Happy New Beer!

Where I left off last (year) was with my weaker-than-a-pale-ale-should-be brew in crude-but-effective cool box, bubbling away.

My previous batch fermented in a rapid 3 days, which I found out was because of the high temperatures.  With the cool box and the temperature down to a constant 23°C – 24°C, I was hoping to achieve the much read about 7-day fermentation.  That didn’t happen though.

After 4.5 days the bubbling stopped and a hydrometer reading of around 1.010 confirmed that a decent amount of sugar had been consumed and that further fermentation was unlikely.

I didn’t rack it over for maturing immediately though.

Kegging It

At some point after I built the box, but before I started the brew, I flew to Singapore on an AirAsia cheapy and acquired a second hand, reconditioned Cornelius soda-keg.

This 19-litre metal wonder was the answer to my bottling worries where temperature control was a whole different kettle of fish.  The only niggly bit was the CO² tank, which I didn’t get in Singapore because a) it was prohibitively expensive to buy and b) would have been just as expensive to take back with me considering weight and packaging.

I figured, because there’s plenty of bars serving kegged beer here in KK, finding a CO² cylinder wouldn’t be much of a hassle.  But it turned out to be plenty of hassle.

Clock Ticking in the Fermenter

So while I hoped my brew was secretly doing some undetectable fermenting still, I urgently searched for not just a CO² tank, but also a regulator to bring keg and cylinder together.

Leads I followed from friends didn’t yield any results. By day 7 I had to rack over my brew fearing it might start to suffer from the dreaded yeast autolysis. I sanitised the tank and transferred the beer into the keg, being as careful as possible not to splash and oxidise the beer, which could spoil it.

Even though I closed the keg properly, I was fully aware of the fact that the keg doesn’t seal tight unless it’s slightly pressurised.  I hoped that the lid alone would sufficiently keep out air until I could add CO².

Because I had 24 litres of brew and only 19 litres can fit in the keg, I had some spare for bottling, which was great for testing over the coming days to see how the beer matured.  Which it did beautifully.

A couple of days passed and eventually, through a strange set of circumstances, I guy came and dropped off a filled CO² cylinder for me to ‘borrow’ and didn’t ask any money for it.  The next day I found a place that could supply me with a regulator as soon as they got it in stock, which would be the next week.

I opened the keg, and manually blasted the top of the brew with heavier than air CO², hoping it would be sufficient to safeguard the brew until I acquired the regulator.

Regulator Found

Eventually MOX (Malaysian Oxygen) got new regulators in stock.

Marty Nachel’s instructions from Homebrewing for Dummies guided me through the carbonation process and soon had my keg pressurised.  I tested the brew, and it was awesome.  No spoils, no off flavours, just beautiful beer.

My next challenge was issues with carbonation – it foamed too much and had too much CO² in it.  I reread the chapter on carbonation searching for things that I missed.

The Science of Carbonating Beer

My first error was the temperature of the beer.

For CO² to properly dissolve in to the beer, the liquid needs to be cooler than 15°C (60°F), which was about 10°C less than what it was in my cool box.

The only solution was to put the keg in my fridge.  I have a small fridge.  To fit the keg I had to remove all the shelves and the vegetable tray and then I still had to squeeze to close the door. And there wasn’t space for much else – tomato sauce, a few veggies and whatever I could fit in the door.

I propped up the rubber mallet I use for capping bottles onto a box under the fridge door, just to make sure the door didn’t pop open during the night.

My second problem, would I discover as I poured the beer at a ridiculously fast flow rate, was the my duel-gage regulator didn’t have high and low PSI gauges, but instead had a high PSI gauge and a low litre-per-minute gauge.

This is problematic for two reasons – first, depending on the temperature of your beer, you need a relatively low PSI for carbonation – somewhere between 2 to 4 PSI, and secondly when you dispense it the pressure has to be between 5 and 8 PSI.

Because litres-per-minute is volume and PSI is pressure, there is no easy way to convert between the two. And the high PSI gauge is marked from 0 to 3,500, so you can’t exactly fine tune it by only opening the cylinder a bit either.

Through a series of tests over a span of a week, during which I dispensed (and drank) nearly half my keg of beer, I discovered that bringing the flow-rate up to just above where it’s not flowing at all, it’s enough to carbonate the beer sufficiently and dispense the beer without foaming it.

Litres-per-minute,  as I discover in my quest to find a conversion, is used in welding and not for beverages.  Apparently you can swap in a inexpensive, proper gauge (which would be marked from 0 to 50 or 60 psi) on the regulator – assuming you can find it.

Party Keg

“Stop drinking it”, the Jounro would scold me during my ‘tests’. “Didn’t you say you want to share it?”

I did.  The beer was good; real good. But what’s the point of real good beer if you can’t share it?

Luckily the Journo’s birthday was coming up.  The perfect opportunity to have some friends over for a braai in celebration of the Journo ageing another year, and, of course, beer.

And so it was that my beer got shared in honour of the Journo’s birthday.  Cake, friends, a braai with good food, and fresh beer on tap, which aside from being a little week (probably something like 3.5% alcohol), got rave reviews.  Does it get any better than this?

Actually, yes it does… But that’s another adventure all together.

I can’t help but notice, with some shock and amazement I might add, that I brewed last in February!  To be fair, that brew did last me almost until May.

It didn’t turn out so great, so I wasn’t confident enough to share it and thus, I slowly sucked down most of 23 litres of not-so-great-but-ok-to-drink beer. Amazing what you can get used to.

Replies to me bemoaning my fate in the forums (and on this blog) pointed to the most likely cause of my imperfect beer to be the high temperatures I tried to brew at. My living room, a.k.a. the brewing room, is a toasty and constant 30°C, except when we’re hit by several warm days in a row, in which case it goes up  to 32°C.

At those temperatures, said my fellow homebrewers on the forums, too much fusel alcohol is produced, which gives it the off-not-quite-like-beer flavours. The other annoying side effect of brewing at such high temperatures is that unless your beer is ice cold, it has head that takes forever to settle.

Try pouring that at a picnic.

Temperature Killer

I researched several inexpensive methods of keeping the fermenter cool and in the end decided to build a cool box based on an actual product I saw for sale on a beer brewing site.

A local stationary shop had Styrofoam sheets that I added my building supplies.  After some serious measuring and careful cutting, a cube took shape tall enough to accommodate my fermenter (with airlock attached) and a soda keg I planned to acquire.

To chill the cube’s interior in the first test, I froze solid a 1.5 litre bottle of water and placed it inside.  One side of the cube is detached and at first, based on the product I saw,  it was the bottom. The rest of the cube was the lid.  However, I think because my rough build doesn’t seal properly (at all), the cold just wafts away through the cracks – the temperature didn’t drop significantly and by morning the bottle of ice was almost room temperature water again.

In the second experiment I used 2 x 1.5 litre bottles, resealed the edges of the cube and flipped it upside down so that cube formed a bowl and the lid was 1 sheet on top. This worked much better and the bottles were still icy the next morning with the temperature inside stable at around 23°C.

Let the Brewing Begin

With my temperature worries solved, it was time to get brewing and my next batch is Cooper’s India Pale Ale.  Last night I went through the motions, sanitised my equipment, readied my water and followed the instruction from Homebrewing for Dummies.

In there they advise not to use the brewing sugars, but they also advise using 2 cans of malt extract to get a fuller body.  Clever me, did neither.

I laboured through carefully watching an hour long boil, infusing bittering hops at the 30 minute mark, and even gently woke up the yeast in luke warm water while the wort cooled down.  The cold top-up water was vigorously added to oxygenate the wort, and then I pitched the yeast at about 24°C.

Of course, only then did I realise I forgot to take a gravity reading (supposed to be done before adding the yeast).  It was 1.020 (or 1.022 after temperature correction) and according to my hydrometer in the finished brew range.  Disaster!

In a flash panic I dissolved 2kg of brewing dextrose in another litre of water and added it to my brew.  Now I have 24 litres of wort, but the gravity went up to an acceptable, although still weak, 1.032 (1.034).  Now I just have to hope my yeasties are super diligent and consume as much sugar as possible.

I put the fermenter to rest and started the clock at about 10pm.

The Morning After

Walking down the stairs this morning, intending to change the ice bottles, I was pleasantly surprised by the rumbling of my cool box. I listened as my brew bubbled away at 5-second intervals.

As I cracked the lid the sweet aroma of the fermentation process promised me great tasting beer – I sure hope that promise will be fulfilled.  The temperature in the box was still around 23°C and my ice bottles had a good core of ice in them, which positively affirms the efficiency of the box.  I swapped the bottles of ice out nevertheless.

Clearly the yeast is healthy and everything so far seems OK.  Now for that pain staking wait.

I recently said goodbye to the Acer Aspire 4920 I was using for a brand new Acer Aspire 4535, a decision I might ultimately regret, time will tell.

As the Acer Aspire 4535 comes with an AMD Turion x2 64-bit processor, I thought this was the ideal opportunity to install a 64-bit operating system to see if 32 vs. 64 means anything to me. So I downloaded Ubuntu 8.10 Jaunty Jackalope 64-bit Edition and installed it.

Without going into detail, the default install went smoothly and everything worked fine. The ATI Radeon HD 3500 graphics card driver was made available, which installed and worked out of the box. Even got desktop effects going without having to tinker around at all. Everything else worked like you’d expect it to.

I started hitting snags when I downloaded new stuff though – Firefox 3.5 was first and installation failed a few times before the 64-bit version worked for me. Maybe I just don’t understand it so well. The next snag came when I tried to install the Flash plugin for Firefox – by default Adobe doesn’t offer an option for 32 or 64-bit versions, so you think you’re merrily downloading the correct software, only to be told “incorrect architecture” when you try to install it.

There is, of course, a workaround for this, but I haven’t gotten to it yet, because I encountered a fatal error when trying to set up dual screens with an extended desktop.

On the Aspire 4920, which has integrated Intel graphics, I had dual monitors working like a charm. I have an Acer (9:6) screen at home which is positioned above the notebook while at work a BenQ (4:3) screen is positioned to the right of the notebook. I think I had to fiddle with Xorg to get it working initially, but I don’t remember it being a pain. Point is, I had it working and Ubuntu intelligently remembered when I was at work and when I was at home, using the correct rez and positioning in each location.

So here I was with Ubuntu 64 on the Aspire 4535 and struggle as I might, dual monitors would not work for me at all. Accessing the properties through Ubuntu’s Display manager makes it hang, and ATI’s Catalyst Control Centrer refuses to give me dual monitor options – even though it happily clones the notebook’s output.

After struggling with it (and a slow internet connect), for a day, combined with tech-fatigue of a mammoth restore and a learning curve with the subtle differences of 64-bit software, I gave up. I’ve decided to go back to 32-bit and see if my life is easier.

However, I will be upgrading to Karmic Koala at the end of the month anyway, so I decided I may as well try Karmic Koala Beta now. So I’m downloading Ubuntu 9.04 Karmic Kuala Beta to give it a run and see if it plays nice with my new lappie.

Watch this space.

After a nail-biting match the Springboks managed to stave off the All Black’s last ditch surge, and won what might as well have been the Tri Nations finals, 32 – 29 to claim the Tri Nations 2009 trophy.

When the South Africans conceded a penalty after just a minute and half of play and the New Zealanders pounced on the scoring opportunity to chalk up 3 points, I had flashes of Brisbane.  4 minutes later the Springboks got awarded a penalty of their own to equalise at 3 all, wiping my doubts.

The Bokke continued and opened up a lead they wouldn’t again relinquish and closed off the first half with a 22-12 lead.

The Springboks stood their ground in the 2nd half and opened up their lead to 17 points.  The All Blacks upped their game and in a particularly brilliant moment where the ball was passed in quick succession by overlapping players, they even looked like the All Blacks we fear-but-love.

Dying Minutes Action

And sure enough, their spirited attack paid dividends – hell, they even managed to win their own line-outs and steal 1 from the Springboks.

With minutes left and the All Blacks within 10 points of the Springboks, Dan Carter kicked from wide over on the left of the field placing the ball perfectly at the flag on far right of the field, where Richie McCaw literally stood waiting, picked it from the air and landed it in the corner with not a Bok in sight.

A move so brilliant, that as much as we hated it happening, the Springbok supporters had to applaud it for its sheer brilliance and flawless execusion.

With very few minutes remaining and the Springbok lead shrunk to only 3, the game became almost unbearable,  every second feeling like a minute, slowly ticking towards full time.  T All Blacks relentlessly pounded the Springbok defense, trying to punch a hole.  When the game time ran out the All Blacks had possession and in an all-or-nothing gamble Dan Carter tried to recreate the previous try, this time kicking from the far right of the field to the left.

2 metres from the Springbok try line 2 All Black players were ready. In slow motion the ball tumbled through the air. But luck was not on the All Black side and the ball went over the players head, just out of reach, and into touch.

The referee’s end-whistle was absolute bliss – the score fixed at 32-29 and the Springboks, bloody, but victorious and the Tri Nations 2009 champions.

Well done, Bokke!

Scored for the Springboks

• Fourie Du Preez – 5 pts (try);
• Jean De Villiers – 5 pts (try);
• Morne Styen – 13 pts (2 conversions, 2 penalties, 1 drop goal);
• Francois Steyn – 9 pts (3 penalties)

Scored for the All Blacks

• Sitiveni Sivivatu: 5 pts (try);
• Richie McCaw 5 pts (try);
• Daniel Carter 19 pts (2 conversions, 5 penalties);

With 1 games left in the 2009 Tri-Nations Tournament

Scoreboard:

Opportunities to score more points:

Fixtures:

Now all that remains is for the All Blacks to meet Australia in Wellington next week to see who will be the official loser of the 2009 Tri Nations.

I can’t be sure when exactly it happened, but at last Maybank enabled all the goodies on their debit card and is it finally the only debit card I need to do everything, even online purchases and PayPal payouts.

Late & Shaky Start

When Maybank first released the debit card with the cherries design, this was a little over a year ago, it was a bit of a half baked product.  It had the very exciting Visa logo on the front, and I, like a many bloggers, thought it was the digital money I could carry in my digital wallet to pay for my digital life.

Unfortunately you couldn’t buy anything with it online, put money into your PayPal account or receive payouts from your PayPal account.  The debit card essentially had no benefit over Maybank’s black-and-yellow ATM card and you had to pay RM12 to ‘upgrade’ to it too.  The only plus point was that because of the Visa system, as opposed to the Visa Electron sub-system of the old card, you could swipe it in more physical shops. Whoop-de-friggen-doo.

For me and those who were hoping to join the effortlessness of having a card that you could use like a credit card, the Maybank Debit Card v1 was a big, fat disappointment.

For my Paypal requirements (it had to be a Visa card), I applied for a TuneMoney pre-paid Visa card (what a hassle that was) and otherwise shopped at websites that was Maybank direct-debit ready.  Not ideal, but my digital life went on.

Fate Steps in and Demands Reassessment

So last week I lost my wallet.

It was in the door of my Myvi – you know, in that handy door-handle / mobile-phone-holder / not-really-a-wallet-holder space, when I opened the door and didn’t see my wallet drop out, had coffee (for which a friend paid) went home and the wallet was never heard from or seen again.

Needless to say, cards were canceled and lost cash was cried over.  The Maybank card was easy to replace and I was going to replace the Tune card too. But when I called the Tune call centre, I was put on hold so long that it drained my already-faulty battery and I never got to re-order the card.

As if fate had not overplayed its hand already, I then stumbled upon a blog post somewhere, which said Maybank’s debit card v2 is now the card it should have been when it was first released. I followed the trail of breadcrumbs and wouldn’t you know it, it’s true.

Activate Your Maybank Debit Card for Online Shopping

First things first. If like me you’ve been paying for your AirAsia flights with the direct debit function, you will have been craving to just whip out your debit card and pay for it right then and there. Now you can – but there’s a bit of a song and dance to do first.

• Log into your Maybank account;
• Right at the bottom under Utilities you’ll see “Maybank Secure Online Shopping Registration“. Click.

• You’re then taken to a page where you have to fill out passwords and stuff. I only have 1 card, so I don’t get a choice, but if you happen to have many cards, then you might have to select the right card based on the 16 digits on the front of the card you’re working with;
• Type a Maybank Secure Online Shopping (MSOS) password. Think about it – don’t make it your Maybank2u password, or your email password, or your Facebook password. Remember, this is your life’s savings you’re working with, so don’t choose a password anybody that knows a bit about you can guess. But remember it;
• Retype that password, just to be sure;
• The Personal Assurance Message can be anything. A yo’ mamma joke if you like. It will be used when you’re about to make a payment – you will be diverted to a Visa verification website to type your MSOS password – to ensure that website you get directed to is an authorised website, your unique Personal Assurance Message will be displayed. If it isn’t, you shouldn’t type your password.
• The Expiry Date and CVV is as it appears on the card you are registering;
• The Hint, I feel, is pretty stupid, because this is likely fairly common knowledge. Choose the question you think the fewest people will know and will be the hardest to find out.
• Answer is the answer to The Hint above. Type it in a way that you will remember it.

Once you’re done, your card is registered and, technically, you can go out and spend the contents of your savings account from the comfort of your plastic card.

Right after doing this I went to buy something online, but for some reason it didn’t recognise my password, even though my Personal Assurance Message was displayed. I can only imagine it takes a few hours.  I’ll update this when I successfully purchase something online.

Link your Paypal Account

Next, of course, you would want to use your Maybank debit card to cash in on your stash of mula that’s been accumulating in your PayPal account. I’m sure you know how this works:

• Log in to PayPal, go to Profile and click on Add / Edit Credit Card (Ha! We’re going to use a debit card);
• Click on the yellow Add a Card button (bottom right);
• Select the card type (Visa) fill in the details, check the address and click Add Card;
• PayPal will query your card in the background, and if everything checks out, it will be listed as 1 of your credit cards;
• On the right of the entry, under Action you will see Link & Activate Your Card. You have to let PayPal deduct US$1.95 from your account to test / verify your card (which is credited back to your PayPal account upon completion);
• Once that’s done, you then have to enter the 4 digit number that appears on your debit card statement to complete the process.  It may take a day or 2 before it shows up though, so log out and go do something else;

And that will successfully link your Maybank Debit Card to your PayPal account, which will enable you to ‘pay’ money from your debit account into your PayPal account, and vice versa ‘download’ money from your PayPal account into your Maybank debit card.

Maybank Debit Card Withdrawals When You’re Overseas

One last thing you might consider is having your Maybank debit card activated for transactions / withdrawals while you’re overseas.

The first time I tried drawing money from Singapore, it failed. I was also unable to pay for my accommodation, although that might have been unrelated. On my return to Malaysia the call centre did say the debit card needs to be activated for overseas transactions.

Since then, I’ve been able to draw money with my Maybank debit card from overseas ATMs that display the Visa logo in Bangkok, Phuket and again, Singapore.

The Journo advised me you can activate this feature at any Maybank ATM in Malaysia, or you can do like I did and give the helpful people at the Maybank call centre a buzz on 1-300 88 6688 if you’re in Malaysia or on +60 3 7844 3696 if you’re not.

Now, life is good. Thanks for listening to your customers Maybank, I’m glad your debit card finally caught up.