Musings of a Beer Goddess

Is ejection from an airplane really THAT much worse than revoking the Fair Pay Act?

2017-04-11T17:59:33Z

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?

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Brewin' the Golden Sphinxinator

2017-04-09T17:43:08Z

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.

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Migration

2017-04-06T21:22:18Z

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.

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