This is just for a joke.
Phillip found a scared Wild Turkey on their farm. Oh no!
November 13th, 2009Brew Day: Epilogue
May 18th, 2009Well, the brew day went pretty well, but it was long.
Pros
The new false bottom for the kettle worked pretty well, all told. Brewing ten gallons with twelve ounces of hops, including a half-pound of pellets, I got all but a quart of wort out before the pump just couldn’t pull any more out. The underlet space was jammed with pellet particles.
Also, the time I spent the night before thinking about what I was going to be doing paid off in fewer trips up and down the stairs, and more time off my feet. This left me a lot less worn out than on previous days.
Cons
My efficiency was terrible (65%.) I think my crush was not all that great, but even worse is that I suspect that I had dry spots throughout the mash. My tun volume is small compared to the amount of grain I was mashing, and I did a fairly stiff mash to boot. These conspired to make stirring difficult.
My burner is wimpy. It takes too long to get mash water heated, and to get the wort to a boil after the sparge.
Chilling took too long, although part of that was due to low flow rate at first — I wanted to catch some hot water for cleaning.
It took me from around 9:00 AM till 4:00 PM to make this batch of beer. A plate chiller would probably knock half an hour off that, and a higher-output burner would probably knock another half hour off. When I get the bucket heater on a timer, I will be waking up to a Gott cooler full of mash water on brew day, which will probably shorten my brew day by an hour.
Third Base IPA Pale Ale (UPDATED)
May 16th, 2009
An American IPA for when the “kiss of the hop” just ain’t enough. Think of it as a celebration of the easing of the hop shortage.
22.00 lb Brewers Malt 2-Row (Briess) (1.8 SRM)
2.00 lb Caramel Malt – 20L (Briess) (20.0 SRM)
2.00 oz Magnum (US) [12.28 %] (60 min) (First Wort Hop)
2.00 oz Cascade [4.05 %] (30 min)
2.00 oz Cascade [4.05 %] (15 min)
1.00 oz Williamette [3.44 %] (15 min)
1.00 oz Sterling [6.43 %] (15 min)
1.00 oz Williamette [3.44 %] (2 min)
1.00 oz Sterling [6.43 %] (2 min)
2.00 oz Cascade [4.05 %] (2 min)
0.55 tsp Irish Moss (Boil 10.0 min)
2 Pkgs SafBrew Ale (DCL Yeast #S-33)
Beer Profile
Estimated Original Gravity: 1.060 SG (1.056-1.075 SG)
Estimated Color: 5.8 SRM (6.0-15.0 SRM) Color [Color]
Bitterness: 68.4 IBU (40.0-70.0 IBU)
Mash as a stiff single infusion at 154 F.
UPDATE: Measured specific gravity was 1.052!
Hop farm report
May 14th, 2009Well, the hops are coming up like gangbusters. Since I’m expecting them to grow quite high this year, I’ve built a trellis out of electrical conduit and twine.
The crossbar is 10 feet long, and around 12 feet high. The poles are driven three feet beneath the ground to avoid frost heave.
I’ve trained a couple of bines up from each plant, and pruned the others. You can sort of see them in the photo, but the light isn’t all that great. I’ll have more photos as the bines grow.
Bachelor Ale
March 22nd, 2009An adaptation of my old Summer Ale recipe, with a little more malt, and a little less honey. I named it Bachelor Ale because Jasper and I were living the bachelor lifestyle the weekend I brewed it.
Brewed 3/22/2008
11 gallons
9 lb Dry extract,Pilsner Light (Briess)
2.00 lb Caramel Malt – 80L (Briess)
1.00 oz Magnum (US) (old 2) [12.5 %] (60 min)
2.00 oz US Goldings [4.65 %] (15 min)
2.00 oz US Goldings [4.65 %] (2 min)
Fermentis US-05 yeast /Nottingham Ale yeast (split batch)
Measured Original Gravity: 1.050 SG
Est Bitterness: 31.8 IBU
Est Color: 10.7 SRM
I used a hop bag for the hops this time, which helped immensely in getting the wort into fermenters this time. I hope it won’t lower the utilization too much.
Memento Mori
March 20th, 2009
The Continental Illinois Bank (now Bank of America) building.
The Continental Illinois Bank building. Surprising that they have left the name up for the last 25 years.
Plain Mead
March 19th, 200912 Pounds Clover Honey
3 Pounds Mesquite Honey
4 tbsp bread yeast (boiled to provide yeast nutrients)
2 packages Red Star Montrachet yeast
Estimated OG: 1.126
It’s bubbling away with none of the sulfurous notes noted in the pyment-cyser last year, which seems to indicate that the bread yeast makes a good nutrient.
Another oldie but goody
March 17th, 2009Seanbaby’s Super Friends Page – Lex Luthor
Lex Luthor had cameras everywhere. It didn’t matter if Jayna was on the toilet or if Superman was 3 galaxies away enjoying a bowl of cereal, Lex Luthor could put it up on the big screen if he wanted. Sometimes, if you were too lucid while you were watching the show, you’d notice, but most times you didn’t care that Luthor was watching a tight closeup of a couple Super Friends fixing a satellite. Luthor had to have had the hugest collection of blackmail tapes. His tapes at home are probably labelled “French Ambassador with Transvestite Hooker,” “Prime Minister Eating what he Found in his Nose,” and “Monkey Fucking Dog.” Why did he go through with all the complicated mind control bullshit when he could have quietly extorted money from every country’s government without the Super Friends even knowing? And if they did find out, just threaten to release the tapes of Wendy and Cyborg’s Titanium Pleasure Arm.
Well, shit.
February 9th, 2009Glenn Greenwald reports:
Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability — resoundingly and disgracefully
Two weeks ago, I interviewed the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, counsel to 5 individuals suing the subsidiary of Boeing (Jeppesen) which had arranged the Bush administration’s rendition program, under which those 5 plaintiffs had been abducted, sent to other countries and brutally tortured. Today the Obama administration was required to file with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals its position in this case — i.e., whether it would continue the Bush administration’s abusive reliance on the “state secrets” privilege to prevent courts from ruling on such matters, or whether they would adhere to Obama’s previous claims about his beliefs on “state secrets” by withdrawing that position and allowing these victims their day in court.
Yesterday, enthusiastic Obama supporter Andrew Sullivan wrote about this case: ”Tomorrow in a federal court hearing in San Francisco, we’ll find out if the Obama administration intends to keep the evidence as secret as the Bush administration did.” As I wrote after interviewing Wizner two weeks ago: ”This is the first real test of the authenticity of Obama’s commitment to reverse the abuses of executive power over the last eight years.” Today, the Obama administration failed that test – resoundingly and disgracefully
No justice, it seems. Damn it to hell.
The Story About the Water Balloons
January 28th, 2009Back when I was in graduate school, there was a Foucault pendulum hanging in an alcove outside the physics building. This was a rather large affair, stretching from the tenth floor to the third floor, which was at ground level. At the bottom was a heavy three-foot brushed-aluminum ball, and an electromagnetic device to keep it moving. This device did not work, and all the time I was there, the pendulum hung straight down.
I was studying for my final exam in Really Hard Differential Equations (better known as Classical Mechanics) one night, when a fellow student and I decided that a nice study break would be to try and get the Foucault pendulum moving again.
From the tenth floor.
With water balloons.
It turns out that a 3-foot metal ball is a lot harder to hit from 70 feet with a water balloon than it sounds. Before long, the alcove looked like the surface of the Moon, as the water balloons made craters in the gravel covering the ground. No problem, making the craters was fun, too — so much fun that when we ran out of balloons, we went out to buy more.
Eventually, though, we figured it would be best to get back to studying, so as a finale, we made the Queen Mother of all water balloons. I’m certain that it wasn’t actually a foot in diameter as I seem to remember, but it was big enough that we had to carry it up to the tenth floor in a bucket.
We dumped the bucket over the ledge, and watched it fall to the ground, at which point the safety glass separating the alcove from the building’s lobby went totally white. When we went downstairs to see what we’d done, there was a hole in the glass about ten feet above the ground.
Partly because we wanted to be honest, and partly because we figured we’d get caught anyway, we went to the campus cop shop and told them something along the lines of “there’s some broken glass at Stevenson Center. That was us, sorry. Send us a bill.”
We never got a bill, but I was talking to the department administrator a few months later, and he made sure to mention that they were pulling out the pendulum and putting in a picnic area because “you never know what sort of hijinks students are going to get up to next.” That was the last I ever heard of it, except from my sisters, who seem to remember the incident more distinctly than I do.