Musings of a Beer Goddess

I'm starting to think that Trump really doesn't need to do anything to distract from his policies. There's a whole lot of dreadful things that happened last week (see below for a summary of some of it), but what's REALLY got everyone up in arms is that someone was ejected from a United flight.

Not saying the United thing is OK; it's not. And certainly not saying the we can't be upset about this outrage when there are other outrages. But given that I found NO mention on FB of, say, the elimination of funding for the forensic science commission, the fact that Trump's chief terrorism adviser expressed support for a violently anti-Semitic organization, or that Trump signed an EO to revoke the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces Act.

I did see a few mentions of the destruction of the filibuster & subsequent installation of Gorsuch, and some discussion of the bombing of Syria, but neither of those got anywhere NEAR as much attention as United Airlines.

So... what's up with that?

It's been a very long time since I brewed, but I kind of backed myself into a corner by letting NPL members vote on beers I could brew and saying I'd make three of them for the con in Boston this summer. OK< now it wasn't REALLY meant to be a vote, it was a hidden contest, but there was SO MUCH enthusiasm that I figured I should actually make the top three winners. One of which I'm working on now. It's a doppelbock, and will be my first ever lager. I ordered this termperature control sleeve that takes cool gel backs (of which I have many, thanks to the fine folks at Home Chef. I'' use that for fermentation. And I just ordered a freezer & thermostat which I will set up on the garage for lagering, which I'll do after I bottle.

Complicating this is that when I wrote up the beer descriptions, I wasn't really intending to BREW them, just to create a description that was entertaining and contained the information necessary for the puzzle hidden within. So I'm making a doppelbock using British & German malt, Swiss hops, and - God help me - Pilsner Urquell yeast. To give myself a bit of a break, I"m doing a partial mash. And I'm gearing I pitched the yeast into the starter about 8 pm last night, and so far it's not really doing much of anything. I can't tell if this is standard lager yeast behavior, or if I somehow managed to shock the little Slovaks into dormancy. In any event, I'm mid-sparge and it smells good.

For posterity, this is what's going in it:

3 lbs. 2-row Pale
2 lbs. Munich Cara-pils 1
2 lbs. 20 L Crystal Malt

2.5 lbs dry amber extract
2 lbs. dry pale extract

2.5 oz Tettnanger hops (2.5 AAU), half 45 minutes from end of boil, half 15 minutes from end

1 Whitfloc pellets, 15 minutes from end of boil

ETA: Starting gravity 1.084, so if they yeast are alive, they should be reasonably happy...
ETA (4/10): Good cold break, and the yeast are definitely alive. Now to see if we can maintain temperature in the sleeve I bought...

The other two are both wheat beers & won't require lagering. Eric the Half-a-Weizen will be a grapefruit infused hefeweizen, and Brugghaus Bru is to be brewed "in the Icelandic style" whatever that means.
Actually, by NPL convention, it means brewed in a style that doesn't actually exist, that should be interesting.

Like many folks, I'm migrating to Dreamwidth from Livejournal. I had to sign that horrible agreement to get access to my on fucking content to import it. Which I have done. Well, after 22 hours I'd imported my posts, and I've been in queue for another 12 waiting to import comments. Once that's done I'll delete the LJ account.

It's nice to have a username without a useless "ha" prepended.

DW seems to use European style dates, so I was initially a bit confused because I thought everyone was posting on June 4.

I've had my apartment listed with a broker for a while, because I really don't have the energy to deal with checking people's credit & such. However, it would be nice to have a tenant I know. Those of you who've been to my place know it's an awesome location: on a private way, right on the bike path two blocks from the Davis Square T. The apartment is technically a two-bedroom, but one bedroom is large with bay windows & a huge walk-in closet, while the other is smaller, with no closet, so it's generally been used as an office. There's a large sunny eat-in kitchen with a dishwasher, a private back yard area with plenty of room for grill, picnic table & hammock, and your own washer-dryer in the basement. You can see pictures on the broker's site. I'm amenable to having the apartment painted if the tenants want something more colorful. Cats welcome (there's a ton of them in the neighborhood).

$1,800, plus one month security deposit. It's gas heat, cable ready.

You can contact me at my-LJ-name - atsign - gmail - dot - com. This is an unlocked post, but I will be a lot more responsive to friends & friends of friends. If you're a friend of a friend, having the friend make contact will go a long way toward making things go smoothly

When I was studying psych in grad school, one of the concepts discussed was the flashbulb memory, a highly detailed, exceptionally vivid 'snapshot' of the moment and circumstances in which a piece of surprising and consequential (or emotionally arousing) news was heard. Usually these are highly personal, but occasionally there is an event of importance that impacts an entire community, a whole country, or the world, for which almost everyone will hold flashbulb memories. I went to grad school in the 90s, so the go-to flashbulb memory event was JFK's assassination, even though it happened before many of the students were born. Myself, I was born two months after. Therefore, I have an alibi: I wasn't the second gunman; I was in my mama's tum-tum trying to grow my toes in a more interesting order -- but I digress. Anyway, there's a new go-to flashbulb memory now, and yup, I remember where I was when I heard the news. So yeah, important, impactful event.

You know what I don't remember though? From when I was 5 or 8 or 12? Having an annual day of being maudlin to ensure that those flashbulb memories get called up, touched up, fired up. I think it's a new thing, to have an annual day of dwelling on something awful happening; well, there's Good Friday, but even as a non-Christian I can appreciate how incredibly important that is - and it's got a lot of history. I'm wondering what happened in the thirty-eight years between November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001 to cause this change. Is it just the proliferation of social media? Has the Zeitgeist changed? Is there something inherent of the events of 9/11 that inspire this type of prolonged agony, that is NOT inherent in the events of 11/22?

I'm curious. I'm also kind of sick of dwelling on it.