In concert with my upcoming kegging setup, I’ve just brewed the beer that ought to be my first kegged beer. I’m also aiming to enter it in the Reddit Homebrewing Competition.

It’s pretty straightforward and virtually all extract, but that’s fine with me. I made a couple of weird decisions, namely the darkness of the crystal malt. I’m a little concerned about how dark it’s looking in primary at the moment — I know, I know, what did I expect from crystal 120L? — though the photo makes it look a lot darker than it actually is.

I’m also worried I went too far with the hops, but I suppose we’ll see what we see. I have some hophead friends. As they say: don’t worry, relax, have a homebrew. And I plan to.

I’ll name it once I’ve tasted it.

Recipe Characteristics

Ingredients

Recipe Notes

Steep specialty grains for 30 minutes at 155F.

60 minute boil.

Batch Notes

Hops added directly to boil and strained out with a kitchen strainer when transferring to primary. Some remain, which should contribute something like a dry hopping effect; I’ll rack off of the settled hop fragments into secondary and probably filter more efficiently then, as well.

At iSec we make extensive (or as extensive as possible for an organization our size, anyway) use of Netgear ProSafe switches; these are inexpensive gigabit ethernet switches with decent management features that seem to be marketed mostly to a SOHO type of clientele. We like them because they have a nice balance of configurability vs. price.

Because of the, erm, aggressive nature of some of our research traffic, we use VLANs pretty extensively to provide extra isolation of the nasty stuff. We use VLAN 10 as the switch management VLAN (there are some pretty good reasons to avoid the default VLAN for this type of traffic), and everything generally works pretty well.

Unfortunately, the management VLAN setting, present on our $70 GS108T 8-port distribution/access switches, is conspicuously absent from our $700  Netgear GS748AT 48-port “core” switch. After a considerable amount of flailing about, trying to find the proper way of moving switch management away from VLAN 1 on the 748, I discovered this little tidbit on the download page for both available firmwares (4.0.1.1 and 3.0.6.1):

Limitations and Known Issues:

1. Only members of default VLAN (VLAN ID of 1) can manage the switch.

facepalm.

So, my solution? Or, more aptly, my kludgy workaround? I put untagged VLAN 1 traffic on port 2 with a PVID of 1, and untagged VLAN 10 traffic on port 6 with a PVID of 10, and I jumpered the hell out of those ports (black cable). I’d imagine there may be something more elegant that can be done, but I haven’t been able to divine one based upon my understanding of the Netgear web interface.