Holiday Beer

Nothing says holiday spirit better than beer am I right?

Yesterday my Dad and I bottled up my American Strong aged in a whiskey oak barrel.  Topping off at around 9% ABV and smelling (and tasting) strongly of whiskey I'd say this was an excellent showing for my brewing effort.  The side batch of 3ish gallons of lower gravity wort finished carbonating but the one we opened seemed a little flat to me.  I had almost 3x's as much corn sugar in this batch and it took off bubbling so fiercely that it bubbled out of my carboy before settling down.  I'm actually more concerned about bottle bombs more than I am about under carbonation.

So Solstice has come and gone, and that leaves me tapped out for pagan holidays for a while I suppose.  Sure theirs new years eve, which could be interpreted as pagan (or at the very least adopted as) but having a kid seems to suck the fun out of those types of celebrations.  Stay warm and merry, (if that's your thing).

The crud, and other crust

It's stunning how quick and slow things seem to go.  Nothing really to report on any front, I've been wrapping up this and that but mostly moving chairs around on the titanic.  I bottled the side batch of the American Strong, that is really just a pale ale,  I've made arrangements for a guest brewer to host a beer in my barrel, secured enough bottles to get the full batch of the American strong bottled (though I'm going to need more caps and other bits), cleaned up the beer storage area where one of my containers of Starsan leaked nearly a gallon of water inside of a cabinet.  Unplugged my kegorator and am working on a rust and moisture problem that you get from running a chest freezer as a fridge.  Dug out the Navel Jelly to address said rust problem just waiting for the last of the moisture to dry up before I attack the rust and them seal up the seam that's letting water leak.  Finished up my rocket Stove and the stand for placing things above the stove, I just need to run a test burn to verify that the airflow is good and see how well my pots fit on my stand.

Otherwise, I'm getting over some cold thing and getting back into the gym.  It's my first full week back at lifting so I'm sore and hungry and cranky.  In short yeah, just living.


I'll leave you with this gem from Modest Mouse, Heart cooks brain. The years go fast and the days go slow.

Wait science damn you!

Minute Physics blows my mind on a weekly basis.





Completely un-related Science damn you makes me think of this South Park Episode.  Save the time child!

Video calls on android

I've been on the android train for 3 years now first with the HTC Hero(Sprint) and then with the LG LS670 (sprint Optimus S), and now I'm on the Samsung Galaxy Note II.  First things first, I love the phone.  It's huge, and the battery is so much better than any smartphone that I've had before.  I frequently get home with 60-70% on light usage I'm at 68% right now with 10 hours 41 mins after I listened to music in the morning and streamed 20 minutes of youtube over 3g this afternoon.  Sure I close apps daily, and Jelly Bean has as much to do with that battery performance as the 3200mah battery does but still.  Gushing and pink body glove case aside (don't get me started on this case) I've got a problem with this darn phone.

I've tried several applications to make video calls and thus far Fring and Skype both have the same bug, no one can see the video (front or back camera) on the other end.  I was worried it was must my phone, but after testing today in store with another Note II it appears to be isolated to the Note II.  Interestingly I figured out that video works with google+ hangouts and I'll see if that will be good enough for my purposes or not.  To be Clear I cannot make video calls with Skype and Fring on the Galaxy Note II from sprint on wifi or 3g.

Why bother posting here you say?  Well I'm always amazed at how much traffic something like this tends to get and maybe someone smart will know what's the matter and either direct me to a fix, or get Fring, Skype or Samsung to fix it.  I've also contacted the fring developers to let them know about the problem, so this isn't my only attempt to see this fixed.  In any event here's hoping internet hivemind, save me from my phone.

Twilight of the Elites

It was an interesting read, but it would be nearly impossible to summarize. It draws from many threads of history to try and weave a narrative of the decline of American institutions and the trust of people in those institutions and then link that to the increasing inequality we are observing in our society. It's a tall order, and I think he does a decent job of building the case that our fundamental posture in the US of distrusting authority, and authority continually doing things to cause us to distrust them is undermining our ability to even approach issues with common understandings. The more forward looking ending piece is hopeful, but nothing more. He thinks that a radicalized upper middle class of well educated people that are not getting the opportunities that are increasingly being accrued by the top percentage of elites will form the core of a body that works to topple the status quo. 

Again hopeful, and overly optimistic without much of a chart forward. See occupy movements for how much good optimism and faith in people will get you, mostly some brutality and some annoyed people that otherwise might have supported you.  If you stuck with me through the Rise of the Meritocracy and are interested in this type of thinking Twilight of the Elites[?] is a good follow up from the American perspective.  Hayes mostly uses the meritocracy as a canvas to paint the American struggle on so while having read Young's book did make the terms Hayes used more concrete and added weight to his argument, Rise of the Meritocracy isn't a prerequisite for reading Twilight of the Elites.

Interview doesn't add much gravity to the book, interesting to put a face to the author I suppose.  I did expect him to be a little older.



The National has a fairly long excerpt from the book at this link or if you want a very digested version that lacks some of the emotional punch of the book The Daily Beast has that here.

Shut up and play the hits

LCD Soundsystem probably isn't for everyone, but I was surprised by how many of their songs I had heard and liked, but didn't know it was them.  I decided to try and watch their concert documentary Shut Up And Play The Hits[?] for some reason or another and just finished.  I don't know that I would have made it through 3 dvd's of it if I had gone through netflix or bought this, but the 1:48 minute avi I found floating about on the internet was pretty good.  I have a strange love of concert/music documentaries (see Under Great Northern Lights and It might get Loud[?]) so this spoke to my quirky love of music.

Anybody got some other good concert documentaries I should watch?

Small updates and thankfulness

Well it was an uneventful thanksgiving (minus one parent having a meltdown and generally pissing everyone off) and it was amazing to spend so much time with my son over the long weekend.  He's just over a year old now, and I cannot believe how little "baby" I see in him.  He communicates somewhat with sign language, has clearly defined likes and dislikes, and is such a sweetheart.  Last night when my wife laid him down for bed he rolled over and blew her a kiss.

Lady Killer.  For real.  It's a good thing we not competing for the woman in our life, because I would loose daily.  For all that he's a boy, pushes boundaries at every turn, and has so little fear of anything.  I had two cell phones in my hands (kid loves the technology) and he wanted them, so I handed him one while I was trying to get directions on the other.  He kept reaching for the other one (it's screen was on so he wanted that one) and when I told him he hand one and pointed at the one in his hand, he looked at the phone and then looked me dead in the eye and chucked the phone out of his car seat!  He's barely mastered walking and he moved on to climbing.  Couches, chairs, stairs, baby gates, beds.  Yeah, I have smart and destructive monkey that runs around my house all day long.  He walks like a drunk circus clown, but he doesn't miss a thing.  You leave it in his arm reach he's going to find it, and chew on it.

Nothing is safe, but I like the evolving challenge of it all.

On the beer front, the american strong went into the barrel on Friday and that whiskey smells so amazing.  I need to get something brewing this weekend, but that seems like so much work to me right now.

My Soured Vanilla Bourbon Robust Porter needs to go into bottles, the Soured Oatmeal Stout needs to be bottled, and finally the small beer from the American Strong (3 gallons worth) needs to be bottled.  That's a lot of beer work that I'm talking about doing this week, so brewing again lands fairly low on the todo list for some reason.  I'm assuming that the American strong will only be able to last about 2 maybe 3 weeks in the barrel before the oak overwhelms it so if I do another beer this weekend it will be ready to go in the barrel in 8-14 days.  Hopefully  the second beer can sit on the oak a little longer than the first one so I can slow down a bit, otherwise I'm going to have to start recruiting the local bums to come drink my beer!  I mean friends, local friends.  I'm not sure I have enough bottles for almost 11 gallons of beer, I may have to keg some just for lack of space.  I made a gallon of the supper weak runnings of my American strong that I threw the lee's of New Belgium's Brett Beer onto.  If that took I could blend the 3 gallons and that one gallon in the keg for a lightly soured blended beer on tap.  I'm probably the only one I know that likes this stuff so, who cares what the haters think.