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 It's been a little over a month since I left Montréal and a lot has happened since then. The search for a new home took some time but was not nearly as painful as I was expecting it to be. I got a lovely one bedroom apartment on the corner of the building, which gives me lots of natural light. There's a lot to do and see in San Francisco but this will all have to wait because the first thing that I did once I was sure that I would eventually have a bed to sleep on, was to brew a batch of beer.

I left most of my brewing equipment in Montréal. Most of the bulky stuff is simply too affordable to justify packing having it moved across the continent. I had a pretty good stash of hops that I ended up giving away because I was more interested in seeing used for brewing than going stale in a big unrefrigerated cardboard box somewhere between Montréal and San Francisco.

I did not buy everything that I had in Montréal but fortunately, brewing does not require much. I ordered a carboy, some malt, hops, a packet of yeast, and I was ready to go.

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Last week, we had the Mondial de la bière, Montréal's international beer festival. This is a great expo-like event with over 40 craft brewers coming in town to show their creations.

The new venue is a refreshing change. The old one was getting way too crowded and it was a major challenge to move from one kiosk to the other during peek hours. With the larger venue, you have very large hallways and you can get a sense of who's on the floor by walking between the booth while drinking and having a conversation. Unfortunately, the new venue feels like a bunker: you access it from the underground city by passing a maze of up and down staircases then you arrive in this enormous hall with bare concrete walls and not a window in sight. If you think of a grey yellow-lit hallway in Quake, you are not too far from the reality.

It's OK to do a event indoor, but if you do so, do it during the winter. When I drink a beer in June, I think of a terrace and if you are not after very exclusive beers, you will get a much nicer experience on the terrace of a craft brewerie, which were all featuring some guest beers anyway.

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Brewing comes with many benefits. It's true that having over 60 liters of beer on tap means that you can party all night long then some more but really, what I like about it is that you get to drink beer styles that you'd have a hard time to get your hands on otherwise. Drinking good beer and hanging around people who know a lot about turning malt into a delightful brew broadens your knowledge of beer and allows you to taste every beer, commercial or homebrew, with a magnified perspective.

When I taste a craft beer, either from a fellow homebrewer or from a micro brewery, I experience the story someone who cares to conceive a great drink, a beer with attitude. Not a drink that is meant to please everyone, but a bold drink that punches you in the face with an intense shockwave of flavors and aromas.

Next Monday, Cinema Politica will feature Beer Wars, a documentary by Anat Baron about the struggle of craft-brewers to bring tasteful beer to the masses despite the marketing assault of the corporate mass breweries. More infos on the Cinema Politica Website.

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You won't need a blow off tube until you do. With 19L batches you'll be fine with an airlock most of the time but as mentioned it depends on the specifics of the batch. Anyway, as Denis says, you're not a real home brewer until you have cleaned the ceiling with a mop. Down the track, make sure to post the inevitably hilarious pictures of the batch where your airlock blocked up and in hindsight you should have used a large diameter blow off tube instead.

Anthony Wilson, on the MontreAlers mailing list

Brewing is full of challenges. Among other things, you have to deal with organic ingredients with relatively short shelf life and with qualities that varies from one harvest to the other, you need to move large volumes of hot liquid, and you have to handle sticky fluids under high pressure.

While patience is a virtue when brewing, it happens that you have to rush a batch a bit because you want it ready for a particular event. That's when being part of a club is very helpful. Experienced brewers know tricks that are not written in books and they will readily share then when you ask the right questions.

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I'm a brewer. I like to brew beer, I like to share the results, and I like to incorporate the feed back that I receive in order to improve. I am fortunate because we have a great brewing club here in Montréal and it's a very effective source of informed feedback.

Being part of a club means that you have a bunch of brewers of different levels who can give you advice. Once in a while, we meet and samples each others brew and comment on what could push these brews a little further on the greatness scale.

Senior members of the MontreAlers also team up with the Canadian Amateur Brewers Association to organize a yearly brewing competition and for the first time, I decided to submit an entry.

Daniel Haran is the former lead organizer of the Montreal.rb ruby user group, I am the lead organizer of Montréal-Python, but when I met him for the first time, instead of talking about user groups, we ended up talking about food. It turns out that Daniel is also a chocolate home roasters. He is very knowledgeable in the different quality of various cocoa beans and we agreed to work on a project together: Vénus Noire, an Imperial Chocolate Stout.

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Today I had an extremely busy day with the end of the ConFoo.ca call for speakers looming. It's now that everyone asks questions and that we notice all these great people that have yet to be solicited. Also this evening was the ConFoo.ca weekly status meeting so I went back home with very long TODO list. Having painstakingly crossed a few items of my list, I headed toward my fridge for a well deserved glass of homebrew.

Horror! I opened the fridge only to be greeted by the sight of a see of malted beverage. One of my keg leaked and spilled around three liters of beer at the bottom of my fridge and around it. After all the mopping and the cleaning, I consider what is left in that keg to be some of the tastiest beer that I had in years.

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I've been brewing a lot since I got back to beer making. Last weekend, I started my eighth batch since my amber ale. I brewed a blonde, two stouts, an IPA, a Belgian Brown, an Orval clone, a wit, and the latest, an American Pale Ale inspired by Sierra Nevada.

Brewing beer is easy. It takes some elbow grease to scrub and sanitize all your equipment but if you can bake a cake, you most certainly can brew beer. That's what I've been telling my friends and I'm glad that a few of them have started brewing on their own.

Since brewing beer is easy, there are no reasons not to do special brews for special events, just as one would bake a cake for a birthday. You only need to plan a bit to take into account fermentation time and your good to go.

It's Yann Larrivée of PHP-Québec who first pitched the idea of having homebrews from members of the developers community at an informal BBQ. So I brought a buckwheat Belgian brown at the latest PHP-BBQ and it was a huge success. Beside the unexpected party suitcase keeping the keg and CO2 cylinder out of sight, people really appreciated the fact that they were drinking a brew that was prepared just for them. That got me fired up.

As there are many thirsty developers in Montréal, got my stove into high gear and started brewing seriously. As I write this, I have three batches in various stages of preparation. From left to right on the above picture, we can see:

• an Orval clone that is currently maturing with Brettanomyces yeasts;
• an American Pale Ale that I plan to bring to the next Montréal-Python;
• a Belgian wit that I plan to bring to ConFooBBQ, the BBQ for developers.

I like how the wit is clearing up. It started extremely hazy, something that is to be expected when you brew with wheat, but after five days in the secondary fermenter, it's cleared up a nicely with only the bottom third exhibiting intense fogginess. I followed a recipe that called for Irish moss, which help to clear up a beer. The trick is that you want a wit to be served somewhat hazy so you have to balance the amount to Irish moss so you don't end up with a crystal clear drink. Let's see how it turns out at ConFooBBQ.

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It's been a while since I last brewed beer but I'm finally at it again. As I write this, my apartment is filled with the aroma of fresh hops and barley. That smells always makes me incredibly thirsty; I can't drink any of it for a few weeks but I can write on the pleasure of brewing in the mean time.

Back when I did my last batch, I was a caffeine addicted young programmer, running on Penguin Mints and on dark chocolate. I was looking for something extravagant, something with a kick. I made two batch that summer: a coffee flavored stout and an green tea flavored red. When I say flavored, I really mean it: the stout contained one kilo of really dark and oily espresso coffee and the red was just as excessive but I unfortunately can't find the original recipe anymore. I'm certainly not the first to think of making a coffee flavored stout. Dieu du Ciel was serving one at the time, a 9% monster that was extremely strong on all senses of the term.

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Pythonistas of Montréal, rejoice! We now officially have a user group and our first meeting is to take place on 2008-02-07 at 18h30. It's going to be in Akoha's office: 3981 St. Laurent, suite 615.

There are two presentation slots; I think both are for 20 to 45 minutes. As I write this, both are still open. Who will break the ice?

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This guide was originally developed on the Gazest demo site with the help of the MSLUG hackers. I'm about to push a new version of Gazest on the demo site that changes internal storage and the current content will probably be nuked rather than upgraded. This guide, unlike the rest of the demo site, is quite good so I repost it here in hope that it can help local dwellers and future visitors enjoy our fascinating city.

First of all, DON'T PANIC. OOPSLA starts in just a few days and we await a lot of famous Lisp hackers so I thought that it would be nice to give them a list of decent things to do in Montréal. One might think that I'm trying to coerce people into beta testing Gazest and he would be right.

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There will be a Slashdot anniversary party in Montréal, probably at Ste-Elizabeth. Aside from the obvious great beer selection, there will be free t-shirts. I know many of you wasted a lot of time on Slashdot so I hope to see you there. The registration is a bit counter intuitive, you need to select "QC" on the party finder page and to register for the party you plan to attend from there.

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