Today is another brewday. I don’t tend to brew during the week, but I wanted to get this going before leaving on a short trip this weekend. I am basing my recipe on the Abbey Weiss by Jon Sharp, posted here (and it really does look delicious there, and beautiful… I can only aspire to something as gorgeous as the beer in his picture). The two changes I went with were to include about 250 grams of Quaker Instant Oats, and first wort hopping. (I also considered using a Chrysanthemum tea instead of Chamomile, since I’d like to see how …
Month: October 2010
Whose Fault Is It?
Chris in South Korea calls Korea’s English education system psychotic, and his post here ends with some very sensible ideas on what needs to happen for it to become not-psychotic: Make English tests related to actual speaking and comprehension ability, not the ‘ability’ to pass a test. These are the hardest things to test, admittedly, but there are ways to test via a neutral third-party. Someone with no connection to either student or school – perhaps a third-party test center that connects to a call-center of trained native English proctors / testers. Indeed, a real step forward would be to …
So True
Miss Jiwaku and I happened to be around a TV when some woman was talking onscreen about the ridiculously-named Bucheon World Intangible Cultural Heritage Expo going on in Bucheon right now. The woman talking didn’t look Korean (she seemed more Southeast Asian, to me, but I’m told she is Japanese), but she was speaking in Korean. “Is she Korean?” I asked, just as the camera shifted to some white woman with curly hair who seemed to have worse Korean pronunciation than anyone I’ve heard before, and speaks the language with a tone of voice just like the Wicked Witch of the …
Biere D’Enfer
A long time ago, I was in a hurry to use up one of my beer kits, eager to go to all-grain. So I made a pilsner, pitched the yeast, and nothing happened. The record of my panic is here, but I’ll save this post for talking about what happened next. Which was, I was kind of disappointed by the beer when I tasted it a few times–it felt more than creamy, and I wondered if there was something diacetylic about the odd mouthfeel–so I left it over the summer. Didn’t think about it, didn’t look at it. I had …
Brewday: Wonmisan Tan Belgian Pale
Another day, another brew. This is an attempt at a slightly-beyond-style Belgian Pale: the alcohol is a bit higher than the style specifies, in order to take advantage of the characteristics of the yeast cake I’ve got ready for it. I could call it a Wonmisan Tan’n’Heavy Belgian Pale, but I don’t want the name to be too long. Another thing I’m doing differently here is the hops. Since the Belgian Abbey II yeast won’t be doing much in the sense of estery flavors, I’m doing a slightly crazy late-hopping experiment (or what some call “hopbursting”). The thing is, when …