I participated in an enjoyable workshop on letterpress printing and typesetting with metal type in the Museum of Work, on a weekend in june. One of the perks of this is that, I'm "entitled" to visit the open workshop (normal entrance fees apply).

So most mondays I find myself visiting the museum, either typesetting or printing something.

For one of my meetups/regulars table I did print coasters. The front page contains the title "Donnerstags Stammtisch" and fields to enter your consumption of beer, food and shots.

The front is set in 20pt (22pt for the head) Grenzsch Antiqua. The text was set to 16 Cicero width and 16 Cicero height. Together with the line spacing, this means that the beer field ends up just in the middle of the coaster. You have to raise the beer glass from the coaster to enter you consumption, hence it's a little bit unergonomic.

The back page contains a linocut of a certain Kilroy, burning down the White House. I didn't do linocutting for 20 years. Part of the challenge were tools that were blunt and a lack of proper lighting. So I cut the entire picture with just a knife and a flashlight leaning across it.

I remembered a lot of lessons from school, I did linocutting 20 years ago. Since you're working with a subtractive technique, you can't just overdraw lines, you will have to remove the non-printing parts.

Though remembering a lot, I still have a hard time controlling my tools, to get the desired results. Next week I'll get proper tools, sharpen them and get some light in place.

The printing of the linocut went very well, the print came out much better than I had hoped.

The weather was rather mixed, but I did not visit to sit outside and smoke. Next time a visit to the Café will nevertheless be appreciated.

Today I did a slight variation of this recipe from BudgetBytes. Slight variation:

For the sauce:

• 2 Tbsp toasted sesame oil
• 1 Tbsp sugar
• 3 Tbsp soy sauce
• 2 Tbsp siracha

For the main dish:

• 1/2 head of green cabbage
• 4 carrots
• 400g minced meet, extra lean, half pork, half beef
• 1/2 Tbsp sunflower oil
• 3 cloves garlic
• a knob of ginger
• salt and pepper
• sesame seeds

How to:

1. Mix the ingredients of the sauce
2. Add oil to the pan, throw in ginger and garlic and let sizzle for a minute, then add meat, seasoning with salt and pepper, cooking until browned.
3. Add the cabbage and carrots, let cook until wilted.
4. Transfer to the plate, sprinkling some sesame seeds on top.

Very nice. Tasty, but not a lot of calories. Should result in at least 4-6 portions.

On saturday evening with temperatures around or below 0°C and rain, with streets slippery as hell, 15 people got together at FabLab St. Pauli to experience off-flavours in beer first hand.

The bad parts: we should have tasted the beer warmer. The hall at FabLab was rather cold and we had problems to taste the esters in the pack. The bread I bought was some factory bread that tasted too much of butter and sugar. I will have to find a source for english crackers in Germany.

The good parts: we were 15 people with 10 people being the point, where I wouldn't have to put in money into the event (beer, Siebel kit, bread) and we were able to donate a nice sum to the FabLab.

We started to dissolve the samples in 800ml beer, using Beck's Gold to do so, but quickly dialed that down to 600ml. My impression was that many people had problems naming the off-flavour, but most people were able to taste that the 'contaminated' sample was off in some way.

Personally I found it most surprising that I tasted 'old hops' as a kind of cassis or blueberries. Reminding me of holidays in Sweden.

All in all it was an interesting event and went rather smoothly.

We have been planning this for the Foodhackingbase at 33c3 but didn't do it, because the weather was rather bad and we couldn't close up the tent because of the wind.

But now we'll do it! The off-flavour tasting is scheduled for saturday, the 7th of january at 8pm. The tasting will take place at the FabLab St. Pauli, Lerchenstr. 16a.

The off-flavours will be diluted in a neutral beer (likely Bitburger or Becks Gold). We'll be giving out a reference/untainted sample and some bread for cleansing the palate.

This is a Siebel Mix-and-match kit, provided by the BJCP. The off flavours are:

• Acetaldehyde (green apple, cut grass)
• Butyric Acid (putrid, baby vomit)
• Diacetyl (butter, butterscotch)
• DMS (cooked corn or vegetables)
• Earthy (geosmin, soil-like)
• Ethyl Acetate (solvent-like, nail polish remover)
• Ethyl Hexanoate (aniseed, apple or licorice)
• Geraniol (floral, geranium flowers)
• Indole (farm, barnyard)
• Isovaleric Acid (cheesy, old hops, sweat socks)
• Papery (oxidized, cardboard)
• Spicy (cloves, allspice)

Please allow around 1-2 hours for this event. Cost for this event is 20 EUR per person. The event will be in english. We'll be giving out note-taking sheets as well as a short memory aid with all of the off-flavours.

Recently we're experimenting with logging solutions at work. We'd like to have an indication of what our current setup is capable of handling in terms of log volume.

My first idea was to whip up a quick Perl script that simply uses Sys::Syslog to dump Shakespeare's works into the logging setup. That worked quite nicely but it's a limited test case.

I wanted something that is more flexible. Enter logload. Logload uses a simple pattern language to generate syslog lines and adds rate limiting on top.

Syslog Patterns

Logload supports a simple pattern language. The logload tool reads a pattern, interprets it and then generates corresponding output. logload will make the following substitutions:

• a quoted string "foo", which is printed as is
• a group of quoted strings [ "foo", "bar", ... ] which will select one of these strings at random
• the plain string randword which will select a random word from the included dictionary
• the plain string timestamp which will print the current timestamp in iso format
• all of these should be placed in a list ( [ "foo", "bar"], "=", ["1", "2"], ... ) whose elements will be printed according to the rules above

So the pattern ( ["foo", "bar"], "=", [ "1", "2" ]) will select randomly from foo, bar and 1, 2 and print something like bar = 1 into the syslog stream.

Actually the selection is not truly random. At parse time we randomize the list and then iterate through it, starting from the beginning and wraping around when the end has been reached.

The keyword randword will select a random word from an included dictionary. This is nice to simulate usernames and similar things.

Use the keyword timestamp to fetch the current time in ISO format.

Throughput

To control how many loglines are output per second you can use the -r options of logload. This accepts the number of loglines per second that will be sent.

Throughput control is implemented with a simple leaky bucket algorithm, that tries to reach the defined number of lines. The algorithm has a very low time granularity so output may be a bit bursty.

Usage & examples

Command line arguments:

• -H specifies the target host, default is localhost, i.e. -H localhost
• -p specifies the port to send on, default is 514
• -l specifies the logline/pattern to send
• -r rate specifies the rate in lines per second, defaults to 1000

Some examples:

• logload -l '(["INFO", "DEBUG"], ": foobar user ", randword, "logged in")'

• logload -l 'yada yada' -H logger -p 1544

• logload -l '("<13>", timestamp, " mymachine ", ["postmaster[14333]", "httpd[17663]"], ": Oww, i must terminate!")'

Limitations

• currently only plain syslog connections, no GELF or similar
• currently only tcp and no udp protocol support
• currently no ssl

Getting Logload

Logload is available from my github repository or simply do a pip install logload.

At this years Foodhackingbase I was attending a nice workshop on making tempeh. After the foodhacking event was over, Algoldor handed me some nice tempeh.

I never tried tempeh before that. I read on the internet that some people use it to make vegetarian bacon -- I'm not a vegetarian however. I marinated it like meat, and it's delicious.

Tempeh is originally a soy bean product. This batch however, was made with chickpeas. The beans were soaked overnight in water, peeled, and then cooked. Meticulously dried, they are mixed with flour (e.g. wheat flour) and the tempeh (i.e. rhizopus oligosporus) culture. Then it's time for the fermentation to do it's thing.

I used a contraption, made from a camping cooler, a temperature controller and a reptile heat mat, to heat the entire batch of tempeh to 34 degrees celsius for 12 hours. After theses 12 hours I set the temperature to 30 degrees. However the fungus started to produce its own heat and kept the temperature at approximately 32 degrees for the next 36 hours. After two and a half days I had half a kilogram of nicely fermented tempeh.

I enjoyed the tempeh very much, it tastes somewhat like beans, mild yet very umami. Several people report that their tempeh smells like ammonia, mine did definately not. While some black spores on the surface may be ok, my tempeh did not exhibit any of these signs, even after I left it for another day in the fermentor.

For the next batch I hope to complete a custom temperature controller that will be more capable than the current one I have.

Letztes Wochenende war ich bie Jochen Lichtenberg in der Tischlerakademie und durfte am Grundkurs Klassische Handerwerkstechniken teilnehmen.

Das Format des Kurses umfasste zwei mal sechs Stunden, jeweils Samstag und Sonntag. Die Atmosphähre war entspannt, in der Werkstatt haben wir uns geduzt. Das Publikum war gemischt, aber der Anteil der Leute die einen Ausgleich zu ihrem Bürojob haben wollten hat deutlich überwogen.

Und Ausgleich war das ganze. Abgesehen davon, das meine Füsse das ganze stehen nicht gewöhnt waren, war das Erlebnis großartig. Nach dem Kurs waren wir alle Stolz auf das Geschaffte. Vom Entspannungsfaktor war das ganze definitiv höher anzusiedeln, als mein letzter zwei Wochen Urlaub im August. Die beiden Tage in der Werkstatt waren Entspannung pur.

Gebaut haben wir ein kleines Tablett aus Kiefer. Der Vormittag des ersten Kurstages begann mit Theorie über das Arbeiten des Holzes und die richtige Verwendung. Dabei ging es um die rechte und die linke Seite des Holzes. Danach wurde direkt eine Überblattung hergestellt und am Nachmittag ging es weiter mit den ersten Schwalbenschwanzverbindungen. Am zweiten Tag machte nach kurzer Kontrolle durch Jochen jeder seine Schwalbenschwanzverbindungen fertig. Der Vormittag wurde mit dem Verleimen beschlossen, und am Nachmittag wurde dann die verbliebenen Teile des Werkstücks fertiggestellt und geschliffen.

Die Oberflächenbehandlung durfte dann jede(r) selber, nach dem Kurs zu Hause machen. Ich habe mein Tablett mit drei Aufträgen osmo Topoil behandelt.

Zum Vergleich die Schwalbenschwänze am ersten Tag.

Und die Schwalbenschwänze am zweiten Tag.

Der Kurs ist sehr zu empfehlen für jeden der mit Handwerkszeug arbeiten will. Im Kurs hatten wir eigene Werkbänke und eigenes Werkzeug und eben die Betreuung durch Jochen Lichtenberg.

I had some mixed experiences with Buddelship. 'Bügge' is served at the galopper and I didn't like that one.

This is an IPA. It pours a slightly amber color, minimal haze. Long lasting, large head. Big, fresh hop smell. Taste of mango and orange. Slight sweet light caramel. The bitterness is there, but it doesn't overpower you. Hopped with Citra and Mosaic.

Not really outstanding, but something I would serve a friend, who is just getting started in craft beer. In fact I gave a bottle to a good friend, so I'm really excited to hear from him.

Well done.

Serving: 0,33l bottle, best before 23. November 2015.

Rating: 3 of 5 points

A colleage asked me, how do you get rustique, nicely browned pizza? It's simple. You need sugar in the dough, because sugar browns. How do you get sugar? It's easy. Enzymes convert starch to sugar (brewers know this). How do you get enzymes? Easy. Yeast produces them or you could add them artificially.

So you have multiple choices. The first is to use a poolish, that is rich in enzymes. The second is to use active baking malt to add these enzymes artificially.

In Germany active baking malt may be ordered via Teltomalz, which during the time of the GDR supplied baking malt to all bakeries of the country. The standard roll recipe called for baking malt to improve the appearance and taste of the roll. They're still producing it, and you can order from them via ebay. Other than that, I didn't find a lot of producers of this item. Most brewing shops sell dry malt extract, i.e. preconverted malt. What we want however is a powdered dry malt that has its enzymes intact.

So with this in mind, I'm setting up two experiments. I'm not going to try to bake 15 pizzas today, so the Teltomalz alternative has to go, at least for now.

• MC at home Poolish: 175% hydration (is this a typo?) with 0.2% yeast.
• Standard Poolish: 100% hydration with 0.2% yeast

The temperature in my kitchen was a mostly constant 19 degrees Celsius.

MC at home

I'm strictly following their recipe here.

Started: Thursday 7PM. Mixed all components of the poolish together.

Impression at friday 7PM: extremely liquid. After the first night this evokes the impression of a fermented drink.

After adding the poolish to the dough proper, this feels about right. Hydration is a little on the high side, however the recipe calls for adding flour in case the dough sticks to the wall of the mixing bowl, which alleviates this problem. Feels good.

After 24h hours: Saturday 7PM. I took the dough pieces out of the fridge an hour in advance. The dough was extremely elastic and rather hard to get into shape.

Standard Poolish

There are some consideration for the standard poolish here. Weekend Bakery advises 100% hydration for this poolish. They also detail the amount of yeast vs. the poolish needs to develop. Their pizza article is here and it conforms to the poolish recommendations made earlier.

Started friday at 7 AM. After 16 hours it looks firm and spongey. Actually most recipes call for a shorted period of poolish fermentation so i put it in the freezer for the bake-off on saturday.

Saturday at 6 PM. I mixed 200g Poolish with 250g whole wheat flour and added 120g water and the necessary ingredients. After that I put the dough in front of the window. We'll see if this works, the first impression is that the dough is too dry. At one hour in the dough does not show any signs of growing.

After two hours the dough increased noticeably in size. The dough is noticeably more brittle than the MC dough, but very malleable.

Comparison

The hydration level in the standard poolish seems to be a little lower. The reason could be the whole wheat flour I used.

The first picture is the MC poolish.

This is the standard poolish.

Once you get to form the MC poolish you can get nice, very thin crust. On the other side the standard poolish is a little thicker and fuller. I do however find that it tastes somewhat more interesting, if you want to taste your pizza a little bready.

Did we get a nice browned crust? No. This may be because the heat was not all that high. We'll try again next month.

Finally I froze two balls of dough and two rolled out doughs and we'll see the results next week.

Recipes

High hydration poolish

(Adapted from Modernist Cuisine at home, German Edition)

• Make a poolish with 175% hydration
• 100g wheat flour
• 100g whole wheat flour
• 350g water
• 0.4g dry yeast

Let it ferment for 24 hours at room temperature. The combine 312g poolish with:

• 500g flour
• 200g water
• 48g honey
• 15g salt
• 10g gluten
• 1g dry yeast

Mix on medium for 5 minutes, then let it set for 10 minutes, then mix again for 5 minutes. The dough should be sticking to the bottom of the bowl, but not to the walls. I had to add about 5 tablespoons of flour to reach this result. You'll have to try and see how much flour you'll have to add.

Now let it sit for 24 hours in the fridge. Take it out of the fridge one hour before baking.

For the recipe of the standard poolish see here.

The first that came to mind, when I thought about American Pilsener was: nah, no way. This ought to be boring. I remember tasting at least one different beer by Sierra Nevada, but wasn't blown away.

Nooner however is different. Very lightly carbonated, thin temporary head. Golden colour. Mostly bitter hops, but a hint of floral aromas. Bitter and very tart aftertaste. From a hop perspective this is comparable to a northern german pilsener, or to what the northern german pilsener has been some years ago.

I'm certainly not blown away at any rate. But this is a good solid Pilsener. I'd gladly take this of a run of the mill Jever. No seriously, this is the way Jever /ought/ to taste.

Serving: 12 oz bottle, bottled January 23. 2015.

Rating: 3 out of 5 points.