March 2008 Archives

i don't have any keg capacity, but i have 2 empty carboys and a whole bunch of beers that i need to make.

what am i to do? i keep on trying to drain the keg of black death, but the thing is fargen bottomless. it's been "nearly empty" for 2 months now!

meanwhile, i have 2 new kegs of pale ale, one of which has been on tap for a week, one of which should be drinkable tonight. drinking them won't help me drain my "nearly empty" keg!

i need to have some kind of party instead of keeping on going to other people's.

on the way home from sunnyvale, a car passed us bearing a sign in the rear window. the sign read:

BACHELOR PARTY
SHOW US UR TITS

i tried to ignore them for a while, but then i had a better idea. hops floored it, we caught up, and i showed them my tits.

i got a bunch of thumbs up, but no beads.

the other day i reflected upon the fact that upon brewing my 20th beer, and accounting for the fact that all were targeting 5 gallons, and some were under and some were over, i've so far brewed (and consumed!) 100 gallons of beer.

that's kind of a lot.

but i have more to do. now i have 2 empty carboys (but no fridge space until that darned 75 surprise gets emptied. it's a bottomless keg, no matter how much i drink there's still more in there.)

pearl jam.

now that's involving!

(even though the guitar solo in "alive" is left channel only. mixing engineer! hello? wtf?)

my headphone cable is caught in my slinky. there is no way to separate them without an advanced degree in topography. i'm boned.

today at work, instead of this:

for i in [ int(s) for s in list_of_ints_as_strings ] :

i wrote this:

for i in map(int, list_of_ints_as_strings) :

it's a subtle change, very small, and maybe even a step back in efficiency. but it indicates a subtle shift in my thinking brought on by recent meddlings in haskell. before long, i'll be using foldl.

count2 p l = foldr (\x c -> if p x then c+1 else c) 0 l

this (obviously) returns the number of items in list "l" which satisfy predicate "p".

at the time of this writing, i can even understand how.

i've been watching DS9 from start to finish (never followed the show before). i won't debate the merits of the show, but i will point out that avery brooks has a very distinctive vocal pattern.

i've also been reading. last night i was reading a book on the LISP programming language. in my head, i could hear avery brooks reading to me.

the car of the cdr of the cons of the list...

i'm half-way through understanding this bit of haskell:

fibs :: [Int]
fibs = 0 : 1 : [ a + b | (a, b) <- zip fibs (tail fibs)]

if i correctly understand "lazy evaluation", then i understand how this can work without infinite memory space.

neat!

yesterday, i quit coffee. well, technically, sunday morning, after my coffee, i quit coffee. but yesterday was the day when my body figured out what my mind already knew: i quit coffee.

why, mister saint toad?, you ask. why? why? why? why? would you quit coffee? it's so delicious and you just bought that fancy grinder!

yes, both of these are true. i just quit coffee every once in a while.

that's no answer! you exclaim. why?

i just quit every once in a while. really. just because.

also, coffee hoses my digestion. quitting helps.

but quitting coffee is like quitting any addiction: it hurts. i think i'm through with the splitting, incapacitating headache that hit around 4pm yesterday and lasted until i went to bed. the nausea is gone. but i still have the general malaise, the fog-headedness, and the short temper (now, the short temper may be justified: there's stuff going down at work which is not the sort of stuff that i enjoy dealing with). also, and this is part of the fun of quitting -- finding out all the weird, unrealized benefits that i was getting from coffee -- my allergies are worse.

it makes sense, when you think of it. it's the same reason it hurt my head to deadlift this morning: caffeine is a vasoconstrictor, which reduces swelling in the schnozztrils as well as the head. off of it, my schnozztrils are a little less anti-inflamed, and my allergies are perceived to be worse. same for the vasculature in my noggin while deadlifting. hluurgh!

so, i reckon in a couple of days i'll be back to no-coffee "normal", whatever that is. i can't remember, it's been a real long time since my last quit.

i just had a fantastic extract, and i plan to ruin it.

hold on, let's back up a bit. two weeks ago i brewed a disappointing, experimental IPA. i got 60% extraction from my mash, and i tried a method of hopping called "late hopping" -- i added no hops prior to -30 minutes. i added upwards of 4oz of hops in the last 30 minutes, and i dry hopped it just this morning. this was supposed to bitter it adequately but load up on the hop aroma/flavor.

in my case, it gave me an overly sweet beer, with cidery qualities and nearly no hop flavor/aroma at all. where did it go? i don't know. i certainly put lots of hops in. the flavor just didn't make it, i guess. hopefully dry hopping will shore up the flavor and a little aging will mellow out the cider. maybe not.

so today i'm brewing a beer with two goals: to use cluster hops and find out why people don't like them, and to try repitching yeast from the above beer. the cluster beer was to be a smallish beer, around 1045-1050. instead, based on the pre-boil gravity, it appears it will be around 1062. why so high? because i got 85% mash efficiency. what? how did that happen? my usual is 60-65% with one outlier at 75%. but 85%?! unheard of!

but that's cause for celebration, right? well, normally, sure. but i really wanted a small beer -- haven't made one in a long time. and this is gonna be a great wort, whereas the one i'm dry hopping may well be no good, but i'm planning to ruin it with unsavory hops (and they surely do smell different from my usual citrusy hops) and contaminate it with geriatric yeast.

all this for the best wort i've ever had the pleasure of boiling.

sigh. so it goes.

at devil's canyon.

i think the beer was better last time, this time it was a little too chilly. still, this time they had the IPA on tap, which, according to the brewer, sells much better at brewery events than at restaurants/bars where they hawk their wares.

it was way too bitter at first, but once acclimated, i could taste and enjoy citrus rind and spice. a good one. all those lager barbarians don't know what they're missing.

heh, or something.