Dirt simple – but very tasty – pizza sauce. The trick to pizza sauce is it needs to be a bit saltier and a bit spicier than you might make normal tomato sauce. Cook it down a bit to thicken and let it cool before you put it on the crust – otherwise it’ll half-cook the crust and make it soggy/slimy.

• 22oz can crushed tomatoes,
• 1.5 tsp each basil and oregano,
• A bit of red pepper or cayenne,
• Salt and pepper to taste,
• 2 bay leaves,
• 2 cloves crushed garlic,
• 1/2 finely chopped onion,
• 1 tbsp olive oil.

1. Saute onion in olive oil until tender. Throw in garlic and saute another 30 seconds.
2. Dump everything else in.
3. Simmer 30 to 45 minutes.
4. Cool. Makes enough for 2 large pizzas.

Fresh tomatoes are great too, but tend to be a bit more watery – so thicken by cooking longer and/or using a bit of tomato paste.

My second beer – a brown ale with a twist, based loosely on Charles Papazian’s “Dithrambic Brown Ale” from “The New Complete Joy of Home Brewing”.

The twist? Maple syrup and some tweaking of the hops.

Vermont Maple Brown Ale

Ingredients for 5 gallons.

• 3.3 lbs Munton & Fison unhopped dark malt
• 3.3 lbs Munton & Fison unhopped light malt
• .5 lb roasted barley
• .25 lb black patent
• 1.75 oz Progress hops – boiling
• 1 oz Cascade – finishing
• .5 gal Maple Syrup – I used grade A Amber.

Throw the cracked grains in 1.5 gallons cold water. Bring to a boil, removing the grains after a couple minutes.

Stir in the maple syrup, both cans of malt and the boiling hops. Boil for 45 minutes. Add the Cascade in the last couple minutes of the boil.

Put 2 to 3 gallons of cold water into a clean fermenter, sparge off the wort and top up to 5 gallons. Pitch yeast when cool enough.

My goal for this beer is to make a smooth malty brown with a light hoppiness and complexity hopefully improved upon by the maple syrup and roasted barley.

So – I’ve decided to start brewing again. I’ve got all the equipment sitting fallow in the basement and – as I recall from the early 90’s – it made me very happy to brew beer.

Then I graduated college, moved around a lot and ran out of free time. Now I’ve got a house, a bit more free time and a need to brew. So, back again!

My first batch after nearly 10 years away from the hobby:

Strong-like-bull IPA

Ingredients for 4 gallons of beer.

• 6.6lbs Munton & Fison Amber Unhopped Malt
• 1lb Crystal malt
• 1oz Chinook hops – boiling
• 1oz Cascade hops – finishing
• 2oz Oak chips
• .5oz Cascade – dry hop

Bring 1.5 gallons to a boil and remove from heat. Throw in the cracked grains, steep for a half hour and discard.

Dump in the malt, boiling hops and boil for 45 minutes. Toss in the Cascade for the last couple minutes.

Sanitize the oak chips by steaming for a few minutes.

Put two gallons of cold water in a sanitized fermenter, along with the sanitized oak chips. Sparge in the wort and top off to 4 gallons total. Prep and pitch your yeast at the right temp per the usual.

When the primary fermentation has died down, siphon carefully off to a clean secondary fermenter containing the .5 oz Cascade for dry hopping. Let the brew sit for a week or two in the secondary – there should be no fermentation evident.

Bottle. Enjoy!

It’s still early in this beer’s life, but the preliminary results are very promising – malty, hoppy with nary an off flavor. Probably should’ve taken some gravity readings. . . But heck. I didn’t.

I wanted to make a stronger version of an IPA because I’ve been drinking Otter Creek’s 15th Anniversary IPA and it’s just about the best beer ever. Buy it with impunity.

A friend had her Dell Inspiron 9300 give up the ghost this week – and unfortunately it had her un-backed-up Master’s Thesis on it. For reals (hey – sometimes apocryphal stories are true).

The symptoms she described to me suggested out-and-out hardware failure, and I expected that the HDD was probably fine.

Luckily, I’ve got an extra Dell laptop (with a broken LCD but perfectly fine CRT-out) that I could pop her HDD into – but for the life of me, I couldn’t get a Knoppix live CD distro to boot.

So I downloaded the Debian / Knoppix based Damn Small Linux. Amazing – Firefox, busybox, sshfs, XMMS, openSSH and a slew of other tools that fit in a 50 meg ISO! You can load the whole OS to 128meg of RAM.

So I fired up Damn Small Linux, had it load to RAM, mounted an NFS export on my OpenBSD server and copied her files off.

I find the fact that you can fit an extremely useful OS into a 50 meg ISO amazing.