The Renaissance Programmer

Posted on Saturday, September 22, 2018

Brew 1: Kama Citra Session IPA

Category: brewing Tags: brews ipa

It's been a long time since I've made the time to brew beer; over a year, in fact. So it's time to start again. I'm going to reset my "brew counter", so this is brew number 1.

This is a kit beer, from MoreBeer, called Kama Citra.

I brewed it in a Robobrew v3 (the first time using it!), and I'll write more about that later.

Recipe:

Grains

  • 9 lbs Rahr 2-Row
  • 1 lb Caramel 40

Hops

  • 0.5 oz Centennial (60 min)
  • 1 oz Cascade (20 min)
  • 1 oz Cascade (10 min)
  • 2 oz Citra (flamout + 10 minutes)

Dry Hops

  • 1 oz Citra
  • 1 oz Cascade

Yeast

  • One package Nottingham

Mash Schedule

  • Sacc rest: 66 C for 60 minutes (15 L)
  • Mashout: 75 C for 10 minutes
  • Sparge: A bunch of water from 55 C to 75 C. See notes.
  • Cooling: immersion chiller with ice bath recirculation

Log

Brew date: 2018-09-22

  • Liquid in fermenter: 18 L.
  • O.G. 1.035 (!) (Target was 1.050)
  • Pitching temperature: 20 C
  • Time to onset of fermentation: 2 hours

Notes

This was the first time using the Robobrew, and not everything went smoothly. (Over all, I really like the Robobrew though!) The mash out took a very long time; I'm not sure if it's because I used two plates for the bottom of the malt pipe, or if the malt was ground to finely. The sparge took well over an hour. I'll have to do some research to see what other people have done with this.

Posted on Friday, September 21, 2018

Using SQLite Instead of CSV

Category: skills Tags: cli sqlite

I hate CSV files. They seem like a simple and easy way to store data when you first get started, but they quickly become unwieldy. If you have more data than fits in 80 characters per row, or if you need to quote some of the data elements, or if you need to feed your CSV file to other programs you start to lose whatever advantages you thought you were getting in the first place.

There are programs that let you do SQL like queries on a CSV file, but if you are going to go that route, why not go the whole way?

So I've decided to try an experiment. Instead of using CSV or flat text files to store data, I'm going to use sqlite3 for a while and see what happens. I'll keep a directory ~/data in which I'll keep the data files.

So next time I need to make a list of TAs? Into a database. I imagine that I'll write a few scripts to make common things easy, but I don't know what they are yet. Check back in a few weeks or so.