Follow up to Carob Porter - racking into secondary

Just a quick note - today I racked the Carob Porter beer from the primary fermenter into a secondary.  It's been about 3 weeks.  The beer was bitter but not spoiled, and was not sweet, so I'm hopeful the yeast got through all / most of the sugar.

There was a layer of material floating at the top, and of course a layer of muck at the bottom.  I suspect the layer of top material is what would normally get blown off during fermentation - this was a half batch, the carboy is only half full, and in a full batch a good amount of material is carried out through the airlock during the fermentation.  Because the top of the liquid was much further from the airlock, I suspect it is one reason it didn't happen this time (also the fermentation was not that vigorous).  I managed to avoid most of the material (top and bottom) during the transfer, although some did make it over.  Hopefully it will settle to the bottom during this stage.

cross reference - a blog post on AskTheBard

I wrote a blog post over at AskTheBard about the BARD project I've been working on (at work):
http://askthebard.blogspot.com/2014/01/bard-helping-you-answer-you-answer-who.html

Brewing a chocolate ... whoops, carob ... porter. Crude heat capacity calculations...

I started a batch of homebrew today, aiming for a chocolate carob* porter.  My overall goal is to make a peanut butter porter, and possibly even a chocolate-peanut butter porter, but since I haven't brewed in a while I thought I'd start with an established recipe, and if that works try the peanut butter.

* turns out I used carob instead of chocolate...