Jim’s Homebrew Forum Newsletter
February 2007
The long and winding road…
It seems a long, long time ago that the frustration of my failure to find a decent UK-based homebrew community on the internet resulted in the somewhat rash decision to start my own! From the early days of only a handful of members, the forum has now become, arguably, the most successful UK-based homebrew forum on the internet.
Following our initial success we bought our own domain name and web-hosting package and are now independent from the vagueries of free forum hosts (see Reg’s article later for all the sordid details). Thanks to advertising revenue, the forum is self-sufficient and therefore our future is secure – we will be reinvesting any earnings over and above hosting costs into the community that has been built up.
This occasional newsletter is part of the process of keeping members informed and entertained and also bringing in new members (not to mention roping a few lapsed members back to the fold!). To sign up for future newsletters, add your email address to our phplist here.
I hope you enjoy this first issue!
Jim
Recipe of the Month
Reg starts us off with a refreshing all grain recipe..
Winter brew temptations:- Why not try something
lighter?
Now that Christmas is well and truly out of the way,
more than one Beer Kit member will probably be nursing a sore head from
trying to finish off that, by now dreaded, winter brew. We’ve all done it;
that dark recipe with the extra scoop of chocolate malt and half a Christmas
pudding in it that seemed such a good idea at the time. What-is-more, we
have carefully ignored the calculations that could easily have told us that
the resulting brew would have the specific gravity of a small planet; in
fact we have even poured in that spare half-tin of molasses we inherited
from great aunt Sheila in that vain search for the perfect festive brew.
Perhaps it is a side effect of drinking our efforts that makes us forget
that something with the kick of a haemorrhoidal mule and the consistency of
thirsty camel spit is unlikely to be it.
We at Jim’s have therefore decided to offer a
robust, tasty and only sensibly strong hair of the seasonal dog in the shape
of Plummer’s Principal. A medium red sipping ale with the pleasant tang of
Goldings hops making it reminiscent of Kentish brews such as Shepherd Neame
Spitfire.
The Grist:
4500 grammes pale malt,
250 grammes crystal malt,
50 grammes roasted barley.
In the Copper:
75g Goldings in the boil to bitter with
5 grammes of Irish Moss,
25g Goldings after 75 minutes for
flavour.
The Microbes:
This recipe is well suited to easy
yeasts such as Gervin English Ale.
Most sensible all grain mashing and sparging methods
will work well with this brew. I’ve tended not to strike too hot and to
apply extra insulation to my mash tun to ensure a relatively narrow range of
temperatures in the mash tun. With care, I have managed to keep mash temps
between 67.5 at the start and no lower than 64 ºC by the end of the mash.
Not starting too hot has kept a little sweetness in the flavour of the brew.
With minimal ingredients, there’s very little to go
wrong if you’re new to all grain brewing. If you’re worried about making
mistakes, a two-gallon wine fermenter can be used and by cutting all the
ingredients to 40% only a kilo of the main malt need be expended whilst you
try the recipe out.
Here’s to a happy year’s drinking.
Reg
Forum Gossip
Daab reviews the Hot Topics from Jim’s Homebrew Forum!
Steve Flack Finally Builds New Brewery
After a few problems with Parcel Force and UK customs (http://jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=27507#27507)
Steve produces his first brew on his new system, it fell a few months behind schedule and there were a couple of teething problems with temperature control but by the time this goes to press Steve will probably already have had a sneaky sample.
Read about it here http://jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3033
Southern Water, Water Hardness Report Available Online
(Do any other areas offer this facility? Let us know.)
Bitter_Dave discovers a handy facility on Southern Waters website, does your water authority offer this service, let us know by posting on the forum or dropping us an e-mail at forumadmin@jimsbeerkit.co.uk
Kearnage Adds A Cornelius Keg To His Setup With a Little Help From Forum Members and the Famous 'Norm'
There are lots of posts on JHBF about Cornelius kegs, this is a particularly good one, Kearnage asks the questions: -
“I've been reading around the forums and it appears to me that the general consensus is to enter the 'corni' world and get one, if not more, corni kegs.
1. What else will I need in terms of gauges/regulators/connectors?
2. Do you need to leave the gas supply on all the times or can you pressurise and then turn off, leaving enough pressure to serve the entire contents?”
Follow one members learning process into the world of Corni Kegs with a little help from the mysterious Ebay seller Normannumpa.
Covering conception to birth so to speak this thread covers initial purchase to the pouring of the first pint. Very useful for wanabee Corni users.
In A
Shock Move, Jim Buys New Equipment for his brewery, the first since 1973
Presumably to dispel the myth of Northern thrift, Jim expands his brewery by buying a shiny new 33L stainless steel boiler and Beer (Cider) engine. (despite previously claiming he is; “exceptionally tight fisted and bone idle to boot!” see his quote here - http://jimsbeerkit.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?p=15072#15072
and follow Jims spending spree here
The Great Spag Bol Debate
How Do You Make Yours? Ingredients favoured by our forum members include
worcestershire sauce, bacon, carrots, chicken livers, Tabasco, celery,
nutmeg, garlic, Chilean merlot, and MILK
Forum Hall of Fame
Who are the gobbiest forum members – find out below in the latest post-count rankings!
|
No |
Name |
Joined |
Posts |
|
1 |
02 Sep 2005 |
6224 |
|
|
2 |
18 Nov 2005 |
3269 |
|
|
3 |
22 Aug 2004 |
1932 |
|
|
4 |
17 Dec 2004 |
1818 |
|
|
5 |
03 Jul 2006 |
1757 |
|
|
6 |
09 Jun 2006 |
1201 |
|
|
7 |
29 Dec 2005 |
874 |
|
|
8 |
01 May 2006 |
849 |
|
|
9 |
23 May 2006 |
815 |
|
|
10 |
21 May 2006 |
689 |
(Let’s face it; you weren’t really surprised at the result). The record members-on-line-at-any-one-time continues to grow, with the current record standing at 48 on the 31st of January (and yes, Roadrunner missed it again!).
Last Runnings
Reg finishes off our inaugural newsletter with his own very personal take on life, the universe and forum migration
Of mice and (extremely tired and stressed) men…
…and
maybe some promises and piecrusts too.
In the unlikely circumstances that you were in any doubt, I can confirm that
transferring Jim’s Home Brew Forum from one spot to another on the internet
without the co-operation of our free forum provider was, shall we say, an
interesting task.
Those avid followers of English jurisprudence amongst our members, of which
I am certain there are many, will be aware of the legal principle of
volenti non fit injuria. This broadly states that if you do something of
your own free will, then, in the eyes of the law, you cannot be hurt. I have
made a personal note in my diary to ask the next high court judge I see if
he would ‘like to step this way’ before punching him on the nose in a mild
hope of enlivening a debate towards constitutional change.
It may surprise you that this is not the only wholly false assumption on
which we base much of our waking lives. There are many urban myths that
proliferate, not least through the medium of the internet. Apparently, men
think about sex once every seven seconds. Having been blessed with both X
and Y chromosomes and a pulse, I can at least offer anecdotal evidence of a
severe underestimate. If you deem it necessary, I can bring forward Mrs. Reg
as a character witness. In fact, I am resonantly sure that the only reason
that our fine island is not knee deep in the offspring of the male
reproductive drive is that the female of our species has discovered that
nagging about domestic chores is perhaps the most effective contraceptive
know to either sex. In fact, Mrs. Reg has only to holler, ‘have you checked
through your expenses receipts for this month?’ to ensure a night of slumber
undisturbed by the kind of interruptions my unchecked ardour is likely to
bring.
Another myth that has developed over the years is that the internet is a
simple and wholly altruistic place. It is, in fact, a shifting-sands
hellhole dictated by often unsavoury commercial interest and competing
methods of doing things that have come about for the simple reason that the
wide and wicked web was never designed to do the things that we expect of it
as a matter of course today. The internet as we know it is the brainchild of
an Englishman called Tim Berners-Lee. I tell you this not out of some form
of misbegotten patriotism, but a perfect example of my countrymen’s capacity
to come up with a great idea, then give it away for free! However, the fact
remains that an unassuming research scientist working at the Centre European
pour Recherche Nucliaire, or CERN for short, (the big, go-fast, ring thingy
for complete clarity), came up with a system for linking differing computer
systems together to facilitate the exchange of scientific data… and then
failed to patent it. As a result the dubya, dubya, dubya as it is possibly
known within the walls of the Whitehouse is very good as a medium for
publishing scientific papers and frankly, reasonably shyte at doing anything
else. In fact our own forum uses no less than four internet languages to
provide its services to you. These are HTML, PHP, CSS and SQL. I will bore
you with none of the details of these acronyms bar one. There is a further
myth proliferated by Star-Trek-watching creatures whom I sometimes
uncharitably describe as anorak lining, that SQL stand for structured query
language. In a moment of blinding clarity at three o’clock one not too
distant morning, it became perfectly clear to me that this intractable
database language was called sodding quizzical library. I have already
applied to register this trade mark in the hopes of offering just a hint of
the altruistic openness claimed by the ‘for’ lobby of the wasted
weekend’s work.
The second major issue with the internet is that WE ARE NOT ALONE! We
ordinary members of the species homo-occasionally-sapiens are surrounded by
a species of internet monkeys who cruise its highways looking for
opportunities to muck things up for other people, all too often in the name
of some perverse moral code that says if they did not do this kind favour
for an unwitting site operator, somebody else would. This tendency is, of
course, not born out of any form of righteous concern. It is the product of
exactly the same urge that makes us all pick scabs, scratch itches, push
large red buttons marked ‘only for use in the case of thermonuclear
emergency’ and slow down to rubberneck at road traffic accidents whilst
complaining loudly about the behaviour of the driver in front. The only
consolation for the remainder of us is that most of these simians are just
as likely to pull the trigger of a crossbow whilst staring down the barrel
to see which end the bolt will come out of. This leads me to my next
revelation: DARWIN WAS WRONG…! Not about evolution per se, but in the
suggestion that extinction does not represent progress.
Having taken all of these circumstances into account, Jim, Andy, Chris and I
have worked many unsociable hours to preserve both the 17,000 past posts on
everything to pet poodles to mash tun design in the old forum as well as
setting up a working forum on our own web space which already has increased
our archive by another 2,000 posts. The good news is that we have come as
far as we have through careful planning for the future. It is not possible
to know all the reasons for the deterioration of service from forumforfree.
I personally cannot ignore the fact that their existence has allowed us to
develop from a few friends talking about our favourite pastime into a
community of over 300 people sharing a breadth of knowledge that had
certainly helped me over the last two years. Yet we did plan for this change
and once again the UK has its own, well-supported, homebrew forum. I hope
that our using the occasional Google ad to cover our costs is not too much
of a trial for our members as that seems to be one of the ways in which our
free forum provider used to make its money.
All of us involved in the new
www.jimsbeerkit.co.uk site
have expansive plans to improve the entire resource for you. You’ll have to
be patient, remember that we are those uninjured volunteers currently being
chased by a howling mob of bloody-nosed high court judges through a street
near you.
Reg