Brews you can use

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.