Veli.ws

It has begun!

Nov 24th

Hopefully the results wil be something like this.

The equipment I ordered arrived yesterday. It was actually a bit of a workload since I don’t have the routine for it yet. Cleaning and disinfecting the equipment took longest because I wanted to do it right. That is the part where most screw up and get contaminated beer.

I think I messed up with the sugar a a bit. The manual said to add 0.8kg of sugar. I had 1kg form which I removed 2dls of sugar and poured the rest to the brew. It turns out that 1dl of sugar is 90g of sugar, so that means that the final brew ended up getting 20g extra. Oh well, I doubt it’ll make much difference but that’s something I need to bear in mind in future.

I didn’t trust in the quality of my tap water so I bought some spring water from the local super market. That pushes up the costs a little, but I hope it will be worth it. The cost of ingredients per litre is around 0.90€ which is quite cheap in comparison with the normal prices here in Finland.

The fermentation took quite a while to start. I finished setting it up around 5 pm but the airlock hadn’t started to bubble even at midnight. That was quite weird but I think it is because I took the barrel to the coldest spot I could find in my apartment. Cold slows the process down but I’ve heard that it reduces the taste of yeast in the final product. Nevertheless, when I woke up this morning it was happily bubbling and therefore the fermentation had begun.

Homemade Beer

Starting a new project…

Nov 21st

Posted by Veli in Homemade Beer

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Been a while since I last updated my blog. A lot has happened. I have moved to Kajaani. That’s pretty north. I am studying games deveplopment in the Kajaani University of Applied sciences. It’s fun, but I need a hobby. I like beer, so I tought that I’d start amking my own beer.

Why?

Because I want to I have made some homemade beer when I was younger but that didn’t go too well. It tasted awful. Here in Kajaani, one of my classmates started making his own beer, which sparked my own intrest in the subject again. His beer was quite decent but I think I can do better. Much better

How?

I cheated. Like in gamesdev, you must always cheat in order to achieve something great. That’s why I decided to order the ingridients and equpiment online. After a bit of searching I stumbled upon on these:

The 1st image is a picture of the equipment I ordered. To be honest, I don’t know the engilish names for that stuff. But it is pretty much the stuff you need for the beer to fermentate. The next one is the image of the malt extract container. Not too interesting but I have heard that every blog post should contian pictures

Nevertheless I am still waiting for those to arrive. When I get them and get em setup I will update my blog.

Homemade Beer

AoCFinland.net – Finnish Age of Conan community

Oct 25th

Posted by Veli in My Projects

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Back in 2007 I got bored with World of Warcraft and started looking for something new to play. I found out about this nice looking and brutal MMO called Age of Conan made by the Norwegian company Funcom. The game hadn’t come out yet but it was looking very very promising. I decided to quit WoW and commit the spare time that I then had to create a Finnish community around the game.

Yup. That was the logo of the site. I really enjoyed working on it and the site grew everyday with about 10 new users. The community site included news, wiki, forum and later even an e-commerce sections. Forums, of course, where the most lively part of the site.

Hosting and creating the site allowed me to update my HTML, PHP and graphical design skills. I gained so much knowledge about these technologies that I was actually able to get a job at the company that was running the servers for the site. Even while working I continued to also work on the community site. During that time the site went through numerous revisions and improvements.

E-commerce

Veepeli Multimedia e-commerce site

About 6 months before the launch of AoC there were some demands from the community for an bulk order of the game for cheaper price. I asked around for discounts from retailers but they all were pretty hesitant to sell the games any cheaper. Some even gave me offers that didn’t undercut the cheapest pre-order prices at that time. That felt quite ridiculous.

I did some research on the subject and called some companies that import the game to Finland. Their prices were a lot more reasonable but they only sold the games to other companies. I did some more research, ran couple of polls on the site and then decided to start my own company for this purpose.

The company’s name became Veepeli Multimedia. I threw together an e-commerce site to sell the games online (seen on the picture). I think it worked out quite well actually. I still remember the day prior to the launch when my living room was so full of the Collector’s Editions that it made moving around really difficult. Nevertheless, I got the all packed and posted on time. Didn’t even get any complaints

After the success with AoC I tried to sell some other games on the webshop as well. That didn’t work out so well, since I didn’t have a community for those specific games backing me up. Also, AoC as a MMO kinda flopped so there wasn’t much of a market for it’s gamecards.

In 2009 I decided to pull the plug on the site. There wasn’t really any visitors on the site except for the loyal search engine bots It was kinda sad to quit it, but I needed to move onto other projects of mine. Nevertheless I think the project was a great success considering how much experience I gained while working on it.