So we’ve been geeking out about lactobacillus and home brewing sour ales quite a lot for these past couple of months. The topic of old sourdough starters came up which made us wonder if we could start one of our beers souring using a sourdough starter and how that beer might come out. With that, I decided to have my attempt at a fresh loaf of sourdough. I took some old trub from a sour beer that I made ages ago and used it as liquid in a more usual dough starter. I’ve had the starter out for something like four days, cleaning up after it when it overflows and adding more flour/water mixture every day. I did this hoping to get as much lactobacillus to live in the starter as possible. It worked.

Fresh Sourdough Out of the Oven

The bread recipe itself isn’t interesting. It reads the same as any other on the internet, but it did come out lovely. Two cups of sponge (proofed starter), three cups of bread flour, two tbsp EVOO, 4tsp sugar, and 2tsp salt. Mix everything but the flour together and then add the flour in half a cup at a time till you have a nice dough. All in all, it took about 2.5 hours to raise the first time and another 2.5 hours to raise the second time. As I understand it, sourdough rises slower and our house was somewhat frigid. Bake at 350 for 40 minutes. As an afterthought, I should have egg washed the crust.

As for beer, we’ve been single infusion mashing our beers and leaving the mash in the mash tun to sour.  The length of souring has been between a night and the better part of a week to experiment with different amounts of souring.  After the souring period is over, we mash out and continue the brew as usual with sparging and boiling.  The first beer we used the method on was a loose translation of Kentucky Common, and it came out awesome.  The next beer is Cory’s epic, which may or may not be known as “Big Redneck.”  This beer is a 17% blend of two halves of the common recipe bumped up several notches.  One batch was fermented with distiller’s yeast for a 25% dry product, and the other with a British ale yeast (Burton) that should come out around 9.5%.  Mixed together, the hope is that they’ll balance each other out for a sour of epic proportions.

Finally, this brings me to Kentucky’s lactobacillus.  Our postulation is that our lovely Ohio River valley has a good and strong strain of lactobacillus that can reward brewers and bakers alike.  In addition to our allergy problems, Louisville has a historic sour beer ale style that was the “common” beer in the land before Prohibition.  The beer is known as “Kentucky Common” or “Kentucky Cream Ale” and was a dark brown to black beer made mostly of adjuncts with souring to give the beer a bit of depth.  A facsimile of the common ale can be had from New Albanian Brewing Company today, just ask for a pint of Phoenix Kentucky Kommon. Based on our experiences in making sour ale and this bread, I think an open fermentation Flanders Red style may be in order soon.

My lovely infected yeasties

Natural Bridge & Red River Gorge Cabin/Hiking Photos

Flickr Photo Gallery

I finally uploaded the pictures of my Boulder trip. Enjoy. [link]

I’m working on my first (useful) iPhone app. It’s a push mechanism for Twitter updates and functions similarly to the Polar Bear Farm Tweet Push updater app ($0.99/30 days). Their app pushes all friend updates, which is quite a bit too much. Instead, mine is set to only push those tweets with users marked for notifications. That’s an option not available in any of the push notification Twitter apps that I’ve seen so far. This is to save on the outrageous SMS costs on which I still refuse to subscribe to any more than the base plan on. Twitter can eat that like candy if I want alerts. I may opt to allow ad-hoc distribution to friends’ iPhones, we’ll see. Until then, my server’s hard drive seems to have crashed so service quality is a bit low!

As far as thoughts about my experience with developing the app, I followed a recipe that I had seen in an article on Ars Technica before the 3.0 SDK was public. Overall it was very easy to write the skeleton push app and have it launch Twitterific once it loads, but the notifications certificates and other required handshakes were fairly hard to navigate. After all that’s done, all I had to do was make a daemon to check Twitter and push it over Apple’s network. For this, I used Python Twitter Tools to great success.

I did run into one fairly odd problem. It turns out that Twitter’s API doesn’t actually match up to what I’m fairly sure it’s supposed to be at the moment. Requesting a user’s friends status list (statuses/friends, max 100 at a time) seems to correctly report which users are set with device notification turned on. However, the friends timeline (statuses/friends_timeline) function that returns the last X number of tweets has a user tag in it for each update. This user tag doesn’t show the same value for notifications that the friend list does. That’s a problem since my app is suited to using the friends_timeline to get the last few updates to push out, but can’t use the notifications without spending another API call per 100 friends a user has. A bug report has been submitted to the API folks. For now, I can manually filter the users out without using Twitter’s data, but if I were to let anybody else use the app, I’d really prefer it to work correctly.