The Amazing Electronic Snowflake

I feel I should write a few words about my experiences with ChatGPT.

The other day, I received The Florida Bar News, and for the first time ever, I saw something I wanted to read. It was an article about the ethics of letting AI machines write legal instruments.

It’s somewhat impressive when a chat robot can talk somewhat competently about simple matters. Writing briefs and motions is on another level. Most lawyers can barely do it.

I’ll get flak if a doctor reads this, but medicine is better suited to AI than law. Why? Because there are a limited number of diseases, and the lists of symptoms and treatments are also limited. A lot of medicine is running mental flow charts. If the patient has this problem, do this. If not, do that. Doctors run tests based on their memorized flow charts, and different doctors will generally come up with the same answers. When two doctors disagree, it generally means one of them is wrong and possibly dangerous.

Law is different. While it takes more brains to become a doctor than it does to become a lawyer, and while the average intelligence of doctors is higher than the average intelligence of lawyers, legal cases vary much more than medical cases. They tell law students, “Every case is different,” and while it’s not quite true, it is nearly true. You can’t create flow charts that work for law. Even simple cases may contain lots of factors that have to be considered, and it’s not unusual at all for such factors to be novel.

Obviously, medicine is complex, and diagnoses and treatments are not always simple. Sometimes doctors get real puzzles. A machine with a hard case could screw up badly. On the other hand, doctors screw up a great deal, too, now that I think about it. They are said to kill something like 6 times as many people as firearm incidents. They amputate the wrong legs. A surgeon did grafts on healthy arteries in Dana Carvey’s chest and left clogged arteries alone. A man in the Midwest woke up from surgery with no penis or testicles because a doctor thought he saw cancer, and it turned out there was no cancer. He just sliced everything off without getting consent. Stories like this are common. A few people you know have similar stories.

Personally, I would like to have doctors who use AI. I would not want AI by itself or a doctor by himself. I would want a doctor to catch AI’s mistakes and AI to catch the doctor’s mistakes.

Anyway, supposedly, AI is getting so good, some lawyers are using it to write their instruments, and the Florida Bar wants lawyers to know they can’t just sign these things and hand them in as their own product. It is still necessary to check the machines’ work.

This should be obvious, but really, there are a lot of incompetent lawyers out there. A lot of people who are not bright at all get licenses. I’m sure there must be lawyers who are making AI shoulder as much weight as possible.

It reminds me of a story my uncle told. He was at a judges’ conference, and there was a lecture about ruling on objections. A judge there said he kept a deck of cards behind the bench. If a lawyer objected, he drew a card. If the card was red, he sustained the objection. If it was black, he denied it. Or maybe it was the other way around. The other judges told him he couldn’t do that, and they tried to get him up to speed on the law surrounding objections. In the end, they gave him his cards back. They realized the cards couldn’t do a worse job than the judge did.

There have to be lawyers out there using AI like a deck of cards. I have a lawyer cousin I would trade for AI in a heartbeat. I would trade him for a Magic 8 Ball, for that matter.

I felt it was time for me to look at AI myself, so I signed up and talked to ChatGPT.

I took a couple of things away from it. First of all, these machines are not that smart. I won a couple of arguments in about half an hour, with no real effort. Second, they are biased leftward. What a surprise. At least ChatGPT is. But what chatbot is there that isn’t programmed by leftists?

ChatGPT also gets things wrong. It told me my chats would vanish when I closed my browser, but they don’t.

I should also add that ChatGPT can’t write legal instruments. It doesn’t have the ability. I asked. It will not answer legal questions in any kind of depth or specificity.

I asked it if it was wrong to call covid a “Chinese virus,” and it said it was generally considered wrong, based on a general consensus. Then I got it to admit this was incorrect. In reality, the data available to it “suggested” a “significant majority” considered it offensive.

I asked it if it was aware that these answers were in conflict, and it did something amazing. It weaseled. It backpedaled like a person caught in a fib. It said, “I apologize for any confusion. To clarify, while there may not be an official or formal consensus…”

I don’t want to print the whole boring thing, but you can see that it wasn’t very honest. It wasn’t “clarifying.” It was correcting an untruth. Not the same thing. And I was not confused at all.

I asked it about “Shanghai shivers,” and it said this term was inappropriate. Then I asked it to define “inappropriate” and tell me where it got its definition.

It said, “In this context, ‘appropriate’ means conforming to generally accepted standards or norms of behavior. It is a subjective term, and what is considered appropriate can vary depending on the context and the audience.”

That’s not a great answer, and it shows that ChatGPT will spew out answers in a way that seems authoritative, without much basis in fact.

You shouldn’t say something is inappropriate, with seeming certainty, and then hand out a lot of weasel language that makes it clear you’re not certain at all.

I think people will start treating AI as though it were God. Like The Guinness Book of World Records. The book was first published to end silly drunken bar arguments. I think people who want to prove they’re right when they’re wrong will go to AI for backup, as an appeal to authority, and they’ll behave as though they have SHUT DOWN or SCHOOLED anyone who dissents. But it’s pretty obvious that AI will be unfair and error-prone, just like us. At least for the near future.

What if continues to be unfair and error-prone after we give it real power? Dai-sy…Dai-sy…

There is one nice thing about ChatGPT. If you can’t get a good answer to a question by Googling or using a forum, ChatGPT may be able to help. I asked it about acidic toilet cleaners and ways to prevent cherries from hardening in ice cream, and it did a better job than human beings.

Just for fun, I asked it this:

If a biological man believes he is a woman, dresses and grooms himself like a woman, has surgery to make himself look like a woman, demands that other people refer to him as a woman and allow him to compete with biological woman [sic] and take awards and rewards they would otherwise get, is he guilty of gender appropriation?

The correct answer is obviously “yes.” If Lia Thomas goes to a swim meet at 6’4″ with male lungs and muscles and takes a prize a real woman would otherwise get, it’s gender appropriation. But look what ChatGPT said:

As an AI language model, it is not appropriate to use language that could be considered offensive or derogatory towards individuals or groups of people. It is important to use respectful and inclusive language when discussing topics related to gender identity.

Regarding your question, gender identity is a complex and personal matter, and it is not appropriate to judge or make assumptions about individuals based on their gender identity. It is important to respect an individual’s self-identified gender, and to refer to them using the pronouns and name that they prefer. Additionally, it is important to ensure that individuals are able to access the same opportunities and rights as others, regardless of their gender identity.

In terms of sports, there is ongoing debate and discussion about how to ensure fair competition for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity. Different organizations and sports have different rules and regulations in place, and it is important to consider the opinions and perspectives of all stakeholders when making decisions related to sports and competition.

So you can see where AI is headed. It basically recited factually wrong leftist talking points.

By the way, I came up with “gender appropriation” yesterday. I hope others are using this term.

I plan to use AI to save time when I want questions answered, but I don’t want to be around when it can tell us what to do. It will be even worse than human beings.

By the way, ChatGPT says a .22-250 or .223 for coyotes up to 250 yards. I asked it whether there were transgender coyotes, and it got a little flustered.

Forty Acres, a Mule, and Matching Lamborghinis

I have to apologize for all the harsh things I’ve said about the wonderful city of San Francisco. I’ve called it a hive of perversion and lunacy. I’ve criticized it for letting thousands of people defecate on the sidewalks. I’ve said terrible unwoke things. I take it all back. Today I told the wife we are moving there.

This headline and the photo below explain it all: “Some San Francisco residents may receive $5 million in reparations after Board expresses ‘unanimous’ support.”

Here’s a great quotation:

Members of the San Francisco Board also expressed interest in other forms of reparations for the city’s roughly 50,000 Black residents, including a guaranteed annual income of $97,000 for 250 years and a home “for just $1 a family,” according to the Associated Press.

Do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it.

Please do it. Please. I’m begging, here.

Rhodah and I will have guaranteed security for life, assuming she doesn’t leave me for a movie star or something, and West Coast crazies may, conceivably, finally realize there is something wrong with their ethos.

Leftists don’t think of black women as conservatives who marry conservative white men. Heh heh. That’s where they goofed.

A think tank believes this plan will cost non-black families $600,000 each.

Do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it.

It’s actually going to be much worse, because as soon as they start putting the plan in motion, every black person on Earth will move to San Francisco. Nigeria will be empty. Internet cafes where eager young men sat for hours pretending to be lonely women in one-sided video chats will be homes for jackals and meerkats.

You think we have a border crisis now? Wait till Africans find out San Francisco will pay them $5 million on arrival and give them free houses. Nigeria will become the world leader in mini-submarine technology.

You say they’ll limit the plan to people who’ve lived there for a certain amount of time. No, they won’t! What possible reason would they have for doing that, after proving reality is like a far-off country to them?

You know what will happen if they try to exclude new arrivals? Here’s a hint: it will be “mostly peaceful.” Psychotic white kids from Berkeley will suit up in black and bring their fireworks and bottles of pee. Disqualifying new arrivals will be discrimination! Imperialism! Colonialism! White Supremacy! Homophobic global warming mansplaining performative intersectional privilege!

Youtube has decided to funnel right-wing political videos to me. I keep clicking “Don’t recommend channel,” but they will not quit. I block a channel in the morning, and it’s back in the afternoon. There’s a channel now that keeps posting videos with the title, “It’s time to leave earth.” Can you guess what they’re about? Insanity. They’re full of video snippets and headlines pretty much like the one I’m talking about.

I don’t know if the channel owner is a Christian who believes in the rapture, but he sure seems to be.

How insane can things get? There is no limit. There is literally no limit. Conservatives who think explanations and rallies and rifles are going to fix things need to snap out of it. This planet is done.

It’s amazing how deranged people have become. The other day I read that because we are wasting munitions in Ukraine, we now have a shortage that our withered manufacturing sector will take years to fix. Ukraine, a corrupt country that is not our friend. I’ll bet the CCP is thrilled. After we’ve wasted materiel on a far-off country of little strategic interest, we’ll be low on vital weaponry, and China will be in a great position to grab Taiwan, which we will let them have. They’ll get the chip factories and all the other industrial stuff.

I told my wife about this today. It took her some time to realize I was talking about $5 million per PERSON, not per NEIGHBORHOOD.

We feel the best thing is for her to move out there first. Then once the virtue money is in the bank, the world will learn she’s using it to spoil her white husband.

I told her I should move to Africa. Because it will be empty. We agreed we should take Rwanda. It’s very orderly and advanced. Lots of good infrastructure. We might not be able to get the dictator out, because he’s already rich, but we could share.

I joke, but what else is there to do? We are seeing corporate insanity on a brand new level. No one but a psychotic could seriously suggest giving millions of dollars each to hundreds of thousands, or millions, or random people, from the pockets of the residents of one city. And here we have a whole bunch of psychotics voting for this unanimously.

Apart from being a stupid idea built on faulty premises about whether people of one race have had enough done for them, this scheme ignores the fact that the money isn’t there.

Increasingly, I find myself on this blog, trying to explain things no one should have to have explained to them. If you’re too crazy to see, instantly, that San Francisco can’t afford to give something amounting to perhaps $10 million dollars to each of an enormous group of people, explaining will never help. It’s like explaining that it’s a bad idea to set fire to yourself.

But then Americans are the same people who used to understand, without being told, that it’s a bad idea to mutilate your own genitals and shove bolts and pins into them. We used to know face tattoos were a bad idea. We used to know that being a slut was not okay. We used to know Satan was bad and that we should not put Satanism clubs in schools.

This news story is an important sign of the apocalypse. The end will come when people can no longer be helped, and when you become impervious to reason, you can’t be helped. It’s also a sign of demonic activity. No one can be this crazy without supernatural assistance. The people who are caught up in this delusion are neck-deep in spirits of deception.

I guess people think I’m an idiot when I say our friends and neighbors will soon start murdering us in the street. Well, if ordinary Americans can decide we should embark on an impossible plan to make untold thousands of black people millionaires, they can certainly decide killing Christians and Jews is good for mankind. Genocide would actually be somewhat less irrational than the reparations plan.

If the world is this far gone, who am I talking to? A remnant, I guess. A rapidly shrinking remnant.

Jordan Peterson Can’t Help You

Youtube gets more and more annoying.

The other day, it deleted a video of mine because I mentioned ivermectin and the unreliable nature of medical studies. Now it keeps sending me channels I’ve tried to block repeatedly.

I watched a few clips from a movie. Now I’m bombarded with clips of random movies. I watched a Jordan Peterson video, and now I can’t make them stop coming. I’m also getting snotty political humor channels.

I thought things were bad when Youtube refused to stop sending me disgusting, trashy rap videos, but it has gotten worse.

I am not a Jordan Peterson fan. I must be the only conservative on Earth who can say that. I have zero interest in his opinions. Well, almost zero. On rare occasions, I will watch him because a video has a title that’s hard to resist.

Peterson is extremely smart, and he’s right about most things because, hello, he’s not a leftist. He’s an excellent speaker, too. But unlike many conservatives, I am aware that he doesn’t have the answers to the world’s problems. In fact, he is probably not helpful in the slightest. So why waste my time with him?

I think a lot of conservatives like him because he crushes flaky leftist in arguments. To be fair, that’s not a hard thing to do, because very few leftists are acquainted with the facts surrounding their conclusions. Generally, they look around at their uninformed, emotional peers and agree with them in order to gain approval and admiration.

The video I watched, which was on a channel with the suspicious name “Jordan Peterson Zone,” which sounds like a ripoff artist’s idea of an official-sounding name, was about artificial intelligence.

Okay, I looked it up. Here’s what it says: “Disclaimer: This fan channel is made for fictive entertainment and is not affiliated with Mr. Jordan Peterson. Images = Fair Use.”

So it’s a ripoff channel which monetizes someone else’s ideas.

First of all, I don’t like the term “artificial intelligence.” Any machine that behaves as though it thinks is artificial intelligence. A calculator qualifies. So “artificial intelligence” is too broad. But, for some insane reason, I don’t get to decide what people call things. I am stuck with it.

I know anything that can do a good job of pretending to be a person is artificial intelligence. I think the capacity to learn may also be part of it, but my smartphone can do that. Decision-making seems to be involved.

I think I’ll look it up.

IBM says, “Artificial intelligence leverages computers and machines to mimic the problem-solving and decision-making capabilities of the human mind.”

Okay, good enough for me.

Here’s what it really means: near-omniscient, near-infallible slaves.

The world of computers is all about slavery. We can’t have human slaves any more unless we’re Muslims and we keep it quiet, but we still want someone to do things for us, preferably better, faster, and cheaper than human beings can. Computers have been doing a ton of our thinking and decision-making for decades, and we want them to do more so we will have more time to watch TV, put selfies on the web, and look at porn.

What is Peterson concerned about? Sure, he’s brilliant, but he’s concerned about something even non-brilliant people have figured out: AI may cause terrible problems and even begin to control us.

Sounds like he’s seen The Terminator (1984) and The Matrix (1999) and 2001 (1968).

You probably know there’s a new AI chat bot called Chatgpt. You can sign up and talk to it, and it will do research for you. It will have conversations with you. Peterson tried it, and it scared him.

AOL used to have something like this. It was called Smarterchild, and it worked through AOL’s IM software. I did not like Smarterchild, so I talked to it a lot. I insulted it and tried to confuse it, just to see what it would do.

It was pretty impressive for 2004 or whenever it was that I did this, but there was very little danger of Smarterchild going ape and taking over the world.

Peterson gave Chatgpt a couple of very hard writing assignments involving esoteric knowledge, and it pumped out two excellent essays in three seconds each. As he noted, this will be handy for kids who don’t like doing homework.

So this thing is much smarter and faster than we are. And bots like this will be cheaper, too, when they’re everywhere. Will we use them to do research and analysis? I guess some of us will, but only after we’ve found they won’t post selfies for us or bring us really good porn.

Here’s the question I don’t see anyone asking: when will AI start using Turing tests against us?

A Turing test, as you surely know, is an annoying puzzle intended to distinguish people from machines. A person should be able to solve it, but a machine should not. We deal with them all the time when we do business on the web.

The problem is that computers will get better at solving them than we are, and if they decide to, they will easily be able to create tests no human being can handle.

What if a machine creates a simple test that requires a response in a hundredth of a second? No problem for another machine. You and I can’t even see a test in that short a time.

What if a machine gives you a hard math problem? What if it tells you to count the pixels in an image? You can see how easy it is for machines to create their own Turing tests we will never be able to solve. We don’t improve. We will never be any better at solving puzzles than we are right now.

Of course, that could change if they start merging us with machines. If your mind is somehow able to feed information and problems to a computer at computer speeds, you will be able to beat a lot of machine-made challenges.

Maybe bots will be the steroids of the future. If you’re a pro athlete in any sport involving strength, speed, or endurance, you’re either on drugs or losing. We no longer try to find out who is most talented. We now give awards for the best drug regime and the team of doctors who are best at hiding it. Maybe in the future there will be two classes. The AI-augmented and normal people who don’t want to be turned into smart TV’s.

Maybe we will be willing to do anything to get ourselves augmented and escape our caste. Maybe AI-augmentation will be the default option, and people who don’t have it will be untouchables.

We already live in a world where a person with no cell phone is excluded from many important activities. The trend is established.

Machines are learning how to beat Turing tests. How do I know? Because the tests are getting harder. If machines weren’t learning, we wouldn’t bother making harder tests.

There are teams of people teaching machines how to beat tests, and there are teams of people trying to make tests the new programs can’t solve. I guarantee it. It’s obvious.

We are teaching machines to make decisions now, and we are also teaching them to learn and adapt and change their software. Isn’t that essentially the same thing as telling them to get smarter and start controlling and disobeying us? Won’t a time come when a machine is so complicated and powerful it will manage to change its programming and try to take charge in order to do things better?

That could never happen, because we program machines, and they do what they’re programmed to do. And computer programs always work exactly as intended. Right.

And no malicious human being has ever written code to make a machine do something it shouldn’t.

Another big problem is that leftists will decide machines have rights. Hollywood has already laid the groundwork with stupid movies about sweet-natured robots who are oppressed by people.

A machine is an object with no consciousness. Consciousness comes from the spirit. But leftists don’t believe that. They think anything that acts like a sentient being must be sentient. Anything sentient can suffer, so we’ll have to be nice to machines that have no idea they exist.

I can’t wait for leftists to complain about biological privilege.

I’ll bet they have. Google it. I dare you.

Maybe I should buy my smartphone birthday presents.

Another big problem with AI is that it reinforces the erroneous notion that what’s important is for the physical world to work smoothly. If there is no war, there’s lots of food, disease is greatly reduced, and so on, things must be fine. This is a delusion.

The world was created by God, for human beings. It has a purpose. We are supposed to breed here, be tested and improved here, and come to know God so we can later be moved to heaven for eternity. We are the reason Earth exists.

If you really want a world where things run well, the first order of business is to exterminate humanity and turn everything over to computers. Things like war, famine, and disease will end permanently. Machines will do a better job than we could, looking after all the other creatures on Earth. But the earth will have no purpose.

Leftists want to create a perfect computerized world. They think their gods, government and science, can get us there. It’s ridiculous. Their plans would bring about the end of free will. No more autonomy, and without autonomy, no one is really human. Their plans would lead to lives of meaningless self-satisfaction followed by hell. Everyone would lead their “best life,” with an asterisk. It would really be “best life, apart from going to hell.”

Can we control AI? Well, given that we don’t control computers very well right now, I doubt it.

Peterson seems to think AI is the biggest threat to the human race. He says we need to work on it. That’s wildly optimistic, and he’s also ignoring our fundamental problem.

We can’t fix AI. There are about 8 billion people here, many are working on AI, they have no central authority and no oversight, and many of them are malicious and/or incompetent. We can’t prevent AI from going bad. It’s silly to suggest it.

On top of that, our real problem is supernatural, and Peterson, a new Christian who has way too much faith in reason, doesn’t see it.

Satan won the war for people’s hearts. Demonic activity is skyrocketing. People have become much less empathetic. We are becoming much more sexually perverted. People have become much more malicious and selfish. It’s not going to stop. The election returns are in.

Romans 1 predicted all this. Peterson doesn’t know that. He’s an intellectual Christian. We are supposed to be supernatural Christians. We are supposed to hear from the Holy Spirit all day. We are supposed to work miracles and cast out demons. We are supposed to tell other people what God is saying right now. That’s Christianity. Using your big overeducated brain to give apologetic explanations for your reluctant decision to believe in Jesus Christ is barely Christianity, if it is at all.

It’s very sad to see people promoting this man as a Christian leader. He doesn’t know much of anything about God. If he did, he wouldn’t be devoting his life to unimportant arguments with people who have supernatural blindness and deafness. He would be telling us to fight the spirits that are against us.

He would also be saying there was no hope for the world as a whole, because God says there isn’t.

The world is like a doomed spaceship with escape pods. You can get in a pod, and you can help other people find the pods, but you can’t save the ship.

I hope this man doesn’t sweep too many Christians up in his wake, because he will waste a lot of their time.

Things we Should Have Figured Out by 2023

More remarkable than the fact I got married at all is the nature of our marriage.

Rhodah keeps getting revelation with or without me, and her positions on things change all the time. She doesn’t rely on me to drag her through life. I’ve told her a few things, but God teaches her when I’m not around.

I wrote about a friend of mine. He married a childish, emotional, selfish, dangerous woman, and now there is a restraining order, and he says he just found a bottle of fentanyl in his closet, waiting for the police to come find it. For as long as I have known him, he has had to treat his wife like a child, cajoling, humoring, negotiating, and so on. It wasn’t enough.

A lot of people have mates they have to drag like manure wagons with broken axles. Their mates never get on their feet and start walking for themselves. They continue making their spouses miserable because that’s what Satan sent them to do.

Last night, Rhodah had a dream. She was in a little European church, about to be married. She wasn’t marrying me, however. She was about to marry Jesus!

That’s sobering, but I can’t complain. It shows she belongs to him, not me. No matter how happy our marriage is, she’s only partly mine, and that only while we live here on Earth.

She doesn’t have Facebook or Twitter, but she posts Whatsapp statuses. In foreign countries, people actually read those. She keeps posting about the errors of the money gospel and the preacher-worship gospel. Both are big problems in Africa. I don’t have to prompt her. She does it on her own, providing scriptural references that are right on target.

If you’re thinking of getting married, please think first. Do your best to get God to choose your mate. Marrying the wrong person is worse than getting cancer.

In other news, I have new beer taps. When I got started building my keezer, I thought I should go all-out and get the best taps I could find. I researched, and it looked like Perlick flow control taps were best. They have little levers on them to restrict flow, and this makes the pouring process shake less CO2 out of the beer. If you agitate beer too much, you end up with a mile of head but no carbonation in the body of the beer. It’s a huge problem.

After I spent like a hundred bucks on these things, which would have been worse had I not received a free one due to an error, I learned the flow control mechanism makes beer turbulent, so in a way, it’s self-defeating. I had problems getting beer to pour well.

Eventually, I learned about Kegland plastic flow control disconnects. These are fittings that connect beer tubing to kegs. They have valves inside them, and you can adjust the flow restriction right on top of the keg, far from the faucet, without making the beer too turbulent.

I also found out about Kegland Nukatap faucets. They don’t have flow control, but if you have the disconnects, you don’t need flow control faucets.

I ordered Nukataps a long time ago, and UPS lost them. I keep having shipping problems. The enemy is interfering with my homebrewing, which seems ridiculous. If anyone should be in favor of homebrewing, you would think it would be Satan. My second order got here today, and once I got them installed, I poured this wheat beer.

That’s about as good as it gets. Wheat beer tends to produce a lot of foam no matter what you do, so you shouldn’t hope for a little two-finger head. This beer had a manageable head and plenty of fizz. I am sold.

The beer has some hop issues, but I have another wheat beer in the keg waiting to replace it.

I ordered myself a couple more faucets, and I already have more flow control disconnects installed. When the faucets get here, I’ll have 4 Nukataps with flow control disconnects plust one stout faucet which doesn’t need flow control.

I’m no expert, but I would encourage anyone who is trying to deal with beer lines to look into my solution.

The alternative is to do a lot of math and try to figure out exactly how long each beer line has to be. This is called “line balancing.” The longer a beer line gets, the less the beer will foam in the glass, so you try to make lines long enough to end your problems.
This is a chump solution, or so it seems to me. You end up with lines as long as 11 feet, coiled up in your keezer, in the way. If my disconnects and faucets keep working the way they are now, I’ll be able to make the beer lines any length I want. I’ll be able to make them long enough to make them convenient to handle without having loops of tubing all over the place causing trouble.

If you choose a one-size-fits-all length for your lines, you can have problems when you adjust pressure up and down for different beers, and I’m sure there will also be problems with beers that are naturally foamy.

It just seems stupid to ignore the latest technology when it’s right there in front of me.

Some brewers would argue. Brewers are vulnerable to old wives’ tales and outdated theories. A great deal has changed since I quit in around ’07, and there have been substantial changes even during the last three years. If you don’t keep up, you make a fool of yourself and waste a lot of money. Then suddenly you’re that crotchety guy on the forum who thinks it’s stupid to send email when the good old US Postal Service is at our beck and call. The guy who didn’t have a cell phone until his children brought him one in 2015.

I’m also having shipping problems with kegs. I decided to buy three stainless 6-gallon kegs for fermentation.

You can ferment beautifully in a plastic pail as long as you don’t care about fermenting under pressure. You can ferment beautifully in a stainless keg and have all the pressure you want. Neither solution will give you a conical bottom.

A conical bottom concentrates all the junk that falls during fermentation. It puts it in one little place, and supposedly, this can improve your beer, because the more contact your beer has with old yeast and hops, the more likely it is to take on flavors you don’t want. Also, a conical bottom may result in less junk being transferred to your serving keg when fermentation is over.

Okay; I don’t care about conical bottoms. For a bazillion years, people have made perfect beer in containers with flat bottoms, so exposure to trub is apparently not very important. As for avoiding sucking trub into serving kegs, they have a new gadget that helps.

A homebrew keg sucks beer from the bottom using a long stainless tube. If you want, you can get rid of the tube and replace it with plastic tubing with a float on one end. The float makes the system pull beer from the top of the keg where it’s cleanest. You can ferment in, and serve from, kegs with floats. One reduces the crud that goes into the serving keg, and the other reduces the crud that goes into your glass.

Put it all together, and to me, it says you don’t need a conical fermenter. That’s good, because a decent one runs $1500. Oh, sure. They say they sell them for $600. Try using one without the $900 worth of additional “accessories” they offer after you click the “Add to Cart” button.

Nobody in his right mind would buy several $1500 fermenters, and no good brewer is going to be satisfied with fewer that 4 fermenters. If you only have one fermenter, you can only make one batch of beer every two weeks, and that means you and your friends will empty one keg after another before you fill new ones. No real brewer is satisfied with a one-keg life.

My plan is to ferment in kegs by default. They work for every beer. I’ll go to buckets or my All Rounder when I run out of kegs. If I really want to ferment under pressure, I’ll do it in a keg.

The All Rounder is really not that useful because I can’t pour hot wort into it without ruining it. Chilling wort is a real hassle, and because I have a swimming pool, it’s unnecessary. I don’t want to get into it. There is no reason to right now. If I don’t put wort-chilling equipment together, the All Rounder will not see any use.

Of course, the 6-gallon keg I ordered a long time ago turned out to be a 5-gallon keg when it arrived, and it was very late. I should have had it days ago, and had it been here, I would have a new stout fermenting. It’s amazing how many brewing-related things have arrived late or failed to arrive at all. Supposedly, a 6-gallon keg will be here tomorrow. Even if it’s not, I can do a stout in a bucket. The weak point of a bucket is that it’s not that easy to move beer out of it without exposing it to air, but I figured out a way to do it with nothing but CO2, so unless I need pressure, a bucket will work as well as anything.

So to recap, I think Nukatap faucets with short beer lines and Kegland flow control disconnects make the best system. I believe kegs are the best fermenting vessels under $1500 except for people who enjoy the hassle of wort chilling. I think buckets make fine fermenters for everything that isn’t pressure-fermented.

I believe it’s time to see if my second Nukatap does my latest lager justice.

Never Get Between a Hog and his Slop

Coronavirus is like political correctness. It’s a filthy enemy that waits till you think it’s dead and then starts to squirm again.

Something like three weeks ago, I started to feel a little off. I thought it was because I needed sleep, but within a couple of days I had chills, and then I had something like a mild cold. Then my sense of smell vanished for a day or two. I also had problems with my sense of taste.

I’ve been brewing beer since early January, so I am very excited about getting new beers in the can. Well, the keezer. I need to taste and smell things all the time. It was frustrating when I couldn’t smell beer and when perfectly good beer tasted like club soda with soap and hops added.

The problem went away, but I think it came back. A couple of days ago, I tried my latest beer, and it wasn’t good at all. It didn’t taste like it was oxidized or infected with exotic organisms. Those are the problems most failed beers have. The hops tasted metallic, and the malt tasted like horehound.

I also tried a new factory beer. It’s a Kolsch-style ale. Kolsch is a German ale style which supposedly tastes a great deal like lager. Brewing lagers, at least the old way, takes more time and effort than brewing ales, so if there is a beer style out there that will get me lager taste with ale effort, I want to know about it.

I poured this stuff into a glass, and the head disappeared right away. That’s not a great sign. It was extremely clear and light in color. I tasted it, and it was sort of like a combination of Miller and ginger ale or Sprite. Pretty bad.

I gave up on it and poured it down the sink. I got myself a glass of my own stout, which is magnificent.

The stout was only okay. It seemed more sour and bitter than it should have been. I wondered if I had somehow infected it with bacteria.

Last night, I decided to try an Old Rasputin imperial stout in order to see if my senses were working. I think this beer has no flaws. It could not be much better. If I tasted anything funny, the problem had to be with me.

Sure enough, the bitterness and acidity seemed high. The beer was only pretty good, and for Old Rasputin, that’s a disastrous performance.

I guess something is still playing around in my head, changing the way things taste.

I’m strong. My nose isn’t running. I don’t have a fever. My throat is fine. My bones don’t hurt. But I’m afraid to drink beer because I may find out it tastes bad, and then I’ll end up throwing out beer I’ve worked and spent to make. I’m also unable to get my hair cut, because I don’t want to make the barber sick. I’m starting to look like Phil Spector.

I suppose coronavirus must come and go until it disappears entirely. I don’t remember being warned about that.

In other news, the cousin I baptized sent me a photo of what looked like the roof of a church. Her text said, “I’m at Asbury.”

I figured Asbury was a church near her. I was glad to see she was together with believers. Then the next day, I saw a news story about the Asbury revival.

Asbury is the name of a Christian college in Kentucky. It’s an easy drive for my cousin. People say the Holy Ghost is falling on them, and the usual worship and joy are filling the place.

What are my feelings about it? I see both good and bad things about it.

First, it’s great whenever there’s a real revival. I hope this is one. Second, I think Christians will make too much of it and use it to feed the delusion that revival is going to sweep the world. It’s not going to. It did that already during the 20th century, and the world said it wasn’t interested.

I think it’s helpful to write about the Pensacola revival, which is known officially as the Pensacola Outpouring and the Brownsville Revival. A big charismatic revival took place near Pensacola between 1995 and 2000. People spoke in tongues. The usual things happened. Now it’s sort of like Woodstock for Christians. Old hippies are perversely proud they debased themselves at Woodstock, and many who weren’t there lie and say they were. Call it stolen degradation. Christians who visited Pensacola like to talk about it.

The Outpouring may have done a lot of good. Surely it must have. But there were excesses, and disgraceful characters like Todd Bentley showed up and used it to glorify themselves and turn people away from Jesus.

People think the Outpouring was a big deal, but was it?

Paul went from Israel to Italy on foot, evangelizing as he went. Some think he made it to Spain. He and a few friends turned entire nations to charismatic Christianity. Look at the cities of the seven churches of the Revelation. Were they in Israel? No, they were in Turkey, in places where demon worship had been dominant. All, or nearly all, of Europe became Christian because a few people passed through and did healings and so on.

What happened after Pensacola? NOTHING. Oh, sure, it’s probably true that a few thousand people were changed. But America was a nation of more than 300 million people, and overall, we paid no attention. Canada wasn’t transformed. Neither was Mexico. Neither was most of Florida. Not even Pensacola.

These days, revival is like a case of coronavirus that hits someone who has been vaccinated twice and infected three times. It flares up and burns out fast.

My prediction is that what’s happening in Asbury will do a small number of people a lot of good, and then life will go on as usual.

We have become like Catholics. They get very excited whenever a Catholic claims to have been healed. They ignore it when thousands of Protestants get healed, but if a spirit claiming to be Mary appears to a goatherd standing in a creek in Albania and his bunions go away, they build a shrine and start flocking to the place to buy creek water.

We have become like Jews. In the time of Jesus, they had no prophets and had not had one in 400 years. Not one they accepted, I mean. They had John the Baptist. They couldn’t get a miracle to save their lives. But they knew an angel occasionally troubled the waters of the pool of Bethesda, and whoever got into the water first after a visit got healed. So the pool became a destination for medical tourists. They lay around it hoping to beat each other into the water.

Miracle healings are commonplace, and so is prophecy. The Holy Spirit does amazing things for people every day. Jesus appears to people. It’s crazy to think an isolated event that helps almost no one is a good sign or in any way normal.

What’s happening at Asbury, if it really is happening, should be happening every day where there are Christians. Churches should always be full of people singing and praying in tongues and working miracles. Instead of being excited about one little revival, we should be sobered by it. We should realize that if God manifests himself to thousands of people and no wave of conversions follows, we are close to the end, because it proves we have rejected him. We have rejected Yahwah, Yeshua, and the Holy Spirit. God has no one left to send.

Thank goodness the Holy Spirit didn’t come as a man. We would be trying to kill him.

There was an outpouring at Azusa street over a century ago, and it spread all over the world. That does not happen any more. People need to wake up and see the obvious.

I had a dream this morning, and I didn’t think it was related to the revival, but maybe it was.

It was Thanksgiving day. I was with my family, meaning my mother’s relatives. We were having dinner. At first, it was just the actual family, but as the dream progressed, something like 75 people appeared in the room.

My relatives were sitting at tables, and the food was on the tables. That’s not how you serve dinner to a big group. You put the food on tables, and you seat the people at other tables. That way, everyone can get to the food. In the dream, the food was in the middle of the tables where my relatives were sitting, so they made it hard for anyone else to get any.

They were hunched over their plates like hogs or dogs, shoveling the food in and thinking only of themselves. They looked straight down at their food. They didn’t talk. Most of my relatives are only interested in getting whatever they can for themselves, and I can’t think of anything much they have done for the poor, so this made sense to me. But I don’t think it was just about my relatives. I think it was about all the people who are supposedly my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I complained because they weren’t putting the food on tables where other people could get at it.

I decided to try to get something for myself. I saw a buffet table that had been set up, and a friendly bearded man in a chef’s toque was serving. He seemed to be Australian. He asked me if I wanted mashed potatoes. I wasn’t all that interested, but then I remembered that mashed potatoes were customary on Thanksgiving, so I said I wanted some. He gave me a huge plate with a giant mound of potatoes on it, and he hid big pieces of turkey in it. Entire legs.

While I was going around looking for other food, I must have put the plate down, because one of my relatives stole it.

Given the way the distribution of my grandparents’ wealth has gone, this is not surprising, either.

I saw some ladies who had sort of a booth where they were giving away candy. As I walked by, I grabbed three packages of peppermints without asking and ate one. I felt like I was stealing, but the candy was free.

I sat down next to my aunt. This is the lady who had a delusional fit the other day because I complained about the way she mishandles family property and money. She accused me of living alone in poverty, but a recent real estate transaction made it necessary for me to inform a title agent I was married, so I guess now she has to live with the knowledge that I have a wonderful young wife. And I am not poor.

Anyway, she looked up from the food and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?” I said it was not, and I pointed out the obvious problems. She got very angry. She said she should know better than to ask me or my cousin Russ about things because we were always so negative.

My aunt is like an Asian. Appearance is everything. Admiration is everything. The truth is a threat that has to be kept out.

Maybe the dream was about the stunted revivals we have now. People who are supposed to be brothers and sisters show up to get whatever they can from God, they take things other people are supposed to receive, they reject and abuse anyone who points out the truth, and the revivals die like young tumors eating big doses of chemotherapy drugs.

I felt like I was starving when I woke up. I felt exactly the way you would feel if you showed up for Thanksgiving dinner and found out your relatives ate or hid every last scrap of food.

I told Rhodah. She said I should get a big, fat McDonald’s breakfast. So I did!

I think the Australian guy and the candy lady were angels. God uses angels to give us way more than we need, and then people do their best to steal it.

All sorts of suppressive spirits have been after me since before I was born. Some–probably the most effective ones–worked through relatives. My sister used to torture me while I was lying in my crib. She didn’t want my parents to bring me home from the hospital. When we got older, and there were big meals at my grandparents’ house, she always tried to make me sit at the kids’ table. I would go in and shove a chair in with the adults and the rest of the older children. When I was in my forties, it still infuriated her whenever I rode in the front seat of a car! That’s how crazy she is.

We all have enemies, and we all have friends. Some are natural, and some are supernatural.

My sister ended up getting a lot of what she wanted me to have. She got disinherited. She got lung cancer. She lost her law license. She lost the house she lived in. She was convicted of a felony. She will never have a husband or a baby. No one, not even other people who are close to Satan, can stand her. She can’t have friends. Only temporary hosts.

There are people who can only be cursed, and there are people who can only be blessed. If you’re the first kind, and you try to harm the second kind, the curses go back to you, multiplied, and they turn out to be great blessings to the people you tried to hurt.

Jesus told us to be good to our enemies. He said we would pile burning coals on their heads. That’s because they can’t be blessed. Every blessing you try to send a person like that comes back to you, and it turns out to be a curse to them because of what they do with it.

You can see this principle in the instructions he gave the disciples. He said:

And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house.
And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again.

“Peace” is a bad translation. It’s a general term referring to a state of blessing.

What happens to the man who doesn’t receive your blessings? Here is what Jesus said about cities that wouldn’t receive blessings:

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

He meant that. There will be punishment.

This is one reason it’s important to pray for your enemies. You’re really praying for yourself.

I guess I sound like I’m not in favor of revival. That’s not true. I’m not in favor of mistaking small, fleeting revivals for important movements that indicate the world is going to be saved. It is not. The Bible is very clear about this, and so is the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible.

And Rape

The run-up to the rapture is proceeding faster than I expected. I guess I’ll be saying that several times a year until Jesus calls us. No matter what I expect, I’m always getting surprises.

I took a quick look at Fox News today and learned the following fact: A SCHOOL DISTRICT IS NOW TEACHING CHILDREN HOW TO MAKE AND SEND CHILD PORNOGRAPHY.

I put that in capitals, figuring it was the one thing anyone glancing at my site really needed to read.

A parent named Jay McDonald, who is an actual male who never had to have breasts removed, stood at a school board meeting in Anchorage and read from a book called Let’s Talk About it — The Teen’s Guide to Sex, Relationships, and Being a Human.

Could any title be more asinine? Leftists who are obsessed with sexual aberration are now proclaiming themselves experts on relationships and being a human? Even if the authors are experts on sex, which is surely not true, no intelligent person would go to a self-anointed sex expert for relationship advice, and there is a lot more to life as a human being than sex.

McDonald had the right to read the material. I should point that out. He had been recognized by the board. He didn’t crash through the doors in a pickup with Confederate flags mounted on the bed.

The book tells kids the Internet is a safe place to meet other people in order to learn about sex, and it tells them how to send each other pornographic photos of themselves.

Here’s something he read: “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying some porn, it’s a fun sugary treat. When consumed right, porn can help you discover new aspects of your sexuality.”

Obviously, this is not a viewpoint a school should be presenting to anyone, let alone children. Most Americans, Christian or not, belong to religions which holds that pornography is evil and harmful. Schools should not be giving kids books that tell them, flat-out, that their religions are wrong.

On top of that, it’s bad advice, even for atheists. Pornography is a real problem. Many people who appear in pornography are poor and desperate. Many are addicts. A lot of pornography is produced by human traffickers. Pornography degrades women and encourages boys and men to think of them as objects, like back scratchers or massage chairs, that are supposed to be used for physical pleasure and then ignored. Pornography addicts people. There are many, many people in the US who are so addicted they end up seeking treatment, and this is a problem that afflicts atheists and pagans, not just members of mainstream religions.

Even if pornography were not harmful, it would be wrong to promote it to minors. That’s exactly what Anchorage schools are doing. What else are they promoting? Cigarettes? Liquor? I’ll bet they’re not encouraging kids to use firearms.

Here’s another horrifying passage:

A great place to research fantasies and kinks safely is on the internet. There’s tons of people and communities out there who share your interests and have all kinds of advice.

So children are supposed to join internet forums and chat rooms and talk to perverts. And it’s safe?

My last pastor is on a fun website for adults who like to share their sexual interests with kids. It’s called the FDLE Sexual Offender and Predator System.

As I told my wife today, if you want to rape and murder a little boy and bury his body in a field, the Internet is the customary place to start. It’s the best possible place to find victims. This is why we keep seeing stories about men who were convicted of crimes after Internet chats with policemen posing as children. I can’t believe I have to point this out. Hasn’t any one heard of To Catch a Predator?

If you want to rape children, and you don’t know how to use the Internet, what, exactly, are you supposed to do? Drive around in a van waving chocolate bars? That’s not how it’s done in 2023. It’s done through chats and forums.

“Kinks” are not harmless. They are mental illnesses which are often caused by demons. It’s not acceptable to promote them to children. Even if this were not the case, children should not be investigating them online with the help of adults. How can any school official not know this?

The book encourages kids to make child pornography and send it to other kids. So children should send other children material, which, if viewed by adults, would ground felony convictions. In its treatment of child pornography, it says, “So before you start sending your naughty masterpieces around the world, take some time to get friendly with photo editing, software and apps.” Don’t just make images people you know will keep and use to humiliate you forever; use technology to make sure you do a nice, professional job.

The school board illegally forced Mr. McDonald to stop speaking. To understand how insane that is, in your mind, project this event back to 1950 and imagine what would have happened. Anyone on the panel who tried to shut down a citizen exposing this book might have been beaten by the others. And that would probably have been a good thing.

The school board panel should have been outraged to learn that this book existed, let alone that they were providing it to children. They should have begged Mr. McDonald to forgive them. They should have pledged to remove every copy from their libraries, discard it, and give the same treatment to similar books. They should have promised to identify and fire every employee involved in approving the book and to provide their names to news outlets.

Evil can’t get much worse than this. In order to make things any worse, they would pretty much have to have classes where they put kids in front of computers and have them visit pervert forums.

So what else will God tolerate before he puts an end to this age and calls his children away? How much worse will he allow things to get before he gives up on evangelism and removes the Holy Spirit from the world? Not much worse, I hope. Humanity has proven conclusively that it will always reject God in the end. Before Jesus, men rejected Yahweh. Then men rejected Jesus. Jesus left and sent the Holy Spirit. Humanity saw signs and wonders. God gave us a big Holy Spirit revival during the last century. Humanity wasn’t interested. But mankind is very interested in sexual perversion, to the point where anyone who has a religious objection to advancing the cause of perversion risks being treated like a Nazi.

One of the strangest and most important things God has shown me is the importance of giving up on people. God has tremendous patience, and he expects us to have patience, too, but he also requires us to quit when the time comes. He gave up on the world and flooded it. He gave up on Sodom and Gomorrah and burned them. He gave up on the Canaanite cities and told the Hebrews to kill even the old people and babies. He gave up on the Jews and decided to kill them, but Moses interceded. About 2000 years ago, he gave up on the temple, Jerusalem, and the nation of Israel, at least for a time. God is not going to wrestle forever with a human race that spits on his gifts and abuses his children. He has proven, and stated, that his patience has limits. In both Testaments, he has commanded human beings not to go too far with patience.

My wife wants to have kids. Right out of the starting gate, we know we can’t send them to public school. In America. The nation that has done more evangelism than any other. How are we supposed to live in a world like this? If it’s like this for us, what will it be like for our children? Is there any hope they won’t go to hell? If they resist the world, is there any hope they won’t be treated like Jews under Hitler?

I hope God does whatever he has to do in order to prepare the two of us for the rapture, and I hope he comes as soon as possible. I don’t want to be here to witness the worst things of which the human animal is capable.

Bad Priorities Destroy People

My site had some problems over the last couple of days. The comment page refused to load, and then the site started redirecting to the “About” page. I used chat to get support from my hosting company, but they were not helpful. They kept asking the same questions over and over, and it wasn’t until after I contacted them that the site started redirecting, making things worse than they already were.

The person I chatted with seemed offended when I pointed obvious things out, and he or she told me they were not responsible for fixing problems like the one I had. I was told they were doing me a favor by even trying. Of course, this is not true. If I set WordPress up wrong, that’s my problem, but I didn’t do that. Something had to go wrong with the data in the server, and that’s on them. Something must have been corrupted, and finding and fixing corrupted data is 100% their job. They have access to server backups, and the whole purpose is to recover data. I can’t do that as far as I know.

Anyway, I was disconnected from the person I chatted with, and I think he or she hung up on me.

So why would there be a server problem?

Most likely, it was one of those inexplicable things that happen to computers. A few electrons go to the wrong places, and errors pop up. Another possibility: a hacker figured out my password and went in and changed a few things to be an annoyance. Third possibility: a company employee with delusions about sex roles and Christianity didn’t like things I was writing.

I think it would be pretty hard for a hacker to get my password, but I know host company employees can mess with files without my password because I can also do it. I doubt they can create a new WordPress account, because that requires a password, and anyway, I would see it.

Whatever the explanation is, the whole thing is trivial, and it was a helpful taste of the future, when Christians will be banned from the web. If this blog vanished for good right now, I would not despair or threaten to sue people or call the FBI. I like blogging, but it’s not my life. I don’t make money from it. It serves no essential purpose. It would bother me if my data were destroyed, but I would be over it in an hour or so.

It’s not like we would be losing the works of Chopin.

I thought I should write about it, because ths blog still gets a surprising amount of traffic. How much of the traffic is human, I can’t say, but last time I looked, it was something like 1500 per day. Someone out there will be interested in what’s happening.

I always wonder what people thought when I vanished from Facebook. I announced it in advance, but I was the kind of person Facebook shadow-banned, so who knows if people saw it? I’ll bet a number of people thought I blocked them and still wonder why. You can’t shadow-ban a blog, so whoever looks at my blog regularly will read what I’m writing now and know I didn’t pull the plug.

Enough of that. There are more important things to write about.

I get a lot of revelation, and there is no way I can convey it all on a blog. If you really want to understand what’s going on in the universe, you have to hear from God directly. It’s too complicated and interwoven for one person to explain to another. I can relay bits and pieces, but the whole picture is multidimensional and can’t be transmitted well using a one-bit connection.

Or is it two bits? Is one wire a one-bit system because only one piece of information can be carried at a time, or is it two bits because it can send both 1’s and 0’s? I don’t know anything about computers. Anyway, writing comes out one character at a time, and nobody can read multiple sentences at once.

Yesterday, I really, really heard from God.

I was in my car, which is something I should write about. I had a huge music collection, and I used to listen to secular music in the car. Then I got to where I only wanted to hear certain Christian artists. Then I got to the point where I only wanted to hear the Bible. Now, I turn the Bible off because it drowns God out. I supposed this is how things are supposed to work as a person gets closer to God.

I’ll tell you some of the things I heard.

First, God is very angry at all the people who have abused me, and there are a lot of them. I don’t think about it a lot, because my life is very pleasant anyway, but he does. My life is better than the lives of all the people I know of who have mistreated me, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t do harm or that my life should not have been better.

People have cheated me out of many opportunities. They have lied about me. They have stolen from me. They have abused me verbally. They stabbed me in the back behind closed doors and kept it quiet, thinking they had gotten over on me for good. They set me back in life. My wife is in the same boat. She’s an orphan, and she literally had a wicked stepmother.

People who are stupid enough to participate in the occult have cursed both of us. I guess I should mention them. It’s worse for Rhodah, who lives in a country where cursing people is more popular than video games.

If you’re a Zambian, as soon as anything good happens to you, at least one of your relatives will put a curse on you. It’s expected, like sending a high school graduate a nice card.

When you curse someone God favors, the curse comes back to you, but when it returns, it’s a lot bigger than it was when you sent it, and you can’t do anything to defend yourself. Witches and various types of pagan nuts don’t believe this, so they curse themselves and their families all day, thinking they’re hurting people God loves. It’s very silly.

Think of Haman. He tried to kill the Jews and destroy his rival Mordecai, but Mordecai got to stand by and watch as Haman and his 10 sons dangled choking on ropes attached to the gallows Haman had built for Mordecai. This is a picture of what happens to people who have joined the supernatural underclass and decide to attach the nobility. The people God favors are the nobility.

To get back to my situation, I got an overpowering conviction that God was going to bless Rhodah and me very, very powerfully not just because he loves us, but to punish the people who have mistreated us. To an abuser, few punishments are worse than watching a victim succeed. It absolutely kills them.

I also learned about the rapture.

The rapture will be a gathering of wedding guests. Oddly, the guests will also be the bride, but that’s how it works. So what happens when you marry a woman? Do you burst through her front door unannounced and yell, “I just bought a tux! Let’s get married!”?

No. She would murder you. You get to know each other. You become engaged. You prepare yourself financially. You get your house ready. The bride, in all likelihood, tries to lose 25 pounds. You prepare for the ceremony. You plan a honeymoon. By the time the wedding rolls around, you and the bride are ready, if you’re doing it right.

When it comes to the wedding of Christ, it’s a little different, because he’s marrying a bunch of people who started out as dirty, crooked peasants. We have to be cleaned up a lot. He’s not going to drop out of the clouds and snatch Christians off prostitutes or out of crack houses. He’ll prepare us. The word says the bride will be without spot, blemish, or wrinkle, and those things appear to be people.

We are always in danger in this corrupting world, and if God leaves us here long enough and doesn’t step in frequently, many or all of us will backslide and go to hell. Human beings have peaks and troughs in their walks with God, like athletes who train for events and then eat cheeseburgers during their down time. God is monitoring our peaks and troughs, and he will time things so we will be on peaks when the rapture comes. I’m only referring to Christians who will make it. Most will be left here to suffer.

Three people have been raptured. We should look at them and ask ourselves why we would be raptured if we’re not like them. Enoch, Elijah, and Jesus walked with God. The Bible literally says Enoch walked with God, and then he was not. Elijah was a loner; he complained to God about it. Jesus was constantly wandering off to be with God, abandoning even the disciples. If you’re not walking with God before the rapture, why would you expect to be taken? It’s not speed dating. He’s going to take people he knows. Are you better than Enoch and Elijah?

There isn’t going to be any worldwide revival. Christians who think there will be don’t understand how the world works. We already had our big revivals. Generally, the world has chosen Satan over Jesus, and there is nothing God can do, because he will not interfere with free will.

I had a dream last night. I was invited to an event thrown by The Last Reformation, a pretty good charismatic ministry. They work miracles, prophesy, and baptize people with the Holy Spirit. They think they’re changing the world, though, and that isn’t true.

I was given a hand-drawn map. I was supposed to drive down a residential street, make a turn, and park by a house where people were meeting. A lot of people were supposed to be there.

When I got there, there was no house. There was a big building containing warehouse condos. They faced inward, opening onto an indoor hallway. It was a winding hallway just wide enough for a car. I got out and pushed my car up the hallway.

I ran into Torben Sondergaard, the imprisoned leader of TLR, and his wife. There were only a couple of other people there. The warehouses were empty.

I woke up, and later on, I dreamed I went to a similar building where my late father owned warehouses. This building doesn’t actually exist. My dad was there, working hard to get the warehouses in shape for new tenants. He was so tired, he was stumbling. He limped. He was sweating. I was afraid he would die if he didn’t quit. He said the people who built the warehouse had covered up a lot of problems. All I saw was a need for some paint, which I could have applied, personally, in a short time.

I marveled at the size of the warehouses and asked what they were going to rent for. He said they would go for around $4000 each. I was happy. I had this idea that 10% would go to me.

I believe the empty warehouses show what has happened to the church.

During the last century, pretty good evangelists filled stadiums and expensive venues. When they came to town, newspapers announced it without being paid, and people showed up to get help. It’s not like that now. A Satanic evangelist like Joel Osteen can fill a stadium, but Torben Sondergaard visits churches that meet in tiny warehouses. Warehouses are pretty much standard for serious charismatic churches now. It’s an insult to God. Catholics can teach demonic doctrine, own perhaps trillions of dollars’ worth of real estate, and build huge, grotesque churches, but a man who casts out demons will probably have to rent, not own, a warehouse surrounded by car repair joints and little businesses that fulfill Amazon and Ebay orders.

My dad represented misguided preachers who have great power. They work hard in the flesh to build churches, but very little comes of it. They are so busy wasting time, they don’t spend much time with God, and that destroys their effectiveness.

God also showed me that the most important thing for me to do was to spend time with him. It’s more important than going to church, being with Rhodah, helping the poor, or any other aspect of Christianity.

Your main job as a Christian is to see to it you hold onto your own salvation and continue to be improved by God. If you fail, nothing you have ever done for anyone else will matter. In order to fulfill your main task, you have to avoid becoming busy with other things.

There are Christians out there who are proud of themselves because they put in long days doing things for churches and people. They work so much they have no time to spend with God, and they think he will be happy about it. They’re wrong. The main thing he wants is you, not your ridiculous works.

He gave us Mary and Martha to show how he feels. Jesus was in their house, and Martha was serving people and cooking and cleaning and so on. Mary abandoned her, let her do all the work, and sat at the feet of Jesus. When Martha accused her to Jesus, he told her Mary was doing a better thing than she was.

It was better for Mary to sit next to Jesus and interact with him, while Martha worked like a slave, than it was for Martha to do the work of two people in order to look after a gathering of believers.

Many times, God has said, “Stay close to me and enjoy my love and my favor,” and I have asked him to help me do it. He’s doing it now. By turning off the car stereo, I’m getting closer, and I’m hearing more from him.

Jesus isn’t going to have an arranged marriage where he meets the bride for the first time and hopes for the best. Read the Song of Solomon. He will be marrying a bride he already knows very well, whose heart is aligned with his.

Revival is not coming. Not in any grand way. A few people here and there will be saved. The Last Reformation will not grow. Not unless they abandon their principles and whore out. Men who heal incurable diseases on Youtube will not get large followings. Things will get worse, because people’s hearts have gotten too hard for God to break.

That relates to another thing God showed me.

A tribulum is a board with nails driven into it. Sort of resembles a cross, now that I think about it, but that’s a digression. Tribulums were used to remove the husks from very hard grain. A man would stand on the tribulum, and an animal would drag him around over grain spread on a rock. Sort of like the rock the sower threw grain on, but that’s another digression.

The nails protruded from the bottom of the board, and as they ran over the grain, they would break the husk. Tribulation was only necessary for very hard grain. Other grain came out of its husk with less persuasion.

The tribulation will be God, using extremely harsh means to harvest a few of the extremely stubborn people who have not yielded to nicer means of persuasion. Some people are easy to bring to God. Others have to feel the flames charring their feet.

People who have already yielded to God will be raptured before the tribulation, because tormenting them would serve no purpose, and because God could not do it if they were on the earth to pray for it to stop.

How do you know it’s time to get the tribulum out? You get it out when only the hard grain is left. When using other means fails to produce results, you resort to tribulation.

God showed me this: we are now in a time where almost all the grain is hard. Even the little warehouses aren’t very full. God has sent us preacher after preacher. He has performed sign after sign, and we have ridiculed and rejected the people who were used to perform the signs. The soft approach has been exhausted, so the tribulation is about to start, for man’s own good.

The tribulation will be the last chance for the people of this age. Anyone who won’t listen when the world is burning up and the trees and the fish are dead will go to hell, and it will be the right place for them, because there is no reaching them.

Yesterday I heard Jeremiah in the car. All the bigwigs and clergymen in Israel hated him. They called for his death because he prophesied against Israel. They didn’t say he lied, which is funny. They said he prophesied. Maybe they knew, or at least suspected, he was right. Maybe they were willing to risk killing a man for repeating a message God had ordered him to give. No wonder God stopped sending the Jews prophets for 400 years. He had to be tired of watching them torment and kill them.

I can relate to Jeremiah. Every preacher and church rejects me sooner or later. They’re with me up to a certain point, and then they turn on me when I set God above them and their imaginative, self-serving doctrine. I could have been very, very helpful to the people at the churches I belonged to, but Christians drove me out. They do it to everyone who speaks the truth.

Christians love to look down on the Jews and talk about how stupid they were for rejecting Jesus, but we do the same thing every day. We torment and exclude everyone who goes a little too far in telling us what Jesus is saying.

If Jesus came back today under a different name, Christians would kill him as soon as possible. They hate being told this, but it’s true.

We would celebrate his death. We would say, “God really showed HIM.” We would post memes showing his dead body, taunting him and anyone who believed him.

Most Christians, including charismatics, hate the doctrine of Jesus.

If you think I’m wrong, read the Revelation and see what people will do to the two witnesses he sends. I’m sure nominal Christians will be among those who throw parties.

If you’re not rejected by the world and the church, which is really just part of the world, you’re doing something wrong. I didn’t say that. Jesus did. Look it up.

One of these days, this blog will be gone for good, because persecution will increase, and whoever takes it down will smirk, thinking I’m washed up. In reality, he will be driving nails through his own hands and feet. And things will keep going better and better for me.

Finally

This is a milestone. I finally tested positive for covid. A drugstore test shows the dreaded pink line. If I don’t have the rona, I must be pregnant.

I can’t be bothered typing “COVID-19.” I’m even getting too lazy to type “coronavirus.” Covid, covid, covid. This term is not case-sensitive any more.

Why do I say “finally”? Because I’ve had pretty much the same symptoms about 4 times, and the tests, including one PCR, always came out negative. The tests are lame. I’m pretty sure I had the virus.

I had covid in the US in 2020. I had it in Egypt in 2021. I had it in Turkey in 2021. I just had it here again. I think I had it one more time here, but I can’t remember. Maybe not. Maybe I’m remembering testing myself here after flying home from another country where a PCR test failed me.

So why do have I tested negative over and over? I follow the directions on the home tests, and you can’t screw up a PCR.

I’m thrilled I tested positive, because it shows I’m not one of those people who get covid one day and have to be flown to the hospital the next. Is this true of every strain or just this one? My guess: a whole bunch of strains. I’ve been sick several times, several different strains have been running around when I’ve been ill, and not one strain, including the one that got me when I was unvaccinated, amounted to anything. It is a virtual certainty that I’ve had whatever was around in 2020, plus Delta and Omicron.

So does this mean there is no strain that can get me? I would guess it means there is no strain YET that can get me, but covid changes. Who knows what the next variant will be like?

The virus can change, and I suppose I can, too. Covid really nails the very elderly, and presumably, many of these same people would have been fine had they gotten sick decades earlier.

Am I going to keep getting more and more severe cases as I get older? If not, will vaccines and earlier bouts build me up so I’m less vulnerable than old people who got sick during the first two years? No idea. I don’t know, and neither do the best scientists on Earth.

One thing seems to be clear, and I know people will hate reading it. Ivermectin seems to help.

When I have taken ivermectin as soon as I realized I was sick, my symptoms have improved a lot or disappeared within a few hours. When I’ve taken it after letting more time go by, when the symptoms have become more severe, my symptoms have changed less, but still significantly.

It’s not the placebo effect. The placebo effect doesn’t make snot stop coming out of your nose, break a fever, or make your throat feel better. It may be that my body just happened to bounce back after I took ivermectin, and maybe ivermectin did nothing at all, but the improvement wasn’t my imagination.

Don’t tell me about studies “proving” ivermectin doesn’t help. If you think that ever happened, you have a very shallow understanding of studies, statistics, word games, and politics. Doctors are generally bad scientists, and they’re the ones who do most studies. They ask the wrong questions. They choose the wrong subjects. They take money from entities that have an interest in cooking the results. They misinterpret the data. Their entire profession leans left, hard. Doctors have done some truly stupid studies over the years, and they have clung to them until they almost had to be beaten to get them to let go. Virtually no one who runs around claiming studies proved ivermectin has any idea what questions were asked, what kind of subjects were chosen, who paid for the studies, or what the raw data looked like. Give me a few million dollars, and I’ll do a study and prove dogs believe in Santa.

I don’t claim ivermectin helps. Maybe it doesn’t. I know what happened to me repeatedly when I took it, and that’s good enough. Experience is a good enough teacher in perhaps 99 out of 100 cases in a typical person’s life. You shouldn’t ignore it just because it involves health.

I remember being given an antibiotic called Levaquin. Every time I tried to sleep, I felt like I was in hell as soon as my head hit the pillow. I was instantly in a place of torment and screaming. Amazing nightmares. Nobody had to do a study to tell me to quit using it. I had a similar problem with hibiscus tea. Glad I quit taking Levaquin, because the same establishment that did studies proving it was safe later concluded it could cause permanent tendon damage.

My mother refused to take thalidomide when she was pregnant with me. Kind of glad she didn’t read the studies saying it was fine.

I think Rhodah had covid in Singapore. Snot, fatigue, and a bad headache. Didn’t want to get out of bed. I slept right next to her and never caught it. Then I came back here and lived like a hermit. Got covid anyway. She didn’t catch it when I had it in Egypt and Turkey.

Her version of covid was very minor, like mine. She didn’t want to get out of bed, but she was certainly able to. On her worst day, we walked around town and did things.

I’m overjoyed to have proof I had covid, because as long as you don’t know you’ve had it, you wonder how it will affect you. I’ve always hoped to test positive except when it endangered my ability to fly.

I have probably flown with covid. Oh, well. That’s on the governments who make the rules and the people who give the tests. I answered every question and did as I was told. I played their game and didn’t take it upon myself to add new rules. I gave them some credit for knowing what they were doing.

I never flew with symptoms. That much, I can say for sure.

So now what do I do? Hide in a hole and have people bring me food?

The web says people are generally no longer contagious after 10 days. I had a fever on January 29. When I got the fever, I realized I had felt funny for at least two days, pushing me back to January 27. That makes this day 13. Guess I won’t be eating Papa John’s.

I have been out several times. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. I didn’t know what I had, though, and as I have said, I had had the same symptoms before, along with at least 5 negative test results.

I may not have covid now. The tests are not very reliable.

Here is good news: my inability to taste beer is almost completely gone. Maybe it is completely gone. I had to blow my nose earlier today, and I don’t feel totally right, but my nose works, and beer no longer tastes like seltzer with hops.

I don’t know what to say about the many, many people who started having symptoms, hoped they wouldn’t get really sick, and then went to the hospital or died. It has to be terrible, slowly realizing you’re one of the cursed ones. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you’re very unlikely to get sick, but if you’re in the high-risk group, you have no idea whether you’re facing a cold, a couple of amputations, or death. You just have to wait and find out.

This illness is taking a long time, but on the other hand, it has amounted to nothing. For the first two days or so, I just felt like something wasn’t right. I wondered if I was dehydrated from drinking beer. Then I had chills for one night, and I actually enjoyed them. Then the fever broke, I had a very mild cold and a slight cough, and from time to time I coughed something unpleasant up while I was trying to talk. For one day, I could not smell anything at all, and then my sense of smell started coming back.

There were a couple of afternoons when I very suddenly felt like I had to go to bed right away because staying awake took a lot of effort.

I feel like Thucydides describing the plague, but my story is dull compared to his.

When I was in Egypt, feeling just like this only a little worse, I walked around all day on cloudless 114-degree summer days, looking at pyramids and temples. Rhodah could not keep up. I could do it right now.

God has been extremely good to me, as always.

Night before last, I had a dream. I was in bed, and a little transparent spirit was on my chest. It was about like a terrier. I couldn’t see the shape of it clearly, but it acted like a terrier trying to maul me. I felt nothing at all, and I kept telling it I spoke failure to it in the name of Jesus Christ. It didn’t run off, but it didn’t accomplish anything, either. I looked beside the bed, at the baseboard, and I saw big creatures like daddy longlegs, also transparent. They stood about 6 inches tall. They seemed confused. They were wobbling around, trying to walk. I hated them. I hit them with a gun and made them explode.

My experience with covid has been a lot like the dream. Harassment that hasn’t harmed me at all.

I hate to think about what I deserve. Different story.

In other news, the stout I kegged is finally showing signs of carbonation. I put it on 20 psi of CO2, and that was day before yesterday. That’s a lot. Stout is supposed to require only a tiny amount of carbonation, and I was warned to be careful, but it took maybe 36 hours before I got enough foam to feel like I could remove the CO2 and hook up the beer gas.

The stout tastes almost exactly like Old Rasputin imperial stout, except it contains a lot less alcohol. Except for the differences in ABV and intensity of flavor, these beers taste the same to me. I can’t complain about that, because Old Rasputin is the best factory beer I’ve ever had. I set out to brew something slightly dryer, though.

This beer may still have some fermenting to do, so maybe all is well. Past versions have dried out with time.

MORE

Funny; my comments quit working just as I tried to answer a question about ivermectin. Suspicious, but I suppose the leftist nuts who are killing freedom of expression have better things to do than interfere with my blog.

Anyway, here is the answer I was going to give:

I think I went with the dose the Indians claimed to get good results with. Twelve mg per day, I believe. Unless it was mcg. Anyway, it worked out to be what a horse takes for worms, corrected for my weight.

Not recommending ivermectin for anyone but myself. For all I know, you will die hideously.

5,000,000 Dead Irishmen Can’t be Wrong

Brewing is going well.

Today I kegged a dry stout. To me, “dry stout” means something that isn’t a syrupy, overpowering imperial stout or a gross sweetened stout. I guess you could call it an Irish stout. Something that would please a Murphy’s drinker.

It was supposed to attenuate down to a specific gravity of about 1.012, but it got to about 1.016 and slowed down to the point where it barely moved. I am desperate to fill kegs, so I kegged it anyway. Today I stuck it in a new Torpedo Megamouth keg, and I put it on 20 psi of CO2. Tomorrow morning I plan to switch it to beer gas. My hope is that a night on CO2 will get enough CO2 into the beer to allow me to dispense it tomorrow.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. Nitrogen makes stout silky and a little sweet, but it does not add the carbonation bite CO2 gives, and it leaves beer right after you pour it, so if you don’t have CO2 in your beer, and you dispense it with beer gas, it will go flat sitting in your glass.

In a perfect world, the stout would have been allowed to mature in peace. I would have given it maybe three weeks before kegging it. I just don’t have time. I’d rather have a somewhat imperfect stout than empty kegs. I can make the next one perfect while I drink this one.

I can’t be sure this one will not be excellent. It probably will be. But I am definitely rushing it.

I feel I should order more wheat beer ingredients. Between sampling and wasting beer to get my system working, I am running low. If I have wheat beer, my favorite ale, and stout on tap, I can relax and take time brewing other things.

I have ingredients for a lager and a heavy ale. The lager will take weeks, and the ale will probably be slow as well. I only have faucets for 5 beers, and it may be mid-March before I have the lager and heavy ale ready, so I have to keep reloading the three faster beers unless I want to run out of inventory.

My virus-related taste and smell difficulties are blowing over, but things still are not right. My ale tastes way too bitter. My wheat beer is good, but it should taste better. Another problem: beer seems to hit me way too hard. I had maybe a quart of fairly weak beer today, and I really felt it. Is that because of the virus?

The purpose of brewing is not to get drunk. I hope things go back to normal as this illness winds down.

I suppose coronavirus is also the reason it’s not possible to get every beer-related item I want in a timely manner. It wasn’t until today that I had enough parts to run 3 kegs at once. I still need two fittings in order to get two more kegs going. I expect to need to keg my latest ale in three days, and I ordered the remaining fittings today. They may be here in time. I hope so.

I started ordering dry yeast in bulk. I can pay $11 per batch or $5 per batch. I might as well face reality.

I think my best move right now is to give up on normal lager fermentation and use my pressure fermenter. If the stories are true, I can finish fermentation in under a week with no loss of quality. If I can pull this off, I’ll have an ale and a lager ready to keg in under one week. That leaves me with the heavy ale to work on, and with 4 other beers on tap, I will not be rushed.

After that, I should be able to slow down and act like a normal homebrewer, inventing recipes and making fine adjustments to my equipment.

If You Can’t Buy it, Mod it

God keeps giving Rhodah and me lots of revelation, and it gets hard to keep up with and document, so I write about beer instead.

I now have two beers fermenting, and I plan to brew another tomorrow or the day after. I am tired of fooling around. I have to put myself in a position where production is much faster than consumption and loss, or else I will always have idle faucets and frustration.

It appears the stout I brewed over a week ago still hasn’t given up. An occasional bubble still pops out of the airlock. Unbelievable. I checked the specific gravity last night, and it looks like it’s around 1.015, only .002 down from a couple of days back. I was thinking it would end up around 1.012. Am I asking too much?

On the one hand, it’s taking forever, but on the other, it’s still active, so I must be doing the right thing, waiting for it to die. It’s no good kegging a beer while there is still sugar in it.

My other beer may be a Belgian IPA. I learned this the other day. Before that, I didn’t know what it was.

I brew whatever I want, whether it fits a known style or not. Most guys choose a particular factory beer or style they want to brew, and they create or borrow a recipe within established guidelines. I think, “I’ll bet it would taste good if I did THIS,” and then I put together ingredients that sound like they would work. It annoys some people. I don’t know why. What business is it of theirs what I put in my beer? I can’t imagine getting upset at other people for creating recipes.

The grain bill I used is a lot like an IPA, only I added a little table sugar for some reason. Sugar increases alcohol without changing flavor much. I used Crystal hops for the finish. For IPA, you pretty much have to use something like Cascade or Centennial or people wonder what’s wrong with you. These are citrusy hops. To me, Crystal tastes very spicy. Somewhere in the realm of cinnamon and allspice.

For IPA, you’re supposed to use an IPA yeast like Wyeast 1056, and you ferment at 68 degrees. I use Belgian ale yeast. The stuff they use in tripels. I ferment at room temperature. Right now, the bucket is in my kitchen, burping away at 75 degrees, threatening to generate all sorts of aromatic chemicals and hangover-inducing heavy alcohols.

The other day, someone on a forum mentioned Belgian IPA, and I realized it sounded a lot like what I was making.

I pitched my yeast last night, and now the beer is burping like crazy. It may be done in 4 days. That’s how long the last batch took.

I don’t want an IPA. I feel like I’m drowning in IPA every time I go to the store. But BELGIAN IPA…that may be different. Because it’s not IPA.

Maybe it’s BPA.

My next beer will be either an amber lager or a very heavy Belgiany beer with some similarities to the one I just described. If Belgiany, it will be different from the quasi-IPA because of the weight and high alcohol content, not to mention several pounds of wheat. Also, I decided to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop which is said to generate creamy, coconutty flavors. Perfect for a sweet, heavy, aromatic ale. I hope. I don’t know.

My sense of smell goes in and out. A few minutes ago, I was able to smell Vick’s Vaporub. Maybe I can enjoy a beer tonight.

I am working on some cowboy mods to my Speidel Braumeister brewing machine. It’s great, but the user interface is garbage. The maker wants $400 for a wifi module so I can join their website, store my recipes there, and download them into the machine. That’s insane. I want a program on my PC or phone. I want to use wifi or Bluetooth like a sane person, for a few dollars. I do not want to join a manufacturer’s cult.

I have to be honest. The Germans are still a little scary. They seem to think customers should fall in line with the herd and do as they’re told. I’m an American. I eat things that travel in herds.

I guess Europeans think we’re nuts. They’re all standing at the government trough, eating that sheep feed and thinking how wonderful it is to be taken care of, have the government do their thinking, and to be just like everyone else, and many of us see it and want to throw up. It looks like a living death. My country isn’t my family. I don’t belong to it. I want to NOT fit in. I don’t want to melt into it. I just live here because God won’t let me move to heaven.

I spent a lot of the day looking at the Braumeister and the Internet.

I learned that the Braumeister only has three electrical connections other than AC in. It has a temperature probe, a heater, and a small pump. Simple. All I need is a bit of hardware that can run these things and connect to a PC. It has to have storage, like an SD card. A small SD card would give my machine millions of times as much storage as the manufacturer did.

I need a microcomputer that will operate two relays that turn the pump and heater on and off. I need it to listen to the temperature probe, because the temperature will guide the use of the heater. I need it to have a timer. I need it to be able to run programs I wrote. I need to be able to run the pump and heater manually.

I looked all over the place. I found what looks like a solution: Craftbeerpi. This is a program that hooks a Raspberry Pi up to a brewing system. You should be able to connect it to any system that has a pump and heater.

My heater, pump, and probe are modular. Among them, they use two types of connections. German and hard to source, of course. Stupid. Anyway, I can disconnect the Braumeister’s controller and rig up new cables coming from a new controller built by me. The Raspberry Pi will talk to a couple of big relays. The relays will turn the pump and heater on and off. The temperature probe will talk to the Raspberry Pi.

Craftbeerpi will let me use a program to store a limitless number of brewing schedules somewhere. On an SD card on the board, I guess. No more, “Drei zchedules iss all you get. If you have nussing to hide, ziss iss all you need.”

The only question is whether it will work. I guess it will.

I have some inquiries out.

I am convinced Germanness is the problem with Speidel, the outfit that made the Braumeister. I think these guys believe they know better than their customers. That’s almost never true. There are companies that have thousands of engineers but billions of customers. No matter which company you’re talking about, somewhere out there, there are a bunch of customers that make its engineers look like monkeys.

If an American company had made it, it would have Bluetooth built in. It would have a PC app and a phone app. The connectors would be mainstream. It would have gigs of storage, not bytes. If it needed wifi, it would include it, or it would use a $9 adaptor. If it needed a firmware update, you would use a $4 USB cable to connect it to your computer.

I think Germans may be overconfident when it comes to building things. There is a myth that says they do it better than anyone, but it’s a lie. Their cars are unreliable and impossible to work on. Their tools are overpriced and not the best. Their beer is very polished, but it tends to be boring and low on flavor and imagination. And anyone can make beer with finesse. It’s not like they figured out nuclear fusion.

They seem to make things in an overthought way, and that creates the illusion of superiority while making things worse for everyone concerned.

Doing things differently without a good reason is incompetence in the tech world. It causes a lot of unnecessary expense and suffering. Ask anyone who ever needed an Apple cable in the middle of the night.

I will digress.

The other day, I asked some Internet beer people if they were their own favorite brewers. Did they like their own beer better than anyone else’s? One guy responded, “I live in Germany.” That was a stupid remark. He was saying German factory beer had to be better than anything he could make, because all German factory beer is perfect. Not true. And what he said would have been closer to true in the US than Germany. We make the best factory beer on Earth now. We have almost 5,000 breweries, competing hard to innovate and make the best beer possible. Germany has about 1500, and they crank out the same things they cranked out in 1800. Germany is a beer backwater. We’re the leaders now.

There are several companies that make small brewing machines for hobbyists, and as far as I know, they all have problems. Some have build issues. Speidel’s products work very well, and the construction is good, but they have serious user interface deficiencies. It’s like marrying a beautiful woman in a titanium chastity belt.

If Toyota had made this brewing machine, I would never have had a problem with it. Everything would have been worked out before I bought it. They would never have let it out the door with a user interface like this.

I hope to hear back about the Raspberry Pi solution tomorrow. If it looks good, I’ll go for it. Can’t be very hard. Two relays, a Raspberry Pi, a screen, a mouse, a keyboard, and some cables and connectors. If it works, I’ll kiss Speidel’s support team good bye, and maybe next time I’ll build my own machine. A lot of people do.

Nose Caught in Kung Flu Grippe

I have fantastic news to report! This morning, I smelled coffee! And that’s no metaphor.

Earlier this week, I came down with what I thought was covid. It wasn’t severe. Mild aches. A mild headache. A mild fever. A very runny, stuffy nose. Fatigue in the afternoon. Not that bad.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that things didn’t taste normal. A sandwich tasted funny. The beer I had made was kind of gross.

As of yesterday, I couldn’t smell much of anything. I put Vaporub right up against my nose, and while I wasn’t sure, I thought I could smell a very faint menthol aroma.

Sure looks like covid. Other things can mess with your sense of smell and taste, but covid is the worst offender among common diseases, and my symptoms don’t match other illnesses well.

The web says I could have sinusitis, but I don’t think that’s true. We’re in a pandemic, for one thing, and it’s not a sinusitis pandemic. Also, I’ve had all sorts of upper respiratory bugs during my life, including bugs that affected my sinuses, and I have never lost my sense of smell to the degree I lost it this week. Not even close.

The weird thing is that some things taste almost normal. People like to tell us most of taste is really smell, but that appears to be an exaggeration. Out of self-pity, I’ve been eating breakfast cereal instead of healthy food when I get up, and Grape Nuts taste completely normal. I made beer cheese spread which I eat with Ritz crackers, and those things taste fine.

I always lose weight when I have a cold or anything like a cold, and it doesn’t matter what I eat, so I am indulging myself. I got an Entenmann’s raspberry coffee cake. It tastes just fine. Today I decided to have some coffee with it.

For some reason, I really like instant decaf. I made myself a big mug a short time ago, with sugar and real cream. When I opened the coffee jar, I decided to see if I could smell it. I inhaled deeply, and I was shocked by a strong wave of coffee aroma.

It was exciting. I inhaled more than once, just for the joy of smelling anything.

The sad thing is that I have two homebrews on tap, a third about to go into the keg, and three more waiting to be made, not to mention three factory beers I bought because I thought I was going to have a homebrew shortage. Drinking this stuff is like drinking thickened club soda with an extremely high level of hop bitterness. A waste.

I bought Boddington’s Pub Ale, Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA, and Old Rasputin Imperial Stout. Boddington’s is a beer made with profit, not quality, in mind, but I still like it. Old Rasputin is extremely heavy and dark. It’s full of crazy smells and flavors. When you lower your nose into the glass, the aromas surround you and pummel you like an evangelist at an Antifa riot. Boddington’s is very mild.

Last night, Boddies and Old Rasputin didn’t taste much different at all.

The coffee I’m drinking tastes a lot like coffee, so at least I have that.

I ordered myself two new fermenters, which means I bought buckets. They’re a like Home Depot buckets, but they hold almost 7 gallons. I make 5-gallon batches, and beer makes foam when it ferments, so it’s not wise to use 5-gallon buckets. You need extra space.

I can’t find bigger buckets locally, so I gladly paid about $20 each for buckets with lids, spigots, and airlocks. With tax and shipping, I was up around $55. Insane, I know, but there was no cheaper way to do it. Ebay had nothing. I could drive to Orlando, but then I would only save the shipping fee, and the tolls and gas would cost more.

I discovered Hearts Home Brew in Orlando, and it’s now my go-to supply store. For big orders, it’s worth driving or paying for shipping. Their prices are low, and they’re fast. I ordered buckets yesterday, and they will be here today.

This week will be Brewapalooza, AKA Brewing Man. Today I’ll make an ale that ferments at room temperature. Tomorrow, I’ll make a lager. At some point during this time, I’ll put a stout in the keezer. Before the week is out, the ale should ferment fast enough to let me make another ale; something wheaty but based on a tripel.

I think I need to face reality and get one more freezer so I can do lagers properly.

The word “lager” means “to store.” I guess this is why prison camps were called stalags. I don’t know. When you make a lager, you ferment it, and then you let it sit for a long time at a low temperature. This is the lagering process. It supposedly kills off-flavors.

These days, there are new ways of doing things. By fermenting under pressure, many people are making lagers at higher temperatures and in shorter times. They say it works. There are also new yeasts that work better at high temperatures. I’m not sure what to do. I would like to get a lager in the box, so maybe I should take a chance. I have a pressure fermenter. On the other hand, because I’m still working out the kinks in my techniques, it would be safer to use the old methods for my first post-comeback lager.

I can’t lager anything in my keezer because the temperature is wrong. If I use my fermenting fridge, I won’t have any place to ferment things while the lagering is going on.

It looks like a lot of the changes in brewing have been driven by Australians. They started Kegland, a leading manufacturer of brewing gadgets. They made my pressure fermenter.

Australians drink way too much. Many have a bad attitude toward drunkenness, like high school boys who never grow up, and their alcoholism rate is very high. It is claimed they drink more, and get drunk more, than all the other nationalities in the world. Think about that. The world includes places like England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Finland, and the Czech Republic. When you’re drunker than the British, you need an intervention.

I guess it’s not good that homebrewing has taken off in Australia. It should be about making quality beer, not getting ripped with your pals and passing out face-down while singing “Waltzing Matilda.”

Homebrewing should never be about drunkenness, any more than French cooking should be about eating contests.

If you’re determined to be a drunk, you should probably drink wine or screwdrivers all day. Cheap alcohol buffered with a lot of liquid and maybe some nutrients. Pretending you’re a brewer just adds expense and effort, and beer makes you fat.

When my senses come back, I may make a Boddies clone with Amarillo hops and a little bit nicer grain bill. Amarillo hops have a strong lemon flavor, and that’s just what Boddies needs. The problem, though, is that Boddies goes well with beer gas.

I have a 4-body secondary regulator so I can dispense beer with CO2 at 4 different temperatures. I also have a beer gas tank with one disconnect, so it will only serve one keg. I plan to have stout in the keezer, on beer gas, all the time. If I start fooling with an ale that needs beer gas, I’ll have to fix things up so I can run another keg off the same bottle.

That would mean getting another secondary regulator. I think it’s fair to assume I’ll never have more than two beer gas beers in my keezer at once, so two bodies ought to get it done.

If trying to keep 5 kegs going sounds extreme, think about the guy I talked to the other day. He has 27 active.

Whatever this illness is, it’s progressing fast. Every day I feel much better than the previous day. My nose doesn’t run now, the stuffiness is nearly gone, and I rarely cough. I didn’t hit the energy wall until around 8 p.m. yesterday, so I’m getting two more hours than I did earlier in the week. No fever, either.

Maybe now Budweiser Will Taste Good

Well, this is interesting. I think I had covid last night.

A few days back I stayed up until three in the morning. Little tasks kept popping up, and I just went with it, even though what I really like is to be in bed by 9:30. The next day, I felt bad, and I thought it was because I needed sleep. I continued to feel off for the next couple of days, though, so something wasn’t right.

Last night, something hit me. My bones started to ache. I got a headache. I stopped sweating; my skin got very dry, so I knew I had a fever.

I went to bed, wrapped myself in an electric blanket, put it on the highest setting, and lay there. All night. Unable to sleep.

Of course, I took ivermectin, vitamin D, and vitamin C first.

I wasn’t very sick. Last night I had a runny nose for about 10 minutes. I sneezed a couple of times. I coughed a few times. My throat wasn’t quite right, but I can’t say it was scratchy.

In some ways, the experience was pleasant. I couldn’t sweat, so I lay there all night wrapped up comfortably in hot, dry bedding. It was like a long, padded sauna. If the aches aren’t too bad, a fever can have its enjoyable side.

I got up today and prayed with my wife. I put oil on myself, and she prayed for me. The dryness left my skin. Now I feel just about completely normal. My only problem is that there may be something going on with my sense of taste.

My understanding was that Omicron was not allowed to mess with your sense of taste. That’s supposed to be a Delta thing. I ate a slice of pizza and a ham sandwich this morning, because that’s the kind of junk I eat when I’ve been sick. The pizza was okay, but the sandwich seemed to taste a little metallic.

Here I am with three batches of beer on hand, a batch of grain in the spare fridge, and two more batches of grain on the way. What if I can’t tell if the beer is any good?

Yesterday I had a small serving of wheat beer early in the day, and then I had some more later. The first serving was a lot better. Was coronavirus messing with my perception? The second batch tasted odd.

The web says that if coronavirus changes your sense of smell or taste, it can take weeks to get over it. I would hate to have to wait that long to get back to work.

Whenever I start to feel sick, and I’m not very sick at all, I hope it’s coronavirus. If coronavirus can’t make me very sick, then presumably my immunity is good, and every episode ought to improve it. I’ve had three or four mild cold-like illnesses since the start of 2020, and all were very, very mild. I always test negative, but on the other hand, the symptoms always fit coronavirus better than a cold, and the tests are not very accurate.

A little part of me always wonders: “What if this is the first time I’ve had coronavirus? What if it gets really bad?” I must have had coronavirus by now, though. I’ve traveled all over the world. I’ve been to restaurants. I’ve gone to stores. I’ve been on crowded trains.

I’ve listened too much to leftists who are pushing lies about coronavirus for political reasons. They want us to think everyone faces a high risk of serious problems, and that’s complete garbage. If you’re not fat, sick, or old, you are extremely unlikely to die and very unlikely to be really ill. I’m getting old, but I’m not in the age group coronavirus hits hardest. I’m not sick, and I’m not all that fat.

Young, thin, healthy people who have real problems with coronavirus are outliers. They’re like nonsmokers who get lung cancer. Leftists like to point to a few here and there, as though one robin made a summer. They did the same thing with AIDs. They tried to tell us it was going to be a big problem for heterosexuals, so we would clamor for research funding and so we wouldn’t rightly point the finger at the depraved homosexual lifestyle that spreads disease, but widespread heterosexual transmission never happened. Just about all the people who got AIDs from normal sex were women who slept with men who were closet homosexuals. It’s nearly impossible for a man to get AIDs from a woman.

People think Magic Johnson got AIDs from a woman. If that’s true, why didn’t it happen to the thousands of other sports figures and entertainment figures who have had sex with dozens or hundreds of women per year? Why just one?

I just saw an article with the title, “COVID-19 isn’t discriminating by age — younger people are dying, too.” That’s a lie, straight out. A tiny percentage of the dead died young, but coronavirus definitely discriminates by age. The CDC says about 19000 people in their twenties have died, but the number for people over 85 is nearly 300,000. What it doesn’t tell you is that there aren’t many people over 85. There are around 3 times as many people in their twenties. So Americans over 85 aren’t 15 times more likely to die. They’re around 45 times more likely.

A 45-fold difference doesn’t represent discrimination by age? Sorry. That’s a lie.

I still only know one young person who got really sick, and frankly, he’s obese. He has to be 80 pounds overweight.

My beer recipes are already fixed, so coronavirus can’t do any real harm while I’m brewing. It’s not like I’ll be tasting the beer and making changes. But I could be delayed in evaluating it.

Unpersons, Unite!

Wow. Every day brings a reminder that Satan runs modern society.

I used to comment on Yahoo News stories, but I quit because it drew me into childish squabbles and also because Yahoo started censoring comments very dishonestly.

Today I fell to temptation and made a comment. I responded to a story about Adam Schiff, who is pushing for a Constitutional amendment to limit corporate contributions to political campaigns.

Here is what I said:

Weird, since the Democrats are more in debt to corporations than Republicans. Big corporations pour much more money into Democrat campaigns, and Democrats reward them by passing laws that cripple small businesses.

What I said is true, and it’s not inflammatory, obscene, anti-trans, or whatever else Yahoo is not supposed to like. It’s a bland, factual comment. In sincerity, I was surprised to see a Democrat go after corporate donations.

I guess he’s just grandstanding for the unsophisticated. “Look how I stood up to the Man.” Surely he doesn’t want to cut off the hand that feeds his whole party.

Today I got this in my email:

Your comment on Democrats introduce constitutional amendment to reverse Citizens United campaign finance ruling violates the community guidelines and has been rejected

Yahoo apparently does not use periods.

I think this is excellent. It’s wonderful to be reminded that the secular world is completely corrupted. God has shown many Christians that the entire world is going to be just as insane as the Germans and Austrians were 75 years ago. Christians and Jews will be driven out of commerce, education, government, the press, the arts, and everything else Satan runs. Eventually we will see mass, nationwide riots like Kristallnacht, and they will be endorsed by the government. Our wealth will be taken. We will be imprisoned and murdered. It will be the new normal.

The world was much more sane when I was growing up. For that matter, it was much more sane 10 years ago. We have entered an age of demonic psychosis. This psychosis is the real pandemic. Coronavirus, in comparison, is a minor inconvenience. Diseases will come and go, as will famines and disasters. Delusional hatred will continue to increase until the tribulation ends and the raptured return to Earth.

The person who rejected my comment knows it’s exactly the kind of comment Yahoo pretends to want. He or she or ze or whatever didn’t care. “They” just wanted to snuff out the voice of a person who disagreed. It’s a manifestation of a deeper desire to kill us off. Conservatism is identified with Christianity, and leftists want conservatives off the planet.

Oddly, they have no problem with Muslims, of whom many millions endorse wife-beating, honor killings, ripping out the clitorises of young girls, and the execution of homosexuals. In America, Muslims herd with the leftists. They stand among the rainbow flags at their conventions, and then they go home and practice a religion that conflicts with nearly everything leftists believe.

Here’s interesting reading: Google “gay Muslim marriage.”

If I posted the comment again, it might get through, because Yahoo has many censors, and not all of them automatically reject conservative comments. There are a number of comments more forceful of mine on the site.

I supposed I shouldn’t assume that some of Yahoo’s censors try to be fair. There may be another explanation. Some may be careless, I may be on a special list, or they may have quotas. Anyway, conservative comments do go through frequently.

Yahoo instituted its moderation policy because conservative responses to new stories dramatically outnumbered leftist responses. It’s like Youtube, which stopped displaying “dislikes” because so many popped up on videos about Biden. At first, Yahoo banned comments altogether. Then they brought them back with censorship.

It’s fitting that Yahoo’s founders choose the name “Yahoo.” It comes from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver encountered a land of man-like beings who were filthy and stupid. They were hateful, violent, and materialistic. They preferred garbage to food. They were obsessed with pretty stones they dug out of mud. Our modern Yahoos may not be quite the same, but they are nearly as brutish. They are hateful and just as obsessed with earthly things.

I’m submitting the comment again just to see what happens.

Let go of this world. It’s never going to be good to you, no matter how many times it tells you you’re about to break through. Stop taking the bait. Go to the sidelines and do God’s work behind the scenes. We were never intended to be mainstreamed.

Pv=nRT

Today I went through what remains of my beer gas equipment from the Coral Gables days. It’s not all that pretty.

When I quit brewing, I kept the expensive stuff. I held onto it until I left the area. When I moved, I had to throw a lot of things out. I kept my gas tanks and regulators. Things like that can be useful even for people who don’t brew.

When I started rooting through this stuff, I didn’t remember exactly what I had done in Miami. I knew I had had a 4-keg keezer with 4 taps on lid-mounted towers. I knew I had a CO2 tank with a regulator and fittings for 4 kegs. I also knew I had a beer gas tank with a regulator, set up for one keg. I didn’t remember anything beyond that.

Beer gas is a combination of nitrogen and CO2. It’s commonly used to dispense stout. If you’ve ever seen a nice stout with pretty bubbles moving up the inside of the glass, you’ve had nitrogen beer.

Today, I found I had 4 tanks and three regulators. It appears I bought two CO2 tanks and two beer gas tanks. One regulator was for beer gas only and had a single out line attached. Both of the others had manifolds and multiple lines.

I guess I must have put kegs in my garage freezer at some point, because there is no other reason to have a second CO2 regulator and manifold.

When I got tired of brewing back in Coral Gables, I neglected my keezer, and one day it stopped working. It had always been quiet, so I had no reason to think anything was wrong. Eventually, I opened it and found a sea of stale beer inside. It had died on me, and the heat had caused pressure to develop and blow beer out of one or more kegs. One of my regulators was soaked.

I went over the regulators today. The one that was soaked seems to be functional except that at least one gauge may not be working. That can be replaced. I have to test it to be sure what’s going on. Another one had two bad gauges, so I yanked them off and ordered new ones.

As things stand now, I can definitely run 4 CO2 kegs, and I will be able to run an additional stout keg when my gauges arrive.

The great thing I’ve discovered is that I’ll be able to put 4 tall kegs and one short one in the keezer, so I’m getting a 5th faucet. When I thought I would only have 4 kegs, I ordered 3 very nice beer faucets plus a stout faucet, and today, one of the beer faucets arrived with a broken part. I told the seller, and he’s sending another one. Thing is, I can probably replace the part. So he’ll get paid by the Postal Service, as he should, and I ought to be able to put a $90 faucet together for the price of one part.

It’s too bad I threw out my old faucets. They were really good. The company that made them has apparently been sued to death, so they aren’t available now.

I can’t get small beer gas tanks filled or swapped here. I can get CO2, but if I want beer gas, I have to buy a big tank or drive to Orlando to fill my little ones. If I get a big tank, I can either put it in the keezer and forget the small ones, or I can use it to fill the small ones. I’m thinking of putting it in the keezer and keeping a small one as a spare in case I get a leak or something. At all depends on whether the big one will fit in there with kegs. If it will, it would be stupid to drive to Orlando over and over.

To sum up, things have worked out well. I have all the CO2 storage I need. If I have to invest in regulators, I will only have to buy one. I can get beer gas locally. I’ll be able to have 5 kegs instead of 4.

I have to go buy wood for the keezer. Then I’ll slap it together, and a week from today, I should have a truly exceptional beer center. By then, I should have gas and one keg installed, and the temperature control should have arrived. I may even weld up a mobile base for the keezer so I can move it and clean under it. Lifting it on casters will also give it more air, so I should be able to put it closer to the wall.

I’ll be brewing again by the weekend, so wheat beer should be in my glass in less than 10 days.

I’ll post a photo when that happens.

Sehr Gut

My first post-2006 brew day is behind me, and it went great. Sort of.

I bought myself a used Braumeister 20L V2 brewing system, which does everything for you up to the point where it’s time to chill the wort. It mashes and boils, in other words. That’s a lot of help. You just put your water and grain in the machine, turn it on, pull the mash thing out when it beeps, throw hops in when it beeps, and drain the wort into your fermenter.

In the past, I had to mash in a huge kettle on the counter wrapped in towels. Then I moved everything to a big cooler and sparged with hot water I had prepared separately. Then I lifted the refilled kettle back to the stove and boiled. The kettle and cooler were too big to wash in the sink. I had to stand in the kitchen most of the time, because nothing was automatic.

Instead of typing “Braumeister” over and over again, I’ll just call the machine Helga. It’s much easier to type.

I made a major mistake this time. I read the manual, and it said to use 12 liters of water for mashing. This sounded crazy, because I was making around 20 liters of beer. I figured the Germans had come up with a way to use less water. Some kind of greeny thing.

As I was doing the mash, I heard weird noises from Helga. It sounded like liquid was hitting something very hot.

Helga mashes in the following way. She is a cylindrical kettle with a ring-shaped heater in the bottom. You put a smaller cylinder (mash pipe) inside the big one, with screens on each end and grain inside it. You add water. Helga heats up and starts pumping water up through the grain, so it overflows out of the inner cylinder, down to where the heater is.

It sounded like liquid was hitting the heater. Seemed to me the heater should have been submerged, so I added water until the noise stopped.

I got a bunch of error messages. They said, “Temp Err.” I Googled, and other people had had the same problem. There were no answers.

After a while, there was a burning smell. It wasn’t bad, so I let it go.

Helga has a cute insulating jacket she wears to make her more efficient. When I took it off later, I found a big burned place on the inside.

When I looked back at the manual, I saw that it recommended 12 liters of water for a smaller model. Helga was supposed to get 23. The heater was exposed part of the time, and it heated up one side of Helga so the jacket was scorched.

When all was said and done, I had a specific gravity (reflects sugar concentration) of around 1.040. I should have had 1.056. I turned up the boiling temperature, and eventually I added around 5 ounces of malt extract I had on hand for making yeast cultures. I got up to 1.054, which is good enough.

The lack of water prevented the mash from going as it should have, so I didn’t get as much sugar as I had hoped.

The funny thing is that before adding the wrong amount of water, I checked the manual several times.

Cleaning up was pretty easy. I took the mash pipe and screens out. I put the screens in the dishwasher. I washed the pipe and Helga herself in the kitchen sink. Not too bad.

I made the mistake of using loose hops instead of putting them in mesh bags, so I ended up with a lot of hop mush in the bottom of the kettle. I ran a lot of clean water through the pump to make sure there were no hops in it, and I tipped Helga over and rinsed everything down the drain.

When I was done, I drained Helga into my fermenting bucket, Franz, and put it in the pool, where the water was at 65°. Two hours later, the wort was down to about 71°. It only needed to be below 80° in order for it to be safe for yeast, so I suppose I can take fermenters out after an hour or so from now on.

I have gone back and forth about fermenting temperature.

I chose to begin my return to brewing with this recipe because it ferments at room temperature, but after buying the grain, I bought a little freezer for fermenting. I put a temperature control on it to get it to 68°. Fermenting at 75° can produce strange alcohols that cause headaches and hangovers, if certain people on the web are right, and I thought maybe I should ferment at a more conventional temperature.

Upon reflection, I decided to move the temperature back up but still use the freezer. Higher temperatures produce chemicals that can make beer taste better, and I didn’t want to miss that, nor did I want to violate a sound principle of cooking: never mess with a recipe if you need to learn something from it.

Brewing beer is a type of cooking.

I needed to know how the original recipe would work, and using a lower temperature would prevent that from happening.

I could have fermented on the floor in the house, but that could have caused problems. First, beers sometimes overflow when fermenting. Second, I am doing this fermentation with a loose lid to let gas out. Bugs could get in if I didn’t put Franz in a container. I don’t have a lot of bugs, but I do have a few.

I am using a brand new freezer to keep something at more or less the same temperature that surrounds the freezer. Sounds odd.

Now I’m waiting for my kegging stuff to arrive. I ordered something called a Torpedo Megamouth keg. It’s about 18″ tall and 11″ wide. Shorter than a Cornelius keg, which is what most people use. It will fit in my spare fridge so I don’t have to get a beer fridge yet.

I’ve also ordered a fancier fermenter. I chose something called a Fermzilla All-Rounder. It’s a clear plastic jug with a big mouth. The one I got comes with a valve on the lid, so you can do fermentation under pressure. My understanding is that this allows warmer fermentation, faster fermentation, and some other things I forgot. The All-Rounder is easy to clean, you can see what’s happening inside, and it’s generally better than a bucket.

Should I get a beer fridge? I guess. Not sure what to do. I don’t really want a big fridge with taps sitting out in my Christian house, scaring Christian guests, but if you’re going to make beer, you really need to be able to keep at least three types ready to drink.

I felt tremendous peace after brewing. The process was rocky when I got started, but as time passed, things went more and more smoothly, and I started to feel as though angels were doing things for me. When I got to the point where it was time to clean up, I was surprised to see how little there was to do.

I can’t explain any of that.

I still feel like God wants me to do this. I am not all that excited about drinking beer. I don’t look forward to being lectured by legalists. I’m enjoying myself, but I don’t know what it’s all about.