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	FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
		Digest Janitor: pbabcock at hbd.org


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Contents:
  Have I Missed Something? ("Phil Yates")
  Biere peche, sorta (stencil)
  re: One other thing that's going to kill HBD.... (Dion Hollenbeck)
  HTML redux ("Pat Babcock")
  Re: One other thing that's going to kill HBD.... (Scott Alfter)
  oxygen permeation/reports of the death of HBD are somewhat exaggerated ("steve.alexander")
  Re: One other thing that's going to kill HBD.... ("Greg 'groggy' Lehey")
  Secondary Hopping w/Pellets ("Brian Dougan")


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JANITORs on duty: Pat Babcock (pbabcock at hbd dot org), Jason Henning,
                  and Spencer Thomas



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Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2007 12:42:13 +1100
From: "Phil Yates" <phil.yates at bigpond.com>
Subject: Have I Missed Something?

>As stupid as a Peltier cooler is, it can't hold a candle to conducting a
>boil by tossing hot rocks into a wooden barrel in the misguided belief that
>the old ways are always worth revisiting.

Brian (sorry, Bwian)
Worth revisiting? How else do you do it?
 Is there a new technology available for keeping water on the boil?
I guess you're also going to tell me there are better ways to crack malt 
than using a sledge hammer?

Phil 



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Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 19:13:54 -0500
From: stencil <etcs.ret at verizon.net>
Subject: Biere peche, sorta

I tend to brew more by what's in the inventory than by stylistic
considerations.  The fruit was the last surviving sack of the 40 or so
pounds I had cadged from the Produce manager at the local Price
Chopper back in Aug of '05.  This was all stonefruit - peaches, plums,
nectarines, apricots, and pluots, in about that order of bulk - that I
parboiled, skinned, pitted, and froze in plastic sacks.  Some ended up
in a pretty fair melomel, and some in a fruit-fortified ale like this.
This time around I opted to get rid of a partial sack of brown sugar,
caramelizing it and tossing the black syrup in at the end of the boil.
Fermentibles:
Weyermann Pilsener Malt - 8#
Munton's Wheat Malt - 1#
Weyermann CaraFoam - 1/2#
Brown Sugar. caramelized - 1#
Stonefruit, mixed, frozen and thawed - 6#
Hops:
Northern Brewer - 1oz fwh ("7.7%AA"  but '04 harvest)
Liberty 1-1/2oz 20min (homegrown, no AA spec)
Yeast:
Fermentis Safale 004, dregs of previous 11-gal batch in ca 1 gal beer
Mash:
Dough-in 6qt tapwater, 55F - overnight rest
Infuse 6qt 170F, rest at 100F - 15 min
Direct heat, rest at 125F - 10 min
Infuse 6qt boiling, rest at 145F - 20 min
Direct heat, rest at 158F - 20 min to conversion complete
Sparge yielded 8-1/2gal at SG1038; 2-hour boil and caramel addition
gave 6-1/2 gal at SG1058.  
On brewday, added 2 campden tablets and 1/4 tsp pectinase to thawed
fruit.   On brewday+2, put fruit, a stick of toasted butternut (about
5-in long, ca 1-in square,) and a handful of SS fender washers in a
paint strainer bag and tossed it all in the fermenter.  On brewday+13
(today) racked 6-1/2 gal at SG1004 (!) to carboy.  Taste is neutral,
not at all 'beer-like', only mildly bitter.  The low SG indicates that
the sulfite was not very effective, but whatever ate all that sugar
seems to have been fairly benign.  Time wil tell.

stencil sends
[535.2mi, 86.4deg] AR


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Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2007 10:41:19 -0700
From: Dion Hollenbeck <hollen at woodsprite.com>
Subject: re: One other thing that's going to kill HBD....


Bev Blackwood said:
>Is the fact it rejects MIME encoded e-mails.  Time for HBD to catch
>up to the modern world.  I can post to my club e-mail list (volunteer
>moderated) without fear of rejection and same goes for AHA Tech-
>Talk.  Last conversation I heard regarding HBD among the AHA folk was
>that it's dying a slow death... well, getting posts rejected
>regularly only speeds that process.  I realize this is a volunteer
>effort, but technical currency is an essential element to being
>relevant.
>
>  -BDB2

The HBD rejects HTML (as do all well run lists) for two important reasons:

1 - HTML can contain executable code and if sent to you, could infect 
your computer with a virus, or install a trojan.

2 - Email clients that send out HTML messages send out the same text 
twice, once in plain text, and also once in HTML, thereby putting 
over 50% more characters in the archives, for NO additional 
content.  If Pat were to change the policy, his already strapped 
servers will be more strapped for disk space, and this might just kill the HBD.

No, Bev, I strongly disagree with you.  Letting HTML through has a 
much better chance of killing the HBD than rejecting it.  Any 
responsible list admin will NOT allow HTML in order to protect the 
list members.  The list admins of which you speak are doing you a 
dis-service by allowing HTML on your club mail list.

And, why should the internet be clogged by HTML bloat which is not 
necessary to convey extra meaning in mailing lists?  Sure, it's fine 
for fancying up Web pages, but mailings lists do not *need* it.

And why should this cause you any problems?  Just set your Email 
client to send only plain text and you will be 100% compatible with 
everything.  Send out HTML, and you are the one causing yourself the 
problems.  And if you have an Email client that forces you to do some 
sort of conversion (as you speak of) then you have a braindead Email 
client and ought to get a good one that will allow configuration to 
send out plain text as your default.

Just my $0.02 as a list admin of several lists and an internet user 
since about 1982.

Keep up the good work, Pat, and thanks for protecting us from HTML BS.  B-}

regards,
dion

- --
Dion Hollenbeck
Email: hollen at woodsprite.com    Home Page: http://www.woodsprite.com
Brewing Page: http://hbd.org/hollen   Toys: 98 4Runner, 86 4x4 PU



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Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2007 14:02:57 -0500 (EST)
From: "Pat Babcock" <pbabcock at hbd.org>
Subject: HTML redux


Greetings, Beerlings! Take me to your lager...

Bev is correct: the HBD would be better off if it did not reject HTML-encoded 
messages, over 80 character line lengths, etc.; and I have been working on a 
solution. Problem is that I've found other, more pressing issues this year to 
work on. Perfecting the subscriprion probe is about the only programmatic thing 
of the HBD that I have had time to tackle. As many know, I am employed by Ford 
Motor Company, which is struggling to keep its head above the water line. This 
has necessarily removed the luxury of spare time at work as I am one of those 
folks who are deadicated to truning the company and it practices back toward 
reasonability and profitability - this or seek employment elsewhere. My work 
outside of the HBD network is necessary to keep this beast afloat, despite the 
many generous donors the HBD has garnered over the years. This work is also 
necessary to keep my family afloat - all seven of us, and, as my children 
mature and get involved with their lives, my attention is further diverted 
from this beast.

I can only ask for patience. Dion's comments are spot on - the HBD will never 
publish in a format that enables our profit-seeking, phishing, and hacking 
friends in their pursuits; however, it is not unreasonable for Bev and others 
to hope for the day when sending HTML does not result in rejection from the 
queue.

See ya!
Pat Babcock
HBD Chief of Janitorial Services


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Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2007 13:35:39 -0800
From: Scott Alfter <scott at alfter.us>
Subject: Re: One other thing that's going to kill HBD....

Bev D. Blackwood II wrote:
> Is the fact it rejects MIME encoded e-mails.  Time for HBD to catch  
> up to the modern world.  I can post to my club e-mail list (volunteer  
> moderated) without fear of rejection and same goes for AHA Tech- 
> Talk.

MIME encoding is an almost foolproof indicator of two things that don't belong
on the list:

1) File attachments (a security risk to the unfortunate souls who are still
   running Windows, and an annoyance to the rest of us who've moved on to
   something better)
2) HTML (which doesn't belong in email)

There shouldn't be anything attached to your mail unless you've told your
client to attach a file (unless your mail client has been compromised by
malware of some sort), so that leaves HTML as the likely culprit.  I don't want
random people with a poor sense of typography screwing with character sizes,
weights, and colors in the email I receive.

I used to block HTML mail on my personal mail server, but too many clueless
companies don't bother asking if it's OK before they send HTML-infected mail
that you're otherwise expecting to receive (such as invoices for goods
purchased).  It used to auto-reply with an error message, but more than half of
the time the reply address was invalid or unmonitored.

That said, if you insist on cluttering up most of your mail with HTML,
Thunderbird can be set to selectively disable it for selected destinations
(such as HBD).  Under the "General" tab in composition preferecnes, click "Send
Options."  Click the Plain Text Domains tab and add hbd.org to the list.  When
you reply to the list or send a new message to the list, it'll be sent as plain
text without any further manual intervention on your part.

HBD does have some annoyances (such as rejecting non-ASCII ISO-8859-1
characters, several of which are useful in a beer-and-brewing context), but
rejecting HTML email isn't one of them.  On more than one occasion, plain-text
TechTalk has been mangled to the point that the entire digest is one long
run-on paragraph, and I have to "view source" to read it.  That never happens
here.  (I sometimes wonder about the sanity of whoever is making IT decisions
for the AHA.  They should've kept TechTalk plain-text only.  HTML adds nothing
of value to it.)

  _/_  Scott Alfter
 / v \ Visit the SNAFU website today!
(IIGS( http://www.nevadabrew.com/   Top-posting!
 \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden            >What's the most annoying thing on Usenet?



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Date: Mon, 01 Jan 2007 17:29:56 -0500
From: "steve.alexander" <-s at adelphia.net>
Subject: oxygen permeation/reports of the death of HBD are somewhat exaggerated

Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Huh - well it appears that I still only receive 75% of HBDs despite 
disabling
every spamfilter in the path.

Going back almost 2 weeks Nick Nikiforov comments about better bottles ...

 >I just bought another 6 gallon glass carboy recently.[...]

 >One point: How much oxygen is permeated through the rubber bung and air
 >lock? I would be willing to bet that there is more O2 transferred 
through the

I'll take that bet !!!

The bungs transpire essentially zero oxygen.

The topic of oxygen transpiring back through a bubbler comes up periodically
on HBD. Here is my posted calculation from 9 years ago !
 http://hbd.org/hbd/archive/2549.html
So a bubbler could allow up to ~0.2cc of O2 (similar to 1cc of air) to
diffuse into the beer every 3 months or less than a teaspoon of air per 
year.
Thats an unrealistically high worst case estimate.

Now I don't know about "best bottles", but common PET bottles transpire
oxygen at a similar rate per unit area as the ~1cm.sq bubbler, but every
square cm of the bottle surface is diffusing O2 - leading to a total
about 1000 times higher than a bubbler (for a 2L PET). My hunch
is that the best 20L plastic bottles are still one to two orders of 
magnitude
worse than a bubbler in a glass carboy.  I'd like to see their numbers.

 >I would consider trading in my carboy for store credit. Never did feel
 >safe using
 >such a large piece of glass filled with 80 pounds of liquid.

Serious exaggeration there - you can't fit 80# of fermentables into
a 6gal carboy - that exceeds the density of solid sugar. It's more like
45# in reality.

I'm not in love with glass carboys and I sure do WISH that plastic
carboys were useful in brewing and winemaking with much lower weight,
far less breakable and dangerous, and acceptable though generally inferior
clarity. Wishing won't make it so; don't delude yourself by exaggerating
the advantages and minimizing the deficits of plastic. They're fine for
primary fermenters and short term storage, but I wouldn't store beer
or wine in plastics for long esp after fermentation is fading.
- --

I would like to see an upgrade in HBD, but I doubt that it's death is 
imminent.
Just review the last week's HBDs and we see posts on culturing a bottle 
yeast,
peltier coolers, converting mice (the computer type) into sensors.   There
is nothing lacking in the motivation for the existence of this forum.  
To mix
metaphors, and mangle a Harlan Ellison "Star Trek" bit of dialog "Since 
before
your mash cooker burned bright in a garage space, HBD has awaited a 
question".
(City on the Edge of Forever).  I hope it continues to do so well into 
the future.

YES - I would like to see the line-wrap monster and it's mime-munching 
cousin
disappear.   That would be wonderful.   I do have a more pressing and 
perhaps
prescient suggestion - HBD needs a memory.   One complaint I have wrt HBD is
that we rehash the same topics repeatedly.  It's no matter than someone 
wrote
a wonderful treatise on the flavor properties of Fubar hops last 
September; or
that peltier coolers were detailed 14 months ago - the collective has a 
very short
memory and no means to easily access the decade+ of brewing wisdom of 
the HBD.

There have been many systems proposed since the first Plato gui appeared for
organizing information for ready access.  The currently en vogue method is a
wiki.  Wouldn't an HBD wiki be a terrific resource ?  At least to nip 
the common
questions, but also for the collection & organization of deeper topics ?

I've no clue what sort of resources would be required, but in concept it 
looks
like a winner to me.

 -S






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Date: Tue, 2 Jan 2007 11:21:11 +1030
From: "Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at lemis.com>
Subject: Re: One other thing that's going to kill HBD....

On Saturday, 30 December 2006 at  0:26:59 -0600, Bev D. Blackwood II wrote:
> (Oh wait.. I sent this without doing the conversion and it got
> rejected... silly me....) ;-P
> - ---
> Is the fact it rejects MIME encoded e-mails.  Time for HBD to catch
> up to the modern world.  I can post to my club e-mail list (volunteer
> moderated) without fear of rejection and same goes for AHA Tech-
> Talk.  Last conversation I heard regarding HBD among the AHA folk was
> that it's dying a slow death... well, getting posts rejected
> regularly only speeds that process.  I realize this is a volunteer
> effort, but technical currency is an essential element to being
> relevant.

There are certainly some good ideas in the guidelines, like not
attaching unnecessary junk, and limiting line lengths to something
legible.  But I agree, a little more MIME tolerance would be a nice
thing.  Problems I have include not only the inability to include
images, but also:

 - Can't even specify a whole range of URLs, because they're too wide
  for the guidelines.
 - Normally I automatically digitally sign my email messages.  This
  causes them to be rejected.  In my case, about one message out of
  three is rejected because I forget to turn it off.
 - A lot of what we talk about is in German.  But if I put a non-ASCII
  German character in the message, it will be rejected.  Same goes for
  the degree symbol.

Pat, how about it?  Time to reconsider?

Greg
- --
Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.


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Date: Mon, 1 Jan 2007 20:40:22 -0500
From: "Brian Dougan" <dougan.brian at gmail.com>
Subject: Secondary Hopping w/Pellets

I am in the process of a blackened bitter and the recipe I am working
from calls for a hop addition in the secondary.  My question is this;
in the past when I have dry hopped (with fresh hops) before bottling I
have steeped a "hop tea" and then added it to the bottling bucket.
However, with this one I am working with pellets and adding to the
secondary.  Would I just drop the pellets straight into the carboy for
the secondary, or would I be better off working up another version of
a "hop tea" to add to the carboy?

Thanks,
Brian


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