And now, let's get back to the beer

Enough mocking the Church of Warmingtology... Let's talk about beer! (OK... so the COW will have a cow over my CO₂ footprint, but that can't be helped.)

After way too long a pause, I've started another batch of homebrew. This time I'm going for an American Strong Ale (an Arrogant Bastard clone). Tonight, I got the yeast started and I plan to pitch the brew onto that yeast cake this weekend. I brewed up a gallon and a half of unhopped wort to get the wee yeasties going. After I rack off the liquid, I may try my hand at making a malt vinegar. The recipe I'm using is...

• Grain
• 12 lb. two-row malt
• 1.25 lb. Crystal (120L)
• .75 lb DME (I added this when the SG didn't end up as high as I wanted)
• Hops
• 1.5 Oz. Chinook (whole), 60 min.
• 1.0 Oz. Chinook (whole), 30 min.
• 1.0 Oz. Chinook (whole), flame out (I added a wee bit more that was left in the bag.)
• Irish moss at 15 min.
  

EPIC FAIL!

This week, the gurus of glorrible warming were forced to cancel a hearing before a U.S. Senate committee due to "inclement weather"...

UPDATE: The following Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearings have been postponed due to inclement weather this week:

- The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Subcommittee on Water and Wildlife, will hold a hearing entitled, "Collaborative Solutions to Wildlife and Habitat Management."

- The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works will hold a hearing entitled, "Global Warming Impacts, Including Public Health, in the United States."

(Yes, I bolded that last part.)

This makes no sense...

Sure, the Dems have wished for decades to impose universal health care. Each of them since Franklin Roosevelt has recognized that they'd have every American by the short and curlies if they could just pull this off. Obama is no different. He says that he's not giving up on health reform; even after the drubbings the Party has taken in elections where Republicans made health care an, or the, issue. One would think that at some point they'd realize that this is a suicide mission. I guess not.

I really ought to update this more often...

No, I haven't forgotten the password or something stupid like that. I've just been lazy.

I guess the teleprompter called "BS"...

TOTUS' favorite electronic device has finally had enough...

Why do we "cling" to our guns?

So what is it that motivates us clingy gun owners? Why the obsession with guns? This clip from Iran (Be forewarned: This is extremely graphic and disturbing. Do not click the link if you are easily offended.) shows what happens when the government holds a monopoly on violence.

Across Iran, the people have been protesting an obviously fraudulent election. Government thugs, the Basij, have felt free to employ whatever violence they please to put down this growing insurrection. This includes firing on unarmed civilians, such as poor Neda. Reports say that she and her father weren't even involved in the protests, but were merely observing from some distance when she was shot by a sniper. Neda, whose name means "voice" in Farsi, was silenced by her own government.

There are those who will say that "this can never happen here". No, it can't. But why can't it happen here? It can't happen here because our government doesn't hold a monopoly on violence or the means by which one can do violence. More importantly, it knows this and has known it for over 200 years. No American leader would even think of suppressing protests the way that a foreign dictator would. The dictator knows that his subjects are unarmed and can be beaten down in whatever fashion pleases him. In the US, any politician aspiring to similar oppression knows from the start that we aren't unarmed subjects; we're armed citizens. He knows that against even a fraction of the nation's 100,000,000 gun owners, he doesn't stand a chance; thus he wouldn't even try.

Hence the obsession.

But this can change. Gun owners won a major victory in Heller, however that victory can be lost through apathy. If we allow our rights to slip away a little at a time, there may come a time when an American father will have to watch his 16-year old daughter die before his eyes; unable to defend her, fight back, or do anymore than wail in grief for his Neda.

Speaking of beer...

My hops plants have sprouted. The Willamette in the front yard is really a happy camper this year. It's already putting out bines and it's begun looking for places to climb. The Chinook in the back yard has just come up. Pics to follow.

It's either a tribute to my patience...

...or my laziness.

Remember this batch? I brewed it on New Year's Day. Well... I finally got around to bottling it.

Obamanomics...

DOW Loves the Stimulus..Down 258

...-260 as I write this.

Crude analogies come to mind...

...about doing something "just a little", but I'll pass.

Kevin Yamamura, Steve Wiegand and Jim Sanders of the Sacramento Bee characterized the Democrats' planned $14,300,000,000 worth of tax hikes in the current budget scheme as "temporary". There is no such thing as a temporary tax increase. Do you remember the Spanish-American War Tax? That was supposed to be temporary too. It's like a frickin' zombie! It keeps coming back!!

America held hostage: Day 1

His Obammyness hasn't even been in his new crib for 24 hours and the market's taken a big crap. Off 332.13 on Obammyday.

Once more, with feeling

Yup... That last batch went down the drain. I was nothing but brownish-red hoppy water.

So upward and onward!

Or... Bash my head against that wall one more time!

I prefer to be optimistic. I started a new all-grain batch on New Year's Day. This is an Irish Red Ale; this one again, but all-grain instead.

More later.

OK... It's later. (i.e. 24 is over.)

This time I was a lot pickier about the OG of the wort before I sealed things up in the fermenter. The last all-grain attempt gave my an OG of only 1.036 or so. A nice finishing gravity, perhaps, but not a good place to start! This time I was still a little light, but 1.045ish isn't bad. I just racked to the secondary and the SG was 1.008ish. The finishing gravity should have been 1.011 or so, but this should be fine. A little light, but still drinkable. A nice "session" beer.

(Of course, the question really is: Why aren't I getting more efficiency? I think that I'm simply not using enough grain and not giving it enough time in the tun. Easy problems to fix.)

I guess you call this the learning curve

I'm not too happy with this first all-grain batch. I think that I messed up the sparge. The OG was wa-a-a-ay too low. I just racked off to the secondary and measured the SG. Again, way too low. I took a sip and it's pretty watery. It's going to sit in the secondary for several weeks. (It will be that long until I can do anything with it.) We'll see... Maybe it will make a nice light beer.

(Of course the beauty of home brewing is that it's pretty cheap. I won't be out much at all if this goes down the drain.)

OK... Time to try an all-grain brew

I'm trying an all grain recipe for the first time. This is an ale called "Raucous Red".

I've been slowly building up the stuff I need for a mash tun. I've got an Igloo water cooler and I've replaced the valve with a 1/2" ball valve. Inside, I've made a screen from the steel braid off of a 1" water line. The resulting loop looks like it covers the correct amount of the cooler's diameter. Not too close to the walls and not too far away. (I'll post pics later.) I also got a wort chiller today. It's an early birthday present from my lovely wife.

Another 45 minutes and it's time to sparge!

Hops

I'm doing my part to alleviate the hops shortage...



This is a Chinook hops. I also have some Willamette growing, though it's not nearly as prolific as the Chinook.

YES!!!! NOW THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKIN' ABOUT!!

Get Drunk And Vote 4 McCain

Keep an eye on your mivonks, Barak!

I dunno... There's just something about the look in Jesse's eye in this pic...



...that ought to have Barak Obama checking his shorts now and then. I mean there's "change" and then there's "change"!

Webhosting update

It only took a about 5 days, but the host finally got back to me. They still won't 'fess up to a security breach. Their advice was a "stronger" password. Given that the old password was about 12 characters long and made up of several words run together, I don't think that password strength was an issue. I still think they got rooted.

It's been a week and a half...

I just put a sample bottle of the Irish Red Ale in the 'fridge to chill. I'll sample it tomorrow.

I'm getting ticked at my Webhost

No, not the host for this page. Blogspot does a just plain ducky job of hosting blogs. I'm talking about a service I pay real, cashy money for to host a few sites.

The service, which will remain nameless for the time being, seems to have some "issues" with security patches. Google, the fine folks who run the fine site hosting this blog, flagged two of my sites last week as hosting malware. The "malware" was code injected by the host itself as part of a system upgrade. It didn't do anything more than tell them that the files were in the right place on their system. But, since that upgrade was finished a while ago, I decided that the code wasn't really needed anymore. So, to keep the Googlistas happy, I deleted the script. And sure enough, the Googlistas were indeed happy. The sites got a clean bill of health.

...Until today.

The "clean" sites suddenly sprouted real malware. (A virus/worm AVG identifies as Framer.Z) Now, the first thing one ought to suspect is a weak password; but, that wasn't the case here. We were using a nice, strong password on the site. A little Googling turned up several other customers of the unnamed host complaining about virus injections on their sites. Those same complaints pointed to a spotty job of patching their server software. Guys, if you're reading this and something seems familiar, you've got a week until this 5+ year customer wanders off of the reservation and stops recommending your to his clients.

Yeah, it's a Linux system and yeah, to those in the Windows World, Linux seems like rocket science; but really, it's not rocket science. You can patch a Linux system without having to reboot and without any downtime. There's no excuse for allowing someone to run around on your server adding scripts to everything named "index".

I'm waiting for a decent excuse from them as to how their system got rooted and how it will never happen again. Until then, however, I'm browsing the vast multitude of web hosting review sites out there.