I designed and bought a stamp for my home “brewery” (known as Baltic Sea Brewing).

Why? Mostly because I could and wanted to…

It’s been a bit over a year since I started brewing beer and Ilves IPA was the very first beer I ever brewed (brewed on December 14th 2013, bottled January 4th 2014).

I’m afraid time has not been kind to this beer, possibly at least due to my suboptimal storage conditions (I don’t have a cool place to store beer for long periods).

The beer has ended up a bit overcarbed and the flavour profile frankly isn’t great. Luckily this was the last bottle of this gyle of Ilves IPA, so no one will have to have another glass of it ever again.

If you like brewing, you should check out Beer Styles, a free iPhone and iPad app I built for browsing the 2008 BJCP style guidelines.

Since I did this sort of thing last year, I figured I might as well make this a tradition of sorts.

Favourites of the year

Picking out favourites turned out to be a bit difficult this year (it seems that I read a bunch of good books in 2014), but here’s a few that stuck out.

Going Clear

I haven’t quite finished this book yet but having read a bit more than half of it I can already tell that this is going to be one of my favourites for the year.

Written by Lawrence Wright, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, the book details the history of the Scientology movement and the life of it’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

HBO is currently adapting the book into a documentary (slated to air in 2015).

What If?

As a long time time fan of xkcd and occasional reader of [What If?] (the online version), this book was most welcome…

The book is both hilarious and informative. I’m pertty sure there wasn’t a single chapter where I didn’t giggle at least a little bit…

Command and Control

Warning: this book is extremely scary and will make you wonder who we (we being humanity) have managed to avoid accidentally blowing ourselves up with nukes.

Surface Detail

Since all my other picks where non-fiction, I thought I should include at least one book that isn’t depressing and based on true facts…

Surface Details turned out to be one of my favourite books from the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. In fact, I ended up reading it twice.

The full(ish) list

The (almost) full list of books I read this year. Some books that I had previously read don’t show up on my Goodreads list. Plus there might be a few others missing because of my sloppy Goodreads habits…

• Going Clear by Lawrence Wright
• Flat Earth News by Nick Davies
• The Algebraist by Iain M. Banks
• A Wild Life: Adventures of an Accidental Conservationist in Africa by Dick Pitman
• The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi
• Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross
• The Little World of Liz Climo by Liz Climo
• But He Was Good to His Mother by Robert A. Rockaway
• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats. by Jim Benton
• One Good Turn by Kate Atkinson
• The Long Mars by Stephen Baxter & Terry Pratchett
• Command and Control by Eric Schlosser
• The State of the Art by Iain M. Banks
• The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks
• Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks
• The Home Brewer’s Guide to Vintage Beer by Ronald Pattinson
• Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmull
• Band of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose
• Going Solo by Roald Dahl
• Boy: Tales of Childhood by Roald Dahl
• Matter by Iain M. Banks
• Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks
• America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren’t by Stephen Colbert
• Unnatural Creatures by Neil Gaiman
• Inversions by Iain M. Banks
• Will We Ever Speak Dolphin? by New Scientist
• American Sour Beer by Michael Tonsmeire
• iWoz by Steve Wozniak
• Axis by Robert Charles Wilson

Full disclosure: All book links in this article lead to Piranhas, my book price comparison service.

Since there seems to be a bunch of homebrew gift lists floating around, I thought I might as well publish my own little list…

These are books and other items that I want, not necessarily things that, for example, a novice brewer really needs. In fact, these might not be things I need as much as things I’d quite like to have…

Equipment

Digital Refractometer

The Milwaukee MA871 is an affordable and highly praised digital refractometer. It can measure gravity from 0°Bx to 85°Bx (about 1.000 to 1.438 OG) and has automatic temperature correction.

Using Sean Terrill’s Refractometer Calculator, you can even use it to measure/estimate FG.

Digital pH meter

The Hanna Phep 5 pH meter is the pH meter recommended by The Electric Brewery and should be accurate and long lasting if cared for correctly. It’s also waterproof and floats if dropped in water or wort.

You might want to grab some extras along with the pH Meter:

• 4 pH calibration solution
• 7 pH calibration solution
• pH meter storage solution
• Distilled water (for washing off the meter)

Books

Farmhouse Ales (by Phil Marowski)

Today’s farmhouse styles resulted from years of evolution, refinement, interpretation and re-interpretation of the simple, rustic ales once brewed on farms in Flanders and Wallonia.

Farmhouse Ales defines these Saison and Biere de Garde brews in modern and historical terms while guiding today’s brewers toward credible and enjoyable reproductions of these Old World classics.

For a more detailed book review, see Michael Tonsmeire’s review of Farmhouse Ales on his blog.

Brew Like a Monk (by Stan Hieronymus)

In Brew Like a Monk, Stan Hieronymus details the beers and brewing of the famous Trappist producers along with dozens of others from both Belgium and America. Sip along as you read and, if you feel yourself divinely inspired to brew some of your own, try out the tips and recipes as well!

Michael Tonsmeire also has a good review of Brew Like a Monk on his site.

Full disclosure: Equipment links are Amazon affiliate links. The books link to Piranhas, my book price comparison service.

You should also install Beer Styles, a free iOS app I built for browsing the BJCP style guidelines.

I bottled my Baltic Amber this weekend. It’s an American Amber Ale brewed with sahti malt, hopped with Newport and Amarillo, and flavoured with a small amount of dried juniper berries (as a nod towards traditional Sahti). Fermented with Safale US-05 yeast.

You should totally install Beer Styles, a free iOS app I built for browsing the BJCP style guidelines.

The next time you have connection issues, you can play this little Dinosaur game in Google Chrome.

Press spacebar or the up-key when Chrome can’t connect to the internet.

Google Chrome can’t display the web page because your computer isn’t connected to the Internet.

The label for my Extra Sahti Bitter, which is an ESB brewed with Sahti Malt (from Viking Malt), flavoured with English hops and dried juniper berries. It was fermented with two yeasts: an English ale yeast (Fermentis S-04) and a wheat beer yeast (Fermentis WB-06).

The wheat beer yeast was used as a “clean” substitute for the bread yeast which is normally used when brewing Sahti (since you can’t be sure that bread yeast doesn’t contain miscellaneous microbes).

Beer Styles is a free iOS app I built for browsing the BJCP style guidelines. You should totally install it

A new and improved version of Beer Styles just went live on the App Store, though it might take a little while before it propagates to everyone.

Release notes

• You can now search for styles!
• Send feedback via the app info dialog
• Better contrast between the navigation and title in the top bar
• Miscellaneous bug fixes and improvements
• Now with extra lemurs! (No, not really. I just made that up)

What is Beer Styles?

The app might not be very useful if you’re not into homebrewing, or at least into beer. Beer Styles wraps up the 2008 BJCP Style Guidelines in a pleasing interface on the iPhone and iPad.

Read more about Beer Styles from the original announcement blog post…

Just labelled two cases of Me, I’m Counting, my Dubbel that was supposed to be a Tripel (there were problems with efficiency).

I’m happy to announce that my first iOS app, Beer Styles, is now available on the App Store.

The app might not be very useful if you’re not into homebrewing, or at least into beer. Beer Styles wraps up the 2008 BJCP Style Guidelines in a pleasing interface on the iPhone and iPad.

Features:

• Charts for OG, FG, IBUs, SRM, and ABV
• A visual representation of SRM colours
• Print the guidelines for individual styles
• Share style guidelines (with links to the official BJCP website)

Beer Styles is a native app built for iOS 8 with Swift. Due to a combination of arcane technical reasons and laziness on my part, iOS 8 is required.

I built Beer Styles to scratch my own itch, but hopefully a few other people will find it useful too…