-Its like, about finding true meaning, not nihilism. Existentialism is like the total opposite of that, Jeeze!
-I'm reading Updike, you know Updike? He wrote this series of books called Rabbit Run [sic-k], its like I read a sentence and I'm like, that's you dude, that's you. You could take that sentence and put it in any book ever, and I'd know, that's you dude.
-Do you stretch? Oh.
-We bonded, you know. No one else in our lives for six months, and it was so amazing.
-I try incorporate all of these new things, like.
-Have you read that one where the guy wakes up as a bug?
-I read like 30 pages of it. I'm reading The Stranger, though. [ed- that totally counts]
-Is that game with the four boxes called Four Square?
-I don't eat animal products.
-I need to get a ten speed, my legs are killing me.
-It's like a western. Guy Peirce is in it. This song is in it. I haven't seen it.
-It tries to be like a social commentary, but its just so over the head [top]. Its like trying to be like District 9.
-Cask conditioned beer is like, sharper. Right?
2.4.10
30.3.10
29.3.10
She once was
-Its like there's something there, in the way.
-As if, you mean?
Can you see it?
-No.
-Can you smell it, feel it?
-No.
-Interesting.
-No.
I've just got this sense 's all.
-We've all got our problems.
-As if, you mean?
Can you see it?
-No.
-Can you smell it, feel it?
-No.
-Interesting.
-No.
I've just got this sense 's all.
-We've all got our problems.
is a rocky beach a beach at all?
Travels by Train beats
sailing at sea.
And we own the the ocean, a hundred miles out.
Was it
was worth it.
Roiled O'er 'er
O! (half-stop) stopped.
Bacon will spoil
when left
sitting in the sink.
You can think with certain,
say, alternating currents.
To me,
every dog looks the same.
Vote YES!
to Nullifictation. Sorry,
I've forgetting irony, sentiment escaping.
sailing at sea.
And we own the the ocean, a hundred miles out.
Was it
was worth it.
Roiled O'er 'er
O! (half-stop) stopped.
Bacon will spoil
when left
sitting in the sink.
You can think with certain,
say, alternating currents.
To me,
every dog looks the same.
Vote YES!
to Nullifictation. Sorry,
I've forgetting irony, sentiment escaping.
20.3.10
30.1.10
Ten Step Program
1.
We brewed this on January 8th; since we’d been brewing a lot of strong dark beers lately, and the temperature was probably going to stay low enough, we decided to brew a lager. There are really two types of beer, Ale and Lager. This difference is essentially a difference in yeast, though as a result you make changes to a recipe because yeasts each have different flavor profiles. Ales as definition ferment at a higher temperature and the turnaround from brewing to drinking can be as little as a few weeks. They are also top fermenting. Lager, from “to store” in German, is a bottom fermenting yeast, which typically ferments at a much lower temperature (frost-brewed, like in the Coors Train ads). As the name suggests a Lager needs at least a month and typically longer before you can think about drinking it.
Your Bud, Miller, PBR etc. are all some variation on a Bavarian or Bohemian Lager. I don’t have a fridge that I can put my fermentation vessel in, so this type of Lager is out, as are most German style Lagers that are more interesting beers. You probably know of Anchor Steam, which is also a Lager. The thing about Anchor Steam is that its yeast ferments at higher temperature than most Lagers, essentially just a little below the temp range for Ales. The “steam” part is historically anachronistic marketing. Beer nerds refer to the style as California Common, or San Francisco Lager. You can brew this type of Lager in a garage or outside during winter. If you happen to have a root-cellar, that would work also. We’d like to keep our beer around 55*F, but I’ve heard you can do a steam beer at like 65*. The thing with all beer is to keep the temperature from fluctuating very much while it’s fermenting actively. It’s a little out of our control, but fingers crossed for consistent weather.
Recently we’ve been fooling around with doing Partial-Mashes. This might make more sense after you see the process, but there are two ways of making homebrew: 1. You can use a pre-made malt extract (powder or liquid), which is basically a base-malt that is made into wort and then atomized into powder or boiled down into a less than 20% water syrup. 2. You brew All-Grain, purchasing your grains whole and then “mashing” it to extract the sugars. Without getting into the detailed chemistry that I don’t really understand, this is like making a big batch of grain-tea. Partial-mashing is combining elements of both processes. You can do this because of limited space, time, material, money etc. It’s worked pretty well thus far, and as ad hoc as we do it, we get a little more efficient each time.
We’d been talking about doing a steam beer for a while before it would be cold enough outside, so when we finally decided it was time I just looked at a couple of mocked up recipes we had toyed with. I picked one and went with it, although I have to say I’m not sure exactly what I was going for originally. Hopefully I looked into it enough back then. There is a vast amount of recipes and info on “cloning” specific beers online as well as calculators and recipe builders, both for purchase and for free. I use Tastybrew.com, because it’s free. Anyway, this is what ours looks like:
Fermentables:
Single Infusion Partial Mash
[2# American Pale Two-row Malt
1# American Dark Munich Malt
.5# Belgian Aromatic Malt
.5# Belgian Biscuit Malt]
3# Amber Dry Malt Extract
2# Corn Sugar
.5# Molasses
Hops:
1.5 oz Amarillo @ 8.5%Alpha Acid for 60 Minutes
.5 oz Cascade @ 6.6% AA for 30 min.
.5 oz Northern Brewer @ 7.8% AA for 5 minutes
Yeast: WLP810 – San Francisco Lager
2.
So for the Partial-Mash there are a few things you have to keep in mind. First, the amount of grain you can use is limited to the amount of water you can heat. The typical ratio is 2 pounds of grain for every 1 gallon of water. Second, there are some grains that lack a certain protein necessary to convert their starches into sugars (this is referred to as a malt’s Diastatic Power, and is derived largely from the way in which the grain was malted, roasted and/or kilned). In this case, both the Belgian malts are of this low diastatic power variety. In order to extract sugars from these grains you need to combine them with malt that has enough diastatic power to compensate. These malts are your base malts, usually either two- or six-row barley. The two- or six- references the number of hulls on the stalk. Every beer used to be six-row but two-row is currently in favor and is supposed to have a less grainy mouth-feel and more delicate flavor. Drinkability, I guess.
For this I am using 2.5 gallons of water and 4 lbs of grain, with another gallon of water to be used later. This is about the limit of what my kettle will hold and I expect to lose half a gallon in the process. There is a lot of science about water Ph and mineral levels, but as far as we’re concerned there are two big rules for homebrew water: if it tastes bad to begin with don’t brew with it, and you cant use distilled water. Anything in between will work. We use five gallons of bulk filtered water from the grocery store.
Heat the 2.5 gallons of water to 175*F. When the grain is added this will drop the temp to around 155* which is a pretty average mashing temp. Heat the grain too much or too little and you can end up with a sour or spicy beer, which is actually desirable for some types of Ale, but the spicy or fruity flavors that result will be less integrated/masked in a Lager. There is a whole science to this, but given our resources worrying too much about it is overkill.
Once the temp hits 175 we kill the heat and add the grains inside a fine mesh nylon bag. This is unique to partial-mashing and will lower the attenuation. In All Grain you would want to stir the grain thoroughly and in the lautering process (later) you use the grain bed as a filter, extracting every last bit of sugar you can. Also, you would really want to add the water to the grain, but we don’t have an insulated vessel to use as a Mash Tun.
Once the grain is stirred in, cover and leave it off the heat for an hour.
3.
Now we’ve got our hot wort ready to go. Over the last hour the hot water has done its thing and a whole bunch of proteins have broken down to their component parts. At this point we want to run a bunch of the wort back over the grain bed. Ideally this will get the smallest particles of grain that got through the nylon bag to sit on the top of the grain, while soaking out some extra sugars. I say Ideally because it doesn’t work so well in this set up, but it’s better than nothing.
We are using a bottling bucket for this, and running it back into the kettle. This is pretty ugly, and requires one of us to hold four pounds of soaking grain elevated over the mouth of the bucket for a good twenty minutes while the other gently pours very hot wort over the top a few ounces at a time. I did this solo once, and it was a total mess.
Now that we’ve run the wort back over the grain we are going to use that gallon of water we had reserved. This water is at 175 degrees, so it’s hotter than the wort. We run this over the grain a cup or two at a time, again, to get as much of
the sugars as possible. After this you can biff the grains. I’ve heard you can make a decent bread, or flushable kitty litter out of it.
4.
We now have about 3 gallons of wort back in the kettle and heating up. The extra half-gallon of water has been soaked up by the grain or evaporated. As we heat the water we add 3 pounds of Dry Malt Extract. This is a total bitch to dissolve, but it stores better than the liquid alternative and freshness is important.
5.
Once we hit a boil it’s T=60. When you look at Dogfish Head’s IPA’s they are named 60, 90 and 120 minute respectively. This is pretty clever because it references a number of things (amount of hop flavor or IBUs, and alcohol content) but most directly the length of the boil. Boil length has an effect on the protein characteristics of the beer, and will affect flavor and alcohol (in that the more you boil the more water evaporates, strengthening the solution). Because we use a lot of pre-made malt, boiling for more than 60 minutes has little point.
6.
This is our first addition of hops.
You can use pellet hops, which are condensed leaf hops, but half the fun is sticking your face in some fresh cones. The oils on the hop leaf are where the flavor comes from and the utilization of the oil varies based on how long it is boiled. After just a few minutes most of the oil is gone. It seems counter intuitive then to boil them for a long time but there are three basic types of hop additions: Bittering, Flavoring and Aromatic. The longer you boil the hops the more they add to the underlying bitter flavor, so often you will use the hop with the highest Alpha Acid rating as your bittering, or full boil hops. We will do three additions, the first at 60 minutes for bittering, the second at 30 minutes left in the boil for flavoring, and the third a few minuets before we take it off the heat, or at knockout. These last hops will have the most oils left and add most of the bouquet. You can also add hops directly to the fermentation vessel for even more upfront hop character. That is called Dry Hopping, and it kicks ass.
There is actually a ton of things you can do to change how hops taste in the beer, and there are some pretty cool devices like Torpedoes, Randalls and continuous hopping devices.
7.
At a certain point in the boil some remaining proteins will begin to break down. The beer takes on a miso soup look, with bits of matter floating around. This is a good thing and is called a Hot Break. You want some proteins left in the beer because they add to mouthfeel, body and head retention, but too many of the wrong kind will effect how the yeast works and can cause some problems.
With about 15 minutes left in the boil we add the 2# of Corn Sugar and a half-pound of molasses. The Molasses is between 50 and 70% fermentable, but could be as high as 90%. Its important when using added things like molasses or maple syrup that you buy products that don’t use preservatives, because they’ll effect fermentation. The hope here is that molasses will give a little rum or tawny flavor (I guess that’s what I was thinking?). The corn sugar, is 100% fermentable and will bump the alcohol level a bit and help dry the beer out a little.
8.
This is a wort chiller. You run cold tap water through the copper tubing to lower the temperature of the beer. You want to do this as quickly as you can, but if you have snow you can just dunk it in the snow or a sink full of ice.
During the cooling process we take a little time to sanitize some of our equipment. Nothing has to be sanitized that goes into or near the beer before and during the boil; but once it is cool you want to be pretty thorough about cleaning and sanitizing everything. I dunk my arms, surgeon style to the elbow into a sanitizer solution. For some reason, hops when added at this point wont spoil a beer, and dry hoping hops do not have to be sanitized.
9.
We’ve cooled the wort down to about 75*. There is a fair amount of grain husk and hop debris in the wort, so we use a fine strainer and pass the wort between a bucket and the kettle. You want to do this a couple of times, getting it to splash around a good deal. When you add the yeast they initially need oxygen to get started converting sugars to alcohol, so aeration is crucial to good fermentation.
We could only boil 3 gallons in our pot, so when we did the
calculations we assumed that we would be topping this up with another two gallons of water. Once we put all of this in the glass Carboy we stir it up really good and stick a wine thief in to take a sample. We use the sample to take a temperature reading and use a hydrometer to get a initial gravity reading. You might remember hydrometers from high school, but they measure the density of a liquid in respect to the force it exerts counter to that of the force of gravity. With beer it is a measure of the sugar content of the water. You can use this to determine the potential alcohol content of your beer after fermentation. The way you do this is by assuming an attenuation rate for your fermentation. Typically this is about 1/4 of the original gravity. So if you have an original gravity reading of 1.040 you will probably end up around 1.010. 
You then take the original gravity reading less the final gravity reading and multiply that number by 131. Gravity readings are dependant on temperature, so you can be more specific in your calculations.
You should also taste it.
10.
Add the Yeast.
If you are making a strong beer, say over 1.080 gravity units or 7+% alcohol you should make a starter for your yeast, which is basically just a little bit of the same kind of beer you are going to make more of later. You make a gallon, let it ferment for a day or two or three and then pop it in the fridge for a day. This will cause the yeast to drop out of solution and you can pour off the beer and just add that yeast right to the full batch. Or, if you’re lazy or bad at planning you can just use two vials of pitchable yeast, like this one.
Give the yeast a good stir and pop on an airlock (in this case a tube that ends in a jar of sanitized
water. In a less than a day or two there will be noticeable activity in the carboy, marked by a whipped eggwhite-like Krausen and the airlock will be bubbling away indicating that the yeast are producing a lot of CO2 and alcohol.
Now it’s a lot of waiting. For this beer we will let it sit in the garage for two weeks, then take it inside for a day or so and pausing fermentation with the temperature shift. We will then use a siphon and transfer the beer to a new carboy, finally placing that back in the garage for two or three weeks, until we get down to our desired final gravity.
For our Steam Beer our Original Gravity was 1.062, which was a little shy of the 1.065 we were looking for but not too bad considering our methods. This should be around 1.015 when we put it into bottles a month from now giving us a 6%ABV dark amber lager.
We brewed this on January 8th; since we’d been brewing a lot of strong dark beers lately, and the temperature was probably going to stay low enough, we decided to brew a lager. There are really two types of beer, Ale and Lager. This difference is essentially a difference in yeast, though as a result you make changes to a recipe because yeasts each have different flavor profiles. Ales as definition ferment at a higher temperature and the turnaround from brewing to drinking can be as little as a few weeks. They are also top fermenting. Lager, from “to store” in German, is a bottom fermenting yeast, which typically ferments at a much lower temperature (frost-brewed, like in the Coors Train ads). As the name suggests a Lager needs at least a month and typically longer before you can think about drinking it.
Your Bud, Miller, PBR etc. are all some variation on a Bavarian or Bohemian Lager. I don’t have a fridge that I can put my fermentation vessel in, so this type of Lager is out, as are most German style Lagers that are more interesting beers. You probably know of Anchor Steam, which is also a Lager. The thing about Anchor Steam is that its yeast ferments at higher temperature than most Lagers, essentially just a little below the temp range for Ales. The “steam” part is historically anachronistic marketing. Beer nerds refer to the style as California Common, or San Francisco Lager. You can brew this type of Lager in a garage or outside during winter. If you happen to have a root-cellar, that would work also. We’d like to keep our beer around 55*F, but I’ve heard you can do a steam beer at like 65*. The thing with all beer is to keep the temperature from fluctuating very much while it’s fermenting actively. It’s a little out of our control, but fingers crossed for consistent weather.
Recently we’ve been fooling around with doing Partial-Mashes. This might make more sense after you see the process, but there are two ways of making homebrew: 1. You can use a pre-made malt extract (powder or liquid), which is basically a base-malt that is made into wort and then atomized into powder or boiled down into a less than 20% water syrup. 2. You brew All-Grain, purchasing your grains whole and then “mashing” it to extract the sugars. Without getting into the detailed chemistry that I don’t really understand, this is like making a big batch of grain-tea. Partial-mashing is combining elements of both processes. You can do this because of limited space, time, material, money etc. It’s worked pretty well thus far, and as ad hoc as we do it, we get a little more efficient each time.
We’d been talking about doing a steam beer for a while before it would be cold enough outside, so when we finally decided it was time I just looked at a couple of mocked up recipes we had toyed with. I picked one and went with it, although I have to say I’m not sure exactly what I was going for originally. Hopefully I looked into it enough back then. There is a vast amount of recipes and info on “cloning” specific beers online as well as calculators and recipe builders, both for purchase and for free. I use Tastybrew.com, because it’s free. Anyway, this is what ours looks like:
Fermentables:Single Infusion Partial Mash
[2# American Pale Two-row Malt
1# American Dark Munich Malt
.5# Belgian Aromatic Malt
.5# Belgian Biscuit Malt]
3# Amber Dry Malt Extract
2# Corn Sugar
.5# Molasses
Hops:
1.5 oz Amarillo @ 8.5%Alpha Acid for 60 Minutes
.5 oz Cascade @ 6.6% AA for 30 min.
.5 oz Northern Brewer @ 7.8% AA for 5 minutes
Yeast: WLP810 – San Francisco Lager
2.
So for the Partial-Mash there are a few things you have to keep in mind. First, the amount of grain you can use is limited to the amount of water you can heat. The typical ratio is 2 pounds of grain for every 1 gallon of water. Second, there are some grains that lack a certain protein necessary to convert their starches into sugars (this is referred to as a malt’s Diastatic Power, and is derived largely from the way in which the grain was malted, roasted and/or kilned). In this case, both the Belgian malts are of this low diastatic power variety. In order to extract sugars from these grains you need to combine them with malt that has enough diastatic power to compensate. These malts are your base malts, usually either two- or six-row barley. The two- or six- references the number of hulls on the stalk. Every beer used to be six-row but two-row is currently in favor and is supposed to have a less grainy mouth-feel and more delicate flavor. Drinkability, I guess.
For this I am using 2.5 gallons of water and 4 lbs of grain, with another gallon of water to be used later. This is about the limit of what my kettle will hold and I expect to lose half a gallon in the process. There is a lot of science about water Ph and mineral levels, but as far as we’re concerned there are two big rules for homebrew water: if it tastes bad to begin with don’t brew with it, and you cant use distilled water. Anything in between will work. We use five gallons of bulk filtered water from the grocery store.Heat the 2.5 gallons of water to 175*F. When the grain is added this will drop the temp to around 155* which is a pretty average mashing temp. Heat the grain too much or too little and you can end up with a sour or spicy beer, which is actually desirable for some types of Ale, but the spicy or fruity flavors that result will be less integrated/masked in a Lager. There is a whole science to this, but given our resources worrying too much about it is overkill.
Once the temp hits 175 we kill the heat and add the grains inside a fine mesh nylon bag. This is unique to partial-mashing and will lower the attenuation. In All Grain you would want to stir the grain thoroughly and in the lautering process (later) you use the grain bed as a filter, extracting every last bit of sugar you can. Also, you would really want to add the water to the grain, but we don’t have an insulated vessel to use as a Mash Tun.Once the grain is stirred in, cover and leave it off the heat for an hour.
3.
Now we’ve got our hot wort ready to go. Over the last hour the hot water has done its thing and a whole bunch of proteins have broken down to their component parts. At this point we want to run a bunch of the wort back over the grain bed. Ideally this will get the smallest particles of grain that got through the nylon bag to sit on the top of the grain, while soaking out some extra sugars. I say Ideally because it doesn’t work so well in this set up, but it’s better than nothing.
We are using a bottling bucket for this, and running it back into the kettle. This is pretty ugly, and requires one of us to hold four pounds of soaking grain elevated over the mouth of the bucket for a good twenty minutes while the other gently pours very hot wort over the top a few ounces at a time. I did this solo once, and it was a total mess.
Now that we’ve run the wort back over the grain we are going to use that gallon of water we had reserved. This water is at 175 degrees, so it’s hotter than the wort. We run this over the grain a cup or two at a time, again, to get as much of
the sugars as possible. After this you can biff the grains. I’ve heard you can make a decent bread, or flushable kitty litter out of it.
4.
We now have about 3 gallons of wort back in the kettle and heating up. The extra half-gallon of water has been soaked up by the grain or evaporated. As we heat the water we add 3 pounds of Dry Malt Extract. This is a total bitch to dissolve, but it stores better than the liquid alternative and freshness is important.
5.
Once we hit a boil it’s T=60. When you look at Dogfish Head’s IPA’s they are named 60, 90 and 120 minute respectively. This is pretty clever because it references a number of things (amount of hop flavor or IBUs, and alcohol content) but most directly the length of the boil. Boil length has an effect on the protein characteristics of the beer, and will affect flavor and alcohol (in that the more you boil the more water evaporates, strengthening the solution). Because we use a lot of pre-made malt, boiling for more than 60 minutes has little point.
6.
This is our first addition of hops.
You can use pellet hops, which are condensed leaf hops, but half the fun is sticking your face in some fresh cones. The oils on the hop leaf are where the flavor comes from and the utilization of the oil varies based on how long it is boiled. After just a few minutes most of the oil is gone. It seems counter intuitive then to boil them for a long time but there are three basic types of hop additions: Bittering, Flavoring and Aromatic. The longer you boil the hops the more they add to the underlying bitter flavor, so often you will use the hop with the highest Alpha Acid rating as your bittering, or full boil hops. We will do three additions, the first at 60 minutes for bittering, the second at 30 minutes left in the boil for flavoring, and the third a few minuets before we take it off the heat, or at knockout. These last hops will have the most oils left and add most of the bouquet. You can also add hops directly to the fermentation vessel for even more upfront hop character. That is called Dry Hopping, and it kicks ass.
There is actually a ton of things you can do to change how hops taste in the beer, and there are some pretty cool devices like Torpedoes, Randalls and continuous hopping devices.
7.
At a certain point in the boil some remaining proteins will begin to break down. The beer takes on a miso soup look, with bits of matter floating around. This is a good thing and is called a Hot Break. You want some proteins left in the beer because they add to mouthfeel, body and head retention, but too many of the wrong kind will effect how the yeast works and can cause some problems.
With about 15 minutes left in the boil we add the 2# of Corn Sugar and a half-pound of molasses. The Molasses is between 50 and 70% fermentable, but could be as high as 90%. Its important when using added things like molasses or maple syrup that you buy products that don’t use preservatives, because they’ll effect fermentation. The hope here is that molasses will give a little rum or tawny flavor (I guess that’s what I was thinking?). The corn sugar, is 100% fermentable and will bump the alcohol level a bit and help dry the beer out a little.
8.
This is a wort chiller. You run cold tap water through the copper tubing to lower the temperature of the beer. You want to do this as quickly as you can, but if you have snow you can just dunk it in the snow or a sink full of ice.
During the cooling process we take a little time to sanitize some of our equipment. Nothing has to be sanitized that goes into or near the beer before and during the boil; but once it is cool you want to be pretty thorough about cleaning and sanitizing everything. I dunk my arms, surgeon style to the elbow into a sanitizer solution. For some reason, hops when added at this point wont spoil a beer, and dry hoping hops do not have to be sanitized.
9.We’ve cooled the wort down to about 75*. There is a fair amount of grain husk and hop debris in the wort, so we use a fine strainer and pass the wort between a bucket and the kettle. You want to do this a couple of times, getting it to splash around a good deal. When you add the yeast they initially need oxygen to get started converting sugars to alcohol, so aeration is crucial to good fermentation.
We could only boil 3 gallons in our pot, so when we did the
calculations we assumed that we would be topping this up with another two gallons of water. Once we put all of this in the glass Carboy we stir it up really good and stick a wine thief in to take a sample. We use the sample to take a temperature reading and use a hydrometer to get a initial gravity reading. You might remember hydrometers from high school, but they measure the density of a liquid in respect to the force it exerts counter to that of the force of gravity. With beer it is a measure of the sugar content of the water. You can use this to determine the potential alcohol content of your beer after fermentation. The way you do this is by assuming an attenuation rate for your fermentation. Typically this is about 1/4 of the original gravity. So if you have an original gravity reading of 1.040 you will probably end up around 1.010. 
You then take the original gravity reading less the final gravity reading and multiply that number by 131. Gravity readings are dependant on temperature, so you can be more specific in your calculations.You should also taste it.
10.
Add the Yeast.
If you are making a strong beer, say over 1.080 gravity units or 7+% alcohol you should make a starter for your yeast, which is basically just a little bit of the same kind of beer you are going to make more of later. You make a gallon, let it ferment for a day or two or three and then pop it in the fridge for a day. This will cause the yeast to drop out of solution and you can pour off the beer and just add that yeast right to the full batch. Or, if you’re lazy or bad at planning you can just use two vials of pitchable yeast, like this one.
Give the yeast a good stir and pop on an airlock (in this case a tube that ends in a jar of sanitized
water. In a less than a day or two there will be noticeable activity in the carboy, marked by a whipped eggwhite-like Krausen and the airlock will be bubbling away indicating that the yeast are producing a lot of CO2 and alcohol.Now it’s a lot of waiting. For this beer we will let it sit in the garage for two weeks, then take it inside for a day or so and pausing fermentation with the temperature shift. We will then use a siphon and transfer the beer to a new carboy, finally placing that back in the garage for two or three weeks, until we get down to our desired final gravity.
For our Steam Beer our Original Gravity was 1.062, which was a little shy of the 1.065 we were looking for but not too bad considering our methods. This should be around 1.015 when we put it into bottles a month from now giving us a 6%ABV dark amber lager.
2.12.09
30.11.09
17.11.09
Kids and Golf
In the backyard we had a net set up for my dad to practice his golf swing. It looked like a miniature backstop attached to a length of astro-turf. An auxiliary net was hung loose from the back of the apparatus, with a box indicating where a good drive should be located in space five feet after impact.
My dad had taken an old set of clubs and shortened them down to miniature size, so I could go duff around with him and mom on the occasional weekend afternoon. I liked golf, but I really liked the contraption in the back yard best.
The neighbor kid and I would spend a number of unsupervised hours practicing drives. As will happen, we took the activity to its logical conclusion – aiming at one another. We would take turns, positioning ourselves between the target net, and the back of the cage and deftly dodging golf balls that struck the target and fell harmlessly to the ground.
Hours we spend doing this. Breathlessly taunting one another, probably squeeling in that way little kids do when they are certain they are doing something unusual, dangerous and awesome.
The game came to an end when I hit him in the forehead. It was probably the best contact I’ve ever made with a golf ball and the ease and beauty of my swing must have stunned him because he didn’t dodge. He stood there frozen, even for a time after the ball struck him between the eyes, hands extended to his sides palms forward.
It was a hollow sound, like tapping a fresh mellon at the grocery store. The welt came up immediately dashing my hopes of playing it off. I still think he could have gotten out of the way.
My dad had taken an old set of clubs and shortened them down to miniature size, so I could go duff around with him and mom on the occasional weekend afternoon. I liked golf, but I really liked the contraption in the back yard best.
The neighbor kid and I would spend a number of unsupervised hours practicing drives. As will happen, we took the activity to its logical conclusion – aiming at one another. We would take turns, positioning ourselves between the target net, and the back of the cage and deftly dodging golf balls that struck the target and fell harmlessly to the ground.
Hours we spend doing this. Breathlessly taunting one another, probably squeeling in that way little kids do when they are certain they are doing something unusual, dangerous and awesome.
The game came to an end when I hit him in the forehead. It was probably the best contact I’ve ever made with a golf ball and the ease and beauty of my swing must have stunned him because he didn’t dodge. He stood there frozen, even for a time after the ball struck him between the eyes, hands extended to his sides palms forward.
It was a hollow sound, like tapping a fresh mellon at the grocery store. The welt came up immediately dashing my hopes of playing it off. I still think he could have gotten out of the way.
9.10.09
10.9.09
History, Use and Meaning
Integrated ShamWow
Octomom Recession [T]Czar
Baby Water Board
Downplay Known Knowning
Green Tea Party Death Panel
If An Antidepressant Isn’t Enough:
Anal Swine Flu Bleaching 2.0
Change You Can Follow Us On Twitter In
Octomom Recession [T]Czar
Baby Water Board
Downplay Known Knowning
Green Tea Party Death Panel
If An Antidepressant Isn’t Enough:
Anal Swine Flu Bleaching 2.0
Change You Can Follow Us On Twitter In
2.9.09
Get With The Zeit-Gist
Jesus Was Not a Spartacus / The Wisdom of Crowds
The Leader was crossing the line. That is perfectly clear in hindsight, but things change in such incremental ways. Leader was always convinced that logistics were crucial. He had no doubt that our break was coming. We had attracted some attention, not of God, but some unnamed political player of great influence.
Leader informed us, the Council of Disciples in Holy Actualized Self, that our work in the recent protests had been well received. He said our discipline was the envy of the right. Our militaristic show of ominous force shamed organizers of the tax protests, the pro-life movement looked impotent compared to us, and the NRA hadn’t the balls we possessed and presented.
We were popularly known as the Barabbasian Council. In many ways we were no different from any protestant faith, as practiced in the wide-open-West’s glass and steel cathedrals. Our defining characteristic was a drastic reinterpretation of the events surrounding the pardoning of Barabbas, the “criminal.” Leader maintained that the pardoning of Barabbas was a metaphysical choice, granted to the masses by a mischievous Pilot. Barabbas was Jesus.
As we all know, Abba means father in Aramaic. Jesus uses the word in Mark. Jesus refers to God as father, and Bar Abbas can be translated to mean “son of the father.” Leader found that the people of Judea essentially nicknamed Jesus after this unique rhetorical flourish. And as such, when Pilot offers the crowds the option of freeing Jesus or Barabbus, you might think much of the crowd was unaware of whom this Jesus fellow was, because they knew him as the Bar-Abbas. This is not a new theory, but Leader believed that Pilot and the crowd were engaged in a complex meta-debate about what a populace should rightly demand of their revolutionaries. “Pilot tells the crowds, you cannot have a strong and sensitive man like this one here: You must choose between the feminine or masculine. The lover or the fighter.
“You can have either your Jesus cuddling lambs, Pilot informed the crowd, or your Barabbas, agitating insurrection. The crowd chose the strongman. We chose the strong man. Men will always choose the strongman.”
We often watched Fight Club as a way of illustrating the binary nature of our Christ. Leader loved Fight Club; but he said the ending was retarded: the weak imposing their weakness on the strong. That, and he totally should have died. Come on, shooting out your cheek? Leader gave a live commentary throughout the movie, for benefit the flock, “See, Tyler’s being very Barabbas here, with this monologue. Tyler is voracious in all things, see how he ravages Helena Bonham Carter: How Mary Magdalene must have felt in the hot desert nights, Oh My! We must be Barabbas in all things, particularly in bed, for the sake of our own Marys.” He was quite passionate about it. He enjoyed our annual Foxy-boxing competitions very much, and would have like to institute a formal club in the basement, but feared it would bring negative attention, and possible investigations.
We believe that when Pilot executed Jesus, he permanently killed the spiritual, weak Jesus. But the strong, revolutionary man survived in the consciousness of the masses. The tongues of fire, we believed, were available to all men if they only sought it out; but spiritual enlightenment was crucified with the body of Jesus. The castrated dogma that emerged in the early days of the church was very much a result of Roman interference. The colonizers, the empires, have vested interest in promoting, among the colonized, the false ideal of weakness as strength. We, the followers of Barabbas were sworn to agitate, to shock and to advance the strong over the weak.
We drilled regularly, learned the principles and formations of Roman Phalanxes, which Leader assured us would be the most efficient defense, and offense, against riot police, when the time came. When the town meetings started, and we saw conservative groups waving signs, and tossing eggs we decided it was time to showcase our strength. We watched X, particularly paying attention to the scene where Denzel commands his followers with brief commands and hand movements. Leader mimed the gestures as he watched; practicing his jaw flex. We coordinated our branches in six states. We showed up in numbers. The conservative protest groups were confused, and grew quiet as we approached, two abreast in a passable lock-step outside the town hall. When we were close enough for them to see our cross-cross-flag lapel pins they relaxed significantly. We stood in silence, trying to be as ominous as possible, for two hours. Then we executed a left-hut, and marched back from whence we came.
Leader was ecstatic, and his enthusiasm was contagious. He informed us that it would be the perfect night to initiate the children of the flock, with the holy light of righteous victory shining from his eyes. The Initiation of the Children of the Flock, a sacrament with details known only to the Leader, had been promised for some time. He said it was a trial, a test of worth of spirit, and the completion of which would identify the holy potential of the youth. Those who emerged rosey-cheeked and giggling were blessed. Those emerging teary-eyed and mouth-breathing were not yet ready to accept Barabbas in their lives. A little concerned about the details of the sacrament, a group of us fathers snuck secretive peeps through the windows and doors of the room. Leader was in a loin-cloth and covered from head to toe in caked mud. He reclined in a banana hammock and had the children lined up in front of a flat screen television. He periodically sprayed them with a small, coiled hose and directed them to pay attention to the movie: a montage of montages and scenes from war movies like Apocalypse Now, Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, Platoon, Brave Heart and Full Metal Jacket and the victory sequences of popular reality-TV shows. It went on for six hours; we were relieved and ashamed at our lack of faith in leader – it had been much like our own baptisms.
That week we watched Network. Leader said we’d have to hone our broadcasting skills. He had a bit of a high pitched voice, and when he was excited he tended to squeak. He anointed Bill, who possessed a booming voice, the Actualized Neck and Mouth of the Barabbas in Christ. Bill was dispatched to New York, and instructed to wait outside the Today Show for further instructions.
Finally, Leader was prepared to reveal the identity of our sympathetic political leader, our patron as we were calling him. First we watched the first half of Network again, followed by the end of Spartacus. Then Leader paused the movie, cleared his throat and turned to address us.
“We see the power of bombast, a characteristic of Barabbas, which derives its power from the exponentially increasing velocity of the words and the energy by which they are delivered. Our patron is a master of bombast. Much of what he says is of doubtful accuracy, but the righteousness of the speaker is such that accuracy is subjugated to the fervor: the fervor of violent transcendence manifest in the utterances of a man. And we know that transcendence without violence is like margarine to butter. Our apostle, Bill of the Neck and Mouth, etc., has done an admirable job, and has recently made a number of appearances on cable television. He has made only halting references to us, to our mission. He has been John the Baptist, clearing a route through the wilds for the son of Abba to follow.
“Tomorrow I will leave for New York. The time has come to take our movement to the masses, to affect the change. Tyler Dern style, Network style, I will appear on the cable program hosted by our patron, Garry McBain’s America Effect. For the occasion, I temporarily lift the ban on Cable Television. The basement here will be available on Tuesday, and I invite the flock to gather and see the dawning of the Barabbaian future.”
The days before Tuesday were fraught with speculation. We received word that Leader had visited Ground Zero; while there he was abused by a cop, who was attempting to maintain a perimeter around the construction zone there. Leader was successful in his resistance, and had obtained a scorched rock as memento.
We debated watching a baseball game before the airing of the America Effect, but decided that the lifting of the Television Ban was effective only for the five minutes Leader would be on. It had been a long time since I’d watched baseball and was disappointed, but agreed that it was not an issue worthy of Barabbaian revolt.
The America Effect opened with a screaming montage of tanks, the floor of the NYSE, a close up of the President’s hand on the bible, Eagles swooping down and pinching hares in their talons, all under a waving, translucent American flag. Garry McBain opened the show with a sermon about the threat of trans-gendered, militant, homosexual drug-dealing, illegal immigrants using state issued driver’s licenses to ram into old-folk’s homes and farmer’s markets while forcibly violating young boys. The flock watched this passively, as we had no opinion on such matters, and we could see no angle by which revolt was the obvious remedy, on the contrary the immigrants in question seemed to be waging a fairly actualized campaign.
After a brief commercial, the coiffed host promised, we would be introduced to an “emerging warrior in the Siege on Self-Interest.” This was Leader, and we hooted and hollered.
After a five-minute break, during which we learned of the increasing value of gold and the limited availability of a crystal decanter shaped like the head of Richard Nixon eating a Snickers bar, McBain again introduced Leader as “the leader of an exciting new force in the Siege on Self-Interest, a respected leader of a church that promotes the insurrectionist Jesus. Doctor, how’s the fight?” We didn’t know Leader was a doctor.
“Good evening, Garry. Thank you for the opportunity to appear on your show.” Leader stifled a squeak, before continuing. “Tonight, you are very lucky, because you will see the truth, that Barabbas is the Christ, that Barabbas is the force, that He survives and Jesus died! All one but none!”
Leader was laboring to keep is voice under control, and he gave no pause for Glen to interject. “The time has come to say: I’m not going to take it anymore, by any means necessary! From the Mountaintops a tree falls and no one hears it! In the long arc of history the blessed beasts and children caged at last! Dulce et decorum est! A hard rain united shall overcome! You have the right to remain silent, which will be held against you! It is the greatest taste of time, it is the worst filling of time! Cast the money-changers out of the banks! I ME ME MINE! Power to the clampdown by the toe! NO – JESUS WAS NOT A SPARTACUS!”
I wondered why he added the A.
He reiterated that Jesus was not a Spartacus, and the camera panned out, revealing a pale, confused Garry McBain, looking not at Leader, but at the camera, helpless.
It happened very quickly, and it was unclear where the gun came from, but as Leader inserted it into his own mouth he kept talking. “Ewe et ee at a weary ang im im eye wife!” he seemed to say. Then the back of his head jumped away from his body.
The signal cut away and the television showed only static. Slowly we stood, stretched and ambled home, discussing how commanding Leader had been. In the parking lot, I spoke with Dave Anders about the show.
“He was right, wasn’t he,” Dave said, “About the end of Fight Club. The guy totally should have died. The wrong consciousness transcended.”
I agreed.
31.8.09
Soup line dancing, for
fun on faulty sprang sprungs
He was in on the
Dylan phaser, from tonight forward
we were not to be trusted with our
duties. an endless parade of donut
holes sporting their sporty
sport coats. And I was there.
The dynamite stacked
in an ominous way. Anachronistic
Anarchist cohort studies applied;
the beast blessed the beastial, this
of course, a systemic design. Intelligent,
I will deny I was there.
One man,
a million levers’ Justice. Representative,
of parabolic banana peels. The dead seal
‘s parsed in the adult theater,
names your name. And I, on business
in St. Louis.
Ozark beauties
bow-legged on the rundown Taliban feather
and tarred. The bar skank
waiting willingly. Bartender
make your shots count;
cold lead, tequila pump’s the jukebox dead.
When the giant foam finger points
I will follow, you sir,
to Xanadu and no further.
30.8.09
Diptychled Pink or FreeRange Junk Farm
Gravity pulls you up. You shift into neutral just as you hit the exit. You accelerate as you rise above the highway, towards a stop sign at the end of what looks to you like a hill. You gain about thirty feet in altitude on the cars continuing toward Providence, or places more distant and exotic like New Jersey. That’s how you’re greeted, with a sensation of weightlessness, a mystery spot.
Of course, the mystery spot is gone. They tore it up when they expanded the highway. It was before I was born, but I know all about it. I’ve heard all about it. It might as well be my own memory.
Going to the dump was the best. We’d go on Saturday or Sunday, I don’t remember which, but I want to say Sunday because I associate the dump with cream-filled doughnuts. Dad got us doughnuts sometimes on Sunday. As a result I also associate doughnuts with WWF Wrestling, and NFL Football, but not college football. The allure of the dump is evasive. In my memory I can recall only peering over a teetering hill of washing machines and toasters. It may be olfactory, the sulfur rotting stench might have appealed to me. I thought skunk smelled like McDonalds McNuggets then.
The Dump is gone. They tilled it under and planted it over with grass. You can see it from the highway, an emerald hill dotted with odd little pipes like decorative toothpicks. You might think, oh a golf course, if driving by on your way from one place to another. But we know the truth. The hill vents gas. Still, the transfer station has none of the charm, with its neatly organized piles of junk. Junk wants to breathe free.
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