Monthly Archives: August 2012

Brewing Like a Monk

Beer, , ,

Well, maybe with a little more swearing.

My fantastic mother-in-law got me the perfect birthday present this year — Stan Hieronymus‘ Brew Like a Monk.  We’ve been thinking about brewing a tripel ever since we did a big tasting in the Netherlands earlier this year.  And we finally got organized to brew a batch today.  I went to the homebrew shop after lunch and picked up the supplies.  I hadn’t really been planning on brewing today, but I looked at my saison brewing notes (where I actually kept detailed times for everything), and realized we would have time.

So, the mash and boil all went pretty smoothly, except the wort collection ran faster than I intended and so the gravity was low.  But there was enough wiggle room with the addition of candi sugar to the boil, and evaporation, that I wasn’t really sure that it would be a problem.

But, alas, it was a problem.  So I wound up extending the boil by 15 minutes and just barely getting it up to the target (1.080).  Then the fun part started when I turned on the hose for my wort chiller and remembered that I was going to get a new hose, because it leaked last time.  But I guess laying around in the yard for two months didn’t help, because it was leaking a lot more than last time.  So I come back into the house to see a geyser of water spewing from the hose, and the output hose slipping out of the sink onto floor.

I yelled for help and madly grabbed towels to contain the damage.  After some decidely un-monk-like swearing, we got it mostly under control and down to pitching temp.  But one thing and another, we only wound up with about 3 gallons of beer.

Coded Scarf

knitting, , ,

I have found a way to roll my nerdy, knitty ways into one single project, the Coded Scarf:

This is a scarf that is knit length-wise, and was a joint project design between Redbeard and I. Obviously knitty, but what about nerdy? The stripes in this scarf spell out Redbeard’s “real world” name in a simple, geeky code: Binary-encoded unicode. If those words only ring quiet bells, read the next paragraph (otherwise skip to the next one):

Everyone knows that computers really only deal in numbers, and this means letters and other characters, too. All characters are actually numbers to the computer, and over the years there have been many different mappings between characters and numbers. (These pile up and part of Redbeard’s day job is detangling the knots that this can sometimes create.)  The current standard is called unicode, but even within unicode there are different flavors (i.e. different ways to match characters to numbers).

Basically, we took the four letters of his name and got the unicode (UTF-8) numbers for them. Then, we just converted those numbers into binary. Then, I translated that into yarn by making the zeros light gray and the ones dark grey. Each digit (0 or 1) was given two rows in order to have each one have a ridge.

Here’s the pattern, in case you’d like a secret message scarf, too.

Coded Scarf

One 50g skein dark yarn – fingering weight (I used Regia 4-fädig)
One 50g skein light yarn – fingering weight
(This was just enough yarn for Redbeard’s four-letter name, so you will want to have more if you want a longer name.)

Size 2 needles (circular, long enough to hold the scarf)

First, go to Redbeard’s letter-to-binary generator – Use this first to get your 0’s and 1’s. He’s added a visualization that assumes a light color for 0’s and a dark for 1’s, so you can play around with different words and names and find what you like the look of. This particular pattern is going to work best for short words/names, between 3 and 5, maybe 6 if you really like wide scarves. We’re planning to design a project for longer names next, so all you Gwendolyns and Maximillians out there, we’re on to you next (if you’re too mature for Gwen and Max, that is).

Let’s say that you type in “hi” into Redbeard’s generator. That should give you a sequence of 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1. You will then take that sequence and do the following:

Cast on the number of stitches that you need to get the scarf length that you want in the light yarn (0 = light yarn).

Knit 2 rows of light yarn (one ridge)
Knit 4 rows of dark yarn (two ridges)
Knit 2 rows of light yarn (one ridge)
Knit 2 rows of dark yarn (one ridge)
Knit 8 rows of light yarn (four ridges)
Knit 4 rows of dark yarn (two ridges)
Knit 2 rows of light yarn (one ridge)
Knit 2 rows of dark yarn (one ridge)
Knit 4 rows of light yarn (two ridges)
Knit 2 rows of dark yarn (one ridge)

Finally, bind off using the dark yarn.

That’s it! You would now have a scarf that says hi, secretly.