Brews you can Use

Via fafblog, a good summary of the arguments against CA's medicinal marijuana law, currently in front of the Supreme Court. Highlight:

But just cause you're gonna eat the sandwich doesn't mean it's not commerce. How does the government know you're not gonna do somethin commercy with your sandwich like feed it to livestock or let it have sex with a prostitute? Wouldn't you be drivin down the price of sandwiches in the black sandwich market?

The linked article had its moments, too:

O'Connor, still bogarting the oral argument, insists ...

and:

And Justice David Souterwho clearly has never been high on anything stronger than yogurtsays it's clear that most Californians will go out and buy their medical marijuana "on the street."

But for the pure, distilled absurdity of the article, you just can't beat fafblog.

Now to go home and see if the Ken and Alex show is really ending, or if it's all just the kind of elaborate bastardish ruse I would pull if I were in charge....

Going on about 4 hours of sleep the last two nights. Couldn't turn in early yesterday -- Sunday Night Football. Can't turn in early today -- Monday Night Football; the Packers, no less. I'll watch this through if it kills me.

Maybe I can sleep tonight. Here's hoping <raises glass>. A few nice hoppy beers should help. It's generally less disruptive than my usual insomnia cure (stay up until a trustworthy hallucination says it's time to go to sleep), but not nearly as effective.

Beer anyone?

I just took a brown porter (a little roastier than a brown ale, but less so than a normal porter) off line to replace it with a beer I'd rather be drinking. I estimate there's a gallon or two left, by the time-honored "heft test".

It's not bad beer, but it never cleared¹, and it's the end of a 10 gallon batch so I've had enough of it for a while. It's also light and lightly-hopped enough so that it won't keep until I want more, so it's going to get dumped if nobody rescues it.

The catch is that the beer is in a keg and I don't want to bottle it. The simplest workaround is transferring it to growlers or similar suitable containers. My fleet of growlers is all spoken for/out on loan already, so the rescuer will need to bring their own.

This being the Internet and all, I'll have to limit this deal to IRL friends and friends-of-friends in the area. No shipping and no strangers please.

Update: 11/29/2004 -- If there are no takers by Friday, the beer gets it <evil laugh>. That is all.

¹ A cosmetic flaw which bothers me as a brewer, but hasn't seemed to bother many drinkers.

I'm back from a rather rare experince: being the least computer-ed one at a gathering. We spent Thanksgiving with Jess's aunt, who is very technologically up-to-date with a broadband connection and wireless ethernet. The rest of the family is similarly adept, and most of them brought laptops. I left mine at home mostly out of laziness.

In total, there were four iBooks and a Windows laptop in the house, and during slow moments between turkey gobblings, they were out and surfing while I (horrors!) read a book instead. On the last night, I got to hear everybody reach the end of the internet simultaneously:

"Holy [cow], look at this picture! Eww!"

"Look, you can choose the way this animation commits suicide!"

"Your random <fill-in-the-blank> name is ...."

"This web page says I'm going to die next summer."

Of course, I have to admit that the page with the obscene candy wrappers was pretty amusing. No links here, I didn't have a computer handy (bwahahaha... Google if you dare!)

Not that the book was any great literature ¹, but it just felt "right" somehow to be less tied to a computer. I'm sure that feeling will pass soon enough...

¹ "Quicksilver" by Neal Stephenson. It's a fun book with the classically painful Stephenson turns-of-phrase, and of course a classically-Stephenson clumsy sex scene or two. I've read much better, but I've started reading much worse. I may do a review when I finish it. At the rate I'm reading it, that should be summer 2006...

I just finished moving 10 gallons of apple cider to carboys (huge glass bottles for you non-brewers) to age. It'll be ready to drink late next summer at the earliest. Patience? I think I have some sitting around.

This brings the total booze-in-progress at the house to:

• 10 gallons of cider
• 10 gallons of Alt (my best so far, based on the early samples)
• 5 gallons of Cranberry Honey mead
• 5 gallons of smoked dark wheat ale
• 5 gallons of IPA
• 5 gallons of Barleywine (4 - 4.5 after "samples" -- it was on tap for a bit)

So, what to brew next... :-)

The IPA is smelling much better than it did on brew day. I just have to keep telling myself: "If the smell's in the house, it's not in the beer... If the smell's in the house, it's not in the beer...." Next time I'll do that one with Goldings hops, which is what the original recipe called for, and has the advantage of smelling more like an orange herbal tea than leather/rubber/tobacco.

I think I'm officially addicted to football. My TV's turned to ESPN2 right now because Bowling Green is playing Toledo. I don't even know where Bowling Green is, and I know only four things about Toledo:

1. It's in Ohio (I assume, there are probably others).
2. It's Klinger's home town.
3. It's named after the city in Moorish spain whose fall led to the rediscovery of ancient Greek science and philosophy leading to Western Civilization as we know it.
4. Apparently, it has a college football team.

Other than that, I got nothin'. I don't know anything about the teams, don't care about the outcome of the game, haven't even really figured out which team is which. Don't care, it's football.

That's really all I ask of a sport: it has to be football.

NASCAR's wildly popular, has a technology angle, the occasional crash, and its origins lie with enterprising young men trying to get moonshine to thirsty people, a goal I can respect. But it's not football.

Baseball's the national pastime with a lot of history, but it's not football.

Basketball must have something going for it. I wouldn't know -- it's not football.

Soccer's the world's most popular sport, but it's not... well, I guess it actually is, but not American football. Ahem....

Hockey's like soccer on ice, with body checking. Pretty cool, I admit, but not football.

Curse you, football addiction! You force me to watch the one Gophers team which reliably sucks mud, making me miss the sports that sometimes win.

Everyone has an off day or two, I think.

I decided to brew on Sunday since the Packers were playing the late-night game, leaving the early afternoon free for wrangling beer. I brewed a five gallon batch of IPA, mostly without incident. The only big mishap was the chilling water hoses didn't seal on the new wort chiller causing a minor flood of hot water. That was easily contained with a spare bucket and what escaped helped with cleaning up the kitchen. The beer had a boatload of Fuggle hops, far more than I had ever used before. Fuggles have an earthy character which is pleasant in small quantities, but in this quantity it smelled like somebody had been smoking cigars in the house. While tanning leather. Downwind from a tire fire. Not very pleasant, to say the least.

After all this, I relaxed, watched football, and tried not to worry too much about my potential leather-rubber-stogie ale. Jess was half-watching the game and IM'ing the highlights (i.e. when I cheered, groaned, yelled at the TV, etc.) to her cousin, a big Packer fan stuck in Ohio without cable, thus unable to watch the game.

I usually "watch" non-televised games using Yahoo!'s game info page. This is usually just a few minutes out of date, and can give a play-by-play account of the game. It's far from ideal but is easier to follow than a radio broadcast, and would give a better picture of the game than the IM converstion. I was wondering why Jess's cousin wasn't using this, and wanted to suggest it if she could.

I asked: "Does she have an Internet connection?", realizing what was wrong a split second too late.

Finally catching up with the late 1990s. Let's see what pours out of my brain here, eh?