one is great for graphic and/or web designers. Colorzilla lets you eyedropper sample any color code on any website in RGB, HSV and additional formats.
• Cooliris – If you are into graphics or photography, this is for you. Cooliris transforms your browser into a full-screen 3D wall for searching, viewing, and sharing images and graphics.
• Delicious Bookmarks – Adds buttons which allow me to easily bookmark pages to my Delicious account, which then feeds into my FriendFeed, which then posts to my Twitter.
• FoxyTunes – Adds play controls for iTunes to your browser’s status bar. Who wants to minimize their browser just to pick a new song? Now you don’t have to. Btw, if you are into the music network thing.. here are my last.fm or blip.fm profiles
• Screengrab – Does just that, in jpg or png format.
• StumbleUpon – Adds a toolbar, which I am usually not crazy about, but this one allows for very easy focused browsing of the web. You start a StumbleUpon account, enter your interests (i.e. web design, programming, and graphics) and then one-click browse away through related sites. I have my Stumble account linked to FriendFeed so I can share my “I like it!” pages via Twitter.
• Web Developer – Another toolbar yeah, I know : ( .. but suck it up (and/or disable it when not in use) Web Developer provides a great set of features for viewing html source code, dealing with forms, images, etc. However, I find the CSS editor to be extremely useful. You can split any page with css into two panes (one is the css and one is the preview), view stylesheet edits instantaneously, and then save the newly edited stylesheet. It’s really great for editing WordPress themes, or any theme for that matter.

Greasemonkey Scripts: first you download the Greasemonkey plugin.. then add the others.

• Greasemonkey – Allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript.
• AutoPagerize – Eliminates the need to click “More”, “Next”, or any other page navigation on most websites… just keep scrolling down!
• Better FriendFeed – Displays extended user profile information on FriendFeed.
• Better Gmail 2 – (requires Greasemonkey) Enhances Gmail with a compilation of useful features like hierarchical labels, macros, file attachment icons, and more.
• Twitter Search Results - Displays recent relevant tweets in a short list before your Google search results

Here’s some stuff I found interesting and/or useful recently:

• Phpbb is a nice solution for people looking to add a forum community to their site. It is open source, highly customizable, and quick to install.
• FlashChat is a chatroom program that is fairly robust, quick and easy to setup, plus it integrates with the the phpbb user database mentioned above, saving your users from filling out two registrations.
• Fawnt provides a nice list of downloadable free fonts.
• Tutorial9 has a photoshop tutorial to help you “Design an Epic Fantasy Scene“. Perhaps you may want to make it Celtic inspired for St. Patrick’s Day.
• Spoonfed Design has a huge list of 110+ Awesome Resources for Popular Adobe Products.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day

The following is my notes on a recent completed brew: a  robust porter. This personal favorite is an old beer style, of British origin, characterized by a dark color, a fair amount of roastiness, and mild to firm hop bittering. For reference to commercial beers, it would fit somewhere between a Newcastle and a Guinness,  a Northern brown ale and dry stout, respectively.  Porters are not all that common in the US anymore, although that is changing. Historically, several of the founding fathers of the United States had recipes for a porter-like ale. Also, I find it interesting that this was considered the beer of the working class manual laborers of Great Britain, hence the name, porter.

In the name of experimentation, I decided to split this batch into two beers at bottling time. One half I left as a standard robust porter and the other half I dubbed a Mexican Coffee porter. To accomplish this, I added a few tablespoons of cocoa powder, a pinch of cinnamon, and 2 cups of cold-brewed coffee. Cold-brewed coffee is created by leaving coffee grounds in water overnight in the fridge, which are then filtered out. The resulting coffee is very smooth, and acid-free; it really allows the flavor of the bean to shine through. I recommend trying it, if you are a coffee-lover.

I submitted a few of these beers into the Coconut Cup homebrew competition in Miami, FL under the “specialty beer” category because of the extra ingredients. I was not able to attend unfortunately, but recently received my scoresheets in the mail. My score averaged out to 36/50 which is not bad, but not medal-worthy. Both judges seemed to think I had a bit too much coffee flavor and aroma and not enough body and mouthfeel. Next time I will cold brew with fewer beans and probably increase the malt extract level for more body. I also intend to add more cinnamon and cocoa because they were almost indetectable in the finished product.

For those seeking further edification, I have included some further details:

• Scoresheet1 (pdf)
• Scoresheet2 (pdf)
• ProMash recipe report (html)

Here are some resources for learning more about the porter beer style:

• Ratebeer’s Top Porters
• BeerAdvocate’s detailed Porter description
• Wikipedia: Porter (beer)

Please feel free to comment or email if you have any further questions.

This photoshop tutorial demonstrates a quick and easy way to make a subject pop out of an otherwise boring photograph. It is roughly based on the look of a Lensbaby camera attachment, which is essentially a second lens on an adjustable accordian type housing. This produces an effect of one small, focused ovoid section surrounded by heavy lens distortion and aberration.

The first step is choosing the right photo. This method works well on product photographs, portraits, and some landscapes. Choose an image which has one main element to which you would like to add some drama.

Always begin any image editing with Layer>Duplicate Layer so you can start over if you choose.

Step 1. With the duplicate layer selected, press “q” to enter the Quick Mask mode. You will not notice any changes yet, but that is ok. Now press “g” to select the Gradient Tool, and make sure to choose the Radial gradient setting.

Step 2. Decide which area you want to define as the subject, click and drag from the center of this object and outward in any direction. It may take a few undos to get it exactly how you want, but the space covered roughly by the red gradient circle will be the area in focus on your final image.

Step 3. Press “q” to exit Quick Mask mode. There should be a selection circle around the subject of the photo. This is the part of the image that will remain in focus.

Step 4. Choose Filter>Blur>Lens Blur. Adjust the Radius slider until the area outside the focal point is slightly blurred. Use restraint, you don’t want to over do it.

Now your image has the look of a photo taken with a low aperture setting. The next few steps will add a simulated lens distortion look.

Step 5. Choose Filter>Blur>Radial blur. Adjust the Amount slider to somewhere in the range of 7 to 11, and select Zoom for the blur method. Do not click OK yet. Adjust the blur center grid so that the smallest central intersection dot is roughly in the same area of the panel as the focal point of your image. Now click OK.

Step 6. Select the entire image pressing ctrl-A.

Step 7. Add Filter>Distort>Lens correction. Pull the Chromatic Aberration sliders to the left. Play around with them until you find a look you like, just keep the sliders left of center.

Bingo there you have it. A Lensbaby look on a digital image.
From here you may want to Sharpen or maybe Add Noise to make it look more film authentic.

For more examples of Lensbaby photography, visit this Flickr group.
Thank you. Please leave comments/critiques.