Budweiser - Czechvar

I was at Trader Joe's the other day and I found something amazing. Looking in the beer section, they had Czechvar.

Czechvar, for those who do not know, is known as Budweiser in Europe -- well, parts of Europe. You see, there has been a trademark war in Europe over the name Budweiser. In some countries the brewery, Budějovický Budvar, owns the trademark. In others, Anheuser-Busch owns the trademark. The dispute has been going on for years.

Here in the United States, the beer is known as Czechvar, and I found it on the shelf for the first time at Trader Joe's. I've been wanting to try it for years, so I bought a six-pack.

I was worried when I bought the six-pack because all the bottles were green and exposed. I half expected them to be skunked. However, they were not.

The first impression that I got was carbonation. It was lightly carbonated, with little to no head at all, almost like a British bitter. In fact, as I poured it, I noticed no bubbles at all until the very last bit fell into the glass. Then a small ring of bubbles appeared.

The beer itself is a very clean and very clear Bohemian Pilsener, almost like Pilsener Urquell, but less bitter, though the Saaz hops were very apparent. It was very drinkable, but balanced more toward the sweet side. The only flaw I found was the carbonation. Like I mentioned above, it was on the low side. As a result, it did not have a carbonic bite.

That is pretty much it. I'm glad that I finally found it so I could try it.

Brewing Software on Linux: BeerSmith

I had heard about BeerSmith for a long time. In many ways, it was supposed to replace ProMash as the most popular brewing software out there. I had always wanted to try it, but never did because it was natively written for Windows. As I was doing this series on brewing software, on a whim, I visited the BeerSmith website. What I found out, to my pleasant surprise, is that, like ProMash, it supposedly worked on Linux under Wine, a Windows emulator. I decided to give it a try.

On my Asus EEE PC, running Xandros Linux, I downloaded the BeerSmith 1.4 installer, and ran it in Wine 0.9.25. BeerSmith installed it quite easily. When I ran it for the first time, however, Wine came up with a window saying that it needed to install Wine Gecko, a sort of Internet Explorer replacement. After that, BeerSmith started up.


The first thing that I did, like I had done on previous brewing software evaluations for this series of posts, is try to put together my porter recipe. That is when I noticed the first problem. BeerSmith seemed to have a rather limiting display bug. As I added new ingredients, the only thing that it would display in the ingredient pane was the amount of an ingredient. It would not display the name of the ingredient, type of ingredient, IBU contributions, or percentage of the malt bill. There were columns in the panel like it was supposed to. However, those columns were simply blank. I assumed that this was a defect from running under Wine. This seemed much more serious that ProMash's formating issues under Wine, as information was actually omitted from the screen.


Despite the defect, what BeerSmith did have over its rivals was an impressive list of features. It seems to have screens for everything. There were water profilers, strike temperature calculators, decoction calculators, boil off calculators, hop bitterness calculators, hop aging calculators, hydrometer adjustment calculators, attenuation calculators, carbonation calculators, and more. There were also databases for equipment, yeast, beer styles, ingredient types, mash profiles. You could also make shopping lists, and manage inventories. It was all there, everything you could think of.

What impressed me as well is the relevance of the databases. Unlike all its rivals, it had all the ingredients for my porter recipe, including the odd ones like smoked malt, Glacier hops and the oak chips.


One thing that has plagued all the software evaluations I've done for this series is IBU calculations. Every single piece of brewing software I've used has come up with a different IBU value, even though they have all been set up the use the Rager formula. BeerSmith was no different. For my porter recipe, it seemed to fall between QBrew's 19 and ProMash's 24, with a value of 22.

Another inconsistency I found with BeerSmith is that it gave me a lower OG than the rest. It gave me an OG of 1.053 where all the other brewing software gave me an OG of 1.055. I had to bump up the efficiency to give me an OG of 1.055.

There was another problem, too, though this one was more of an annoyance. Like StrangeBrew, BeerSmith did not seem to handle the EEE PC's odd screen resolution of 1024 x 600 very well. They seemed to cram too much information on the screen, and I had to scroll around a lot. In fact, some screens did not even have scroll bars, seemingly leaving me out to dry, but I found that I could get it to scroll anyway with my mouse wheel.

Summarizing, this is what I found: In fact, BeerSmith did run under Wine, as advertised. However, it had a potential fatal flaw, omitting important information from the recipe screen. Also, the numbers, like IBUs, and OG did not match the other software I evaluated. With that said, though, the ingredient databases were the most complete. Best of all, BeerSmith had the absolute best list of features, even more comprehensive than ProMash, which I kind of use as a benchmark.

That is about it. I hope you found this review useful.

Brewing Software on Linux: ProMash

ProMash is arguably to most popular brewing program out there. It is natively written for Windows. However, it advertises that it can be run on Linux under Wine, a Windows emulator. My old Linux box, which ran Mandrake 10.0, died a year and a half ago. On it, I had done just that, run ProMash under Wine. Unfortunately, though it ran, there were some issues. I was curious if the same issues existed on my new Linux netbook, an Asus EEE PC 1000, running Xandros.

The first issue I had running ProMash on my old Mandrake box was installation. I could not run the installer to completion. I had to install the program on Windows and copy over the application from the Program Files directory directly onto my Linux box. That worked pretty well, and I was able to get it up and running that way.

Once I got it running, most of the issues that I had were formatting issues. The screens simply did not draw right. On the recipe formulator, the window I used most, the text would wrap around, making it hard to read. In fact, it often overwrote various text edit boxes, making it difficult to edit data. Also, the columns on lists of data, such as the grain database, did not fit neatly under the column headings.

There was one more thing that seemed happen on my old Linux box. When I formulated a recipe, the numbers did not match the ProMash installation under Windows exactly. It was close, but things like IBUs, SRMs, and OG would be off by a small percentage. In all fairness, however, I cannot be sure that I was running the same version of ProMash on both boxes, and the ingredient databases may have had small variations.

On my new Asus EEE PC, I ran the installer for ProMash 1.8a in Wine 0.9.25, and this time, unlike before, it ran to completion. Upon launching it, however, right off the bat, I noticed a new issue. The icons on the main ProMash screen were blacked out, so that you could not tell what they were.


Fortunately, the features of ProMash are accessible via the menus, so it was more of an annoyance than anything.

The first screen I tried was the recipe formulation screen, to see of the same formatting issues existed. To my pleasant surprise, it seemed to be fixed. I could edit things like mash efficiency without it being overwritten, like before.


On thing that was not fixed, however, was the formatting issues on lists of data. The columns simply were not the same as running it on Windows. Nothing lined up right.


I took my porter recipe and put it into ProMash, like I had done with other brewing programs and one thing that I noticed right away was that some of the ingredients were not to be found in the databases. Neither were my Glacier hops there, nor was the Rauch malt. I had to find substitutes to put together my recipe.

One thing that did happen when I formulated my recipe, however, is that my numbers came out the same in both Linux and Windows. IBUs, SRMs, OG: they were all the same. That issue seemed to be solved.

I should mention another issue, though, one that has plagued all the brewing software that I've run on Linux. The IBU calculations have been different for every program I've run, even though they all have been set to use the Rager formula. ProMash was no different. For my porter recipe, the IBUs came out to about 18 in StrangeBrew, about 19 in QBrew, and about 24 in ProMash. This seemed rather significant to me.

That is about it for running ProMash under Wine on Linux. For the most part, it worked the same, with minor annoyances of formatting issues and broken icons. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Mexican Riviera Cruise Photo-journal, Part III

As I promised: the last of the photos. This is a three part series, showing photos of our Mexican Riviera cruise aboard Holland America's Oosterdam. Part III shows us whale watching is Puerto Vallarta, and our last days at sea, on the way home to San Diego.

In Puerto Vallata, we took a little boat out to sea to go whale watching. It was surprising how many whales we saw. Here are two tails up in the air.

The whales were so close, you could almost reach out and touch them.

This picture show me on our little boat, looking for whales.

This whale tail was so close, you could see the barnacles on it. In the background, you can barely make out Puerto Vallarta. We were pretty far out to sea.

The next day was a sea day. That night, we dressed up and went to the "Pinnacle Grill," the on board premium restaurant, basically a steakhouse. We celebrated my 40th birthday.

The last night, at dinner, the wait staff put on a show as we wore chef's hats. Here is Julie with her chef hat on.

Here are both of us with our chef's hats on. Mine did not fit very well, and kept falling off. Oh well.

That is about it. Next time, it is back to brewing posts.

Mexican Riviera Cruise Photo-journal, Part II

As I promised: more photos. This is a three part series, showing photos of our Mexican Riviera cruise aboard Holland America's Oosterdam. Part II shows us sailing away from Cabo, and arriving at our second port of call, Mazatlan, where we rode horses on the beach.

This picture is looking off to the side, at land's end, from our balcony. The aft balconies on the Oosterdam are tiered, in that you can look up to see the balconies above you, and down to the balconies below. This picture shows the balconies below us.

As we sailed away from Cabo, the sun set behind land's end.

This picture shows me on our balcony as we head out to sea.

The next morning, we arrived in Mazatlan. From our balcony, the Pacifico brewery was visible.

We took a small boat out to Stone Island, and went horseback riding on the beach. This picture is looking from my horse to Julie's horse.

A picture of Julie and I on our horses on the beach.

After our ride, we went to a bar on the beach and rested our sore butts.

"I'd like a cerveza. Negra Modelo?" I asked.

"Pacifico," the man answered.

"Dos Equis amber?"

"Pacifico."

"I think that they only have Pacifico," Julie interjected.

"Okay, Pacifico," I finally said.

When in Rome...

Mexican Riviera Cruise Photo-journal, Part I

As I promised: photos. This is a three part series, showing photos of our Mexican Riviera cruise aboard Holland America's Oosterdam. Part I shows us sailing away, a day at sea, and our day in Cabo San Lucas.

It was dark, rainy, and cold by the time we sailed out of of San Diego bay. This picture shows us on our balcony, all bundled up.

The next day was sunny and clear. We had an aft balcony, that overlooked the ship's wake.

Our balcony, where we spent much of our time on sea days, was quite large compared to the other balconies on the ship, because it was aft. There was also the constant "whooosh" of the water going by.

This picture shows Julie on the tender boat in Cabo San Lucas, the ship in the background.

Our ship, the Oosterdam, from the tender.

In Cabo, we took a glass bottom boat out to "land's end," the very tip of the Baja. This picture show Julie and I, along with our friends.

The water was shallow at parts of land's end. We could see the bottom through the glass, along with colorful fish. Our boat captain attracted the fish by throwing tortillas over the edge.

Near land's end, you could look through the rocks through a keyhole.

This picture shows all of us near the famous arch in Cabo.

Happy New Year!

Smooch!