This Sunday marked my 4th 20 gallon all-grain batch, the inaugural run of my new 26 gallon kettle, and several other brewing moment firsts for me. Brian and I worked up a recipe and managed to get through the brew day with a minimal amount of drama… he took a full 10 gallons home, and [...]

It’s spring and that universally means time to clean. In our case, that meant major work over the past two days has gone into getting our garage back into shape. One obvious reason is creating a safe, clean and adequate space for Donna’s welding…. We intend on taking this wall of the garage, putting up [...]

So tonight I finally managed to kick my American Brown keg. Its not that the AB was bad - in fact, its one of my favorite beers. I just knew it was coming close to kicking, and with my upcoming all-grain brewing demonstration at How Do You Brew? on May 4th, I really wanted to [...]

Man, that’s hot. Well it finally happened… My wife pulled the trigger, and now she’s just a total bad@$$. She is the proud owner of a Lincoln Electric 225 Precision TIG welder.
This weekend we’ll figure out where her work area is going to be and get the area cleaned out & set up. Once [...]

Ok. Get your mind out of the gutter.
So I took the work I did before with multiselection and alignment clues and took it a step further - when the multiselect designer detects that all the selected components are part of the PipeComponent hierarchy, a new context menu is added - “Form Pipe”. When the [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was unhappy with some aspects of the multiselection and the alignment - but I did a little playing around and now have something I like.
I looked to the Visual Studio IDE for inspiration on multiple selection - the selected components now have little boxes in the upper [...]

Just a quick update on my BrewzNET progress since I haven’t posted about it in a couple of weeks. My brief excursion into the SketchUp land did not completely derail my nightly and early-morning efforts on BrewzNET. I have added another large piece of functionality, namely multi-component selection, component alignment, and grouping / ungrouping. These [...]

Yesterday was a brew day - and trying to ensure I stay true to my homebrewing resolutions for 2008, it was a lager - two, actually. I wanted to brew with whole hops, but I lack a false bottom for my 10 gallon polarware kettle. Instead of trying to brew 5 gallons in my 14 [...]

More 3D modeling with SketchUP… this time I did the 3-piece ball valves I get from MoreBeer.com and have on many of my kettles, including the 26 gallon HD beast.
Once those two components (valve and thermometer) were sketched, I turned them into components and fit them into the model of the kettle. Here is the assembled [...]

When I took this screenshot of the kettle, that’s exactly what I heard in my head - the pounding drums, the rising crescendo of brass instruments… And I gave myself a chronic case of the sillies. I couldn’t stop giggling for nearly 5 minutes, and it started all over again once I turned on “shadows” [...]