Wild Hops

Finally found some wild hops down the road.

Might try collect them soon.

Jennings Sneck Lifter

On the bottle it says...

"In northern dialect sneck means door latch and a sneck lifter was a man’s last sixpence which enabled him to lift the latch of a pub door and buy himself a pint, hoping to meet friends there who might treat him to one or two more."

Who knew you could learn words and phrases from a beer bottle.

Pours a deep ruby red colour with a good tanned head. Aroma is toasted caramel, fruitcake and a little coffee. Tastes of toasted malts, little woody notes, and perhaps a hint of chocolate malt. Moderate sweetness. Nice hoppy bitterness. Smooth mouth feel. After taste is light bitter roasted linger. 5,1% strength.

Rating: Good.
As you can see am a professional at rating beer
Overall: A good enjoyable premium bitter.

Tsingtao Beer

640ml Bottle imported by Halewood international uk.

Pours a clear pale golden colour with short lasting white head. Aroma is floral hops, corn and a little barley. Tastes similar to pilsners from main land Europe. Sweet malts and corn. Slightly metallic hint. Soft watery mouth feel.  After taste is dry and clean. 4,7% strength.

Rating: Not bad.
As you can see am a professional at rating beer
Overall: Nothing special, but surprisingly its a damn refreshing lager.

Tweetdeck on xfce / ubuntu

If you're a twitter fan new to xfce or (x)ubuntu, attracted to the efficient and fast environment, you will notice tweetdeck is useless. The buttons show up, but nothing else.

Unfortunately it seems tweetdeck only knows how to store username/password information on Gnome and KDE. When you start tweetdeck from the terminal you are given: "Unknown desktop manager, only Gnome and KDE are supported".

Fortunately there is a way around this with a little bash script.
First make sure 'launch gnome services on start up' - option found in session and startup - is ticked. It should already be ticked if your an ubuntu user - if your not I'm guessing you need the Gnome keyring service installed for this to work.



Next, the script. For (x)ubuntu users you can simply use this:

#!/bin/bash
GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID="gnomeisgo" /opt/TweetDeck/bin/TweetDeck

Copy the above into your favourite text editor and save as "tweetdeck.sh". Once saved, right click the file, and open properties. Look in permissions and tick "allow this file to run as a program" to give it permission to run. Now click the script to run tweetdeck. Done.

For other distributions try this:

#!/bin/bash
GNOME_KEYRING=`ps x | grep gnome-keyring | awk '$5 ~/^gnome-keyring/ {print $1}'
`
DIRNAME="`dirname $0`"

GNOME_DESKTOP_SESSION_ID=$GNOME_KEYRING $DIRNAME/TweetDeck

From www.mindby.com. I'm sure it works for openSuse.

Happy tweeting.

The complete joy of homebrewing

Writen by Charlie Papazian. Known to many as the homebrewers bible it has sold more then one million copies over 25 reprintings and 3 editions. After an introduction the book is split into three parts: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Each section has adequate information. There is, in the beginners section, a step-by-step guide. If your totally new to beer there is a style guide too. In intermediate and advanced there are recipes, various methods, ingredient details, helpful charts, and even a bit of yeast science.

Some of my first beers were from the intermediate recipes. They deal with kits, extracts, small amounts of malt, adjuncts and hops. I did a Cushlomachree stout (page 208) from a coopers stout kit and it turned out to be, up to then, the best I made.

The advanced section deals with all grain brewing. Water adjusting, culturing yeast, grinding grain, mash tuns, lauter-tuns and different mashing methods. If it goes over your head dont worry Mr Papazian writes: Relax. Don’t worry. Have a homebrew!

As a reference, I cannot stress how useful this book is. When I'm looking to buy ingredients or following a recipe, I can always check the hop chart, style guideline or look up an adjunct. Just last year I wanted to try using pears from our garden tree. I looked up fruits and found instruction on how to pasteurize fruit (page 89-90). If your starting to be a serious homebrewer there are three and a half pages on growing hops in appendix 7 (page 353).

If your new to brewing or looking for an excellent reference I recommended it.

Jennings Cumberland Ale

Pours a clear golden amber colour with a little short lived head. Aroma is floral hops, caramel malts and a slight metallic tang. Tastes of sweet caramel and biscuit - bread notes. After taste has a good bitterness linger. 4,7% strength.

Rating: Okay.
As you can see am a professional at rating beer
Overall: Average bitter.