I hate domain squatters

I’ve waited patiently for the registration of my old domain to expire so I could purchase it back from the squatter who has been holding it ransom for the last year. Sadly, he renewed it so I’m left to wait again.

The most annoying part? He’s probably making some decent advertising money off of it. Enough to cover the expense of renewing it. Bastard.

Hello ^Again world!

I’ve lost the Rooftopbrew.com domain and moved to rooftopbrew.net. Damn registrar. Anyway, I’m also moving the domain from my iMac to a real host, so service should be – well – consistent. I’ll be updating the templates over the next couple weeks.

Small updates

I’ve made a few minor changes to the site, and will be making more over the next couple weeks. Most will be invisible as they are mostly changes to the underlying code. Others, like the News Archive section on the right now include links to categories and all listings instead of by-month archives.

I’ve also added a creative commons license to the site, which now replaces the copyright at the bottom and allows you to use anything on the site like the recipes (thanks to Vores Ol for the idea) but not for your personal financial gain. Not that my recipes scale to brewery size, but more as a way of sharing with the community.

Calculate IBU using Glenn Tinseth's Formula

I added a second IBU calculator that uses Glenn Tinseth’s formula. One of the advantages of his method is that it is supposedly superior for full-wort boils. With a 10 gallon kettle, I’ve been doing full wort boils for some time, but my IBU numbers have been a little wacky, a little excessive. This should help things out.

The one thing I’m uncertain about is the utilization difference between whole hops and pellets. I accounted for the difference the Rager calculator. I’ve written Glenn Tinseth himself and hope he’s willing to shed some light. He knows much more about hops that I ever will.

Odd linking request

I received an e-mail out of the blue from the manufacturer of a fancy capping system for home fermentation. They would link to my site if I would link to theirs in return.

I checked out the site, and the product is a slightly improved moonshining operation. They don’t distill, but they give sell you a bottle cap that allows you to ferment beer or cider or whatever in 2 liter bottles. Although I’m sure you could make some palatable drinks with this system, it seems doomed to failure, like most early “brewing” attempts during prohibition.

I decided not to link to them since it had less to do with beer and more to do with bacteria farming. So I received a second e-mail a few days later notifying me that since I had not reciprocated with a returning link, they had removed me from their links page. My loss.

ABV & IBU calculators working

Thanks to Joe (monkey) Jasper for pointing out that the IBU and ABV calculators had stopped working. Apple changed a PHP setting in my last upgrade. But now the problem has been fixed, and you can get back to over-hopping your beers!