We’ve Moved The Blog

What are you doing? What’s that for? How’d you do that? Can you show me? What about this?

Without curiosity, innovation doesn’t exist. We can’t learn if we don’t observe, take notes, measure, poke, prod and risk failing. We’ve done internal experiments like ArtMail, DinnerBell, Curio marks, and the Cubicle Chronicles (this blog).  It seems that a natural sense of curiosity is just a part of being a Data Dogger, so we’ve created a new space to examine, sniff, scratch our heads, applaud and simply explore ideas, topics and trends that we’re curious about; be it the latest social media platform, building a window farm, or a campaign we admire.

We figured, while we’re at it, we may as well share where our curiosity leads us with the rest of the world.

See what we’ve got our noses in…

(A.K.A. Posts are discontinued on this site, visit our this spot for our latest mental meanderings.)

Curiouser and Curiouser

Like Alice, our curiosity can’t be helped. We’re always exploring something new. Soon, very soon, you’ll see what we’ve got our noses in next…in the meantime, you’ll have to sit tight (but not for long)!

Name That Brew Winners!

Well we had a lot of fun creating our micro-brews in the empty cubicle, but now it’s time to move on.  We’ll be having a tasting party next week to see if we should stick to the interactive marketing stuff and leave brewing to the pro’s.  We’re also tickled pink to announce that we’ve picked our favorite 2 names out of over 50 submissions we received!

We’ve selected Carrie Snopek’s Wagging Tail Ale for our take at an American Blonde Ale, and Monica Drake’s catchy Data Dog’s Beta Brew for our Czech Pilsner.

Thank you ladies, we look forward to washing down some of the suds you named next week!

Brew Ha-Ha

Like a Doctor would, the first step when brewing any beer is to sanitize all your brewing equipment – which is basically anything that will come into contact with your beer.  Failure to follow this critical step could introduce harmful bacteria that will ruin the end product.

Next, malted barley and hops are boiled down in water to make wort.  Modern home brewing kits make preparing what is collectively called the “grain bill” for each type of beer very easy, but you can learn more about traditional methods for mashing here.

Yeast is added to the fermentation keg, along with additional hops to begin the fermentation process.  Depending on what style of beer you are brewing, this may also be the time to add additional ingredients like oatmeal, brown sugar, molasses, etc.  We used some locally grown hops from a co-worker’s neighbor, but also some pelletized hops (Palisade and Czech Saaz) from our friends at Northern Brewer.

Once all of your ingredients are combined in the fermentation keg, it needs to sit for a period of time to allow the enzymes in the wort and yeast to work their magic to start converting sugars to alcohol.

After a quick taste test to confirm the primary fermentation is complete, we selected brow and green bottles recycled from…um….various sources, and primed them with a dose of pure cane sugar to jump start the alcohol conversion process – yeast eat sugar and turn them to the good stuff!

Now we play the waiting game….  After a short secondary fermentation period, our brew will get put into cold storage for the clearing process.  As this is naturally fermented beer, any sediment suspended in the beer will settle to the bottom as the full flavor profile is developed in the fridge.  We’re still looking for names for these tasty brews, visit our Facebook page for contest rules!  We’ll be having a tasting party towards the end of the month, hope you can make it!

As always, thanks for reading!

Mike

Name that Brew!

It’s been a while. We know! We’re sorry! After a seriously busy summer, us Data Doggers are running into an even busier fall. With that said, we’ve decided that for our next (er, current) experiment, we’d try something that didn’t require as much daily attention. Therefore, we decided to brew beer!

Mike, our resident cubicle brew master, has whipped up 2 batches of beer that are currently in the process of fermenting. Stay tuned for his home, er, cube-brew how-to, but in the meantime, check out our “Name that Brew” contest on Facebook!

As I mentioned, we’ve got 2 beers in the “Dog Gone Brewery” that need naming and we want your help. Check out the details here, on our Facebook page. The caveat, you have to “Like” us to get the details and enter your suggestions.

I’ve also posted some images to our Flickr page, if you’re really curious!

Stay tuned for more details on how the beer comes out. Who knows, we might just have a tasting party!

Thanks for reading!

– Colleen

You say tomato, I say…well…tomato

It’s been about 3 weeks since we ramped up our window garden project with hydroponics, and our little basil plant isn’t so little anymore!  Given its success, we’ve expanded operations to bring a sickly tomato plant back into fighting shape.  This time around, we’re utilizing the deep water culture method, also known as a reservoir system.

This method is one of the easiest ways for a beginner to get started in hydroponics with very little investment.  Material lists and assembly instructions are available all over the web.  Using an 18 gallon storage bin as the reservoir, we glued some aquarium air stones to the bottom to keep our plants root system oxygenated. We connected them to an aquarium air pump and filled the reservoir with a pH balanced nutrient solution suitable for plants in a vegetative growth stage.

To prepare the plant, we again carefully removed as much dirt as possible from the root system and placed it in a net pot filled with hydrocorn as our medium.  We like to use hydrocorn because it’s made of clay and has wicking properties.  After 2 weeks of swimming in the reservoir, we already see roots sticking a good 4 inches out of the net pot!  I wonder what a Caprese Salad would taste like with CheeseJerky from our friends at Snack Patrol?

Want to learn more about how to grow fresh, safe food using these methods?  Stop by one of Milwaukee’s own organic urban farms like Sweet Water Organics or Growing Power for a tour!

– Mike

Walk Away from the Screen…

We’ve been movin’ and shakin’ here at the dog house on our actual work making for our poor upkeep of the Cubicle Chronicles blog lately. However, we have been playing the classic board games of this segment, so here’s the update:

Currently Mike, Anne and I are in the middle of an intense game of Monopoly. Mike is currently dominating, however I’m hoping for a comeback with my high rent on prime real estate, and Anne is holding on for dear life.

Anne and I are also duking it out in another game of Scrabble.

It’s been a nice routine, taking a few minutes to play your turn, think it through then get back to work. We’re also surprising ourselves with how many game directions we’ve had to re-read. It’s been a while since any of us have played these games, but it is helping to recharge our brains.

Moral of the story? Go out and grab a board game to play at work. The classics are pretty cheap at your nearest big box store and allow for time away from your computer screen. What good is online scrabble? You still have to look at your screen and it makes it easier to cheat. This segment, while not as involved as hosting our artists, has been surprisingly refreshing.

As you’ve seen, we’ve also had some time for some Window Garden improvements and desperate measures for saving the remaining plants. But more on that tomorrow!

Thanks for reading…now get in on the game!

– Colleen