A little while ago I sent a bunch of info over to my bands explaining some of the changes and suggesting ways we could use the new Pages to our advantage. Most of them backed up screaming murder “how can they be changing everything again???”. “Welcome to the future” is my answer to most questions these days.

Here are some of the ideas I sent over to them.

Cover Photo and Profile Photos
The new Cover Image is great. You get to lay a big 851px x 315px image over the top of your Page. Really useful if you have some nice artwork or photos to show off. It’s the first thing people see and if you do it right, this could really make your Facebook Page something special. Think of it like an album cover and get creative, use it to tell more of your story. Update it when you’re on tour with a photo from each show. Imagine how excited your fans will be if they land themselves at the top of your profile? Teaser artwork for posters! Stills from video clips! Overlays! The possibilities are endless.

Overlaying this cover photo is your profile picture. If you are clever you can make it work in conjunction with your cover photo. It’s a perfect square so you could upload album artwork, or use it as an avatar.

There is a new ABOUT section
It’s now front and centre. Before it was hidden in some weird tab but now it will be just below your profile image. If you click on it you get an extended version on a separate page but you can put a brief summary here or even link to your other sites. Next to the cover image it’s one of the first thing people see when they land so update it regularly to keep things interesting. Even treat it like a news ticker if you want!

You can control how posts are displayed
You can now pin a post to the top of your Facebook page for up to seven days if you have news you want to stick (shows coming up? what about a new video clip or a single?) You can also change post dates, which will help you bump up posts that you want to keep at the top of the page. This is one of the best new features and I recommended changing it regularly to keep things “fresh” (that’s my favourite industry adjective).

Stole this from Lifehacker :)

You can also “star” a post which both bumps up the real estate it takes up as well as it’s placement on the timeline. Because of this you need to pay attention to pictures that get posted. if you want them to take up all the space they need to be a minimum of 851 pixels. Not too hard these days given that my iPhone can take 5mb photos. Welcome to the future.

Tell your story through the time line
This is by far my favourite new feature. You can add “milestones” to your timeline. These are date focused posts that highlight events throughout your bands history. I think people will stop looking to Wikipedia first if bands can get this right. When did you band form? Do you have a photo of your first rehearsal room? What about a scan of a lyric sheet from your first single? First live show? What about your best support tour? Do you have a set list from that night you supported Pulp? Or perhaps a plane ticket from your first interstate flight? All of these elements combined can tell your bands story in a really effective, personal and visual timeline. Instead of some bio that your manager uploads to Wikipedia you have something special to share with your fans. Do this right and you’ll have one of your most valuable resources.

This is Coldplay way back when

There are other features which work great but these are the main ones. If you haven’t started updating your profile already, get to work. Welcome to the future.

Again, photos are behind the cut.

OK, this is going to seem really stupid of me, but I’ve just realised that the problems I’ve been having (see below) are most probably caused by the amount of sunlight I allow near the fermenter. I know, obvious, right? I guess I thought the fermenters I use were opaque enough and I definitely underestimated how serious a problem direct light can be. Believe it or not, none of the texts I have made serious mention of sunlight that I could find (How to Brew [Palmer], Designing Great Beers [Daniels], Extreme Brewing [Calagione], Brewing Classic Styles [Zainasheff, Palmer]). Solution? I wrapped my latest batch (made using a fresh wort kit from St Peters brewery) in a giant plastic bag. It’s still very young but Steph and I tasted it the other night and it seemed to be rid of familiar taste my brews started to get. Still not perfect and I put that down to controlling fermentation, but much better than before.

Christmas Ginger Ale

So just quickly, I made a Ginger Ale for Christmas. It was meant to impress the hell out of the inlaws and the heavens were supposed to open and a new crown bestowed upon my head. However for a bunch of reasons none of this happened and instead I ended up with a few polite smiles and a lots of undrunk beer (ahhh 15 longnecks). And you know what? I don’t blame them, the beer was nothing like I intended and despite a megatonne of fresh ginger added to both the boil and the fermenter, the beer tasted more of honey than ginger. I added more than twice what the recipe called for but that didn’t seem to make a difference. The finished beer was beautiful and clear and straw in colour but I ended up having to add wedges of lemon to it in order to give it a bit of flavour.

So what went wrong? My best guess is that I used White Labs California Ale Yeast (WLP001) and it did too good of a job. It’s an epic yeast that is super efficient, leaves not much yeast character at all and I figure it just ate all the ginger flavour up! Here is a picture and the recipe I used, just for interests sake -

Brew House Troubles!

My last few beers have been a bit crap. I’m very careful with my process and sanitation, I’m reading new books all the time, forums every day, The Brewing Network podcasts every day. I feel like I’m doing everything I can to knowledge myself up however I’m still making beers that aren’t even just average. Some of them are straight up terrible (I even had to dump a batch a few months back!). One of the problems I have is that I started brewing only 6 months ago and built myself up to my current level really fast. I didn’t slowly add equipment or casually improve process, I dived straight in the deep end so it’s really hard to know where to start trouble shooting. Boil? Fermentation? Recipe? Sanitation? Personal hygiene?

I’ve got a pretty good feeling it’s either in my boil or in fermentation. With respect to the boil, I’m still doing it on an electric stove top. I have a 35l pot and I really have trouble getting a vigorous boil going without taking the lid on and off the pot. Ideally your boil should be open and vigorous so as to boil off any unwanted nasties before fermentation. If you can’t achieve this you end up with off flavours and clarity issues. This problem I can do something about. All I need is a new burner and to move my operation outside. Not too much extra equipment and not much extra money. The other potential problem might be coming from fermentation. I can’t exactly control my fermentation temperature although I have a spot in my house that only fluctuates between about 18C and 24C and the swings are rarely that big. Usually they’re no more than 3C over a 72 hour period. This I can’t do anything about. I live in a one bedroom apartment with a patient (albeit unreliably patient) wife and there just isn’t room for a bigger fermentation system. To control temperature I’d need a fridge, a temperature controller and a place to put the two. So all I can really fool around with is the boil, sanitation and recipe formulation. I just hope I can improve the beer by changing the boil process.

The Experiment

It occurred to me that I might be able to test my fermentation conditions by using a fresh wort kit from Dave’s Homebrew. That way I can test fermentation conditions with a professionally made wort. If my beer still tastes like crap then I know it’s fermentation and I may as well quit. If it turns out alright, then it’s most likely the boil and I just need to buy a 3 or 4 ring camp burner. Note: I’ve taken extreme care to sanitise everything to absolute extreme so I can be sure fermentation is controlled and any off flavours aren’t caused by contamination.

Here is the fresh wort cooking away. I will report back once it’s all done.

Belles Will Ring were in a particularly odd position and we were facing a few obstacles:

• Crystal Theatre had already been out for 6 months on CD and digital. Presumably most of their die hard fans had already purchased a copy in another format.
• Belles are coming to the end of their record cycle and without a heap of touring to support record sales, we couldn’t realistically expect to shift many units (industry talk for albums).
• Belles don’t actually have a huge fan base. They’re loyal, but not particularly big in numbers. This could been seen as astrength as well as a weakness – smaller communities provide the advantage of being easy to speak directly with so you are able to make your communications more sincere, you can react fairly quickly to individuals and the group of people themselves actually feel more connected with one another than they would if they were a part of, say, Coldplay’s community.
• It’s nearly Christmas and, generally, folks have less disposable income this time of year (which is why indie bands don’t release records around Christmas).

I didn’t hit my numbers exactly and that was because I’m doing Brew In A Bag and am still figuring out my volumes and how they effect my gravity. I kind of do a hybrid and pull the first runnings off the grist and do a mini sparge by pouring hot water over the grain bag while it is draining in to a bucket. This effects my OG obviously and I’m stil experimenting with how much sparging I need to do in order to hit my numbers.

Tastes amazing! I think it’s one of my best beers yet. It’s so roasty it feels like a party in a fire place, but somehow the Nelson Sauvin and Pacific Jade hops balance it out. It feels like it’s on the thinner side of a Black IPA, which i prefer because I can drink more that way. Next time I would probably add a bit more aroma hops, just to make it a bit more floral.

Event Horizon Black IPA

Brew In A Bag

YEAST: Wyeast 1187-Ringwood Ale (Re-pitched. Second generation)

I decided to brew this one to enter in to the Darlo Local Taphouse Brewshare night in mid November. The theme is “Weird Styles” and I wanted to bring something more normal than I usually do but at the same time different enough that anyone at the Brew Share wouldn’t have had anything like it before. I took the recipe from the Extreme Brewing book. It was originally for a extract and specialty grain extract and I modified it to be an all grain batch.

The grain, mixed and crushed

About half way through the ferment I realised I couldn’t really smell much of the hops and I was worried it was going to come out too sweet so I dry hopped some XXX in there. Stupidly, I didn’t use a hop sack and when bottling I ended up with a bunch of hop matter that I think made it over to the bottles. I also had a massive fail when bottling. I got about 4 or 5 bottles in and I realised I hadn’t bulk primed! I had to empty the bottles and start over again. I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up with an infection and I probably won’t enter this in Brew Share.

I had a go at crushing some grain with my Delhongi coffee grinder. As you can see, pulverised and there is no way a single husk was left in tact. However I think I heard Jamil say that darker grains can be crushed fine...

This one also seems to be taking longer to carbonate. It’s been more than two weeks and it still comes out a bit flat. I can be patient I guess!

And some shots of my homemade wort chiller in action. Turns out our ground water has a high temp so I have trouble chilling below 26C. I used sterilised ice bricks to get down that extra few degrees.

Batch 1 of Dogfish Head Indian Brown Ale

YEAST Wyeast 1187-Ringwood Ale

I also did a dry hop addition of Vanguard. Nearly 20g. Straight in, no bag. The beer smelt very sweet and tasted so too. I never thought the hop additions were enough and from smelling and tasting I think I was right. This is supposed to be heavily hopped like an ipa but the rates just don’t match. Having said that they were high alpha hops so who knows. Trust in thy dogfish! I also could have made a mistake when scaling the recipe down from 19L to 12L.

At racking to secondary the hydrometer read about 1.020. Hoping it clears more!

Did a diacatyl rest and moved fermenter upstairs where the ambient temp is about 21-22C. In the cupboard, insulated.

At Bottling the FG was at 1.012. BAM!