Not sure what happened but my back is killing me. It happened a few hours ago after I woke up from my little afternoon nap. I stood up and could immediately feel a sharp pain in my back. It is not so serious that I cannot walk but I can feel the pain even after applying ice packs on my back. However, I feel much relief if I seat down. Standing up causes me some pain. Feels like needles poking at my back at times! However, after moving about and stretching, the pain has lessen considerably. It could be due to the previous reservist duty where I fell and injured my back.

I guess maybe I should start exercising soon. I am not getting any younger and with so many problems with my body cropping up, I am sure that they are mainly caused by my lack of any physical activity.But for the last few months, I have been walking about half a kilometer per day. I stop a bus-stop away from my house and walk the rest of the way home. Anyhow I don’t think this really counts as exercising since I hardly sweat much during this little walk of mine. And the best way is to swim! Before I started working, I used to swim in the evenings. In the beginning, I could only swim like 1 or 2 laps. After a month of swimming, I could swim 20 laps continuously. However, this was when I was about 24 years old. I am much older now and I doubt that I can keep up with that kind of activity anymore. Plus, I am really really out of shape. To say I am out of shape is sort of an understatement.

Well, I will keep you guys updated on the condition of my back. Wooo…..if you are interested in the condition of my back, you are seriously lacking a real life. It’s time for you to go out and do some exercise instead of sitting in front of a monitor and stare into it.

Well, if you guys have been reading this blog, you will know that I had previously done a batch of beer a few weeks back. However, I was unsuccessful because of my own stupidity - I forgot to rinse off the sanitizing solutions from my beer bottles before I bottled the beer, so I had to throw away all the beer, which would taste very funky indeed if drank. Anyway, I redid another batch again. Had to fork out S$50 over for the beer ingredients which included the beer concentrate (or beer kit which includes malt extracts, malts and hops among other stuff), Cooper’s brewing enhancer 2 (that’s a mix of light malt extract, dextrose and malto-dextrin), yeast, additional hops and carbonation drops (to carbonate the beer). Anyway, it’s pretty cheap if you consider the cost of buying commercial beer from the stores in Singapore. I guess the cheapest you can get is like S$2.50 per 330ml can? This batch of S$50 is for 23 litres of beer. That’s pretty cheap right? If you buy the cheapest 23 litres of beer commercially, it’s going to cost you at least S$200.

A lot of people asked me why I brew beer. I think the main reason is because it teaches me patience. Although the work of making the wort takes like an hour, you need to wait for a few weeks or even months to see the fruits of your labour. Yes, mainly it involves waiting. So I guess it can really teach me some patience at least whenever you need to “wait”.

Okay, I have also taken some photos of the brewing process.

I purchased the Australian Pale Ale beer kit, Cooper’s Brew Enhancer 2 and Notthingham yeast. I hope to create a very golden looking and clear beer from the pale ale beer kit since a lot of my friends don’t like dark coloured beers. Perhaps they are too used to tiger beers. Of course, that’s a lager, but I won’t be attempting lagers anytime soon. The Cooper’s Brew Enhancer 2 is a mix of light malt extract, dextrose and malto-dextrin. This is a good mix as it adds more of a body to the beer, plus the malt-dextrin will give the beer a good head (foamy). It also gives more of a malty flavour to the beer. Everyone hates a watery beer, don’t they?

That’s the Notthingham Ale Dry Yeast and my thumb. I think my thumb looks good. Anyways, this yeast is supposed to be a good quality yeast which can attenuate very well. It simply means that it can convert sugars in the wort (unfermented beer) very well which provides some good body in the beer. This creates a very dry beer. And it is supposed to be able to create some very clear beer which is what I am looking for.

The carbonation drops. This is added when you do the bottling to give your beer the fizzle. Just 2 drops per 740ml bottle. Don’t need to measure the priming sugar. Can really save a lot of time and work. That’s why I purchased this. I am not so keen on work plus it can also be very messy.

This photo shows you how to open the Australian Pale Ale Beer kit. Not really that exciting. There is also a rubber band which I use to shoot at little birds.

The beer kit or beer concentrate actually comes with a pack of Cooper’s ale yeast but I am not going to use it. Yeast is very important when brewing beer because yeast is the “thing” that creates the alcohol and taste for your beer. So I got myself the Notthingham yeast instead. The instruction basically tells you to add the brewing sugars and the beer kit concentrate into the fermenter with boiling water and mix well. However, I am going to do a short boil instead.

That’s the fermenter and cover. I am using washing detergent to wash the fermenter first. Then rinse off the detergent (very important so that no detergent remains and spoil your wort or react with your sanitizing solution). After rinsing off the detergent, I use the Straight ‘A’ sanitizing solution and let the fermenter rest with the sanitizing solution for about 15 minutes. Then rinse off the sanitizing solution.

Yes, this one is from my previous post. These are the Cascade hops as well as the Straight ‘A’ sanitizer. I will be adding a little Cascade hops into my wort for about 5 minutes for the aroma. Hops are usually used to add bitterness and flavourings to the beer. Since the fermented wort will always be sweet because of the sugars, you need to add the bittering hops to counter the sweetness. Of course, the bittering hops had already been added in the beer kit, so this additional is for aroma only.

Washing the airlock, spigot (tap), sediment reducer(hard to see), little bottler (nope, not using this yet) and grommet (it comes with the airlock and is sort of like a rubber stopper). Yes, these too will be sanitized. Everything that comes into contact with the wort needs to be sanitized. Being clean is everything when you brew beer. And to ensure that it stays sanitized, avoid touching the sanitized equipment.

This is my brew pot, basically it’s just a stainless steel pot which can hold about 8 litres of water. What I do is boil the water and after the water is boiled, I take the pot off the flame and add in my beer concentrate and brewing sugar. Alas, I have forgotten to take the photos of these steps of adding the beer concentrate and brewing sugar. Must be really getting old.

I opened the pack of dry yeast and add the contents into a sanitized plastic jar of boiled water. The water is cooled and just slightly warm. The purpose of rehydrating the yeast is to ensure that the yeast cells can get enough water for a healthy brew. If you pitch the dry yeast into the wort directly without rehydrating, the yeast may not be able to get enough water fast enough for it to be healthy. It is also done to ensure that there will be less “shock” to the yeast.

In this photo, you can see that I have taken off the green paper covering the beer concentrate. The reason is that when you open the beer concentrate, your can opener may “cut” the paper and the bits and pieces may fall off into your wort. I don’t like to drink paper beer. The water in the small pot has been heated and I have placed the can of beer concentrate into the water. This is to soften the beer concentrate and it makes the syrup much easier to pour out.

Okay guys, I have forgotten to take photos of what I did next. After taking the brew pot off the heat, I added the can of beer concentrate, brewing sugar and hops into the boiling water and do another 5 minute boil. In my previous attempt, I did a full 45 minutes boil which was a big mistake. If you are using a beer kit concentrate, the concentrate has already been boiled for you, there is no need to do another boil. If you boil the beer concentrate for too long, it will turn darker and the beer may turn way too bitter. I wanted a light coloured beer. After which I took off the hops from the pot and placed the brew pot into a ice cold sink bath. This is to cool down the wort fast.

Didn’t buy ice from 7-Eleven, so had to use some of the stuff which I had in hand and I froze them. Of course, these are free. You can see a small amount of foam in the wort, I believe that this is the malto-dextrin which is very difficult to dissolve. Anyway, you may be thinking why do I need to crash cool the wort? Well, the main reason is that you don’t want any infection to occur since the wort now is very vulnerable to infections. So if you cold the wort fast, there is less of a chance of an infection. It also helps to create a “cold break” which reduces the chance of the chill haze which makes the final beer cloudy if chilled. And yes, I am using my nephew’s wash tub to cool my wort.

In the mean time while the wort is being crashed cooled, I added cool water to my fermenter. Then I aerate the water by vigorously shaking the fermenter with the cover on for about 10 minutes. Make sure that the water is cool, not warm if doing aeration as warm or hot water will tend to oxidate instead of aerate. The reason for aeration is to add oxygen into the water for the yeast. Like us, yeast needs oxygen to thrive and reproduce. A healthy fermentation of the wort will produce good tasting beer and good tasting beer is what we want.

Once I have cooled my wort to the desired temperature, it’s now time to add the wort to the fermenter.

This is the airlock. After a few hours or so, you will start to see bubbles gushing out of the airlock. This is a good thing. It means that the yeast is working. You may need to top up the airlock with water though. But it’s kind of thrilling to look at your airlock bubbling away. Feels that you have accomplished something.

There, placed my fermenter into the cooler box and added an ice pack to maintain a cool temperature of 21-24 °C. May need to add more ice packs to compensate for the warm weather in Singapore. The problem of brewing beer in Singapore is always the heat. The coolest temperature in your house will most probably be around 28 °C (unless you have air-conditioning) and this is not a good temperature for your wort to ferment. It may create some off-flavours in your beer. That’s why I use a cooler box for my fermenter.

Covered and everything is done. Now it’s time to wait till the fermentation is finished and we can then bottle the beer. Probably it will take about 4-7 days to finish fermenting, but I think I will let it ferment for 7 days to ensure a complete fermentation. Wish me good luck! Hope nothing bad happens to this batch! I cannot take two failures in a row.

Mistakes I made:

1. Forgot to add yeast nutrients into my wort.

Other than that, I think everything looks fine.

There are 2 stores in Singapore selling beer ingredients and beer kits. If you are interested in beer brewing, I would suggest you to take a look at iBrew and Homebrew. I am using the Cooper’s Microbrew Beer Kit from iBrew. Of course, this does not mean that the Morgan’s Beer Kit from Homebrew is not good. It just means that I am using Cooper’s Microbrew Beer Kit.

I am again on a roll. I am here to introduce to you yet another very cool and useful software. And this is open source as well. This should be interesting to a lot of you webmaster geeks out there. PhpMyVisites is a web statistics script meant to collect information on your website. It helps you monitor your visitors transparently and provides you all the needed information to configure and optimize your site. All it requires is a little javascript embedded in your web pages and you will immediately get information on your visitors. Remember, knowing all these information will definitely make you a better webmaster.

Although PhpMyVisites is free, you will get a ton of features from it. PhpMyVisites can monitor your visitor frequency, visitor statistics over a period of time, visitor analysis, geographical statistics, technical configuration statistics, search engine users and much more. They even have a clicks heatmap which tells you what your visitors are clicking on a certain page. You can get all the needed information from their very friendly interface, complete with graphs for easy viewing. It also supports multiple websites which I believe is useful if you have a number of websites to monitor. You can access all your web stats from just one interface. And don’t worry about security as PhpMySites is built with security in mind. PhpMyVisites also supports more than 30 languages! That’s more than what most people can count so you should be fine.

This script requires just PHP and a MySQL database to store all it’s information. This is pretty standard and most webhosts should already supports this requirement. If your webhost does not support these simple requirements, you should ditch it and change to another better webhost. You just need to edit the file to tell the script where the database is, chmod some files and then it is done! Of course, you still need to add the javascript code into your actual site code.

Heard of this software called WinPooch? Bet you haven’t heard of it before right? And this is a crime. Seriously, this is such a great open source software that it should be mentioned everywhere we go. WinPooch is all about security. It’s an anti-spyware and anti-trojan software and it does real-time protection which a lot of other free software doesn’t. This way, your system can be free of spyware and trojans all the time. Please note that I am not saying that it is prefect, what I am saying that it provides a powerful shield for you against these types of nasties on the Internet. WinPooch uses the API hooking method to stop spyware and trojans from entering your system. It monitors the programs running in your system and gives the user full control of their software behaviour. Of course, I would combine this with other anti-spyware programs.

Oh, and it becomes an antivirus software as well if you associate it with ClamWin. ClamWin is based on Clam Antivirus (the open source email anti-virus system) and it works on Windows. However, the problem with ClamWin is that it doesn’t do real-time scanning. It is a big security hole because viruses can enter anytime and anywhere. It is definitely better to prevent viruses from infecting your system rather than trying to remove viruses from your system. Thus, if you use WinPooch with ClamWin, it does real-time scanning for you, stopping viruses from infecting your system there and then. Getting rid of viruses can also be a very time consuming task.

This free software really makes a different, especially when combined when ClamWin. I always wanted to see how Clam Antivirus would work as a desktop service instead of an email scanning system. The great thing about Clam Antivirus is that it is updated regularly, and leveraging on this superb scanner, we can now do real-time protection using WinPooch. WinPooch is designed for WinNT/Win2000/WinXP. I don’t know whether it will work for Win Vista.

Link: here

Isn’t this so very cool? These are 5 email addresses which will help you convert files to other formats just by sending them the file! You can very easily convert Microsoft Office files to PDF or vice versa. You can even convert WAV files to MP3 files! Although I think that there will be problems when you convert WAV files because of the large size needed.

To use the service provided, all you need to do is to send an email (with or without any subject) with the attachment(s) to the following email addresses:

a) mp3@kooolwire.com - This converts WAV to MP3 files. Problem will most likely be your source WAV file will be too big for the service to handle. This has a 10MB size limit.

b) iphone@pdfonline.com - This converts Visio and Word files to PDF for you. It even works for the latest Word format (docx). Nice for people who can’t view the latest docx extension, especially for those using non-Windows Operating Systems. For anyone using Windows, you should just download the update for your Microsoft Office software.

c) doc@koolwire.com - This converts PDF to Word files. Just sometimes conversion is not always successful and you will not get complete functionality in word.

d) pdf@koolwire.com - This converts your Microsoft Office files like Excel, Word & Powerpoint to PDF. It does not support more than 10MB file attachments.

e) wav@koolwire.com - This is the reverse of mp3@koolwire.com. It converts MP3 files to WAV. Remember to make sure your email service provider accepts large attachment when you use this service.

So that’s it. You send email with attachment(s) to these email addresses to do your conversion and you just wait for the return email. It’s that simple. However, I should tell you that it is much easier and convenient if you use dedicated software to convert for you. Not to mention, you have more control over your files. How about the security risks of sending your important documents to “someone” who you have no idea will do with your data. This service is meant for users who can’t use such software (like in perhaps some Mobile Devices) or just lack the technical knowledge to convert the files themselves.

If you guys have been following this blog, you would know that I am attempting to create a homebrew beer for myself and my friends. I hoped to create something light and clear and thirst quenching. However, now I have to inform you guys that it ended in disaster. Yes, it’s been destroyed by my own stupidity! No doubt about it. My stupidity is the main reason why I wasted 23 litres of good brew. Basically I had to throw the brew down the drain, nothing can be salvaged at all.

And I am sure you would like to know why. Well, you see, for homebrewing, everything that comes into contact with the “beer” needs to be sanitized. Which means that it means to be cleaned and free of dirt and any particles, then you need to remove any bacteria or spores on the surface. This ensures that there is nothing else grows with your beer. That’s the main reason why a lot of beer goes sour or gives off-flavours. Thus, I did what most homebrewers would do, I sanitize my beer bottles right. So happily I go about sanitizing my beer bottles and then I did the actual bottling of my beer. I added the carbonation drops, poured in the brew and then screwed on the cap. Nothing wrong there right? Well, what I failed to do is to rinse the bottles first! Would you believe that I forgot to rinse the bottles? Those bottles still had the sanitizing solution in them. And I poured perfectly good beer into them? Thus all is ruined!

Anyway, this is a lesson learned. And from my first attempt in homebrewing, I learned a lot. I learned that being cleaned is everything. I also learned that sometimes using my common sense and not to rush things is also important as well. I don’t believe that in the final step I cocked up big time. Very disappointing, but I guess what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger right?

And to make myself feel better, I will tell you that the brew itself isn’t exactly perfect. Sure, it is drinkable, but it is too bitter and the colour of the brew doesn’t look too attractive either. Sort of too brownish instead of being pale in colour and slightly golden. The reason is because I had boiled the beer kit for too long. There, I said it. I feel much better now.

Let me suggest to you one very interesting site which requires you to do something. It’s this site. And just what’s so interesting about this site? Well, it’s some sort of physics simulation program whereby it simulates the effects of a cloth being blown by a fan. It’s made up of polygons and you can drag the cloth anywhere and see how it will react. Kind of like a science experiment you do at school but it is much cooler since you don’t have to actually setup the experiment yourself. All you have to do is to to choose what size the cloth you want and the fan speed. After that, you just drag the cloth anywhere on the screen and see how it reacts. Hey, you can even rotate the cube and see the cloth in all it’s 3-D glory! Cool!

No, it doesn’t really tells you anything useful. It’s not that kind of site where the meaning of life is being explained to you. And if you don’t have anything to do, why not play with the cloth. Just drag it anywhere you want and see how beautifully it is being simulated by the program. If you have played with that cloth for over 15 minutes, you should get an award for the most bored person on the Internet. I mean, really, go get a life. Or join me and together we will go get a life. Oh, just think of the programming skill of the one who coded this? Must be pretty complicated stuff to code such things. Amazing isn’t it? Only people who great skill and great understanding of physics will be able to write a program like this!

Alright guys, I have bottled my beer! It’s been over 5 days where my beer has been sitting in the fermenter producing alcohol and waiting to be drunk. I have been checking the airlock on the fermenter and it didn’t bubble for quite sometime. This would mean that there is very little sugar left for the yeast to create alcohol and so, it’s time to get it out of the fermenter. The reason why I am getting the beer out of the fermenter so early is to prevent the yeast from dying inside the fermenter and creating weird off-flavours. Brewers should not keep their beer in the fermenter too long. Or if you would like it to continue in the fermenter, I would suggest brewers to rack (transfer) to a secondary fermenter. This way, you will get less yeast in your beer.

Anyway, this is what I did. I removed the fermenter from the cool box and let it sit on a table for about 1 hour. I did this to ensure that the yeast or any sediment would rest on the bottom of the fermenter because I did not want them to be in the bottles. During that hour, I sanitize my beer bottles and caps and my “little” bottler. I also cleaned the fermenter tap, this is the place where bacteria and all sorts of spores and fungus will hide with some no-rinse sanitizer. Next, I added the carbonation drops to my bottles. Since my bottles are the 740ml type, I added 2 carbonation drops per bottle. The carbonation drops are actually sugar which the yeast will then consume and produce both alcohol and carbon dioxide. Since the bottle is sealed, there is no way for the carbon dioxide to escape, it will then carbonate the beer for you. Cool, ain’t it? You don’t need to keg it or use all the complicated process to get gas into your beer!

Oh, one thing, I had added some gelatin into my beer one day before. This is a kind of finings which help to “clear” the beer. It helps to trap the yeast and sediment on the bottom of the fermenter.

The actual bottling process is just filling your bottles with beer. The bottler really helps me to fill in the bottles. All you have to do is to push the bottle with the bottler inside and let it rest at the bottom of the bottle. It will then start to fill. When the liquid reaches the top, you just “release” it and the bottler will stop flowing. If you use the bottler, it will leave you with the necessary “headspace” at the top of the bottler for the carbonation.

I am already half way through for my bottling when I took this photo. I am always too eager to do stuff and forgot to take shots. The shirt/cloth is to prevent the moisture from cooled fermenter from damaging my precious but rusted table.

Check out the bottler. Pretty nifty stuff, it makes bottling easier and less messy. Oh yes, that’s my nephew’s bath tub which I borrowed for this bottling exercise. Of course I washed it after use with hot water, detergent and later rinse with Straight ‘A’ sanitizer. Don’t want my nephew to get drunk by the alcohol smell. Ahh….yes, the bottler looks a bit straight and stiff, doesn’t it?

All you have to do is to push the bottle up and letting the bottler release the beer into the bottle. Easy. Very easy. It would be better if they have a flexible long hose, then I don’t need to hold the bottles. All I have to do is to put the bottler into the bottles and the beer will flow, don’t need to hold it. Can be tiring after a while (that’s 30 bottles). I am not getting any younger, you know.

Yes, it’s bottled. Check out the headspace for the beer. And the beer looks rather clear. You probably can’t see much from this photo, but I am really glad that it is not too cloudy.

That’s the beer bottle which I hope to enjoy in a few weeks time. Doesn’t look cloudy at all eh? Looks like the gelatin really helps clear a beer. Now the problem would be the chill haze. Since I did not do a proper cold break, I wonder what kind of chill haze will there be.

Woohooo! That’s a hell lot of beer! I will have to keep it anyway from direct sunlight, so I am putting them in the cool box and covering it. I would recommend using amber bottles. This is to prevent sunlight from damaging the beer. Sunlight has adverse effects on the hops, breaking them down and creating terrible flavours in your beer. If you would like to see how much skunk will be produced, check out this website.

Anyways, it’s time to wait for a few weeks and then I will break open a bottle and enjoy. I have already tasted the beer (from the fermenter) and it taste a bit too bitter. Not to worry, I am sure that if I condition the beer longer, then it will become mellower in time. Hopefully.

<Made a fatal mistake during the bottling process - forgot to rinse the bottles after sanitizing them! Had to throw away the entire batch after I have finished bottling>

Must be all those Chinese New Year goodies. Anything that was placed within convenient reach of my hands, I will grab and I will gobble them down. You know those Chinese New Year snacks like pineapple tarts, “love letters“, almond biscuits, sugar cookies, walnut biscuits…….I will eat them down. Especially when I am busy surfing the Internet, I would keep on eating if there is food around, none stop! Binge man! Well, of course I drink water, but I guess perhaps it is not enough. Who can blame me? Blame all those goodies and snacks that my parent, my relatives and friends keep on buying and kept on giving them as gifts to me! Don’t they know that these snacksis very “heaty” and can cause sore throats and ulcers!

And my ulcers stretch from one corner of my lip to nearly the middle of my lip! And all the greenish pus-like stuff can be seen when I open my mouth. Eeeekk! I have never seen such big ulcers before. I think I gave that old lady a heart attack when I gave her directions to her friend’s place. She kept on staring at my lips the whole time I was talking to her. And she looked really stunned and distracted. I hope she didn’t listen wrongly and went to the wrong place. She doesn’t look that fit to walk about too much and considering her age, I think she would be better work taking a taxi to her friend’s place. Old folks shouldn’t walk too much.

Anyways, how has the Chinese New Year holidays been treating you? Good? Collected or given a lot of red packets? How much did you receive/lose? Well, for me, I have visited a few of my relatives and friends and received a small amount of red packets. But nothing too spectacular. Today, I will be visiting a few of my old friends. Not to receive red packets, but to check up on old times. It’s kind of nice to meet up old friends once in a while, isn’t it? We live in such a hectic society that sometimes we can lose touch with our friends for years. I am looking forward to it!

Hooray, ithe next day, it’s the start of the 4 day weekend! Yes, we are finally able to relax for a while, without the pressures of work and from our bosses and enjoy our miserable lives for once. In Singapore, getting a little break is like a god sent, errrr……once in a blue moon. Well, if you money problems (which most of us have), you will be worried still, but then what can we do about that? It’s going to be the Year of the Rat, which is supposed to bring good luck and good fortune. Well, I am pretty sure some of you guys will be lucky and will have good fortune. Some probably not so lucky I guess.

And when you are enjoying yourselves this holiday, remember that there are people out there worse off than you are. Spare a little thought for them. These are the people that the government won’t care less and most of us ignore when we see them. Yes, they are poor, but that doesn’t make them any less important. In Singapore, we are all too busy to really care which is very sad. Work, children, parents, peers, money……the list goes on and on. Most of us are already overwhelmed by our own problems. Perhaps that is what our government is trying to do. Make all of us “don’t care”. However, if this continues to happen, you will see a decaying society. I love my country, but look at what has happened for the last 2 decades.

And please don’t drink and drive. It’s the holidays, time to be merry and you definitely don’t want anything “bad” to happen to you or your family, right? Peace out and “Gong Xi Gong Xi Gong Xi Ni”! Where the red packets?