Texas Tornado Brown Ale

The Texas Tornado brown ale is a beer I first brewed last year around this time.  It's a hop forward beer with a Cascade hops that we all love an enjoy through our summertime pale ales.  This recipe is taken directly from the Ray Daniels and Jim Parker book "Brown Ale: History, Brewing, Techniques, Recipes.  A book I really enjoyed, so much so, I haven't given it back.

I have slightly altered today's recipe given extra ingredients I had laying around.  Just 3/4 of a pound of 2-row addition is all.

• 9.75 lbs Pale Malt (2 Row - US)
• 1.00 lb Chocolate Malt
• 0.50 lb Caramalt (80L)
• 0.25 lb Carapils 
• 0.25 lb Special Roast

With a brewhouse efficiency set at 75%, the estimates are as follows.

• 31.3 est. color (SRM)
• 1.062 est. O.G. (style 1.045-1.060)
• 1.016 est. F.G. (style 1.010-1.016)
• 6.03% ABV

In total, Beer Smith calculates this to be a 31.3 on the SRM scale.  Fairly dark brown ale.  With just a 0.50 lb of the Chocolate malt it would have been much lighter.  As this is a Texas style brown, I wanted to go all with the recipe.

The hops really dress up this beer with a nice bittering underneath with a hop aroma and taste.  

• 1.0 oz Galena (75 min)
• 0.5 oz Galena (45 min)
• 0.5 oz Willamette (15min)
• 1.0 oz Cascade (0 min)
• 1.0 oz Cascade (Dry Hop)

The Cascade addition in secondary really puts the mark on this beer.  This beer was the first beer that I had ever dry hopped and really enjoy the results of the finished product.  I am looking forward to a comparable beer this time around and hope that my guests will appreciate this one again.

Installing PHP's Pear on MacOS Lion

This blog post will cover the installation process of PHP's pear on MacOS Lion.

Googling revealed several blog posts for Leopard.  The first of which I encountered was, How To Install PEAR in Mac OS X Leopard.  The first instruction is not consistent with the version of PHP distributed with Lion, which prompted this blog article.  I received the following error:

Sorry!  Your PHP version is too new (5.3.6) for this go-pear.
Instead use http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar for a more stable and current
version of go-pear, more suited to your PHP version.

If you are using Lion, follow these instructions for completing the installation process for pear.

The first step is downloading the pear PHAR.  Make sure that you execute this command in a directory where you have write permissions.  I chose my home directory.

curl http://pear.php.net/go-pear.phar > go-pear.phar

Next, run go-pear to complete the installation process of the library.

sudo php -q go-pear.phar

When prompted with the installation locations, change the "Installation base" setting to /usr/local/pear.  Press enter, and watch the installation complete.

As documented in the installation instructions in the posting, How To Install PEAR in Mac OS X Leopard, you will need to create the php.ini.  (I am documenting the steps here for completeness.)

Copy php.ini.default to php.ini.

sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini

Next, edit the php.ini file.

sudo vi /etc/php.ini 

Lastly, update the php.ini configuration to include following line to reference pear libraries.

include_path = ".:/usr/local/pear/share/pear"

Restart your Apache server or run your PHP script.  Everything should work as expected.

Amber Ale Recipe

I picked an amber ale for my first all-grain batch on my new system.  It's a good summer time beer, one that I can put on tap and make available to the general drinker.  I found the original recipe at TastyBrew.com, going by the name of, Air Pirate Amber.  I liked the color and hop profile and became intrigued with the use of Special B.  In my first three all grain brews, I did not use anything beyond a typical Crystal malt, so I picked this one.

I have altered the recipe slightly to be more of a session style beer, by reducing the 2-row from 11 pounds to 9.5 pounds.  I used the ultra-helpful BeerSmith to make my adjustments.

Here is what I ended up with,

9.50lb American 2-row Pale Malt

1.00lb Belgian CaraMunich Malt

0.50lb Belgian Special B Malt

Original Gravity (OG) Estimate: 1.054

Final Gravity (FG) Estimate: 1.013

Estimated Color (SRM) of 15.4

This becomes a lighter beer with some color.  The final gravity leaves it a bit sweet.  I have also tweaked up the hop additions by adding a half ounce to combat that extra sweetness.

Here are the hop additions,

60 minutes 1.50 Oz Cascade (Whole) - start of boil

15 minutes 0.50 Oz Cascade (Whole)

0 minutes 0.50 Oz Cascade (Whole) - flame out

The hop additions assuming a 5.5% alpha ends with an IBU of 30.9.  Per recommendation I went with the old stand-by for dry American Yeasts, Safale US-05.