Brews you can use

For over a year now, I’ve been satisfying my own damn bagel addiction, rather than completely outsourcing the task to my dealer. I’ve tried a couple different recipes, and my best results have been using a tweaked version of the Cook’s Illustrated recipe (the original is reproduced here).

My tweaks are basically:

• Don’t bother with the high-gluten flour. Bread flour gives good results.
• Raised salt content to 1 tbsp.
• I add extra water as needed to get the dough to come together. On dry days, it can take a few tablespoons extra.
• Let bagels rise the night before, then refrigerate or freeze until ready to boil and bake.

Total prep time the night before is about 30-45 minutes, plus rising time. In the morning, it takes about 45 minutes from cold water/cold oven to hot bagels. I can be an early riser for these

Since Jess’s Cross-Check was singled, we have a set of bar-end shifters, front and rear derailleurs, and a rear wheel left over. Also, I’ve been feeling the need for a good geared road bike. Hmm, Shifters, derailleurs, rear wheel. Just need a few more parts for a full bike. Let’s see… just need a frame and a front wheel. Oh, and headset, stem, bars, brakes, levers, seatpost, … Darn, that’s most of a bike, isn’t it?

In other words, “If we had ham we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs.”

That little joke describes so many projects perfectly. I haven’t been able to find a reliable attribution, so it may be a well-known linguistic torture device like “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

I resemble that remark…

(except for the beer bit, at least. Anyway “Dead blog, so sad…”)

Of course, it would have to be random geekery which brings this blog out of hibernation. Some things just don’t fit in a facebook status.

I spent a bit of time today digging through the FreeRADIUS source code and stumbled across the following new-to-me C idiom:

switch(n) {
case FOO:
    if (condition) {
         /* stuff */
    } else {
case BAR:
        /* more stuff */
    }
}

The switch statement in C is notoriously powerful and prone to such abuse — see Duff’s device for a particularly infamous example — and I almost filed this in that category.

On further thought, though, this is actually painfully elegant. The effect of the statement is roughly “if case FOO and condition, do stuff, otherwise handle just like case BAR”, but it doesn’t require you to repeat the code for BAR like:

switch(n) {
case FOO:
    if (condition) {
        /* stuff */
    } else {
        /* more stuff */
    }
    break;
case BAR:
    /* more stuff, again */
}

or cheekily fallthrough as in:

switch(n) {
case FOO:
    if (condition) {
        /* stuff */
        break;
    }
case BAR:
    /* more stuff */
}

The interleaved statements are weird enough to convey what’s going on in a way that a simple /* FALLTHROUGH */ comment does not.

Duff said of his eponymous device “This code forms some sort of argument in [the fallthrough] debate, but I’m not sure whether it’s for or against.” Duff’s device was good for only a performance improvement, but this one improves clarity, almost. I think that’s a “for”. I’m going to have to use this one.

I closed an e-mail I wrote today, summing up a technically correct but politically controversial argument, with:

Well, that’s the bottom of that rabbit hole. It wasn’t a bad trip, actually, but this little bottle labeled “DRINK ME” looks pretty tempting at the moment…

I think I’ve also discovered a variation of Godwin’s law I hadn’t encountered before:

As the length of a thread discussing information security grows, the probability of a reference to “Reflections on Trusting Trust” increases to one.

I only let the last brew languish for a single extra week in primary before kegging it. It’s not ready yet, still has a little hop harshness that should mellow over the next couple weeks, but is my favorite beer currently on tap (not that it has much competition; the Belgian Dubbel is only for certain moods, and the Raspberry pLambic is only for a subset of those moods, so the IPA wins the “everyday beer” award by default).

The plan for the last 2008 brew is an Anchor steam-ish beer, tomorrow. More later.

Bottling the 2003 maple wine and 2005 meads will probably have to wait until 2009, unless I’m feeling extra motivated tonight. (Ha!)

(title borrowed from here)

Another half-year, another brew. Jess has recently acquired a taste for the hoppier brews, so I may be brewing some more IPAs in the near future.

In the meantime, more Rye and old-fashioneds should keep the cold away. In addition to the old reliable Old Overholt, I’ve added two interesting Ryes to my collection. The first is Russell’s Reserve Rye, which I finally saw locally. I’d tasted it in San Francisco, and was blown away by its spiciness — it finishes like a chili pepper vodka — and snapped it up as soon as I saw it. The second is Templeton Rye, from a small distillery in Iowa. This is now one of my favorites. It has the most Rye character of any rye I’ve had recently, but is unfortunately only distributed in Iowa and Illinois .

With the slowly-increasing variety of Rye and the amazing variety of good affordable Bourbons, I haven’t perused the Scotches for quite a while. The American whiskey market is starting to become as varied and interesting as the American beer market a decade or so ago. This is a good thing(tm).

Flipping channels Saturday morning, I caught the end of an enthusiastic and illuminating description of Rutherford’s scattering experiment. Very interesting. This was part of a three-part documentary series “Atom”, which was only being broadcast that morning. Drat, I’d missed the first half hour, and couldn’t monopolize the TV for the next two and a half hours to catch this.

Well, the host of this documentary did have a British accent, and I had watched this excellent BBC-broadcast science documentary on Google video, so I checked there to see if it was available.

Sure enough:

Atom, Part 1

Atom, Part 2

Atom, Part 3

Good stuff, probably some of the best popular science programming I’ve seen in a while.

I passed on my usual Saturday bike ride today to indulge my older hobby — I brewed. And boy, did I brew. 15 gallons total, five gallons of a nice strong Belgian dubbel, 10 gallons (more like 8 after miscalculations) of dunkel-weizen.

I started at about 9:00am getting my kit together. First order of business was cleaning out the Therminator. I’d been doing the suggested backflush with hot water after every brew session, but hadn’t done much other cleaning. So, I made a nice strong hot PBW solution, and used an autosiphon to pump it through the chiller.

Boy, did that chiller need cleaning. What came out was green, full of chunks and … bleah. I’d chalked up the odd flavor I perceived in my last few batches to the usual brewers’ anxiety, but now I have another plausible explanation…. I think it’s clean now, but I may start looking at the whirlpool/immersion chiller approach again. That would have the advantage of being pellet-hop-friendly — the hop shortage has meant extremely limited availability of leaf hops.

In previous brew session, I’d spent a lot of time running back into the house for things, and wound up leaving large vessels of hot liquid over open flame unattended for longer than I’d like to. This time, I made a point of getting everything out and assembled ahead of time. That was enough equipment that on the second-to-last trip, I grabbed the camera:

From near to far:

• Buckets of crushed grains (top has Dunkel-Weizen, bottom has Dubbel; 16 pounds each)
• Coolers for mashing: top one is a dual mash/lauter tun, bottom is for mashing only.
• Random pots (on ground): big stockpot for moving and sometimes measuring liquids, the one with the handle is for moving mash around.
• On table: Medium-size pot (6 gallon) for moving liquids, mash paddle and thermometer, retired mash/lauter tun for storing/moving/measuring hot liquids.
• Sanitizing bucket (on ground). Siphon tubing, sanitizer, and squeaky-clean Therminator are inside bucket.
• Dual propane burner with 10 gallon pot for 5 gallon batches and converted 15 gallon keg for 10 gallon batches.
• Stack-o-fermeters

Yes, I did use every last bit of this equipment. Yes, the pots did wind up boiling over. Yes, it went quite well, somehow. No stuck mashes, no screw-ups (like not heating enough water), no snags at all. When I started chilling the last bits of wort, I could barely contain my happy dance. I mostly feel like a homebrewer again! (You can’t really feel like a homebrewer until you reach the “too much” beer phase and volunteer beer for parties, random passers-by, etc. — I won’t be there before today’s bounty is ready.)

I think I’m finally healed from those darned wisdom teeth, and the double case of dry socket they led to. Not the most fun couple weeks of my life, but now I’m able to yawn without yelping, and eat sesame seed bagels without needing a follow-up cleaning (though I admit the reactions of co-workers walking into the bathroom while I’m sticking a huge syringe in my mouth were quite amusing).

So, of course it was time for some more pain.

I got an opportunity to take the Humu on an off-road ride. Answering (against my better judgment) an ALL CAPS POST ON AN INTERWEB FORUM, I showed up at Theo Wirth park at 7am today. One other person showed up early, and we went for a ride on the short loop. I climbed up OK if slowly, then the first small drop went over a rock, followed by a sharp turn to the right. I caught air off the rock, but didn’t quite catch ground in time to make the turn. My front wheel hit a downed tree, the bike flipped, I did a three-quarter somersault, and landed on my back on the forest floor about 8 feet away. The other rider was far ahead of me, and I heard “Are you OK? I saw you flying through the air and got worried.”

Surprisingly, that crash didn’t lead to any injuries. I landed on my back with an upturned branch poking me, but it was a short one and doesn’t seem to have even left a bruise. It did give me a heavy injection of trepidation though, and I walked down quite a few sketchier descents. No, the road rash was from an anticlimactic wipeout. A rock caught my rear tire and pushed the bike out from under me. I hit the dirt. I bled, end of story. But oh, what a pretty picture it left on my shin. I especially like how the ordinary abrasions are embellished by that elegant, serpentine flourish of a laceration to the right…

Having a rather sedentary life and generally safe sedentary hobbies, it’s nice to get out, play in the dirt, and bleed a bit. Almost as nice as getting out and playing in the dirt, without bleeding

After that, I stayed careful and remained upright. A couple other riders showed up, and we moved over to the main loop. The others left me with the advice “don’t turn left” (that’s where the more difficult sections are), and I wandered around the “maze of twisty little trails, all alike” enjoying myself thoroughly for another hour. About when I was ready to leave, I ran into the rest of the group and got directions out of the trails, headed back to the car, and into work, getting there just in time for a lovely 9am conference call.

Yeah, I’ll probably give this mountain biking thing another go sometime, after I’ve healed a bit…