February 2008 Archives

.oO([ osiris@valis ]:[ ~ ]: > ssh eros
ssh: Error resolving hostname eros: nodename nor servname provided, or not known

i had a small deadlifting epiphany yesterday, and a bigger one today as i tested and confirmed yesterday's.

i wasn't pushing my behind far enough out behind me. so today i got into deadlifting position and pushed it out. farther. more. a little more. a little more... a lot more. further. farther. come on, now, your arse is still in the same area code, that's not far enough out... there!

my older DL posture protected the back well enough, i think, but with the new posture, my shins are more upright throughout the movement, i'm balanced better on my heels (instead of my toes), and the lift has a lot more leg emphasis at the beginning, rather than back emphasis. this, sadly, may hold me back a little -- my last big deadlift push (that is to say, my last big pull push, har har har) was sumo style, which, even when you do it right, involves a lot of back and not much legs. in other words, my legs, though massive and strong looking, may prove to be the weak link in my deadlift.

i suppose that does not matter. lifting is a long-term endeavour and in the long term, better form means longer-term.

interestingly, my form revelations came from the kettlebell world, specifically, the book and exercise info i got at the RKC event a couple weeks ago. two drills in particular: the wall squat (face a wall, toes really close to it, squat to touch your kettlebell or the ground, don't fall over) and the box squat (put a box/bench behind you, squat *back* to sit on it, stand). both help to exaggerate the lower back arch and the arse-out posture.

anyways, i'll see how the new posture goes. i felt much tighter, albeit not much stronger, when lifting today.

i had a simple, one-time, throwaway task at work today, and i used python to do it.

it seemed a little odd writing a python throwaway script. the system i built and work on at work is a 24/7 availability distributed system with a web front-end, implemented 100% in python. none of it is "throwaway".

i don't think i've written a throwaway script in a year. it felt weird to use a scripting language for... well, scripting.

*BSD is for People who Love *nix; Linux is for People who Hate Windows.

toad : scripting, ho!
toad : er
toad : that is
toad : ho as in tally-ho
toad : not calling you a ho
chris : awww
toad : scripting, biatch!
toad : er, that's biatch as in tally-biatch

i've never had formal coaching in the deadlift. the only real feedback i've had is via observers whom i've asked to look for specific things, and via videos i've taken of myself lifting (which i haven't done for a while now). when i ask whether my back is rounding or my shins are straight, it always seems like i'm doing things right. i'm lifting more than my bodyweight with no big injuries, and i make progress when i get enough sleep.

i feel like i'm doing something right.

and it's no accident that i'm doing something right: i've taken the time to find out what a proper deadlift looks like. i know things.

so it is occasionally entertaining when i happen to see people deadlifting in a gym. it doesn't happen often because i'm not often in a gym, and when i am, i'm not often near the weights. but this weekend i was at sunnyvale PG and saw a pair of skinny dudes deadlifting what appeared to be at least 135.

i personally constantly worry about the details, starting with the big ones and working my way down to the little ones: is my back flat? are my arms loose? am i pushing into the floor with my legs? am i looking up? am i starting in just the right position? am i pulling my shoulder blades back? am i supporting my spine by tightening my abs? is my bunghole clenched? and so on. i worry that sometimes i don't get the details just right.

whelp, these two guys at the gym weren't getting the details right. in fact, never mind the details, what they were doing weren't even deadlifts, though i could tell they thought they were. their form was so unbelievably bad, it was as if they'd taken a textbook list of things to do while deadlifting, and opposed every single one of them. an inverted deadlift checklist. from memory, they:

- rounded their backs. bigtime.
- lifted their hips before they lifted the bar
- bent their elbows
- jerked the bar off the floor
- didn't lock out
- did i mention rounded their backs?
- had their knees way in front of the bar when starting
- had their heels off the floor when starting, and throughout the lift
- wore squishy shoes
- had too wide a grip

i'm sure there were other defects, but those are the ones i remember. what was most amazing was how they rounded their backs -- perhaps the other details are fine points that only advanced people worry about (shouldn't be that way, but let's assume it is). the first rule of deadlifting is not to round your back. i thought everyone knew that?!

i struggled with the idea of going over and offering advice. i'm not good at that because i am not confident that i'm doing it right myself, and i'm not confident that i could present my help in a way that would be accepted well. so i passed.

later, when contemplating this lame posting, i regretted my decision and resolved not to repeat it. it doesn't matter if they discard my advice because ego gets in the way, or because i'm too funny looking to deliver advice. i could at least try, and hopefully they'll listen, and perhaps, maybe, if they don't catch on right away, they'll hear me now and believe me later.

otherwise, they'll hurt themselves, and tell their chiropractor that they did it deadlifting, and the quack will right an article, and next thing you know, my beloved deadlift will have been besmirched in the press, like maybe an expose on 60 minutes "DO YOU KNOW WHAT DANGEROUS LIFTS YOUR KIDS ARE ATTEMPTING AT THE GYM?" or "THE DEADLIEST LIFT: DEADLIFTS" or something like that.

anyhow, enough of this. i'm off to clench my bunghole for some deadlifts.

it's Frobuary 2, YOMHC 0x25!

A good adjective for my look is "Fuhreristic".

Aside from that, it's great!

i was partly wrong, i did not fix my problem last night -- the problem was that rockbox is unhappy with XLD encoded apple lossless files.

i used itunes on my work peecee to re-encode XLD's apple lossless (created with quicktime, fer chrissakes!) to itunes apple lossless, and now the ihp is happy, and no usb pops in my ears.

so, uh.. wtf? who's at fault? rockbox? quicktime? XLD? i have no idea. later on i'll test the XLD-encoded ALACs on slim server, and then i'll have a better blameant, not that it will matter.

i meant to write this up last night, when i thought the matter was settled. the matter was not settled.

on monday i brewed up a 4.75G batch (a bit of a volume screwup, as usual) of 1070 pale ale. into it i pitched a healthy looking 500ml starter of WLP001. i filled my 3 piece airlock with vodka and stuck the carboy in the closet.

by the next morning, the beer had sucked half of the vodka into itself, and the airlock was bubbling, but not especially frantically. i thought nothing of either matter; i'd had vodka loss before, and maybe the yeast was just a little slow starting (though I didn't quite believe that, considering what a monster WLP001 is, but I had no other explanation for the lackadaisical airlock).

yesterday evening when i arrived home from work, i was very surprised to find the kreusen had risen all the way to the neck of my 6.5G carboy -- recall that I had only 4.75G of beer! this was a first for me.

i had dinner and then went back to check on the beer again. by now, the yeast was actually in the neck of the airlock, and i could see it pumping up and down, prepping for a jump into my precious bodily fluids -- er, vodka. i grabbed a couple paper towels and my trusty bottle of vodka, doused the towels in the least interesting of all spirits (sorry, comrade!), yanked the airlock out of the bung, and capped the bung with my vodkatowel. there was an audible "poot" as i removed the airlock. huh.

a tragedy narrowly avoided, i sat back and thunk. perhaps the pressure is enough to lift the plastic piece through vodka but not enough to lift it through air. so what was needed was... more vodka. i wiped the airlock down as best i could and added more cheap vodka inside it, and stuck it back on. it appeared to work, as it began bubbling furiously. at the same time, the kreusen retreated some. i got back on the computer and made some jokes to my buddy about kreusen retreating in the face of vodka. har!

i relaxed for a little bit and commenced not worrying, but i did not have a homebrew. that was a mistake. when i was ready for bed, i checked the airlock "one last time". it was full of yeastgoo. d'oh! i did the thing with the paper towel again, yanked the airlock, but this time, i replaced it with an S-type bubbler airlock. that has a longer neck for the gunk to climb, and i figured it would be easier to blow off gas because there's no plastic to lift.

half a minute after i had attached it, it was bubbling so violently that it was shooting vodka out of the top (i had not overfilled it). a couple minutes later, the yeast was in the airlock. nuts!

so i gave up and decided to use a blowoff tube. i've never used one before and i have high hopes for this beer, so i worried a little, and became a little un-relaxed, and i still was not drinking a homebrew. i was doing everything wrong!

if there's one thing i have in abundance, it's tubing. someone once said about homebrewing, "how did i ever get involved in a hobby that involves so much plumbing?" i'm with you buddy, plumbing and tubing. and i'm just scratching the surface, so far.

i selected a tube, cleaned it up a little, swabbed the business end with the remainder of my bottle of rotgut, and jammed it right through my carboy hood. the other end went into the rest of the vodka, poured into a saucepan sitting in a large mixing bowl.

i dunno the ID of the tube, i think it's 5/16" or something. pretty small. probably not great for a blowoff tube, but it certainly worked. immediately, in fact. it sounded like a really bad case of the runs, bloorp bloorp bloorp bloorp. the bubbles came fast and furious, and quite loud i might add. before long, some yeast junk came shooting through the 4 foot tube. i went to bed, satisfied that i had protected my beer *and* my brewing closet.

i sleep with earplugs. even with my earplugs in, i could hear the intermittent blurp blorp blarp! of the blowoff. i had to put the bowl into the closet (no small feat -- it's a small closet) and close the bedroom door. even then, i could still hear it. i relaxed, don't worry-ed, and had a nice sleep (but alas, still no homebrew).

this morning, the blowoff bowl was pasty with yeast junk. but it was still bubbling and there was no mess on my carpet. success!

went to hook up my listening rig at work to get some... uh... listening... done, but the ihp wouldn't play my gorram knights of cydonia! so i copied it to my windows box, downloaded itunes, hooked the DAC up via usb, and went to a-listen.

sounded rather crappy. i'm sure i missed some windows setting some place to turn off "crapify the sound", but if i may pontificate, i shouldn't have to dig for it. dare i say that on the mac, it "just works"? on the mac, it "just works". sure, there's a setting i'm sposed to check, but guess what? by default it's set to "don't crapify the sound".

not only that, but on the mac, i use toslink. on the windows peecee i had to use usb, which means: pops and cracks. sigh. that's what happens when you share your bus.

get off my bus, you stinking non-audio bits!

it turned out, sadly, that there are bad sectors on the ihp's drive. i'm not exactly sure why itunes could play the song copied *off* of the bad sectors while the ihp could not. however, i seem to have fixed it, and tomorrow i can groove to dragonforce pop-free.

or time will waste you

check!

pure genius.

i have heard it described as "six minutes and one second of pure genius".

i could not say it better myself.

i can't say that it has a great, fruity nose, and i can't say that i like the descriptions of it on paper, especially when compared to exotic competitors like wlp540 or wlp028. but one thing it does right is reproduce like a mofo. that's right, wlp001 completely removes the stressful question of "did i kill my yeast?" no sir, i did not. look at that starter! holy crap!

exhibit a: i combed my hair before going
exhibit b: i combed my beard before going
exhibit c: i have no tattoos
exhibit d: i have all my teeth plus a crown you can't see, but certainly no gaps
exhibit e: i wore a suit jacket

when struggling to make my way through a dense crowd later that night at The Trappist, I remarked less wittily than it seemed at my then-current BAC that this was only the second most crowded bar I'd had to navigate that day.

the Toronado was crowded for this year's barleywine fest. it's my second visit to the bar, and i thought it was crowded the first time: on a weeknight. little did i know.

some dude was having a birthday and his mates brought a cake and were passing it around. one patron was more blunt than i, and instead of simply passing the cake on, declared that it was idiocy to mix chocolate cake and high alcohol beverages. you said it, mate. not to mention that it was proudly touted as "baked with guinness". hello, we're at a festival celebrating the malty excess of american brewing, and you think an overblown, watery (not-really) euro-brew is appropriate? baked into a cake? okay, well, maybe if it's baked into a cake.

but not while there's green flash on hand!

speaking of green flash, i had their barley wine. i know because their barleywine tastes just like their DIPAs, of which I had two last weekend, which taste almost just like their IPA. now, if green flash produced a bad ipa, dipa, or barleywine, it would be a black mark in my book that they all tasted the same, but all three (technically, four) are best-in-class IPAs, and the reason they taste the same is clearly because green flash has a "house hop profile", not because "they suck". so maybe they didn't "get" the barleywine category (or maybe I didn't!). it could be worse, they could be...

anderson valley. yeah, i'll name names. i always have high hopes for them, they're semi-local, they have funny marketing, good attitude, and all the rest. it's just the beer that disappoints me. well, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, hey, it's a festival, but fool me three times: no sir, i'm not that drunk. the bastids had the nerve to be on tap #23 and hops nearly ordered them for that reason, but i think i was able to restrain her, which brings me to another point: no notes. not only was there no room to write, there was no way (well, there were placemats that would help but we didn't have one) to keep the barleywines straight. even if we'd had a magic mat, we kept on passing the brews between the four of us, and after a couple of barleywines, let's just say i have trouble keeping them straight.

which is not to say they tasted alike! no sir, not at all. broadly, they fell into five categories:

1) the DIPAs. these were brews that seemingly "didn't get it" and came out tasting like a DIPA. I like a good DIPA so i can't complain too much except to say "i was there for barleywine, dammit!"
2) bigfoot. huge, dry malt, balanced hops, golden/amber color, eminently drinkable. a barleywine!
3) nutella beer. what? gooey, smelling of hazelnut butter, maybe some gross earthy hops. interesting flavor that occurred too many times to be a "mistake" (despite what you'll say, 777!)
4) syrup. nuff said.
5) barleywine only with some interesting caramel addition that didn't taste like nutella. magnolia had one, or was that 21st amendment? i don't remember but it was fabulous, as it should be, coming from the city.

right off the bat i had a good couple of nyuks. the bartender handed us a 2oz glass of what looked a lot more like imperial stout than barleywine: opaquely dark. i exclaimed, "this is opaquely dark!" or something like that, and a nearby gentleman with uncombed hair, an uncombed beard, probably a tattoo somewhere, missing teeth, and no suit jacket shook some of the cobwebs from his head and drawled, slowly, and with great assuredness, explaining to me with a face as straight as could be mustered with so few teeth, that that is how it should be, and moreover, that if it were not dark, it could hardly be a barleywine. the reason it's so dark, he explained, is that it's got more grains in it, and the more grains you put in a beer, the darker it gets. they have to put so many grains in there to get the high alcohol content that makes it a barleywine, so you end up with a very dark beer.

i smiled and nodded until he went away to finish his imperial stout. it took longer than i wished. later on when i was ordering sausage... next door? in doors? the toronado is shaped like a horseshoe, and in the middle of the horseshoe is a sausage store which is independent but has a free trade agreement with the bar. locating this sausage shop caused me some consternation in my post-barleywine state. as i said, this was my second visit to the toronado. at my first, chefjef left the bar to fetch us sausages. he walked downhill to get them.

i exited the toronado and walked downhill. somewhere between the toronado and san diego i realized that i wasn't getting any closer to the sausage shop. in fact, while my brother had exited the upper arm of the horseshoe and walked downhill, i had exited the lower arm and totally missed the sausage shop. what a revelation!

in the sausage shop was the same barleywine aficionado, insisting to the cashier that he had ordered sausages ten minutes ago, so where were they?

the poor sausagemongers -- they have their hands full (of, uh... sausage...) on a normal day, i'm sure. on a festival day -- and the toronado has many -- they surely must deal with all manner of drunken mistakenness. they apparently deal with it skillfully and tactfully. i asked how many orders were placed but never picked up. the cashier told me not to ask.

anyhow, i like barleywine. i like douple ipas better, and fortunately, if i'm drinking green flash, i can have both at once! i am grateful that bigfoot can be found in bottles (so grateful that i took piazza's last sixer off their hands last night, unless the clever bastids have more in the back!) and sad that i'll have to visit 21st or magnolia to figure out which one had the one i liked.

after the fest we walked to buckapound to sober up a little and hear sailing disaster stories. once we'd sobered up we decided it was time to top off and headed over to oakland, of all places, to visit The Trappist, which Darwin had been agitating to visit since it opened. It was indeed the second most crowded bar i'd been to all day.

I tried some thick dubbel and a Chimay tripel -- the Chimay because it was on tap and i didn't get Chimay. whelp, now I do, it was quite good. i always wondered how it could be so popular, and i guess that much of it is marketing, but beyond the marketing lies a pretty good beer. don't think i'll be buying any bottles but i don't regret ordering it (unlike the 5 bottles of "hop ottin" still occupying space at sullen beaver).

i could go on, but sadly, it's monday, and you know what that means: time to brew!

i didn't want to consume alcoholic beverages tonight.

but i racked 5.25g of 5c into a 5g carboy.

now i have a liter of 1070 belgian stout to consume.

the weekend brought many things this time around, and one thing it brought was a lack of avoidance. maybe i hadn't shaken the dipa cobwebs out of my head, but i agreed to ride canada road, starting from my apartment. this sounded like a nearly insurmountable prelude to an easy ride. turns out i was mostly wrong.

the route to canada rd. from my place is pretty much the old bike route i used to do on the mtb, only when i did it on the mtb, i'd turn around about 300-500 feet of elevation gain (in about 200-300 yards) before where the canada rd. turnoff starts. so that part wasn't bad. it wasn't easy, but it wasn't terribly tough -- i used to do it all the time, and now i had a bike with working shifters.

on the way downhill, after witnessing a police foot chase, i ended up with a flat. oh boy, my first on this bike. luckily i had a tourer with me, otherwise, in true roadie fashion, i'd have cried and then called a friend to pick me up.

we changed the tire out and i attempted to pump it with my fancy co2 pump. that got me to 60psi according to the touring pump. nuts! (turns out i was not holding the co2 pump tightly enough against the rim, oops.) next time i reckon i'll do it right. once the tire was back on we rolled on down to canada, did the 15 miles, and headed back home. back home involved riding some scary twisty dark roads with no bike lane, passing through a mergeing freeway exit lane, a monstrously steep hill followed by a bridge and an even worse hill, and then a minute of downhill so steep that with full breaks i still blew through the stopsign where i intended to end the ride.

all in all, we did a little over 25 miles with more elevation gain than i'd ever done on a bike. after it all, i required knee ice, but by this morning the swelling was down to where i could deadlift successfully.

maury_cohen > i rememeberd today that $FRIEND_OF_OURS, a self proclaimed "coffee nut", does not roast
maury_cohen > now that you two are buddypals
maury_cohen > you can exert the powers of the lightly roasted side of the force
maury_cohen > together, we will turn him to the city+ side of the force!

hey, i'm a deadlifter: i do sets of five and call it quits.

what the heck is this "extended exercise" crap?

but i had no choice.

i do not like their "we're not marketing!!!11" marketing campaign. i do not like their "you're not worthy, hurf durf, because you're used to budweiser" slogan. i do not like their use of adult language on an... er... adult beverage. in any case, i don't like their attitude.

but i sure do like the beer. dammit!

went to red lobster last night, to spend some xmas gift certificates.

i just don't get red lobster.

the service sucks, the food sucks, the only beers they have on tap are "bud light" and "red hook", the broccoli that you can get instead of "rice pilaf" comes out of a freezer bag, the ambiance is a television playing "wheel of fortune", and the shrimps are variously buttery, bready, or greasy enough to be overly filling.

none of this is bad without the presence of this troubling fact: it's expensive. very expensive. most dishes are upwards of $15.

this is mysterious to me. i realize that the red lobster is not an upper class destination, however, the night before, we dined right in the heart of the bay area ghetto: menlo park. dinner at back-a-yard was less than 15 bucks a person, you get good service, food that is out of this world (or at least, out of this continent), the freshest ingredients, and fried foods that aren't too greasy and don't mask the flavors of the food.

i seriously don't understand how red lobster perseveres. what's that, you say? you can't get shrimp scampi at back-a-yard? well, this is true, but it's the gorram bay area, you can get seafood anywhere, and all of it will be better and cheaper than red lobster, with optional fresh broccoli.

the place baffles me, seriously.

Not long ago, I was digging around in the back of my fridge and came upon a bottle of beer #4. The records from those days are sketchy, you know, on account of The Incident. It appears that #4 was bottled on May 6, 2006. It was a partial boil extract batch, since that's what I did back then, with the following recipe:

	.5lb carafoam
	1.0lb chocolate malt
	.25# munich malt
	.25# honey malt
	.5# special B
	3lb light DME
	6lb dark malt extract syrup
	1oz kent goldings (6.2% AA) (45)
	1oz kent goldings (6.2% AA) (5)
	wlp500

I am kind of proud of this one, it's the first recipe I formulated on my own. Back then I thought that "stout" meant "having an OG of not less than 1.080", and the records show that this one had an OG of 1.094. The yeast is a Belgian strain: I was attempting to make something fruity and estery, but also more brooding and chocolatey than a dubbel. I called it a "Belgian Stout," and it's a concept I tried again later (to limited success).

Anyhow, I was sitting there drinking #4, and enjoying tremendously the raisiny, heavy chocolate notes, and thinking to myself, "self, why don't we make another one of these?" And I said to myself, I said, "self, that's a fantastic idea. also, for some reason, i'm feeling sentimental right now, so why don't we dedicate it to our parents?" We both agreed that this was a great idea, and then hit upon a swell witticism, because every batch of beer needs a witticism (in case the beer comes out poorly, it can at least have a funny name or story behind it). The witticism (term used with permission) was this: beer #4 got better and better with age, so in honor of my folks, I'd make a reproduction of #4, intending to age it, and advertise widely that it, like my parents, gets better with age.

Get it?

Anyhow, it's called Fifth Commandment Belgian Stout, it's number 18, and here's the final recipe:

	Grain : rice hulls 1 lbs
	Grain : dark munich malt 6 lbs
	Grain : roast barley 0.5 lbs
	Grain : special b 1 lbs
	Grain : chocolate malt 1.5 lbs
	Grain : belgian pale malt 10 lbs
	Grain : carapils 0.5 lbs
	Grain : carafoam 0.5 lbs
	Grain : honey malt 1 lbs
	Hop : willamette 2 oz whole
	Hop : amarillo 2 oz pellet
	Yeast : Wyeast 1214

Mash was 90 minutes at 155F, 1.25qt/lb.

There are several things of interest to note. First, it's all-grain. I've sunk so much cash into my all-grain setup that I can't ever go back to extract, except for the batch I'm going to do real soon with the cluster hops I got. Also, since brewing #4, I've decided that I really don't much care for the English hops, which turns out to be a good thing these days since they're damned hard to get. In any case, the recipe calls for boiling the heck out of the hops, then aging the beer for a year, so after all that, it almost does not matter what hops you use. Also: since #4, I've decided I like a hoppier beer, so I upped the hopbill for this one (also because I have a freezerful of the green buggers, thanks to my stockpiling nature).

I wish I could say the brewday went uneventfully. You'd think that I'd have it down by now, being on #18, but every brew provides me with a new learning experience. Last time, the learning experience was "don't dry-hop with unbagged pellets". This time, it was... well, read on.

My on-again off-again brew assistant, ChefJef, dropped by for the assist on this one. This is especially appropriate, as ChefJef is my brother, and this beer is dedicated to our folks. It was his third brew assist.

The mash and batch sparge went stunningly well, with no stress despite the massive 22lb mash. I had calculated that with 65% efficiency, I'd hit about 1.080 OG, but I achieved more like 75% efficiency (note: of my last 4 brews, two have been 75% efficiency, and two have been 65% efficiency. the 75-ers were made with crushed grains from Fermentation Frenzy, the 65-ers were from Williams. I suspect that the crush/freshness has as much to do with the extract as my technique.) which calculated out to a whopping 1.094 after the boil. Right on target for a faithful reproduction of #4!

After the sparge, we had 8.5G of wort. Now for the first mistake: I didn't boil it long enough. I wanted to do a 90 minute boil, and that's what I did. At the end of 90 minutes I had 6 gallons at 1.080 instead of 5 at 1.090. Lesson #1: boil for gravity, not volume. Lesson #1 is minor, because now I'm going to have 6 gallons of kickass 1.080 stout instead of 5 gallons of stunningly kickass 1.090 stout. I can live with that.

Yes, boilovers. I had 8.5G in my 9G brewpot. Part of the reason it didn't boil down was that I simply couldn't boil it vigorously enough without a wort eruption. They say there are two types of brewers: those who have had a boilover, and those who are about to. I am now quite firmly in the first camp.

The other problem: see those whole hops in the recipe? I dumped them in the boil, unbagged. No, I don't have a false bottom, why do you ask? My wort chiller? Yes, it's a Therminator plate chiller, why?

That's right: I clogged the hell out of my wort chiller. We drizzled out about 1.5G before it stopped. Now, that was some ice-cold 1.5G. My last batch, I chilled 5G to under 70F in 11 minutes. I had my system down. That batch did not have unbagged whole hops. This one did.

After the wort stopped, my assistant fetched a stainless slotted spoon, and we sanitized it, and I kajiggled the pot and put the slotted spoon against the out hole. It did not work. After much despair, I began slotted-spooning out the whole hops and dumping them in a pot. This was futile, because as everyone knows, whole hops multiply, infinitely, when exposed to boiling wort. What had begun as 2oz of hops now amounted to 18 bushels, and nobody can remove 18 bushels of hops with a slotted spoon. Nobody. By the time we gave up on the futzing approach, we had maybe 2 gallons of 60F wort in the carboy. I looked at the carboy. I looked at the boil pot. I made an executive decision. I unscrewed the tube from the wort chiller and dumped the hottish (it was freezing cold outside (well, for the bay area... it was 50F or so) so the wort had chilled somewhat on its own) wort directly into the carboy. Five minutes later, I had 6 gallons of wort at 95F.

I shook it like a mofo who is too cheap to buy an oxygenator, grabbed my somewhat anemic starter, and dumped it in.

Now, many of you are saying 95F! Please, Mister Toad, that is too hot for yeast! To you I say: nuts! Yeah, I wanted to pitch at 70F, but you know? 95F is right about where I used to pitch before I had a fancy-pants chiller that can't handle whole hops in the wort, back when I made... beer #4. That's right, I pitched at 95F for authenticity. It was my plan all along. SUCCESS!

I bit my nails in anticipation of my success for nearly two days as I waited confidently (biting my nails) for the yeast to show some sign of having enjoyed the 95F pitch. After 2 days, I was rewarded with a massive kraeusen, perhaps the biggest ever, prompting me to fear a clogged airlock + explosion. It's calmed down by now, all appears good, and though we may have oxidated and infected our hot wort with all that slotted spoon nonsense, there will be at least some alcohol in there -- the yeast is alive!

Now I just have to wait another week to rack it, then a year to find out if it's any good. By exercising such patience, I reckon I honor my parents even more. Cheers!