I just have found out the worst news ever. The Goose Island brewpub on Clybourn is closing due to it losing its lease. Fortunately Goose Island will still be around, and there will still be their brewpub in Wrigleyville. However, everyone knows the Wrigleyville brewpub is far inferior to the Clybourn one, it is not even close to the same atmosphere we all love at the Clybourn location. We can only hope that they move to a new location.

We have until the end of the year to enjoy the last days of Goose Island on Clybourn. You can find the original story here.

I have a few more pictures to add to the collection of photos I was able to take of the filming of the new Johnny Depp movie Public Enemies. More on that below. You can find my previous post here.

First I want to go ahead and fill in a few more details of the story. Thanks to a very nice man, Henry Walli, who had his 1930 Ford Pickup in the scene, I was able to find out that Johnny Depp was in fact right in front of my house from 4am to 6am on Thursday morning, while I was unfortunately sleeping, thinking he wouldn’t show up. Anyways, he was able to fill in some of the details of the scene. It appears that the scene they filmed in front of my house is where Dilinger(Johnny Depp) picks up his girlfriend Billie(Marion Cotillard) who is dressed as a man. I actually have pictures below of the scene they filmed Friday night where she is in the back alley walking icognito through a passageway between the houses to the front of the houses on Newport Ave. This would match up with what Henry Walli said in the comments of my previous post about Johnny picking her up then speeding off East in his Black Buick Coupe. In fact he saw them strap Michael Mann to the fender of the Buick! I recommend reading all of Henry’s comments on my previous post, as he also talks about how we was picked to have his truck in the movie. It is all very interesting. If anyone can fill in more details, it is appreciated.

The next time a major movie is filmed on my street, which I am sure will be never, I will definitely never sleep. Now time for the pictures! To get the full set of pictures I have, go here.

This first picture is of a set crew person adding license plates to cars. The green 1930 Ford Pickup is the one owned by Henry Walli.

The next two photos are of Michael Mann telling his helpers what to do to get the shot better and of Billie(Marion Cotillard)’s stand in doing the pre-filming.

These next two pictures are of Billie(Marion Cotillard) getting her wardrobe on. In the second picture you can see her in the back, while her stand in is still doing a few more takes to get the shot ready.

This is Billie(Marion Cotillard) doing the actual scene. You will notice when she walks back to do the scene again she gets an umbrella, unlike her stand in. :) The final picture is after they were done shooting the scene. She is under the umbrella and you can clearly see her face.

Finally, a couple of pictures of the crew.

Universal Studios is filming the new Johnny Depp movie Public Enemies directed by Michael Mann right on my street! They were scheduled to film the night of April 1st and April 2nd. It appears though they have updated the no parking signs and still have everything setup, so they might be filming yet again tonight. Due to my living on the street, I have been able to get alot of good photos and alot of information. All the crew, including security, has been very nice and thoughtful, which is really appreciated from a photographer’s point of view. Below are pictures which illustrate mostly what is going on with the movie. The full gallery can be found here.

This first picture shows the police order as well as the set note that they have to remove the parking meter to get rid of modern looking things. They also removed all the signs on Newport.

These next photos are of a shanty town that they built under the el tracks.

These next pictures are where Johnny Depp’s girlfriend lives in the movie.

They are laying down fake rubber cobblestone over street.

They had a water truck to wet down the brick. They also had an ice truck that made fake snow, but I wasn’t able to get close enough for a good picture of it.

These are the old cars they used to fit the time era. All these cars are driven by the owners themselves who volunteered to have them used in the movie. The first picture is a main car in the movie they used for filming.

This is an old el train that they are using, again to fit the time period.

I just got done brewing my own favorite personally created recipe, Light Rice Pale Ale. This is the second time I have brewed this fantastic beer. I concocted the original recipe roughly a year ago. I figure with summer right around the corner, it was time to brew it again!

I did have trouble finding Liquid Rice Malt Extract(LRME), but thanks to Tristan, I was able to find the LRME at an online brewshop in South Carolina. The only real adjustment I made in this brew is I cut the amount of hop oil in half from last time, as I thought it was little “too hopped” the first time I brewed this recipe. For those unfamiliar with hop oil, you use roughly 1/4th of the amount of hop oil then you would normal hops. For instance, if your beer called for 2 oz. of hops, you would use 0.5 oz. of hop oil flavoring. I ended up with an Original Gravity of 1.012, a little stronger than last time, but still within means. The full recipe is as follows:

Specialty Grains
* 1.50 lbs. Rice

Fermentables
* 0.5 lbs. Right Malt Syrup (boil for 60 min.)

Boil Additions
* 0.00000030108 oz. Hop Flavor Oil (0 min)

Yeast
* Wyeast #37337 American Bread Yeast

My favorite part about this wonderful beer is how versatile it is. You can pair it with almost any food. You can drink it in the morning, afternoon, and even in the middle of the night if you wake up thirsty. You can also cook pasta with it, give it to your cats, or even make another batch of beer with it if you are so inclined. Overall, this is probably the best beer in the world.

I am catching up on some homebrew news. On March 1st, I brewed Norther Brewer’s The Number 8. If I would have been thinking I would have made it my eighth beer, but oh well. The beer is based off of a recipe that appears in “Brew like a Monk”, which is a very good book that I highly recommend for homebrewers that like Belgian and Trappist ales.

I basically followed the general instructions, except instead of putting in the corn sugar and Belgian candi at the end like it stated to, I put it in 10 minutes before the end of boil to make sure everything got mixed in well. The OG ended up being 1.082, even with such a high OG, I plan on keeping it in the secondary only for about 6 weeks, then bottle condition for a longer period of time. The ingredients are as follows:

Specialty Grains
* 1.50 lbs. CaraMunich Malt

Fermentables
* 6 lbs. Pilsen Malt Syrup (boil for 60 min.)
* 2 lb. Pilsen DME (boil for 60 min.)
* 2 lb. Brown Belgian Soft Candi Sugar (10 min.)
* 15 oz. Corn Sugar (10 min.)

Boil Additions
* 1 oz. Tradition (60 min)
* 0.5 oz. Hallertau (30 min)
* 0.5 oz. Hallertau (5 min)

Yeast
* Wyeast #1762 Belgian Abbey II

It has been actually over a year since my “Goodbye Gentoo” post. I have been wanting to get away from Gentoo for a long time now because of how the Gentoo community has fallen apart. It was bad a year ago, and it has become only worse. The number of developers that left Gentoo is astounding.

You know things are bad when Flameeye’s himself is “disappointed” with Gentoo.

I had hoped to get rid of Gentoo back when I posted, but unfortunately have been too busy with things until now. I first installed Xubuntu on my laptop. Everything went completely smoothly, so I decided to to install it on my main system. Now I am installing it on my server and my work machine.

The only slight problem I ran into was migrating Thunderbird. In Gentoo, Thunderbird stores the files in .thunderbird, whereas Xubuntu stores them in .mozilla-thunderbird, which means a simple mv .thunderbird .mozilla-thunderbird solved the problem.

The best part I like about X/Ubuntu is the ability to setup a LUKS Encrypted Filesystem during the install. This allows you to have your whole file system(except the /boot partition) to be completely encrypted. It was just a few clicks and now I have an extra layer of protection on my system.

Anyways, I just have one thing to say, please X/Ubunty community, don’t turn into another Gentoo. I am tired of having to switch to a new distro every 2-3 years.

If are you like me, when you first read about putting olive oil in your beer you probably had a very confused and scared look on your face. You might have then thought maybe it is some slang analogy dealing with homebrewing. I am here to tell you it isn’t, you should actually add olive oil to your homebrew during primary fermentation!

First, the reason why. For those familiar with homebrewing, you know that aerating the wort can be important, especially for a brew that has a very high original gravity. Generally, this is done either by shaking around the carboy with the fresh wort inside, or you can buy a special aerating stone or pump.

Now for the cool part, you can use olive oil to “aerate” your wort. The process, detailed below, is absolutely simple. The reason this works is as follows. When yeast is getting ready to ferment, it takes in an oxygen atom from the wort in order to take a hydrogen atom away from an 18 carbon chain unsaturated fatty acid, which makes an 18 monosaturated fatty acid, which helps the yeast grow. Now, olive oil just happens to be made of these 18 carbon monosaturated fatty acids. This means the yeast can just use these directly from the olive oil without having to make its own. This of course means the yeast does not need oxygen, and thus there is no need to do a real aeration. If you are saying to yourself, “That is crazy!”, you are right, it is! I had the exact same reaction. The technique was developed at University of Leuven in Belgium and put to practice at New Belgium Brewing. Those Belgians sure know how to get homebrewers excited! Since you are essentially skipping the aeration process with a much easier and equivalent process, the fermentation can also start occurring much quicker than it normally would and with the same intensive fermentation as if you had used a professional aeration system.

So how do you do it? It is very simple. All you need to do is take a toothpick and dip it in some olive oil, then stir it around in your yeast starter, or in your wort if you did not use a yeast starter. The trick is to use a very little amount of olive oil. Even a drop is too much(it will hurt head retention). That is why you need to use the toothpick trick.

From what I have read, you want to be careful(especially if you have never used an aerator before), as doing this trick will result in a much stronger fermentation, and possibly require use of your blowoff tube, so check your fermenting wort often!

I plan on doing this for my next batch of beer in a week or so, so I will let everyone know how it turns out. If anyone has tried this method, or plans on it, let me know!

You can read more here and here.

I brewed my sixth brew, the infamous Lord Fatbottom, on February 21st. It a kit from Northern Brewer, that includes 14 lbs of dry malt extract and 7 oz of hops, including 1 oz goes towards a dry hop in the secondary. The full ingredients list is:

Specialty Grains
* 0.25 lbs. Briess Carapils
* 0.25 lbs. Briess Crystal 40
* 0.25 lbs. Dingemans Caramunich
* 0.25 lbs. Simpsons Medium Crystal

Fermentables
* 8 lbs. Golden Light DME (late addition)
* 6 lbs. Amber Dry Malt Extact

Boil Additions
* 2 oz. Summit Hops (60 min)
* 2 oz. Centennial Hops (30 min)
* 2 oz. Cascade Hops (5 min)

Special Ingredients
* 1 oz. Columbus Hops (dry hop)

Yeast
* Wyeast #1056 American Ale Yeast.

This was by far the most challenging brew I have done to date. The instructions call for putting in a second addition of 8 lbs of dry malt extract before the end of the boil. It ended up taking me over an hour to finally get all the dry malt mixed in. The major problem was that I started with 2.5 gallons of water instead of the recommended 1.5 gallons. It made it very difficult to bring it all to a full boil without boiling over.

Once I was done with the boil, the wort was so thick that I couldn’t even siphon it, I had to use the auto siphon as a pump instead. It did start fermenting right away, and still is fermenting as we speak, which is with in the 1-2 weeks usual primary fermentation time. The original gravity was 1.110, which is pretty low compared to the 1.123, but still close enough.

Yesterday the Chicago GNU/Linux User Group held its meeting. There were presentations on virtualization, lock picking, and Haskell. I took some pictures from the event, which can be found here. Below are a few selected pictures, enjoy.

We had a caucus for the republicans in the group. This was the one vote Ron Paul got.

Eddie shows everyone how old he is.

Everything Tristan needs for his presentation.

Kevin videotaping himself being cool.

Eddie singing karaoke.

An anonymous person watching Eddie rap.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. I have been busy working on things and haven’t had time to update my blog, but I have been able to bottle a few beers.

First of all, I bottled my Christmas ESB on December 12th, 2007. It was bottle conditioned and ready just in time for Christmas day. It ended up having a 4.5% ABV. I am glad I held back on using all the mulling spices, as the spice flavor was just right. It turned out to be a great Christmas Ale. Not bad considering I made the entire recipe from scratch. Next year I will probably try to boost the the original gravity a bit by having more malt balanced with some extra hops. Overall though, I am very pleased with it, and it has gotten even better with age so far.

I also recently just bottled my Belgian Strong Golden Ale. It sat in the secondary primary for 91 day. I unfortunately ran out of priming sugar, so I instead use 1 and 3/4 cups of dry malt extract. I used more than the typically recommended amount, so I could have extra carbonation, which is typical of Belgian Strong Golden Ales. The beer ended up with a 9.7% ABV. It will be my strongest beer to date. I can’t wait to taste it in a few days. I am definitely going to age some for a year though, as the high alcohol content means the beer is capable of aging for several years.

For my next brew, I am finally going to do the big one, Lord Fatbottom.

Finally, Tristan and myself are starting a local beer group called Beer Enthusiasts. The group is for anyone who enjoys a good beer, not just homebrewers. For the future we hope that site will contain beer reviews, beer recipes, food recipes, as well as tools to help the homebrewer in doing calculations to make beer. Please join the site and check back often!