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 Number six on our list of SFB’s Greatest Things of 2010 is “SFB Gets Hacked.”
Earlier this year, our site was down for a few days after being hacked into and having our index pages changed to the home screen of a Turkish hacker. Upon further review, it seems that a lot of sites hosted by GoDaddy were hacked the same day by this person. So it wasn’t really something that we did, e.g. easy password, but rather something that GoDaddy didn’t do to secure their systems.
We were lucky that the hacker did not delete all the files on our server, that I was able to quickly restore the home page in all its former glory, make fun of the hacker, and laugh about it during our Greatest Things of 2010 countdown.
 Lets take a break from the count down for a day to discuss current happenings here at the home brewery.
Our latest beer, dubbed “Spicy Mistletoe” by our self-appointed Director of Marketing — @francogreco20 on the Twitter– may be one of the most delicious beers we have created so far. It is certainly the most talked about. Its not perfect, there is probably some extra bitterness at the end that I would like to be missing for the next brew but overall I like what the spices do to the beer.
In the new year I will start my attempt to brew all the recipes in “Brewing Classic Styles” in one year. I have all of the equipment I need besides somewhere to lager the beers. I will have to figure that out when I get to it which is not that long from now.
Thats it for now. Back to the countdown tomorrow.
 Number seven relates only to SFB and if I had my way from the beginning, this would have been one of the best things of 2009. This thing is a wort chiller.
Read about it here. I blame myself. Myself and home brew books that don’t stress the unbelievable difference in wort chilling times. It used to be that we had to put the wort in a freezer or an ice bath for multiple boring hours. Now its 20 minutes and pitch. It couldn’t be easier.
If you are a homebrewer wondering if you need one, the answer is yes. I made mine out of 50 feet of copper tubing, some hose attachments, and a corny keg to wrap it around. It doesn’t matter if you buy or make it yourself, a wort chiller should be on the top of your list of brewing supplies.
 Looking back: I think it is in the fine print when you sign up for internet service. If you create content, you must create a year-end review. If you consume content, you must read as many year-end reviews as your clicking finger will allow.
This will be my 92nd post this year, and you better believe I will be getting to 100 this week. Counting down..
Number 8…… Opening a beer from our beer celler and having it taste amazing. My original description of opening of that beer is in the third paragraph of the linked to post. We determined that it was our Honey Brown, brewed in February 2010, drank in September. I don’t recall the exact taste in February (or March) when we first drank it but in September it was delicious. It was rich and complex. On the other hand, last week we tried another beer from the cellar that was not very good. I think it was the ESB we brewed in the spring. Not all of our beers will benefit from aging but it is good to know which ones will and which ones won’t.
No beer but…
 If only I had been using 50% efficiency to calculate my recipes the whole time… or our entire all-grain era. Everything is on track for our Holiday Dubbel except the smell. I don’t know what it smelled like. It didn’t smell like fully fermented beer. It didn’t smell like wort that didn’t ferment enough. Honestly, it kind of stunk. Maybe that is what all Belgian-style / T-58 beers smell like at this stage. Its either that or the spices. I guess its the spices. I’ve known for a while that the bobo keggle I bought off of Craigslist doesn’t contain heat that well but I didn’t realize that it was this far below what (supposedly) most other homebrew operations work at. Maybe its time for the cooler conversion or a proper sparge setup.
As for the picture… sometimes I don’t have a picture to add to a post but, for aesthetic reasons, would like one. I usually just Google some phrase from the post and put up a picture from the image search results. Today I went to the Microsoft Office Image Gallery and searched “beer.” This one is called “Man with beer and fries.” He seems contemplative. My guess is that he was doing his taxes, got fed up with some mumbo-jumbo rule and decided that in order to get his mind off of the problems at hand, he needed a smoke, a Biggie Fry, and a beer. He’s now relaxed, savoring the time between drags, and pondering whether he has enough detergent to do his undershirt laundry tonight. I’m betting that he doesn’t.
Saturday I attended the birthday celebration of an SFB founder. During that celebration we decided to open a bottle from the SFB beer cellar. For those who don’t know, we have saved three 22oz bottles of each beer we have made. The oldest (and ones not capped properly) have grown mold inside the bottle and so are now undrinkable. The beer we picked, the oldest drinkable one, we decided, after much debate, was our honey brown. I expected it (as I expect of all the beers in the cellar) to be disgusting. It was not. It was delicious! I hope they are all now delicious. The next beer from the cellar, I assume, will be opened during an upcoming “SFB and Friends” Christmas costume party. If only the next beer will be as delicious…
Sometimes you need to take a break from blogs and twitter and however else you communicate from the world-incognito. Other times you just forget about them. Still other times, you get hacked by some Turkish guy.
So when you come back (as I am hoping to and), like Conan did tonight, it is best to recap what you have done in the time since you last posted (or use WBAL clips featuring the masturbating bear).
1. Remeber “50 beers-50 States?” Don’t worry, I barely do. I’m stuck at 24. Really Arizona? C’mon Alabama. Distribute to Maryland (or Texas) already.
2. Beers, Just brewed: Extra Spiced Christmas Dubbel. More on That tomorrow.
3. Beers, Just drank: Unibroue Terrible, maginfique+ I get to read the bottles and pretend I know more French than I do.
4. No coming soon GABF or BBW to look forward too and the Anchor Christmas tree only intrigues for so long…
SFB was hacked! Not to sound too excited about it… The home page was the image above for a brief time yesterday. The hacker replaced our index files so that any request to our main URL was shown his home page. For that I am grateful. I guess he hacked our FTP password and could have done a lot more damage. From what I can tell, this dazzling intellect call himself iSKORPiTX and is from Turkey and boy does he hate Armenia (although he sends his best regards to the rest of the world). I would love to know the series of events that led up to his hacking. My guess is that he was not too pleased with our offerings at the Homebrew Showcase at Havana’s. Sorry iSKORPiTX. Next time we will do better. I can promise you that.
 Last year, about this time, I wrote something about how I didn’t even know about Baltimore Beer Week until it was over (nevermind if that coincided with starting to follow BeerInBaltimore on twitter). If I recall, the title was (or should have been) “Baltimore Beer Weak.” I thought that, as someone not knowledgeable about the Baltimore beer scene, Baltimore Beer Week should have done more to reach out to people like me, to tell me that there is this wonderful quasi week full of beer events.
This year it seemed to me that Baltimore Beer Week must have doubled just about everything. There was plenty of advertising for the norms and plenty more events. I also increased my participation this year. I attended two events and took part in one. I was surprised (and pleased) to see that a non-headlining event, The Homebrew Showcase, had over 200 people attend. The opening ceremony was a hit, there were many, many tweets about the events I didn’t go to, and the Canton Waterfront looked crowded as I drove by on Sunday.
Speaking of the Homebrew Showcase, I am proud to say that we did not come in last… on of our beers tied for last place! Someone else was down there with us. We also received a nod having another beer come in third to last place. Very exciting. No where to go but up. The beers turned out well except they were under-carbonated. We lost to some delicious beers and apparently, fell victim to one of my own beer festival rules: we did not bring our “A” game. Three hours in a row being nice to people was a little much for me. I feel for the guys that have to do this sort of thing all the time. Although it was fun to talk about beer for three hours in a row. And thats me at the showcase in the picture (I stole from the events SnapFish page) with a stern gaze out into the crowd of people, most of whom would not be voting for SFB.
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