The gravity of your beer is one of the most critical components of recipe formulation. The gravity of distilled water is 1. The more soluble sugars make their way into solution, the heavier the wort. It then goes to say that the heavier the wort, the more alcohol you will probably get out of your beer when fermentation is complete. Read more
Lately, I’ve decided to begin expanding my horizons in making fine alcoholic beverages. My latest foray has been mead. After using a lot of honey in beers, I figured it was time to actually use honey as the showpiece. It wasn’t simply that, but every time I stop by the Fallen Timber Meadery in Water Valley, I always get treated to great samples of quality meads. I figure since I like their mead so much, might as well grab another bucket of their honey.
BJCP Style Guideline for Category 1A – Lite American Lager
This series will cover two main topics as it pertains to building your homebrew recipe from scratch. We will use a BJCP style guideline to illustrate these points.
When I build a recipe looking at these style guidelines, I always look at the vital statistics of the beer first. This is where you get your fancy abbreviations like OG, FG, IBU, SRM and ABV. For the sake of clarity:
OG = Original Gravity, typically used to describe the weight of the wort before fermentation. This will generally indicate total soluble sugars in the wort, but will not tell you the kind of sugars. Read more
This is a recipe that had won me a gold medal in the category for stouts for the Cowtown YeastWranglers Homebrew Roundup. It originally started with a trip to the Fallen Timber Meadery, where I ended up meeting Colin Ryan and some of his employees. We enjoyed a good chat, and bored the heck out of the kids for about an hour, but part of that day involved a good chat by the fermenters, and a sampling of some of their homebrews. Read more
This article is reposted on my site of an interview I had done for Inside HPC. The original article can be found at: http://insidehpc.com/2009/11/16/tycrid-positions-gpu-bioinformatics-market
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11.16.2009
inside SC09
insideHPC sat down with Chris Heier, president of Tycrid Platform Technologies, a first-time SC09 exhibitor based in Canada, to learn more about their purpose built GPU-based solutions and their focus on the Bioinformatics space. Read more
This article is reposted on my site of an interview I had done for H Plus magazine. The original article can be found at: http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/10/20/supercomputing-desktop/
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Warren Frey
October 20, 2009
Supercomputing is the engine that drives our science, commerce, and communication. Giant search engines trawl the net with billions of queries, molecules are modeled and modified in massive simulations, and deep under Wall Street hulking processors trade massive blocks of money at the speed of light. But the era of the giant, room-spanning supercomputers may soon have some serious competition in the form of a small Calgary-based startup bringing supercomputing to the masses. Read more
Ok, this one was kind of out there and unique, and I’m certainly not someone to shy away from such challenges. This is what is says in the title. An apple pie wheat beer. The result, as some would say, tastes like apple pie. This beer was designed meticulously to try and replicate as much of an apple pie flavour as I could including the crust, while still tasting like a beer. In the case of this beer, I think I was about 80% successful, and I may make some modifications on my next revision. Read more
The One IPA’d Bandit was a recipe of mine conceived initially primarily by my desire to finally brew an actual IPA. Though meant to be an IPA, it ended up more like an India amber ale. I just don’t know how to stick to a style, and the more you might get to know me, the more you notice I tend to try and fuze things. A great example of this of course was my India black ale recipe, and my Raptured Abby trappist ale, which was said to be a combination of a Belgian dubbel and trippel (or as the boys called it, a dippel). As I continue to brew beer and post recipes, you’ll probably see how following the rules isn’t my style (most of the time)… 
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Some of you may or may not know who Big Rock Brewery (TMX: BR) is. Generally, this is the case if you are from the United States, simply because it is a Canadian brewer, though some would argue whether they are a craft brewer or not. This is where things get fairly interesting, and where you may beging to see a bit of a grey area.
Big Rock produces over 20,000,000 litres of beer per year. In Alberta, their most well known products are Traditional, an english style brown ale, and Grasshopper, an American style wheat beer. Their best selling products, however, don’t belong to any of their craft beer offerings. What some people don’t realize is that Big Rock also happens to produce adjunct lagers in the form of Alberta Genuine Draught, Co-Op Gold, Bow Valley Lager and other contract beers. These beers account for nearly half of their production volume. Read more
There are those in Alberta that when they think Drummond Brewery, at least those who have heard of them… they think cheap swill brewed cheaply. Recently, they hired David Neilly, former brewmaster for Wild Rose Brewery in Calgary, and he has since been changing that perception, and recently, I’ve had the opportunity to see for myself first hand the work that goes into not only converting an adjunct lager into craft beer, but the process of taking my knowledge from the home brew scale to the commercial scale.
First, a little bit on Drummond. The brewery as it exists today is only a few years old, however, the Drummond name lives on for much longer than that. Drummond existed in the 1990′s, going out of business in 1995. Sleeman had purchased the assets and let the trademark on the Drummond name expire. A couple budding entrepreneurs decided to bring the brewery back to life in 2009, and since then, have been selling beer like hotcakes. Read more
