BOTTLING: Sarcastic Doorman

The great advantage of brewing a very small batch of beer is that it can only be a very small disaster.

I kid.  Somewhat.  Bottling is now finished, but it was a bit of a trial.  To begin with, the beer didn't attenuate quite as far as predicted - it's actually only 5.9% alcohol, I estimate, with a final gravity of about 1.028 or 1.029 - but that's fine.  It certainly tastes good.  Unfortunately, though, between the unavoidable losses, some spills resulting from my still far-from-perfect solo bottling technique, miscalculations, and so on, I've probably got less than three liters all together actually bottled.  This means both that I'm 25% short of my target batch size, and that I probably have too much headspace in my bottles which may affect carbonation.

Still, fingers crossed.  I'd like to crack at least one open in about ten days at the next Edmonton Homebrewer's Guild meeting (my first!), so hopefully it will be ready by then.

It's all worth it in the end, though:







(The label, based on that doodle in a previous post, was made in Inkscape, which is a very cool program I wish I could run the latest version of, and attached with tape, because the glue stick I bought turned out to be no good.)

Well, I've learned a lot of lessons for next time...

The Rack: Sarcastic Doorman

So I've finally gotten around to racking the Sarcastic Doorman tonight, after eleven days in the primary - a record for me, though nothing extraordinary really.  Lots of homebrewers leave things in the primary for a few weeks or more.

I appear, like my last batch, to have lost some volume - I'm down to an estimated three and a half liters, judging by how far it fills my little carboy.

I prefer to think of it as mostly full rather than a little bit empty.

If it were four liters exactly, it would be right up to the bottom of the neck, I think.  Which is where it should be - you don't want much headspace in the secondary fermenter.  I'll live with it this time, and I suppose in future I can beef up the batch size to account for possible losses?

As with my last batch, I'm not totally clear on where the missing volume went.  It obviously wasn't evaporation.  That dense, creamy krausen eventually turned espresso-brown and settled.  I certainly didn't leave that much liquid behind when I was racking (I favour disturbing my sediment a little over missing any of my beer).  I don't think I've been sleepwalking into the cupboard and drinking it with a straw.  I'm at a loss.

It smells excellent, anyway.  I didn't take a gravity reading or taste any, I'm trying to preserve as much of it for bottling as possible, but I have high hopes!

Alberta Bans Strong Beer

This is total crap.

It makes no sense.  As one of the comments on the article above says, banning strong beer to combat binge drinking is like banning swiss army knives to stop gang violence.  Highschoolers aren't buying richly complex imported Belgian Tripels or five-year-old oak-aged barleywine to get hammered on, they're buying cases of Lucky and cheap vodka.

The ban is actually only on beers over 11.9% ABV, and of course it's on the sale, so I can brew whatever I want (and I'm of a mind to put on a real monster as soon as the fermenter is free again, just because), but it's the principle of the thing.  A cheap bottle of wine in the same alcohol range can be had for about the same price as on of these beers, in the same store, and as far as price-per-milliliter of alcohol goes some hard liquors, again on the same shelves, beat both of them, but you're allowed to appreciate a fine scotch whiskey or a French wine.  Beer is still viewed as a cheap, lower-class drink for idiots to get hammered on.

It's always the thing I like...

What's This? (Sarcastic Doorman)

My krausen, rather than falling back into the brew as would traditionally be expected, instead seems to have condensed into a half-inch thick layer of super-dense mottled foam over the entire surface of the beer, and doesn't look inclined to go anywhere soon.  I have never seen or read about anything like this before.  Do I just try to rack through it?  I don't want to skim it off, because on such a small batch even foam constitutes a significant part of the volume...

Next time I do a small batch, I'll invest in an anti-foaming agent and sidestep this whole issue, I think.

UPDATE: Further reading indicates I've just chosen a yeast that's going to work a bit slowly given the low temperature in my brewing closet, despite the massive over-pitching.  I'm going to give it about a week to see if the krausen falls, and if not, I'll check the gravity and probably just rack out from under it; I'm sure it will be fully fermented by that time, anyway.

HIGH KRAUSEN: Sarcastic Doorman

"High Krausen" is not, contrary to popular belief, the time when yeasts
hold tiny shoot-outs in your beer.  That actually occurs only during lagering.

Unsurprisingly, given that I massively over-pitched my yeast (that is to say, 100 billion yeast cells is a bit excessive for four liters of wort), fermentation is proceeding pretty rapidly and the beer is krausening like crazy.  The krausen is the foam which develops on top of the fermenting wort early in primary fermentation.  This is caused, I believe, by the CO2 produced by the yeast when it is metabolizing sugars pushing certain compounds out of the wort, and in some places (notably Germany), this foam is skimmed either to harvest yeast or simply to remove the compounds in it so that they are not reabsorbed into the beer; the foam can contain some of the harsher compounds found in hops, and removing it is supposed to yield beer with a smoother bitterness.  Modern "noble" hops, of course, contain far less of those compounds than would have been found at the time this tradition was started, and in some styles they are desirable anyway, so skimming the krausen is not often recommended for the homebrewer.

For some kind of perspective, I've got as much krausen on these four liters as I get on the average 23 liter batch, but it seems much denser.  I'll probably be moving this brew to the secondary almost as soon as the krausen falls, no later than Wednesday I think.

BREW DAY: Sarcastic Doorman

Today was the day to brew my new experimental small-batch recipe, Sarcastic Doorman rye porter (see the post bellow this one for an early sketch of the label).  As I brew here in my one-room apartment upstairs from my landlord and it's damn cold here in the winter, a one-gallon batch is about as much as I can make without using a kit.

It was a lovely morning for it.

Painting the Cave

Perhaps you recall the original version of the logo at the top of this blog.  It was one of the better examples of my own particular artistic style, "painstaking doodle," which consists of fairly crude, sketchy drawings which never-the-less take me ages to do.

Sometimes when work is very slow, or I manage to have a quiet lunch hour for once, I'll do a little doodling at work and post it on one of the walls of my area to brighten up the otherwise squalid surroundings.  And considering these things brighten the place up, you can imagine how squalid it is...

I really did just give up on finishing
this one.  So many teeth...

I was listening to Bauhaus on the
way in to work.

The beer can was originally "LUCKY",
but I realized only "KY" showed up in
the actual picture...

This was supposed to be something else
but I'm not good at drawing people.

This was inspired by a Language Log
post.  "Balas" can mean either "bullets"
or "candy" in Brazilian Portuguese.

This is just how I felt that day.  Yes,
it is in the correct orientation.

I was reading something that mentioned
Edison's film version of Frankenstein.

Playing around with a label idea for a
beer I'll be brewing soon.

There is a story behind this.  I will not
tell you what it is.

The images are presented here in no particular order; Spy in the Cab was the first one I drew, but after that I'm not sure.  Click for much larger versions.  All pictures taken with my new digital camera, and then very clumsily cropped and rotated as necessary.

Chicken and Eggs, Maybe Some Green Onion

Am I in a better mood when I cook, or do I tend to cook when I'm in a good mood?  I can't tell.

It's Here!

The video is finally done, the pilot for our new and highly irregular series: Don't Cook This at Home.

It's up on Youtube in two parts:





Also, Blogger has been telling me I have unmoderated comments, but it won't actually show them to me - are they yours? You could try commenting to tell me, but I probably won't be able to see it!

A Phone To Save Us From Ourselves

Is it just me, or is the entire premise of the "Windows Phone" ad campaign that you're such a complete jackass that you need a phone that allows you to be a jackass more efficiently so you can get it over with? Who's checking somebody's "status" or whatever the hell you kids have these days in the middle of a baseball game, or on the dance floor?

Star Anise, Star Bright, First Beer I Drink Tonight...

I added two... Cloves? Stars? Flowers? Two units, approximately, of star anise, to the new minikeg of homebrew I carbonated a couple of days ago, and pulled the first glass tonight. I know they say two is enough for a whole batch (five gallons, versus the roughly one and a quarter gallons in the keg), but I like to go a little overboard.

Whoa boy did I overdo it this time, though. After fourty-eight hours it already tastes like there's a shot of Jagermeister in it, by the time the keg is done it'll be overwhelming.

I'm working on my next brew now (punny name to be revealed in time), even though I have an untapped keg of this one left in addition to the one in the fridge. I'm going to try to get into smaller batches for a while so that I can experiment more.

In other news the video is, possibly, done. I just need a final okay from my collaborator and then it's ready to upload.

Music for Film

So where does a person, an individual with perhaps not a lot of resources (organizational or financial) at their command, find some decent music they can use in a Youtube video? Under a Creative Commons license that allows derivative works, or the like. I've looked around a bit and found what might be starting places, but frankly I'm out to sea on this. Could delay the previously advertised video slightly.

Speaking of Which...

Don't Try This At Home

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.06/chemistry.html

I read this article back when it originally came out, I'm pretty certain, but I'd sort of forgotten about it since then. I ran across it again today, and did a little looking around... Things have really only gotten worse. When I was a kid I had one of the last Chemcraft chemistry sets, and I remember all the little empty spaces in the rack of chemicals for things they weren't allowed to include. Of course, people remember the exception; we remember that someone with access to chemicals built a bomb, which very rarely happens, but we seem to forget how many people with access to cars and alcohol kill themselves and others all the time. We see cars and alcohol everywhere, they're part of our lives, so we're not scared of them, but "chemicals" ("Without chemicals, life as we know it would be impossible," as my father would say) are foreign and frightening. Which is exactly the problem with the world in general. We don't really care whether you can build a bomb or make drugs; truth is, we can't stop you from doing either. We're just terrified of you being different.

Depressing.

I wonder if the new keg is ready to serve from yet...

The Last Pint

Why is the head on the last pint from my first keg better than any of the others? Seriously, it's creamy and awesome, almost Guinness-like. Is it to do with sediments, proteins perhaps, picked up from the bottom in the last sputtering of the tap? I know I'm not really supposed to serve that stuff, but as I'm serving myself and I actually rather like the dregs, I went right to the bottom.

Hm... Didn't last, though.

Operation: Stand Up

The operation has begun.  Reconnaissance began tonight and was highly successful.  It appears the initial assault will require about five minutes worth of material, with an emphasis on the filthiest stuff the lab boys can cook up.  Resistance is expected but it should be slight; we will be greeted as liberators.

In other news, it's looking like at least some of the soundtrack for Dr. Zombie-Hands is not going to be available, at least in its original form. Apparently the film is more lost than I thought despite being less than forty years old. I'm still going to do the best I can, though - I may simply have to substitute modern covers or closest equivalents for some tracks.

Next Time, I Guess

I've kegged my latest batch of beer, and in the process tried a little...  I don't know if carbonation will really bring it out somehow, but if not, I don't think there's going to be much effect from the juniper berries.  I didn't notice them at all when I took a little sample, anyway, you certainly can't smell them.  Clearly I did not crush them adequately, next time I'll try actually grinding them up as opposed to just smashing them.  I'm not sure how this batch is really going to work out in general, to be honest, I also managed to lose two liters of it somewhere.  I can take a lesson for next time from the juniper berry thing, but I have no idea where those two liters of beer went.

Life's like that, though, I guess.  You don't always learn from everything, you just try and see if it happens again.  Is it better that it does, and the universe is consistent, or that it doesn't, and it's better the second time?

Those little helicopter seeds are falling so thickly past the streetlight outside I thought it was an early snow at first.

Brought to You by Mug Rootbeer

Remember The Dana Carvey Show?  Apparently you can watch it on Youtube now.

It's good when you're housebound, such as, for example, when you've accidentally severely scalded one of your feet and can't really do anything that involves standing or walking.

Dr. Zombie-Hands!

Following the wild success of my earlier work reconstructing the original soundtrack of the (sadly lost) Romanian sci-fi film Cirque De L'Espace, I've decided to try my hand again.  So to speak.

Dr. Zombie-Hands is a pretty great, weird horror film that I'd like to say has an undeserved reputation, but sadly it actually has almost no reputation at all.  Essentially impossible to find on video anymore, even on the grey market, the movie is practically forgotten.  It may not be a classic on the level of Cirque De L'Espace, but it's certainly deserving of a lot more recognition than it's gotten.  Hopefully I can contribute to that a little bit.

More details as the project progresses.

Drinking Along with Withnail

Not really.  The second drink taken in the film (not, as is often erroneously stated, the first) is lighter fluid, so trying to keep up isn't a terribly good idea.

I did just watch Withnail and I, though I didn't start drinking until afterward.  I'd never noticed it before, but Black Books seems a lot like "Withnail & I: The Series".  Dylan Moran even sort of looks like Paul McGann from some angles, doesn't he?  Though I suppose Withnail is more like Bernard Black in personality...  I wonder how coincidental that is, anyway.

Anyway, I have some catching up to do, so...

The Difference

If it had been him, it would have gone differently.

Two attractive young women on the bus needed help figuring out the local train system on their way to a convention centre.  That system consists of only one train, but the pair of gap-toothed old drunks who were trying to give them directions made it sound more confusing than the London Underground with all the signs rewritten in Cyrillic.  It wasn't that they were giving bad directions - they were just in that stage of drunkenness where you're still coherent but think you're not, so they kept giving the same directions, over and over, slightly rephrased.  Each repetition made the out-of-town ladies look a little more lost.

You can't interrupt them, either, because that will only make it worse, so you have to wait for the ladies to get off the bus to tell them you're going the same way they are.  The girls are dressed very nicely, but not for business - not the skirts or suits I'd expect going to Rexall Place, more like slightly-more-respectable clubbing outfits (but no less revealing), stylish makeup and hair, and the very definition of fierce heels.  They're friendly and bubbly and very grateful for simple directions they can understand.

I can hear in my head the story he'd tell me next week, if it had been him.  They would have been high-priced call girls on their way to a convention of small arms dealers.  They would have been working for a corporate espionage firm as part of a complicated scheme to blackmail a middle manager into stealing some files.  He would have scored them some blow and in exchange, received a black business card with red printing - no name, just a picture of a spider and a phone number in Amsterdam.

But it was me, so they were just two nice girls in a strange town who needed directions.  I told them to get off at Coliseum, and follow the signs; I wasn't going that far.

Post Script, 3:00AM: I relayed all this to him, and he laughed, and then he pointed out that Rexall Place isn't a convention center, and the girls were obviously here to see Lady Gaga.  Kind of ruined it for me a little, not least because, dammit...  I could totally have scored with the brunette if I was thinking about what I was doing instead of what he would have done.  There's a lesson here, I'm sure.

Phosphates

Trisodium phosphate, or TSP, does a great job cleaning stuff, but man does it smell bad.  Sometimes, if something is that hard to clean, it's just not worth it.

I've decided to officially write off the short story/novella/novel/epic saga/all-consuming black hole I've been working on on and off since before I left Montreal.  It's only getting to be more work without getting any better, and I don't think it's ever going to work - there are too many ideas for a short story and not nearly enough plot for...  Well, even for a short story, to be honest.  I'm happy enough with the version I wrote as a final assignment for my creative writing course, as a final assignment for a creative writing course, but it's never going to be anything else.

In theory this frees me up to write something else.  In practice, you're still more likely to get another entry about my latest beer.  (I put a lot of juniper berries in, about twice what's recommended, but I don't think I crushed them enough, because it certainly doesn't smell like gin...)

Ol' Draj

In a 750ml glass bottle (if you finish off that Old Raj gin, say, the empty will do nicely), combine:

• 1-2 stalks worth of fresh mint (at least, you could add more)
• 5-6 cinnamon sticks
• 1 tsp. cayenne pepper
• As much cheap vodka as you can fit in there with the other ingredients

Let sit for a good 48 hours or so before sampling, giving it a shake or inverting it once or twice.  The end result is a lovely amber coloured liquor that both burns and cools quite pleasantly.  Most congenial on a sunny day toward the end of summer.

Sadly, quite impossible for me to photograph adequately with the equipment I possess, seemingly.

Long Live Pere Ubu

There are far, far too many Pere Ubu albums I do not own.

I have recently been reading The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch.  It's an imaginative book, certainly, and it's clear he put a lot of thought into it...  But it's not very good.  It's full of ideas, many of which are good and many of which are original and most often they're the same ones, but it suffers from a few issues.  The language is very uneven; the prose often seems unedited, with unnecessary phrases and analogies that obscure rather than clarifying, and the dialogue can't seem to decide if it wants to be anachronistic or not.  The pacing is terrible, more like reading the author's detailed notes rather than the novel that resulted from them.  But the cardinal sin is that, with all those good ideas, the only thing Lynch seems to be building out of them is a big jumble of good ideas.  Ideas are like paint; you can mix all the best and brightest ones together, and end up with nothing but grey, and that's what seems to have happened here.  Things are looking up a little about halfway through the book - there have been a couple of hints that the plot will be beginning soon - but at this point I'm finishing it because I paid for the damn paperback.

A Better Way of Putting It

You can always do whatever you want, if you actually know what you want.

Money well spent.

Today, I spent:

$52.50 on a poster for a movie that was never made, was never going to be made, and never will be made. Because it has a raptor driving a jeep and a man with three hands (for the three things a man needs to do).

$11 on a joke that will only be funny to one other person in the world, who I at the current time have no way to share it with.

$4 tipping for a breakfast order that was wrong in two separate ways, only one of which was in any sense corrected.

$6.50 on strawberry cheesecake ice cream that melted before I got it home.

Obviously I can't spoil myself like this every day, but now and then it's nice.

For His Health, You Know

At a certain point in his life, if not more than once or indeed continually, a man feels that he must go to sea.  He might go someplace by way of the sea, but really it's as well if he just gets out on to the water and stays there for a while.  The point is just to get off solid land, really.

Inception

So.  Inception is out.  I have now seen it.  Next, I will see it in IMAX.  I might see it again on a normal screen at some point before or after that, as well.

What will I do with my life after that?  I have some ideas.

No Sense of Time

The clocks all say it's 21H00 but it looks exactly the same outside my window as it did at noon, and I have very little sense of any time having passed since then, let alone nine hours.  I was going to do something today...  Maybe I already did it?

Broiled Shrimp, Belgian Beer, and Happiness

Marinate ~900g of raw, shell-on shrimp with one can of coconut milk, about one third to one half cup of pineapple juice, three bulbs worth of minced garlic, maybe four tablespoons or so of minced ginger, and three bunches of scallions for a day and a half, and then broil for ten minutes, turning once, followed by baking at 400C for another eight or nine minutes.  Proceed to eat yourself sick.  Fantastic.  Goes rather well with some toasted naan bread and strong Belgian beer.

I haven't really got any idea what I'm doing with my life, except that at the moment it's not much, but today I'm perfectly okay with it.

Uchronia... Today?

Imagine a world in which Karl Marx was able to find space in a hotel so that he could actually use the ticket he bought to the first performance of Wagner's Ring Cycle.  Seriously.  Consider the implications.

Crazy, right?

Of Course, She Was a Mother

If you are ever in Hinton, Alberta, I strongly recommend the Olympia Restaurant.  Not only is it the best Greek food I've ever had (the lamb mantza is ideal after a day in the Rockies), but it's really, really friendly.  The second night we ate there (of course we went back), the hostess actually brought me extra food, because she "know[s] how boys need to eat."

My kind of place.

New Logo = Changes Coming

I have a pretty nice apartment here in Edmonton.  Much nicer than anyplace I've had myself before.  That's good, in its way, but it does have an unfortunate tendency to show up all my actual stuff, so I'm having to make some changes.  For example, I now buy furniture instead of finding it by the side of the road.  It takes some getting used to.

Regular readers (that means you, Ma), will spot the new logo up above!  This piece of artwork is obviously not the work of my own cracked and crooked claws, I commissioned it.  The only trouble with it is that, like the apartment, it shows up everything else I've got, so now the blog is being redesigned (within the limits of my abilities).  The content will hopefully receive a corresponding upgrade (to actual content) someday as well.

That was fun, wasn't it?

Now that we've had some time to see what this blog is like when it's about writing, back to the beer for a little bit before I try that again.

We cracked open a bottle of the Bockenale at a barbecue on Saturday, just the one liter so everyone could have a little sample.  It's still technically green, since it had only gone into the fridge the night before and it really ought to sit a week after carbonation, but it was quite popular and people expressed interest in drinking it again.  Then they demolished a case of Lucky while we played bocce in the back yard, but you can't ask people to change overnight.

Bottling

Bockenale is bottled and carbonating now - I hope it's carbonating, anyway, time will tell.

The red colour has mellowed - you can really only see the red if you hold it up to the light, now - and the cidery acidity is gone, but it's still cloudy, and I think there's a hint of diacetyl.  That last is a little unexpected given the warm (for the yeast I used) fermentation temperatures and extra week in the secondary, but it's very subtle.  It could actually just be the vanilla.  You can't really taste the tarragon at all, I'd have to be doing a proper boil to make better use of it.  The end result is very smooth and pleasant, anyway (having a small uncarbonated glass before I wash up), and being more of an ale drinker I couldn't really give a toss about the clarity so I'm pretty pleased overall.  It is damn hard to make bad beer with one of these kits.

The more unexpected thing is that I seem to have gotten the gravity wrong in one of my earlier measurements, as it's now reading about 1.015 at 72F (before adding the priming sugar) which certainly doesn't correct to 1.01 at 60F.  Assuming my original gravity reading was correct, by no means a given, that brings the beer down to about 6.5% ABV, though if as I suspect my OG was also ~.005 low then the ABV is pretty much unchanged.

In other news, this is going to turn from a beer blog back into the writing blog I meant it to be over the next couple of weeks.  At least until carbonation is finished a week or so after that.

Bockenale

I love coming up with names - whenever I'm writing something, I've usually come up with a lot of the names, and certainly the title, in advance.  Sometimes they change as it goes along, but that's where I start.  It's not even that I find names particularly meaningful, inherently - I don't subscribe to the idea that the etymology of your name is important, studies about people named "Baker" becoming bakers aside - but I generally find that if I know a character's, place's, or story's name, I'm ready to use it, and if I'm still not sure, it's half-baked.

I also love stupid, stupid puns.

So naming beers is fun, because it combines those things.  It's also a little frustrating because all the good ones are already taken.  There are at least two Coal Porters, for example.  In trying to come up with a name for my latest brew I've been through a couple, and I finally settled on what I thought must be peculiar enough to be unique - Bock'N'Ale (a classic pun, if you'll forgive me, in reference to the combination of yeasts) - but sure enough, there's at least one out there already.  So I modified the spelling a little.  Alternately, I've been working on something to do with Winan's Steam Gun, playing on Steam Beer.

Unfortunately, the reason I'm working on that second one is, rather than that I genuinely need a unique name, the fact that our cold snap ended and it's been warm and lovely and entirely inappropriate for lager yeast, so my beer is probably going to turn out all fruity and cloudy after all.

Vanilla-Tarragon Bock

Only not really very much so, apart from the vanilla part.

After doing a couple of kits straight-up, I decided to do one beer with modifications but without so much care or attention, just to get a bit of it out of my system before settling down to rigorous experimentation with stout recipes.  I found some vanilla beans fairly cheap at the German grocery, and just racked my "bock" (really just a Brewhouse Munich Dark Lager with half the added water) to secondary onto that and about a cup of strong tarragon "tea" - I don't know how noticeable the tarragon is going to be in the finished product that way, but I couldn't really think of a better method on short notice.  The beer itself has a slightly cider-y, apple-like quality right now, not desirable for the style but actually quite pleasant, and a nice red colour.

It's really cloudy, though.  I wound up using two different yeasts (the dry packet in the kit and an Activator of Bavarian Lager yeast from Wyeast) because it was a last minute decision to use less water, and they're flocculating very strangely.  Bits floating on the surface, lots of it still in suspension, fairly thin yeast cake.  Strangely, though I didn't really pitch enough yeast for the OG, it's actually over-attenuating slightly, down to 1.01 from 1.065 (for reference, that's probably around 7.3% ABV).  I'm going to give it a good few weeks in the secondary, and hopefully it'll clear some.  We have had a cold snap so my closet is actually down to a decent lagering temperature, at least, so it should definitely improve if things don't warm up too much in the next week or so.

Nothing is ever finished.

I understand this now.  I don't know what to do with the information yet, though.

Oh, Alberta. What the hell is wrong with you?

Somebody told me this e-mail I sent out was a blog post, and as it's already written, here you go.

Since moving to Alberta, I've been weirded-out by different things.  People speaking English on the bus.  People yelling, "Get a haircut!" without intending it to be ironic.  Straight men wearing cowboy hats.  Some of these things I have mentioned here before.  You can get used to just about anything over time, of course, but every once in a while something still catches you off guard.


So I went out for a late-ish breakfast on Saturday, at Friends & Neighbors, and as is my wont on such occasions I brought along the big biography of Graham Greene I've been reading in bits and pieces since I moved here.  Very thick book, black and white photo of Greene on the cover.  Filled with stuff about Greene completing his first novel and working as a war correspondent and a spy before he was twenty, writing a set amount every day - basically I read it to make myself feel inadequate.

Anyway, as I was paying at the cash, I laid the book down on the counter next to me, and while I was entering the tip (not much, the new waiter got my order wrong at first), a fellow came up behind me and slurred, "That's a cheeky book."

Yeah, I didn't know what to think.

I glanced back at him, a fellow about my height, a little unsteadier than I think one ought to be at that hour of the morning, buzz-cut, red neck.  He continued: "That looks like a really intellect-yual book.  Can't you be an intellect-yual where you come from?"

"Where I come from?"

"Don't you practice...  I mean, you're a muslim?"

My first instinct was of course to call him an ignorant troglodyte and see if he knew what that meant, but we were in a crowded restaurant after all. Avoid confrontation.  Okay.

"No..."

"But didn't you used to be a muslim?"

"What?  No.  Why?"

"But you're from the Midder East, like."

"No, I'm not."

"But you're a muslim.  That's what it usually, a beard that shape usually
means."

A beard that shape?  My beard is beard-shaped, surely.  Fair enough, though, I guess facial hair can mean things, like how having a seventies mustache means you're a skeevy douche.

"It pretty much just grows like that."

"But you do, do you identify with the muslim faith?"

"No."

"But I mean, you identify with the Middle, the Ar...  Terrorists?"

"What?  No.  What are you talking about?"

This has to be the longest it has ever taken anyone to pay for breakfast. Move it along, I want to get out of here!

"You know this guy, Muh-Am-Ar-Uh-Muh-Ar...  You know we paid him ten million dollars, how do you feel about that?"

"I don't know anything about it."

"There are Native kids who got sod...  Who got...  Who got done in the butt, and we only gave them a few thousand, dollars, but this Muh...  Ar-Muh-Am... Uh-Am-Ari, he came and he played our intelligence agencies against each, I mean he played our intelligence against, our intelligence agents, intelligence agencies against the govern...  I mean, he turned our government against our intelligence, and made them give him fif, ten and a half million dollars and a mansion in (unintelligable)..."

I think he's talking about that guy who got sent to a secret prision and tortured.  Who wasn't actually a terrorist, or involved with terrorism, at all.  I really don't know much about it, but it seems like he pretty much deserves whatever he can get out of the government, really.  Anyway, my new friend continued...

"I think that's a problem, isn't it?  Like, it's a sign, our societ...  Our country is getting too liberal, when that happens, right?  Like when my father built this country, as a nucular physicist..."

I am not making any of this up.

"... He wouldn't...  I mean, don't you think, do you agree with that?"

"As I said, I really don't know anything about it."

I finally managed to retrieve my bank card and extricate myself from between him and the counter, but from the way his eyes followed me, I could tell I had failed his test.  I had not managed to convince him that I wasn't a terrorist.  Who could blame him for his suspicions though.  After all, not only did I have a beard, but I had been reading a book.  A thick book that didn't appear to be about wizards or farm equipment.  Speaking of which, as I threaded my way out, he had a parting shot.

"That's a real good book, eh?"

Yeah...  I didn't move here for the culture.

You Can't Rush These Things

I kept a few bottles of my current batch of stout apart from the rest during carbonation, and instead of the cool corner where I usually let them sit a couple of weeks, I let them in a box next to a heating vent - basically the warmest place in the apartment.  In theory, the yeast will work faster in this warmer environment (although possibly producing some off flavours), so they might have carbonated faster than the bottles in the closet.

In reality, not so much.  They're quite drinkable despite my refrigerating them before the other bottles, but they're not really fully carbonated.  A bit of fizz, but not much in terms of head.  Acceptable but hardly ideal.

This blog is pretty ugly, not green-on-yellow ugly but certainly not pleasing to the eye, which is one of the reasons I don't use it much - it's not someplace I want to spend a lot of time.  I'm in the process of trying to make it less ugly, but it's going to take a while.

Originality is Overrated.

Or so I choose to believe after discovering that a project I've been working on much more closely mirrors history than I had previously been aware.  This isn't the first time such a thing has happened, in fact.  I'm still trying to figure out if it could be helpful in this case, or if it's a distraction I ought to put aside.

On the other hand, I discovered a good third of a bottle of forgotten ginger wine in the back of the fridge tonight and am going to sleep very soundly indeed.

Stout's in the secondary, and...

...  more importantly, all these beer-related posts might actually be writing related.

The history of booze is the history of the world.