Sliders and Concealed Carry: the Best America Has to Offer

The problem with brewing is that so few conclusions have been nailed down, even though homebrewers seem to know a great deal. Things that should be obvious by now are still unknown to a lot of us.

Example: which tubing to use to hook gas and beer up.

When you have a keezer, which is a freezer modified with taps and one or more tanks so you can dispense beer from it, you have to have a tank, kegs, and taps. You need tubing to get the gas from the tank to the gas regulator, from the regulator to the kegs, and from the kegs to the taps.

In the old days we used plain old vinyl from Home Depot.

After I quit brewing in ’07, people started getting anxious about oxygen.

When you brew your beer and put it in a fermenter, you want it to have oxygen in it. It makes the yeast happy. When fermentation is over, you want the oxygen gone. It interacts with beer and eventually ruins the flavor.

There are a lot of ways oxygen gets into beer. I used to run a tube from a fermenter into a keg with the lid off. That was how I got beer into the keg. Of course, oxygen got in. Wasn’t really a problem, but it could have become one if I let the beer sit long enough. Now I take a sanitized keg full of CO2 and I pump beer into it from the fermenter. Everything is sealed and pressurized.

Everything should be fine, right? No, because I have been using vinyl to get gas from the tanks to the regulators. At least I did this with one tank. I have two tanks in my keezer. One is CO2, for normal beers, and the other is a nitrogen/CO2 mix, for stout. As of a few days ago, I still had vinyl on the CO2 primary regulator.

What is a primary regulator?

I have 4 kegs of beer on one tank of CO2. The CO2’s pressure is hundreds of psi. It has to be stepped down so it doesn’t blow the kegs up. There is a gas regulator on the CO2 tank to get this done.

Most guys are happy with that. They will have the same pressure in all their kegs. Not me. Ales like more gas than lagers, and heavy beers may want a whole lot of gas. I bought a secondary regulator. This is 4 regulators in parallel. Each one can be adjusted to provide a pressure I like. Right now, three are at 12 psi, and one is at 18 psi, for my brutal fake Belgian ale.

Primary regulator on the tank. Secondary regulator between the primary and the kegs.

I had a fat vinyl tube going from the primary to the secondary.

It turns out vinyl lets oxygen in. The CO2 in the vinyl is at a minimum of 18 psi in order to get 18 psi in the fake Belgian, and atmospheric air is at 0 psi (gauge pressure), so how can oxygen get in? Doesn’t the CO2 keep it out? Apparently not. It’s sort of like osmosis. The tube sees 0 psi of oxygen inside itself, but our atmosphere is about 20% oxygen, so it sees oxygen pressure outside. The vinyl is not perfectly impermeable to oxygen, so some goes in.

This is the story, anyway.

An Australian company named Kegland makes all sorts of innovative products for brewers, and they created (or maybe found) EVAbarrier, a stiff tubing that is pretty good at keeping oxygen out. They also sell Duotight fittings to connect the tubing to beer and gas.

It’s really convenient. You don’t have to use hose clamps. You cut your tubing to the right length and shove it into the fittings. They bite down on it and seal it up.

As of night before last, my CO2 system has been connected with EVAbarrier. I was already using it for everything but the primary-secondary leg, so I only had to replace two fittings and one tube.

I resumed brewing at the end of December. I made some errors. Wrong mashing schedules. I accidentally shot lubricating oil into a batch of beer because I used a pellet gun CO2 cartridge instead of one made for beverages. Little things went wrong, but I still have one beer from early this year which is very good. As I get caught up with new technology, things get better.

I have one recipe I’m not planning to brew again. It’s just not great. Other than that, I can’t find factory beer I like as much as my own. If I had to go back to factory beer, I’d go back to my old drinking habits, meaning around a 12-pack per year.

I’m having a stout right now. It’s hard to imagine how this beer could be better.

I was thinking I should brew a wheat ale tomorrow. I have a couple of batches of grain, including a wheat recipe, and I don’t have any wheat beer except for the really heavy one I made last week. Today I realized that if I brew beer tomorrow, my wife may well be here before it’s ready to drink.

Her embassy appointment is finally upon us. She could be here 10 days from now, depending on the breaks and whether she is serious about getting her hair done before she comes.

It’s very weird, being this close. I go to the store and buy things, and I find myself thinking she may be here to eat them.

We spend a tremendous amount of time on the phone together. That’s all about to end. What will we do with our time when we suddenly find ourselves with days that aren’t broken up by calls? We’ll save at least three hours per day, and we will have nearly nothing to do.

I have to face the reality of not living like a single man. I have to get a kitchen table that doesn’t fold up. I need two real dressers instead of the awful, enormous dresser my mother got at an outlet store in the Carolinas in the Seventies. I’ll have to move my $80 Chinese Amazon headboard to a bed in a guest room.

I have talked about buying her a business class ticket. I’m looking into it. She will probably have a flight running around 35 hours. Airlines don’t have much interest in Zambia, so she will have to have a minimum of two stops.

Personally, I am an economy guy. I believe I’ve flown first class twice. I recall my dad upgrading the two of us with his endless points. That happened once. I also recall sitting in a first class seat next to a drunk who was some kind of prisoner. He cried a lot. As I recall, he was a black man in a red suit.

I was probably in college. I don’t recall how I got into first class, and I have no idea why they chose me to sit next to a prisoner. I seem to recall him being handcuffed to an armrest. That can’t be right, can it? Maybe that’s how they did things back then.

I don’t recall having a cop anywhere near us.

If I’m going to spend thousands of dollars, I want something I can touch. A piece of jewelry. A new welding table. I don’t want to spend $200 an hour for a ticket upgrade so my butt can be slightly less sore the next day.

Let’s face it. While an upgrade may be nice for a short flight, there is no such thing as a nice long flight. Moving you to business class doesn’t help. I don’t care if they give you a stateroom with a bed. It’s still going to be a miserable experience. I’d rather have the money than the 10% decrease in suffering.

I brought up business class, however, and my wife liked the idea, so now I’m on the hook. I hope she enjoys it and takes pictures, because I don’t plan on buying any more business class tickets unless Elon Musk sees my blog and decides to send me one of his spare billions.

Finding my wife a business class ticket that costs less than a major operation is a challenge, mostly because everyone hates Africans. Flights that are low on the cost scale almost always involve self-transfers. That means she will have to get off the plane at least once, get her bags, go through customs and immigration, go through security again, and board. It’s not a big problem if you’re American, but if you’re African, many countries will force you to get a visa in order to walk across their airports and change planes.

It’s idiotic. Even if her brand-new green card will motivate a country to issue a visa, it will take forever to get the visa, so it’s not practical. I would have to pay her rent in Zambia the whole time, and then she might get turned down.

West Africans are the problem. Especially Nigerians. They go to other countries, refuse to leave, and start criminal enterprises.

I can’t route her through England. Forget that. Our best bet looks like Turkey. She might have to stop in Dubai on the way. She might have to land in two different African countries.

So what will we do when she gets here?

High on the list: White Castle. The family that owns the company sadistically refuses to expand in any meaningful way, but they opened a restaurant in Orlando. The biggest White Castle on Earth. We’ll be doing that.

Sonny’s. This is a Florida barbecue chain. Pretty good, even though Bidenflation now has them putting “Market Price” beside ribs on the menu.

She loves Italian food. There’s a really good place near me. Run by Mexicans. Go figure. It’s clean. The prices are reasonable. The food is great. The staff is polite.

I’ll have to get her a driver’s license ASAP, not to mention a carry permit. Permits are not required in Florida, but if she has one, she will be allowed to carry in other states. I already have a 9mm for her with a Crimson Trace.

After all this, the dentist. And we have to get medical insurance and a new phone plan for two.

We are not doing too bad for clothing and so on. We traveled to countries with good stores.

We need to get the pickup in shape so we will have two vehicles.

That’s all I can think of. I wanted to take her to Israel, but our timing has worked out poorly. There are no good winter destinations in the US.

Okay, maybe there are, but we have no interest in skiing or beaches, and we’re not going to places that look better with leaves on the trees.

I hope to have her out in the pasture shooting steel very soon. I can taste those sliders already.

Strange Brew Goes from Grain to Glass in One Week

My newest beer is now drinkable, way before it should have been. And I am delighted and confused.

Way back in 2004, I decided to brew something resembling a heavy Belgian beer. In my eyes, the Belgians are the kings of brewing. At least they were, before Americans and Australians became the world’s best homebrewers and craft brewers. Belgians make all kinds of nutty beers. Germans make BMW beer. Boring. All about hitting certain targets as accurately as possible, as though brewing were F-class shooting. They obey crusty old rules that are, sorry to say it, arbitrary. Belgians make beers that are full of weird flavors. Complex. Surprising. In many cases, strong.

I liked Chimay’s beers. Chimay is or was a Belgian company. I believe it now belongs to a multinational conglomerate. It started in a monastery, with Trappist monks. Let’s put this on the table: historically, monks have really enjoyed getting drunk and eating great food. The Chimay monks made beers I would describe as flamboyant. Tons of flavor. Tons of alcohol.

For some reason I no longer recall, I decided to see if I could make a wonderful beer that was sort of like what Chimay would make if it were me. I came up with a grain bill that was nearly half wheat. I added table sugar just to bump the ABV up, and I hoped it would add a cidery flavor, which sucrose supposedly does.

Belgians use something called candi sugar. I have no idea what it is, but experience brewers told me table sugar would have basically the same effect. There are dark candi sugars that color beer, but I wasn’t interested in that.

I came up with this, off the top of my head:

5 lbs Wheat Malt, Ger (2.0 SRM)
4 lbs Pilsner (2 Row) Bel (2.0 SRM)
2 lbs Pale Malt (2 Row) US (2.0 SRM)
1 lbs 8.0 oz Caramel/Crystal Malt – 60L (60.0 SRM)
1 lbs Munich Malt (9.0 SRM)
1 lbs table sugar

That’s how the brewing program Beersmith describes my grain bill.

I used Nugget and Crystal hops, which give a wonderful, penetrating aroma.

The beer was fantastic, and like a lot of heavy beers, it got better with age. A lot of people age heavy beers for a year or more before drinking them.

When I got back into brewing this year, I decided to redo this beer, but I chose to use Sabro hops. This is a new hop, and it’s pretty weird. It’s extremely bitter, so you have to be careful how much you add when you’re boiling. Boiling brings out bitterness. When you steep it or use it for dry-hopping, you get other things. It supposedly produces coconut and pineapple flavors and aromas. I thought Sabro was perfect for this beer, which is pretty sweet even after fermentation is over.

I brewed my new batch one week ago today. I have a brewing machine called a Braumeister, and it is rated for up to 6 kg of grain. My recipe goes over 6.1, and it contains wheat, which tends to gum things up and require the addition of rice hulls to make water go through it.

I chose to dump this stuff in the Braumeister and see what happened. I was only going over the published limit by a small amount, and the Braumeister does a great job with wheat. If it worked, I would know the machine could handle it, so I would be able to make future batches without changing anything. If not, I would know different.

I was shooting for an unfermented (original) gravity of 1.084, and I hit 1.073, assuming my measurements were okay. I had some issues with my cheap refractometer. I added dehydrated malt extract, which is mainly sugar, to make up the difference.

I fermented using Abbaye yeast, which is supposedly derived from Trappist yeast. It has a reputation for giving off esters that produce spicy and fruity flavors. I fermented at 65° to reduce banana-flavored esters and push spicy esters.

This beer went from 1.084 to 1.017 in two days. My target was 1.018. Heavy beers often take over a week to ferment. Wheat beers ferment very quickly, so I guess that explains what happened.

I sampled the beer when fermentation was over, and it was harsh. It had a solvent taste, which is normal for heavy beers that aren’t aged. I felt a burn when I drank it. This beer should contain about 9% alcohol by volume, and you can feel that when you drink, especially when a beer is young.

Yesterday, I sampled the beer again, and it was still harsh. I moved it to a new keg, to get it away from the hops I used to dry-hop it and the yeast that grew while it fermented. I decided to age the beer at 55° to kill the harshness. I expected weeks to pass before the beer was worth drinking.

Having no patience, today I checked the beer again, and it was perfect. Sweet, tasty, and free from solvent flavors. It no longer burned in my mouth, but I felt the burn down in my esophagus.

This is not supposed to happen. It should have taken a long time to improve.

I don’t know what’s going on. I’m sure the beer is finished. I had a pretty small amount tonight, and I have to say that I felt it. It was nothing like my other beers, which are considerably weaker.

I moved it to my keezer, where it will reach 35° by tomorrow. I see no point in keeping it at 55° when it’s so good right now. I know that if there is any fermentable sugar left in it, the residual yeast will consume it in spite of the low temperature. Anyone who tells you beer stops fermenting when you chill it and get rid of the yeast cake is dreaming.

I can’t figure out what’s going on, but good beer is good beer. If it’s done fermenting and the gravity is low, and the harshness is gone, it’s finished. It may not be as good as it will become later, but it’s ready to drink, weeks before I thought it would be.

It’s Beaujolais beer.

It’s unbelievably good. I thought my stout was good, and it is, but this is better.

All Beer Should be This Good

Today I’m drinking my lovely Great Again Lager, brewed to an orange hue to honor the president who stood up for our right to great showerheads.

I brewed on October 2, and today is the 10th. I kegged at a gravity of 1.013, which should have been rock bottom, judging from other iterations. I pressure-fermented in a stainless 6-gallon keg and transferred the beer to a smaller keg without exposing it to the air. The day I kegged it, I shot a teaspoon and a half of hydrated Knox gelatin into it to clarify it.

It has been 4 days since kegging, and I have been watching the beer closely, taking samples. Until yesterday it was too cloudy and yeasty to really savor, but today it is nearly normal, so I am having a full pint.

I think this beer will be a monster when it’s fully clear and mature. Assuming there is any left by then. It has always been wonderful in the past.

While I was waiting for this beer to be ready, I opened a can of Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA. My favorite factory IPA is Snake Dog, but I can never find it. Dogfish Head is very nice. Lighter in color than my Great Again Lager. They dry hop it, which means they dump additional hops into it after brewing, so they’re not boiled. These hops add raw flavor and aroma, so you really get the value of all that breeding.

I started to think Dogfish Head was better than my lager, and I wondered if I should dry hop my next lager and stout, but then I had second thoughts. The dry hop aroma and flavor were wonderful, but I felt the aroma distracted me from the taste of the beer itself.

When you cook, you don’t always have to give people both barrels. If you throw everything you have at them, you can overpower subtle qualities they would otherwise appreciate. For example, putting anything other than salt and pepper on steak is dangerous unless it’s a cheap cut, because a good steak fried in butter already has all the flavor you need. I would make an exception for Bearnaise sauce, but I believe nothing but salt and pepper should be applied prior to cooking. I don’t even use pepper.

What’s my favorite kind of pizza? Cheese, AKA plain. I like pepperoni, and I like Hawaiian, but nothing impresses like a good cheese pizza. A monkey can make an okay pizza with 6 toppings. It takes a good cook to make an excellent cheese pizza. All the flaws are exposed.

A good beer without too much frippery is like a good cheese pizza or a really excellent biscuit. It stands on its own.

The world is full of brewkids now, and they are always doing too much. They make “juicy” IPA’s. That means they have lots of sweetening malts and not much bitterness. Like juice boxes. They make “milk stout,” which is stout sweetened with unfermentable sugar. It’s gross. I saw one guy making Cinnamon Toast Crunch beer, named for the cereal. No, thanks.

They seem to dry-hop everything. I would not go so far as the Germans, who seem to think flavor and aroma are embarrassing, but if you’ve got something good to start with, why cover it up?

I now think I’m going to dry hop my next beer, a wheat, but I don’t think I’ll touch my stout, which is perfect. I might add a tiny bit of raw Crystal hops to my orange lager next time, but just enough to draw your nose to the glass, not so much it punches you in the face.

I’m always behind the times. Today I joked that my orange beer was really an India Pale Lager. It has a robust flavor and lots of hops, somewhat like an IPA. Then I Googled and found out India Pale Lagers exist.

It seems like a stupid name for a beer. “India Pale Ale” got its name for good reason, long ago. The Wikipedia page on IPA is interesting. British brewers made an amber ale called October beer. In Britain, people cellared it for two years before drinking it. It was also shipped to India, and it was discovered that the conditions of the trip improved it. Eventually, it became known as India Pale Ale.

The phrase “India Pale Lager” is a modern thing invented by brewkids. It didn’t exist until recently. The British didn’t send amber lager to India and all that. I guess I understand why brewkids call it IPL, though, because it makes it pretty clear what it is.

I started brewing again at about the turn of the year, and it looks like I have a pretty good system going. I can keep 5 kegs going in the kitchen, using both beer gas and CO2. I can ferment two beers at once at whatever temperature I want. I have the brewing machine figured out. I haven’t had a single infected beer. I think the brewing future is bright here at the Heavily Armed Gated Northern Florida Compound.

What You Don’t Know You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

My latest beer, an orange lager, is nearly ready to keg, and I only started on Monday.

Brewing is like cooking, because it’s really a kind of cooking. It’s a culinary art. Beverages are part of every cuisine. I stand by that. Like all types of food and beverage preparation, brewing is full of myths and old wive’s tales. You know what I mean. “Steaks have to be rested.” “Dough has to be kneaded for 10 minutes.”

Traditional lager brewing takes a long time. Lagers are fermented at lower temperatures than ales, slowing the yeast down. Then they are “lagered,” which means they sit and age for weeks to kill the off flavors. How much of this stuff is really necessary? Not all of it.

There is a site called Brulosophy. The proprietor tests beer myths. For example, he may make two batches of the same beer, boiling one for 30 minutes and the other at 60. He then makes people taste the results and tell him whether they can tell a difference. He applies statistics to determine whether there really is a perceptible difference. He has brewed beers at different temperatures with excellent results. He has tested to see if lagering is needed. He has done all kinds of things to annoy traditionalists. There must be a bounty on him in Germany.

Also, homebrewing has changed over the last few years. For one thing, many people, myself included, now ferment some beers under pressure. The pressure suppresses off flavors that ordinarily arise when you ferment at higher temperatures. If you crank up the pressure, you can ferment faster and get the same results. Yeast likes heat.

I started pressure-fermenting as soon as I heard about it. I made the mistake of buying a plastic pressure fermenter called an All-Rounder. It’s made by Kegland, an Australian company. Actually, I think they’re Chinese, because they have a shop on Aliexpress, the guy who does their videos looks Chinese, and they have at least one product they can’t sell in the US because of patent problems.

The All-Rounder is just a huge plastic jug with a round bottom. The screw-on lid has fittings on it for disconnects, which are devices that let gas and liquid go in and out.

I got a decent lager out of my All-Rounder on the first try. I fermented at 75°, which was convenient. No fridge needed. It had a taste that reminded me of freshly-mown grass, but it wore off after a month.

I decided I did not like the All-Rounder. The jug is flimsy. It weakens with repeated use. You’re supposed to pressure-test it and eventually get rid of it. I don’t want a fermenter blowing up in my garage, and I don’t want to spend a lot of money on the same product, over and over. It’s like buying an inkjet printer for $50 and spending $5000 on ink.

I now use Torpedo Megamouth 6-gallon stainless kegs. These do not blow up if the pressure gets too high. Like ordinary homebrew kegs, they have pressure relief valves, and these valves release long before the pressure can hurt stainless steel. Plastic, not so much. Not if it’s old and weak.

I make 5 gallons of beer at a whack, so a 6-gallon keg will hold all the beer plus whatever foam grows on top. I add a product called Fermcap to prevent the foam from getting too thick.

I wondered if fermenting at 75° caused my off flavor. I also suspected oxygen, because I believe there was a point where I had to let a tiny bit of air into the All-Rounder. I decided to ferment this latest batch at 60° instead.

There are always a few little problems on brew day, but I got this thing into the fridge in the evening on Monday.

Of course, I always have to make a mistake, and this time, I failed to set the keg O-ring properly. As of yesterday, I thought the beer was doing nothing, because the pressure wasn’t building. I have a gauge on the fermenter, and it was stuck at zero.

Instead of doing the obvious thing and checking the seal with soapy water, I fiddled around for several hours. Finally, I got out the spray bottle, and I found the issue. I fixed it up and pumped 15 psi into the keg. While I was doing all this, I had to crack the keg lid open, and I saw all sorts of krausen, which means foaming yeast. The fermentation was flying.

Today when I checked, the pressure was way over 15. It was past the numbers. Maybe 25, if I had to guess. I adjusted it and tested the beer’s specific gravity, which drops as beer ferments. I got 1.013. That was a lot lower than what I expected. Things are going quickly.

I had some unusual problems measuring the gravity on Monday. Not sure what was happening. I was using a cheap refractometer which generally works fine. I have a theory that, because I was mixing boiled water into the wort to change the gravity, I got some samples which had more water in them than others. Or maybe stirring the crud on the bottom of the kettle up while mixing the water in increased the gravity for some readings. Anyway, my best guess is that the OG (original gravity) was 1.053, or 0.001 above the target. A bullseye, really, because refractometers and hydrometers aren’t as accurate as brewers like to think. This beer’s gravity plunged 40 points in under 60 hours.

My target FG (final gravity) is 1.012, so 1.013 means the beer is either finished or nearly so. If it was actually lighter than 1.053 to start, it’s done. If it was heavier, it may have some time to go.

It tastes fine, except for the harsh yeast bite every new beer has before the yeast drops out. Yeast is bitter. I’m not getting any grass flavor.

It looks like I can ferment a great lager in 4 days at 60°, which tells me there is no reason to go to 75°. I remember when people were keeping lagers in their fermenters for much longer. Four days will be fine.

Now I have to decide when to clarify and keg the beer.

Conventional wisdom says beer doesn’t ferment after kegging, but I know this is wrong. It may be true for factory beers, some of which are pasteurized, but I know at least one of my beers (stout) gets dryer after kegging, and that means yeast is at work.

I would like to have yeast on the job after kegging, to continue to improve the beer.

What about clarifying? I will be adding gelatin to the beer, and this makes all the floating stuff fall out, presumably including yeast. If I clarify before kegging, will that be too much for the yeast to handle?

Stout isn’t clarified, so I can’t really judge by what it does.

When I got started in brewing, they told me not to touch a lager for weeks after I kegged it. Should I listen to that advice now? I don’t think so. Many people question it, and not just people who don’t know good beer.

I think this beer will be very good as soon as I keg it, and it will be perfect a month later. The plan is to keg it and then put it in the keezer at 35°. I’m a slow drinker, so I will probably take 6 months to empty it. I think it will age perfectly well during that time, and I think the beer will stop improving after a month.

Brewers who do lagers often do “diacetyl rests.” This means heating your still-unkegged beer a few degrees and letting it sit until the diacetyl goes away.

Diacetyl is the chemical they put on fake buttered popcorn. Sometimes beer generates it during fermentation. I don’t plan to do a diacetyl rest. My understanding is that warm fermentations don’t produce diacetyl. This is one of the reasons people use pressure. I have also read that commercial brewers use pressure for this reason.

I think I’ll just shoot gelatin into this beer tomorrow and keg it using a closed, oxygen-free system. I should be drinking it on Saturday.

Tomorrow I’m making stout. I haven’t finished my last keg, but the thought of being without stout is terrifying. After that, I might go nuts and make a wheat-heavy Belgiany beer I made in the past. It’s very strong and full of flavor, and you can literally age it for years without ruining it.

By the middle of next week, I should have a keg of orange lager and a fresh keg of stout ready to drink. After that, I’ll feel safe enough to play with other things. I don’t want to run out of staples. They come first.

I wanted to call my orange lager Mar-a-Lager, for obvious reasons, but someone took the name a long time ago. Same for MAGA Lager. “Bigly” is taken. “Covfefe.” I call it Great Again Lager. Best I could do.

Because the beer I’m making now is already under pressure, carbonating it should be either easy or unnecessary. Another benefit. Carbonating a flat new beer is tricky, and you can end up with a long period of foamy beer.

It’s nice, having kind of a system worked out. I don’t wonder what equipment I need or what changes I have to make. The basic plan is in place. Everything else is small strokes.

Or Something

My wife had a funny revelation the other day. We were talking about the male fetishists who have decided they’re women, and we discussed the way they’re pushing women off the stage. My wife said it was “toxic femininity.”

Of course, that’s not really right. It’s toxic effeminacy. Males aren’t actually feminine. They mimic femininity.

Women are finally starting to speak up about the way trannies are mounting a hostile takeover. Too late, but at least it has started. Traditionally, women have been huge supporters of…I can’t think of a word…fruity men, I guess I’ll call them. Men are much, much sharper about fruity men. We can detect them easily, and we have a better understanding of their ability to do harm. We know they rape other males, for example. Women are often totally unable to detect fruitiness in men. They are so clueless, they often date or marry effeminate men everyone else knows are homosexual.

Liza Minnelli married three homosexuals and had no idea.

This is an example of what happens when women don’t listen to men. We were put on Earth to protect them, and they didn’t let us do it because they thought they knew better.

After decades of pushing the alphabet agenda, women are getting payback. Men are getting women’s awards. Men are ending women’s sports by making it impossible for women to win. Men are walking around naked in women’s locker rooms with female minors, with the law behind them. And women are just going to have to take it.

I saw something remarkable this week. Target now has a gay section, and they are selling women’s swimsuits for men. These suits have special flaps or something for men who want to hide their genitals. Sorry if this makes you gag, but they are called “tuck-friendly.” So there is more than one tucker in the news.

Adidas just put out a woman’s swimsuit ad featuring a man, and they had him stand with his side to the camera so his genitals push the suit out and announce their presence.

So where do women fit in now? Are they supposed to be like the chubby girl who goes to a bar with a beautiful friend, waiting for leftovers? Always Miss Congeniality, never Miss America?

This week people are talking about Miller Lite, a quasi-beer made with corn syrup and hop extract. Bud Light committed suicide by putting a famous tranny on its cans, and now people are upset because Miller Lite is shaming men…by shaming Miller. Insert question marks here.

Miller hired a completely talentless comedian named…I can’t remember because she’s so bad…I’m thinking…I gave up. I had to look her up again. Ilana Glazer. Miss Glazer did an ad in which she scolded the beer industry for using models in bikinis. As though commandos had kidnapped attractive girls and waterboarded them into putting on swimsuits.

I’m a Christian. I think lewd ads are a bad idea. But punishing the men you sold billions of cases of bad beer to, for liking ads you created without their input, is somewhat ridiculous.

Miss Glazer goes on to use profanity, with multiple ineffective bleeps, to describe what evil beer execs have foisted on women. She uses the S word over and over, and then she goes on a weird fantasy narrative about fictional women doing things with nonexistent manure in order to make beer.

It’s as crazy as it sounds.

She says women were involved in making beer when it was first discovered. As though this means something. Did someone claim women couldn’t make beer? Is that a sexist canard no one was aware of until now? Have women been battling unsuccessfully for the right to make beer? What man would ever tell anyone not to make beer?

Even Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby would have no problem allowing women to make beer. It’s not a real issue.

Now no one wants to buy Miller Lite, so if you go to your local store, you will probably see stacks of it alongside the cobwebbed towers of Anheuser-Busch products.

I’ll bet AB is telling drivers not to pile the cases up too high. Photos of unbought cases have filled the web.

Here’s an interesting fact Miller didn’t think about: women don’t like beer.

Okay, maybe when you were a kid, your mom greeted you every afternoon with her third Miller tall boy in her hand, and I am not claiming there is no woman who drinks beer, but men are over twice as likely to drink it, and, more germanely, to buy it.

Should I use the word “germanely” even though I’m male? Am I appropriating anything? I didn’t type “Germainely.”

Let me adjust my dreadlocks.

So Miller Coors decided to offend the very demographic that buys their awful and totally fungible product, in order to please a demographic that will never buy much of it no matter what they do.

Incidentally, “Miller Coors” is a hilarious name, because for years, people who like good beer have been referring to bad factory beer as “Budmilcoors.” Life parodies parody.

Here’s more weird information about Miller’s kamikaze advertising: the people who made the ad were chosen via affimative action. Miller hired an all-gal team.

Here’s another important generalization: women aren’t funny.

Yes, there are some funny women. Now, find me a woman who is as funny as Dave Chappelle. Find me a female W.C. Fields or Charlie Chaplin or Mike Meyers. If I name 50 really funny male comedians, can you name 50 female comics who are just as good? No way in heaven or Earth.

Ilana Glazer herself is about as funny as anaphylactic shock on a camping trip. She has appeared in a show called The Broad Show or Broadly Speaking or something, and maybe she’s a funny comic actress when reading other people’s material, but her standup show is as entertaining as watching Hannah Gadsby pass kidney stones.

There is a new crop of female comedians, and they are not like the old ones. When we watched the old ones, we laughed because they were funny. When we watch the new affirmative action beneficiaries, we listen in silence while captive audiences laugh because they’re supposed to.

Not laughing at bad female comedians is sexist.

“Are you an obese Indian lesbian? You are a gifted female comedian. Netflix is proud to have you.” “Do you cut yourself and hate your mother? We have a studio audience you can tell about it.”

I never liked Roseanne Barr’s personality much, but she was funny. Joan Rivers was funny. The girl who impersonates the Asian nail lady is funny. Merit used to mean something. Now you just have to have the right chromosomes.

Well, that was stupid. The chromosomes will actually put transvestites ahead of you in line. But you’ll still be privileged compared to normal men.

I mean men who admit they’re men and don’t have sex with men…who don’t admit they’re men. Or who do admit they’re men but..I give up.

By the way, when I say female comedians aren’t that good, I mean actual comedians, not comic actresses. If you can’t write material, you’re not a comedian. You’re a fake, like Lily Tomlin.

To get back to the ad, Miller hired an all-girl team to make an ad proving women are funny, and they made an ad that’s not funny at all. It’s just angry. “Shame on you for letting our company let women with free will exhibit themselves.” “Shame on you for denying women credit for brewing beer, which you didn’t actually do.”

Hasn’t anyone seen Laverne and Shirley?

Miller actually reinforced the notion that women need help.

You know what would have prevented this? They could have hired funny trannies. Men who claim to be women but still have male humor genes. That would have been perfect.

“We proved women are talented and funny by hiring women with male genitals.”

It brings me back to toxic effeminacy. The fairer sex is committing suicide in America.

The problem with women’s sports is more damaging than people are saying. Why do girls play sports? For fun? No. To get scholarships. They don’t keep playing field hockey or whatever after they leave college. A few go on to make $60,000 a year in the WNBA, a lot of which comes from charity dollars from the NBA, but the real purpose of women’s sports is to save families huge tuition bills and get mediocre students into good colleges. Having that taken away is devastating to a girl.

It can be the difference between Stanford Law and Red Lobster.

You know what I want to see? Dylan Mulvaney with a Best Actress Oscar. Maybe that will wake women up for real. At that point, the tranny conquest will be complete, and women will only be used to create new male babies.

Instead of becoming female impersonators, trannies will become female impersonator impersonators. Forget Cher and Dolly Parton. Let’s all be Dylan.

Why is “female impersonator” still a phrase? Seems transphobic to me. Someone hit the cancel button.

I don’t know it can be any clearer that the end of the age is here. We may have years, but I doubt we have decades. Maybe God is waiting for us to do animal sex acts during Super Bowl halftime.

Here’s a revelation I got today. My wife and I were talking, and we were discussing the fact that we don’t belong to our earthly nations. We are just visitors who are citizens of heaven. We are ambassadors, and our bodies are embassies. The Bible says these things.

I asked her what a country does when war breaks out. Answer: it calls its ambassadors home. We didn’t have diplomats in Berlin during World War Two. There is no point in keeping diplomats in a hostile alien area during a war. When you’re at war, diplomacy has failed.

God has been diplomatic for thousands of years. The time for diplomacy is over. It didn’t work. It’s almost time for us to go, and I can’t wait. I want to live in a world without leftists. My home world.

Guess it’s a good thing I started making my own beer this year. Not that I drank Bud Light or Miller Lite to begin with.

Now You Know Your Purpose

I just saw the news about California “reparations.” I’m thrilled. The boil came to a head, leftist politicians popped it, and now the hot pus is flowing over every citizen who voted for them.

According to Fox, payments can add up to a few thousand to over a million dollars for one “victim.” I wish it were more. I guess it will be, though, because as far as I can see, this is only the state version of “reparations.” I believe the local versions are yet to be announced. San Francisco is talking about payments that could add up to tens of millions for some individuals.

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

We need to see the appendix burst and the patient roll into the OR, only to find out the surgeon is on the side of the sepsis.

I like using quotation marks for “reparations,” because it’s a misnomer. Reparations are for actual victims, and they are paid by actual offenders. There are zero American former slaves alive today. There are zero American former slave owners alive today. I guess I’ll quit using quotation marks now, though, because typing them is a pain. Just pretend they’re still there.

Reparations have already been paid, over and over. Money and opportunities have been piled onto American blacks for many decades. People who had nothing to do with slavery were deprived in order to provide all this assistance. It’s time to let it go. But that won’t happen. Reparations will keep increasing. The apocalypse is here, and delusion that only escalates is one of the symptoms.

I want to see this world fixed. I’m tired of the mass psychosis. I’m tired of living in a broken world.

This place is a mess. Think about it. Think about all the passwords you know. Think about the locks you have to lock. Think about your antivirus software and the stupid puzzles you have to solve to get into websites. In a sane world, would criminals be out to get you every hour of every day?

Think about the suffering around you. If you’re used to the murders and rapes and so on that take place among humans, think of the animals. Think of the horrible suffering they endure due to predation and pointless intraspecies fights. None of this is normal.

I’m tired of it. I’m tired of solving Internet puzzles. I’m tired of being told I have to make up new passwords. I’m tired of knowing leftist lunatics are planning for a time when they can come to places like my county and do things that would shame the Japanese who invaded Nanking.

I’m tired of the hatred and childishness in the news. I’m sick of politics. I hate democracy. I want King Yeshua.

Is hating democracy and rooting for a thousand-year monarchy treason? No. There’s kind of a loophole. You can’t get in trouble for supporting a foreign monarch who lives in heaven. Only earthly enemies.

None of the world’s big problems will be fixed until this age ends, so bring it on. Let’s rip the Band-Aid off the festering scab. Reparations! Pronouns! Sodomy in the streets! Mass firings! Confiscation of property! Socialism! Censorship! War! Racism! Let’s do it.

Maybe the reparations storm will serve to wake a few leftists up and bring them into the family of God before the rapture. Maybe it will wake up other people who have been asleep.

The suffering of the apocalypse is going to happen anyway, and things are never going to get better than they are right now, so the quicker the end comes, the better off the world will be.

Am I the only one who is sick of this place? Am I the only one who has a great life yet wishes to spend the rest of it in a better world?

Most days, I talk to my buddy Mike, who has come around as the Holy Spirit has done his work. Mike always says the same thing: “It’s over.” The Air Force is using trannies to recruit airmen. “It’s over.” Bud Light used a tranny to attract customers. “It’s over.” Satanists are opening clubs in elementary schools. “It’s over.”

I saw a great video a couple of days back. It showed San Franciscans venting to the Board of Supervisors. This is the Board that wants to give millions to random black people. One lady said she was going to spend her microphone time screaming, and she did.

Instead of putting her in a padded room, the supervisors sat and took their punishment. A homelessexual with green hair appeared, and he yelled out his demands. He DEMANDED good housing and medical care, like someone owed it to him. He was furious. They took him completely seriously.

It reminded me of something I witnessed.

My sister is a drug addict, and she is beyond redemption. She is the incarnation of entitlement. She was mad at my elderly dad about something or other that was completely her fault.

I don’t know what she was mad about. He had paid for her rehab more than once, without telling me, even though she had money of her own and some sort of law practice. And equity in a house for which he paid most of the cost. I think she was upset about something related to more money, but I couldn’t tell you for sure. It was years ago. I haven’t had any communication with her in 8 years, I think.

She stomped into his house and slammed the door, and she barked, “I’m going to give you ONE more chance!!” I heard her footsteps as she marched across the hardwood.

She didn’t know I was there, a few feet away, in another room, with the door open.

After her warning cry, I heard her telling him not to touch her and generally venting her shock and anger. I heard their feet moving across the floor. Then I heard the front door slam again. She was outside. He had taken her by the arm and deposited her on the porch.

This is what the supervisors should have done to the nuts who lectured them. Unfortunately, the supervisors are apparently not much different, so if crazy people were going to be ejected from the room, the supervisors would have had to go, too.

Interesting side story: my sister called me a few minutes after she was expelled, threatening to have my dad arrested and disbarred. She had broken her arm in a kitchen fall weeks earlier, and she claimed my dad had re-broken it by escorting her out the door. She was furious.

While she was telling me this over the phone, she bought a Coke at a drive-through. I heard her paying and receiving a big cup. So was in terrible pain with a fresh disabling injury, but she still managed to drive to McDonald’s and buy a huge soda through a window.

As a witness, I knew the whole thing was nonsense, but I didn’t bother letting her know. I figured it would be best to provide that information after the police came, if indeed they did. They never showed.

She did call the cops on another occasion, and they took her about as seriously as you would expect. A middle-aged woman with a BMW 335i and few front teeth, making unsupported claims about an octogenarian who looked considerably less threatening than Wilford Brimley.

Not the Wilford Brimley from The Firm. The one from the oatmeal commercials.

Anyway, I know what entitlement and hatred of the truth look like, so when I saw the video, it was almost nostalgic.

The common thread is the inability to perceive one’s complete lack of leverage. In both cases, people attacked other people they depended on, made bizarre demands as though they had been cheated, and verbally abused the individuals they hoped would show them charity.

It’s not a good approach.

Government bodies and voters have become enablers, and what happens to enablers if they don’t stop? They die, consumed and defeated. Then their parasites move on to other hosts.

If you’re in God’s good graces, you have favor, and he makes you the head and not the tail. That means your enemies fail, and either he ejects them from your life, or you rule over them. You can’t have God’s favor and be an enabler. Enablers are losers.

A person who has favor will get victory over others, no matter how strong their enemies seem to be. As the Bible says, one will put a thousand to flight. If you don’t have favor, you’re the thousand, not the one. People who have no power and no leverage will push you around and eat you alive, no matter how big and strong you think you are. This is what happened to my late mother. My sister emptied her like a tube of toothpaste.

America has lost God’s favor. That’s why nuts can paint lying slogans on busy streets and throw Molotov cocktails at the police without getting in trouble. It’s why Californians are going to get some amazing tax bills in the future. They will lose and lose and lose. They turned on God, and now they’re enablers. Hosts. The parasites will eat them.

Every day, I pray for Yahweh to send Yeshua as soon as possible, to get us out. The days of revival are over. We are not going to see significant numbers of souls saved, but we will see many people lose their salvation.

Actually, there is a revival going on, and it’s huge. It’s global. It’s Satan’s revival. He has revivals, too. He lost a lot of souls in the flood and in God’s salvation campaigns. Now he’s winning again. His crusades are everywhere, and they are winning a staggering number of souls. You can see it in statistics. Now 40% of millennials identify as sexual degenerates, and Christianity has declined by about the same percentage in the US, since 2000. Those are horrific figures. Ten percent would be amazing, but we are looking at 40, and the next decade will be much worse than the last. We’re done.

It’s over.

Reparations for everyone. A global round of Bud Light. Let’s just do it. Sell drugs at McDonald’s. Let women go to malls and church naked. Take white people’s wealth. Open the prisons.

Do it do it do it. But I pray my wife and I will not be here to see it.

Little Beers are Okay

I guess it’s time to be open about my drinking problem.

It’s not the usual kind of drinking problem. The problem is that I did what everyone with a new hobby does. I overdid it. And the hobby was brewing beer. If you start fishing, you’ll fish every weekend. If you buy a wood lathe, you’ll make all your friends unwanted and useless wooden goblets for a couple of months. If you start making beer, you’ll want to have several beers every day.

There are two serious consequences of drinking several beers every day. For one, you get fat, and for another, you can never go anywhere. You’re always waiting for your blood alcohol level to be right before you get in the car. It doesn’t take a lot of drinking to get you in trouble if you have an accident. You may not be impaired, and the accident may be unrelated to drinking, but you can get a DUI off a couple of strong beers anyway.

For years, I barely drank at all. One reason was that I just wasn’t interested in it, but another was that I couldn’t get beer I really liked. When you make your own beer, you get exactly what you want. You pick the grain, yeast, hops, fermentation schedule, mashings schedule, carbonation level…everything just the way you like it. Then when you go back to factory beer, nearly every beer is at least a little disappointing.

I am now at the stage where I have 5 beers on tap. One is not quite perfect, but I still like it better than factory beer. One, my stout, is beyond belief. I actually get a little nervous when I consider the possibility that I may time my next brew wrong and end up with a stout hiatus.

I feel like I’ve been in beer jail since 2006. Now I’m enjoying all the things I missed out on.

When you have really good beer, you don’t want to have just one. You want to start with something relatively light and then have something with more impact. You’re not going to have one pint of lager and quit. You’ll want a stout or an ale next. So for a while, I was having several beers per day, most days.

I came up with an answer. Small glasses.

Early on, I got two sets of what people call pilsner glasses. These are tall, curvy glasses that are good for serving most beers. One set seemed a little small, so I got a set of glasses that hold 18.5 ounces, including foam. A beer that big is very satisfying, especially when you’re in the brewing honeymoon phase.

In order to be able to have more than one beer per sitting, I ordered myself some miniature pint glasses. I know “miniature pint” is an oxymoron. I’m not like Haagen-Daz, the company that pretends 14 ounces are a pint.

These things are shaped like English pub glasses, but they hold about 10 ounces. Now I can have a couple of beers without turning into Barney from The Simpsons.

It’s not easy to find decent beer glasses in this size range. Amazon offers about a billion different personalized glasses, which I don’t want, and it has a variety of huge glasses. It sells a lot of crystal, which gets destroyed in dishwashers. I had to search a long time to find plain old glass glasses that would work.

If you’re thinking about homebrewing, learn from my example. Get yourself some little glasses. You’ll get to have more than one kind of beer per day, and you might live to be 70.

It All Makes Sense

I had one of my stranger revelations today, so I’m going to write about it.

It’s frustrating, sharing things you know come from God. Nearly no one listens. Very few people get doctrine or information from God. Almost all Christians rely on things other people told them. They rely on terrible, Satanic stuff that comes to them through official denomination literature, or they repeat nonsense that comes from personality-cult preachers like Joel Osteen or Joyce Meyer.

God is the only reliable source for doctrine, you should be hearing it from him. He’s better than the Bible itself. People who don’t have God’s help misunderstand the Bible so it does them no good. Remember the story of Philip.

Before I get to today’s revelation, I’ll mention something that came to me a day or so ago. It has to do with study.

I read about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a dead preacher who was an intellectual. He believed we had to study our way to enlightenment. He’s not alone. Many Christians feel this way. The Jews are much worse. They spend much more time reading garbage from commentators than they do the Bible itself, and they think prophets no longer exist.

Here’s the revelation I got: if study is the way to understand God, why is it there is NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON in the Bible who studied his way to God? Name one person who got God’s attention and favor because he was smart. One. Good luck. You’ll never find him, because he isn’t there.

“Solomon was wise.” Yes. Because God imparted wisdom to him supernaturally. Show me where it says he became wise through study. Solomon didn’t read religious books. He wrote them.

Who knew God and was close to him? Let’s see.

David was a great prophet, and he was a shepherd. Amos was a prophet, and he was a shepherd. Jeremiah was a kid, not an old bearded scholar. Elisha was a farmer. The disciples were ignorant fishermen, a tax collector, and a doctor, among other things. No rabbis. Not one priest.

John the Baptist was the son of a priest, but he was not a priest.

Daniel was smart, but God gave him visions and sent him angels, so no credit for that.

Jephthah was the son of a whore.

Paul was very highly educated, but regarding his studies and the doctrine he learned, he said he counted it all garbage or feces, depending on what the word “skybala” meant to him when he wrote it.

You will never find a great man of God who succeeded through study.

You will find that great men of God had success handed to them supernaturally.

So why has the church pushed study as the way for almost two thousand years?

It’s insanity. It never worked in the Bible, and the supernatural approach is the only one that did work, so why aren’t we choosing the supernatural approach? Even Jesus was uneducated. And he was not omniscient, regardless of what people claim. An omniscient being could not be tempted by doubt, and Jesus was tempted in every way, according to the Bible.

It’s obvious why it’s so hard for me to tell anyone anything. They’re stuck on gossip and rumors. The Talmud is gossip. Catholicism is built on gossip. Much of what Protestant churches teach is gossip.

To understand what God has told me, you also have to hear from God. He has to make it resonate in your heart. If you’re not baptized with the Spirit and praying in tongues, you will receive little if anything.

So, back to today’s revelation. I was thinking of Douglas Adams. I consider him the smartest humorist among ones I’ve read. Smarter than Rabelais, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Twain, Heller…any of them. His jokes weren’t always the funniest, but they were brilliant. He came up with the Infinite Improbability Drive, for example.

He wrote a series of books about Arthur Dent, an earthling who was rescued from Earth immediately prior to its demolition. The first book was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the last was Mostly Harmless.

The first book begins with Arthur Dent lying in front of a bulldozer which is about to destroy his house in England. It’s about to be destroyed so a road can be built. He was surprised to see the bulldozers because the publication of the news was essentially hidden by uncaring bureaucrats.

His friend Ford Prefect, who is actually an alien, convinces Arthur to get up and go to a pub with him. He tells him the world is about to be destroyed by Vogons, an alien race that handles the galaxy’s bureaucratic affairs. They’re destroying the world because they want to build the equivalent of a highway in space.

The reason for the pub visit is to get beer and peanuts. These things supposedly helped people who used alien technology to hitch rides on spaceships. Ford helps Arthur get aboard the Vogon ship.

Arthur has no idea how to get by in space, so Ford gives him an electronic book which is essentially a tablet. The title is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ford and the book get him through. In the end, Arthur learns about the meaning and origin of the universe.

I’ve only read the first three books.

Thinking about Arthur Dent made me think about The Book of Eli.

The Book of Eli is a ridiculous Denzel Washington movie which was clearly inspired by the Holy Spirit. It’s all metaphors. Humanity has a nuclear war. The people who survive live in poverty. No food grows. There is almost no drinking water anywhere. Anyone who has it can tell others what to do. Somehow, no one seems to have a Bible.

You can see how ridiculous it is already. Stored food would disappear in a hurry if we couldn’t grow things, and there is no reason to think nuclear war would cause a global drought. Nuclear war would not destroy all the Bibles in the world.

If you keep reading, I’ll spoil the movie for you. Denzel, a former KMart worker, has a Bible. His mission is to preserve it. He hears God telling him things. By listening to God, he makes his way across the country safely. He fights and kills all sorts of people who try to harm him. His fighting abilities are amazing. He wins effortlessly and with no doubt he will prevail.

He ends up in a battle with Gary Oldman’s character, Carnegie, who runs a crummy little town and owns a water supply he keeps hidden. Carnegie finds out Eli has a Bible, and he tries to take it because he believes the Bible can be used to control people.

Carnegie and Eli get shot, Eli escapes, and Carnegie gets the Bible. Eli keeps going to the West Coast, where he dictates the entire Bible to a publisher who is preserving old books for the human race. Eli has memorized the Bible. Carnegie opens the Bible he stole and finds out it’s in Braille. Eli is blind. No one knew this because Eli behaved and moved like a person with perfect vision. God guided him.

To a Spirit-filled Christian, it’s obvious God helped write the movie.

Eli is what a Christian should be, sort of. He knows God personally. He hears from him all day, every day. God guides him and protects him. God provides his mission and defeats his enemies.

We are supposed to walk by faith, not by sight. Eli’s blindness is a reference to this.

Carnegie is a picture of powerful, greedy preachers who use the Bible to control people and who use their stooges to persecute those who know God. I have dealt with preachers’ stooges a lot.

Carnegie’s inability to read the Bible is a reference to the blindness of people who aren’t baptized with the Holy Spirit. Like the Ethiopian eunuch, they can’t see what’s in front of them until God explains it. The word is in front of Carnegie, but he can’t understand it.

Eli’s memorization of the Bible is a reference to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. We are supposed to rely primarily on the Holy Spirit, not the Bible. The Bible can be taken from us. It can be twisted so we misunderstand it. The Holy Spirit can’t be taken away or misrepresented.

Eli’s physical blindness is a minor inconvenience. Carnegie’s spiritual blindness is what destroys him.

I was thinking about these things, and then I thought about Arthur Dent and myself.

I’m sure God told me to make beer. I am pretty sure the purpose is to celebrate the rapture. Beer is a celebration beverage. Like wine. I’m sure God is coming for us soon, and we will be removed from this world. I also know the world will be destroyed after I leave, assuming I’m taken with the ones God favors.

I don’t have Ford Prefect or the electronic book. I do have a different extraterrestrial helper and a different book. I have the Holy Spirit and the Bible.

The Holy Spirit is, literally, an extraterrestrial. “Extraterrestrial” literally means, “not from Earth.”

“Ford” means a submerged bridge, and “prefect” means a type of priest. A bridge allows you to cross water to another place. The word says there are waters in the heavens between us and God. In the Bible, going through water appears several times as a picture of moving toward God.

When I’m taken, many of my questions about the meaning of life and the origin of the universe will be answered, but the answers I get will be real answers, not silly answers like the ones Arthur Dent got.

The parallels are striking.

I think The Hitchhiker’s Guide was inspired by God. Douglas Adams was an angry atheist, and the man who wrote The Book of Eli is also an atheist. Doesn’t matter. God can speak through atheists and pagans when he wants.

You really need to speak in tongues, ask for correction, and ask for help to spend time with God. If you do these things, everything else should take care of itself.

I am Ready to Go

I keep learning more stuff about beer and God.

Beer first.

Homebrewed beer is generally dispensed from 5-gallon kegs made for pop. Some maniacs use Sanke kegs. These are the big cylindrical kegs bars use, and they hold 15.5 gallons.

Because homebrewing is somewhat more popular than it used to be, some companies are making small kegs just for homebrewers. I have a couple of 5-gallon Torpedo-brand kegs as well as three 6-gallon Torpedos used only for fermenting. To ferment a 5-gallon batch, you should really use a keg that holds more than 5 gallons because yeast creates a temporary layer of foam on top of the beer, and it can be pretty thick.

How do small kegs work? Simple. There are two airtight and watertight fittings on top of a keg. Gas goes in one, and beer goes out the other. The one that releases beer is connected to a tube inside the keg, and this “dip tube” reaches the bottom. Gas pushes beer into the lower end of the tube, and it goes out through the fitting on top. The fittings are called “posts,” and the one beer goes through is called a liquid post.

There are some problems with the system. One is that every new beer has some yeast in it, and when you put it in a keg, the yeast will settle. Then you get a layer of yeast right under the dip tube, and when you draw a beer, you get bitter yeast along with it. Eventually, you will drink all the yeast, and then you get clear beer. Also, there are things you can do to make solids in the beer stick to the bottom of the keg.

At some point, a beer genius came up with the floating dip tube. This is a flexible silicone tube with a float at one end. The other end connects to the liquid post. The float has a little steel intake tube next to it, and you connect the silicone tube to it. The float stays high in the beer where there isn’t much yeast or hop debris, so you get fairly clear beer right from the start.

I found out about these things and bought a bunch at considerable expense. Then I learned they had a shortcoming.

Unless you adjust a floating dip tube just right, the intake may never reach the bottom of the keg. The tubing has some stiffness and permanent curvature, and it can push the float over to the side of the keg, which is not the deepest point. That means good beer is left behind when you change kegs. If it does reach the bottom of the keg, crud may clog it because it will hit the crud before dispensing the beer in the layer between the intake opening and the upper surface of the beer.

Some brilliant Vietnamese guy invented a solution: the Flotit. This is a weird float that pretty much assures your intake will get to the bottom of the beer at the best possible time. I have a couple of these things on the way.

While I wait, I’m fooling with my existing tubes. It turns out there are three things you can do to improve them.

1. Put a heavy stainless nut around your steel intake tube below the silicone tubing. This will help pull the tubing straight and discourage the intake from getting too high in relation to the float. It will help to avoid sucking gas at the surface and failing to reach the bottom.

2. When you install the silicone tube, make sure the bends in it move the float end toward the center of the bottom of the keg, where the last of the beer will end up.

3. Make sure your tubing is short enough so it doesn’t try to coil in the bottom of the keg. You want just enough to get the intake to the bottom reliably.

I’m doing all these things now when I put tubes in kegs. They may make it unnecessary for me to use Flotits, but other brewers think Flotits are great, so I want to try them.

The other day, I came to the end of my first keg of stout. This really broke my heart. My stout is incredible. Whenever I take a sip, I sit back and marvel at it.

I had a floating dip tube in the keg. When I opened the keg to see what was happening, I saw that the float was over on the side of the keg, too high to get at the remaining beer. The tubing was too long, and the bends in the tube were not oriented correctly.

I opened the keg thinking it was time to dump it, but there was a lot of stout in there. Precious, sweet, sweet stout. Stout I could not replace with inferior store stout. And my next keg of stout was not ready to drink.

Ordinarily, I don’t like opening kegs and fooling around with them when there is beer in them. It’s a great way to introduce bacteria and wild yeast, and these things cause infections that can ruin beer. Yesterday, however, I did not care about the risks. I needed that stout. I needed it, I tell you. And there wasn’t much left anyway. It wasn’t like I was risking 5 gallons.

I blasted everything I could with sanitizer and went in and fixed the tube. Later in the day, I got about two and a half pints of liquid joy out of the keg. My repair worked.

Not only did I rescue the beer; I rid it of excess carbonation. I had accidentally overcarbonated it, and I had been putting up with more foam than it really needed. Opening the keg and fiddling with the tubing reduced the beer’s carbonation so it poured beautifully.

My next batch of stout is ready to keg right now, so I’m hoping for better results than last time. Also, I used Crystal hops in this batch, and I’m excited about seeing how they work out.

Stout is the best beer. It just is. Other beers can be wonderful, but stout dispensed with beer gas is the beer of beers.

My problems with beer gas pressure continued until today. I think they’re done.

I dispense stout with 75/25 CO2/N3. For some reason, the gas and beer people have convinced the world you need a special tank and regulator for beer gas. Turns out it’s not true, but anyway, I have two nitro (slang for “beer gas”) tanks and a special regulator.

When I started brewing, I had the fatuous notion I would be able to save money by using my old equipment, including a CO2 regulator that got soaked in a beer flood a long time ago. I replaced the gauges on the CO2 regulator, and it worked, so I got cocky and tried to fix my nitro regulator.

The gauges had bent faces that prevented the needles from going as high as they should. Somehow, I convinced myself they had been bent in an accident, even though they were covered with plastic crystals. In reality, it seems pretty obvious the manufacturer made them that way on purpose, for reasons I can’t even guess at. Why would you not want to know if your pressure is over 30 psi?

I tried to unbend the faces, gave up, and installed new gauges which were a lot nicer. Oil-filled for one thing. I used PTFE tape on the brass threads so the gauges would screw in far enough to seal.

I also decided to use fancy new EVAbarrier tubing and a Kegland Duotight gas disconnect instead of my old tubing and disconnects. In the past, they had leaked. Or something had, anyhow.

After I got the system running, the gas dissipated quickly. There had to be a leak somewhere.

I didn’t know I had a problem at first because I was wrong about how much pressure a full tank should have. There is a fair amount of mythology in the beer world, and people often speak authoritatively and confidently when they are totally wrong. When I tried to find out what my starting pressure should be, I saw people talking about 850 psi, which is reasonable for CO2, not nitro. When I saw my pressure at around 790, I thought I was doing great when I had actually lost over half my gas.

In case anyone wants to know, I asked a guy at American Welding Gas while I was swapping tanks, and he said the real starting pressure is around 1800 psi. It will vary because tank sizes vary slightly, and gas is sold by the pound, not the cubic foot. The pressure will dip maybe 7% when you chill the gas, which will happen even if you put the tank outside your keezer. It’s not significant, so a chilled tank will not read something crazy like 850. It will still be somewhere near 1800.

I actually calculated the pressure drop, so 7% should be a reliable approximation.

I took my tank, regulator, and line and put them in the pool. That’s how frustrated I was. I had sprayed them in the past with a sanitizing solution that bubbles a little, and I hadn’t found problems, so I went nuclear. I found a leak on a Duotight connector between the regulator’s outlet valve and the line to the disconnect. I tightened it, and the bubbles stopped. I figured I was in the clear.

Of course, the pressure kept dropping. That tank is now at around 200 pounds.

I kept telling myself to set a spray bottle aside, fill it with Dawn and water to check leaks, and get the job done right. But when I went out, I would forget. I’d be at the store, ogling the Twinkies and rib eyes, and I’d forget all about my beer gas.

Today I decided to do it without a spray bottle. I put soapy water in a bowl and dribbled it on the gauge threads going into the regulator body. I couldn’t check these in the pool because I couldn’t immerse the regulator. I had great confidence on them, because I had installed the gauge threads with a lot of torque.

The thing about a gauge is that it has to face a certain way, so you don’t tighten it as much as humanly possible. You tighten it until it’s really tight and faces the right way. If you aren’t happy with the tightness, you have to go another 360°, and you may not be able to do it, so you compromise.

I had compromised, and bubbles started popping up where one of the gauges went in.

I have since wrenched the gauge in with extraordinary torque. Sure enough, I couldn’t get a full 360°. I guess I could use a breaker bar. It’s maybe 5° from where it should be. But there are no bubbles now.

Good enough. I was so desperate, I was looking at new regulators. A “Like New” from Amazon is $62, and and new ones run $100. I would have to buy it, remove the crummy outlet valve it comes with, install my new valve, redo the flimsy Duotight connector, and hope for the best. Now I should be able to install my second tank and have beer gas for the next year without a swap. It shows how important it is to seal draft systems. New gas runs $20, and I have to drive to get it.

Incidentally, I think PTFE tape is lame. Pipe dope seems to lubricate a lot better, and I think it seals better, too. I think people are afraid of it because it makes a mess.

The regulator seems to act funny when the pressure gets low. Not sure if that’s normal or not, but at least it should be leak-free until that problem has to be faced.

In other news, I bought a keg-washing device.

Cleaning a beer keg is not all that hard, but it’s not all that easy, either. You have to reach down through a narrow hole with a brush, and you have to keep turning the keg over to empty the suds out. Some of my kegs have holes so small they actually contact my skinny, non-working-out arm all the way around, so when I put my arm in there, it feels like I may not be able to get it out, and then I picture myself driving to the ER with a keg on my arm.

The other problem is that situations will develop that require you to clean several kegs in a couple of days, and that gets unpleasant.

The Kegland company, which seems to make every brewing product now, makes a crazy thing that washes kegs. It has a little pump. You hook it up to your posts, set the keg over a pipe that sticks up in the middle, add hot water and powdered brewery wash (like super Oxi-Clean), and turn it on. It cleans the whole thing while you drink beer.

I bought me one of these things. It arrives today. Good thing, too. I had to clean an empty stout keg yesterday. I have an empty ale keg to clean. I made two beers that have to be dumped due to mashing issues and spoiled hops. I also have a couple of new/used kegs I haven’t cleaned yet.

The product is called a Bucket Blaster, and it will clean anything you can fit over it.

Powdered brewery wash is made by more than one company. The best-known example is PBW, named for obvious reasons. People say Oxi-Clean does the same things but is harder to rinse off. Kegland, of course, makes a product called Meister Clean or something like that, it it is said to be the best. I made my own generic Oxi-Clean, and I’m wondering if adding TSP to it will make it better for beer tools.

As for things I’ve learned about God, I got a strange revelation the other day. It turns out you should refer to God as “my God,” not just “God.” I started doing this, and I felt supernatural energy rushing through me. When you say, “in the name of Jesus Christ,” you’re not getting everything you should. Say, “In the name of my God, Jesus Christ.”

I was freaked out by what happened, so I told my friend Mike over the phone. He felt energy when I said it. It made his hair stand up. That wasn’t me. All I did was say some words.

I believe when you call God “my God,” you assert your standing and authority. You identify yourself with God, so the things you say are backed with his authority and power. A Muslim witch can pray in the name of Jesus Christ. Remember what happened to the seven sons of Sceva? It’s different when you can say Jesus Christ is your God. Same thing applies to Yahweh and the Spirit of Holiness.

Try it. I’m not making it up.

For a long time, while leading Rhodah in prayer, I’ve asked God to help us to love the culture of heaven and hate the culture of hell, which is the dominant culture of Earth. The Kardashian/Cardi B/tattoo-sleeve/boutique weed dispensary/YOLO/Living-Your-Best-Life/dad-breastfeeds-me culture. This is a good prayer, but I didn’t realize how it would feel when God granted it.

These days, I keep telling God, “I hate this place,” referring to Earth. It shows how he granted my request. I look at the news and so on, and I feel so out of place, I can’t describe it. It’s like the feelings I have for Miami, the disgusting city I fled to move here. I really hate Miami. I hate it more every day. I don’t even like to drive south on I-75 to Orlando, because I see “Miami” on signs and know I’m getting closer to it. Miami is full of rude, shallow, malicious, trashy, racist people. So is Earth. No difference. Some areas are nicer, and some are worse, but this planet is a ghetto.

A long time ago, God gave me this sentence: “The whole world is a ghetto.” It’s true. It’s a place dominated by idiots. A place that will never improve. Ghettos never get better unless rich people buy them and move the existing population out. The world will never get better. We are swimming in astounding stupidity and evil right now, and as insane as people have become, they will be a lot worse in 2024.

He also told me the world is a death camp, and he once said the world was like my sister, who seems to me to be a narcissistic, malicious, entitled sociopath. Being around her is unbearable, and being stuck in this world feels pretty similar. You have to be set apart in order to stand it. There has to be substantial buffering.

The sad thing is that I’m right about these things. I questioned myself. I wondered if I was just spoiled, thinking about myself and my desire for a better world instead of thinking about my mission here. No; I’m right. Jesus hated this place, too. When the Bible says God loved the world, it doesn’t mean he wants to live here or that he doesn’t hate a lot of people.

The Bible says that if you love your life, you will lose it.

I enjoy life a great deal, but I still want out of this place. I can’t wait for the rapture. I don’t want to be here when normal Americans in Iowa are performing sex acts in supermarket checkout lines and Satan’s grinning face is all over billboards. I don’t want to be here to see the new Nuremberg laws enacted.

I live in a hard core Christian county, and sometimes I hear filthy rap music while I’m shopping. I mean in the same stores that sneak Christian music into the air during the winter. That’s how corrupted America is.

Two days back, I saw a colossal fool at the grocery wearing a shirt with big letters on the back, saying, “It’s Okay to Be a Slut.” And he was with his woman. I won’t call her his wife. That’s a huge assumption in this case. He was wearing his idiotic shirt in front of children who could read. In my Christian county. How can anyone be that much of a moron? And what, if anything, is going on in the head of the woman? Is she calling herself a slut? If so, she’s probably right.

There is nothing good about being a slut. Sluts go to hell, and they take others with them. They destroy families. They raise doomed children. They murder their own children inside their bodies. They cut themselves. They die single. They make life much harder for decent women. Sluts are evil. Do I actually have to explain this after thousands of years of human history have proven it?

I keep telling God I hate this world, and then I say, “You were right, you were right, you were right, you were right.” I am ready to be extracted from the LZ.

It’s funny, but the first miracle Jesus worked was creating wine for a wedding, and here we are, waiting to be taken away to his wedding.

There are some stupid apocryphal forgeries out there that claim Jesus worked miracles when he was a kid, but the miracle of the wine was first. A couple was marrying in Cana, and they ran out of wine. Jesus had servants fill 6 water pots with water, and he turned it into wine for the celebrants. At least 180 gallons.

The water pots were huge, and they were used to carry water for Jewish baptism. No one seems to understand the significance. Containers symbolize human beings. Jesus compared his doctrine to new wine, and when the disciples received the baptism with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, people accused them of being full of new wine.

There is astounding symmetry in the supernatural. Jesus started his ministry with a wedding, and he will end this age with a wedding.

And here I am, making beer to celebrate his return. Very odd.

I wish he would come tomorrow. I’m so tired of dealing with boneheads. People who are intelligent but deliberately boneheaded because they want to be their own gods.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famous theologian the Nazis imprisoned and then murdered in order to prevent him from being rescued by the Russians, called this kind of boneheadedness “stupidity.” That’s a misnomer. A truly stupid person can’t determine the truth. Bonhoeffer was describing people who can see the truth right in front of them but refuse to admit it. He said it was a herd thing. We call it peer pressure.

I doubt he knew the Holy Ghost or understood that what he called stupidity was a delusion that comes from demons, ultimately caused by rejection of the Holy Ghost. This is what he was really describing. When the Holy Ghost, who is one with Yeshua, is cast aside, the spirit of antichrist comes in and rules. The spirit of antichrist rules through social pressure. The voice of the crowd. Democracy.

A crowd demanded Saul and rejected Yahweh. A crowd voted to murder Jesus. Crowds of Jews executed the prophets. A crowd turned on Yahweh, who had shown them great miracles, and worshiped a golden calf. Democracy is not a good thing. It came from a people who worshiped fallen spirits.

Many Jews believe in Jesus but refuse to admit it because they are terrified of ostracism, poverty, and even violence. They’re crippled by peer pressure. Jesus requires people to admit their faith before others, so hiding at home and believing in him privately may not save people from hell.

Hitler was elected legitimately. Think about that. People may say his victory was illegitimate because of intimidation, but he got 90% of the votes. The masses chose him. The crowd.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Hitler–an antichrist–was elected by Germans, because Germans are extremely confident in the abilities of man, and they have an oppressive culture that pushes people to be part of the herd. They think man has figured out how we should live, and anyone who threatens their social structure is a problem.

The ironic thing about Bonhoeffer is that he was not fully on God’s side. He was not really a man of God. He was actually harmful. He was a leftist, and he was no charismatic. He thought we should study God and figure him out with our little minds. This is pride, and pride is from Satan. Pride is where bad doctrine comes from.

To get back to the point, we are surrounded by people who know they’re wrong but go along with the herd every day, to the point of persecuting people then know are right. The stupid, by Bonhoeffer’s definition. If they were really stupid, they would have some hope, because no one could blame them. As it is, they condemn themselves.

People do stupid things, and instead of looking up to God, or even inward to their common sense, they look around to see if other people approve. How many “likes”? This is what guides them. Imbeciles leading imbeciles.

I dreamed about persecution last night. I dreamed I saw Jesus, walking around able and happy. Then I was taken back in time to see the Romans hurting him. They carved a big piece out of his leg and took it. There was blood all over him. The first Jesus I saw was the post-resurrection Jesus. The second was the Jesus democracy killed.

I also dreamed a crowd of ghetto people were furious at me. They wanted to hurt me, but they didn’t have the guts to attack. I took a huge knife and waved it at them and told them to knock it off. I was on a raised place, like a set of steps, and they were below me, assembled. I had no interest in harming them, but I didn’t want them harming me.

I relieved myself in a sink that belonged to them. It wasn’t malice. I just needed to go. Maybe that makes sense. People who are against God drink from the wrong source, and the Bible shows God likes to make Satan’s shrines public toilets and dumps.

I can’t imagine how happy Jesus is that he doesn’t live here any more. He must thank Yahweh every day.

I guess I’ve written enough. Can’t wait to get those kegs clean.

My little water pots.

Just Let me Brew

My first 6-gallon Megamouth Torpedo ball lock keg is still not here, and I feel like my life cannot continue until it arrives.

Have you ever been in a situation like this? You want or need something, you order it figuring it will arrive in an acceptable amount of time so you won’t lose your mind, and then it keeps being delayed and delayed and delayed.

I ordered two Nukatap beer faucets 17 days ago. Amazon and UPS kept telling me they were coming. They were almost here. “Get ready.” “We really mean it.” They were out for delivery. “Honest.”

Then they weren’t out for delivery any more. They were coming after the weekend. Then they were coming a few days later. Then they didn’t have a date, but they were still sure. They were coming. Of course, I never got them.

I ordered a keg 13 days ago, which is a long time in a world where stuff commonly arrives in three days. I used Morebeer.com, which is usually a pretty good site. For days, they did nothing. I contacted them, and suddenly, the keg was on the way.

All this time, I was losing brewing days. I was afraid I would run out of beer, and I didn’t want to use my existing equipment to brew more. I kept thinking, “It will be here tomorrow. I can wait one more day.”

Then the keg arrived, and it was the wrong size. They sent a new one, and it’s supposed to arrive today. Wonder what size it will be.

Eight days ago, I decided I really wanted three kegs, so I ordered another. I used an Ebay seller who had been okay with earlier buys. As of today, Ebay says the kegs have shipped. Oops; wait. “Shipped” means a shipping label has been printed. The kegs have gone nowhere.

Yesterday I went ahead and made a batch of stout. I used one of my plastic buckets. It will be fine, but a keg is easier to use and clean. It will cool faster when I fill it with hot wort and throw it in the pool. You can’t pitch yeast into wort when it’s hot, so it’s a pain when it takes a long time to cool.

Today, Fedex says Morebeer’s replacement is out for delivery. Am I supposed to believe it?

I have ingredients for a lager. I want to get it going. I really, truly do not want to use a bucket. I want to ferment under pressure, and that means a keg.

Pressure won’t make the beer any better, but it will speed it up. So I’m delaying brewing so I can speed it up. Not sure that makes sense.

I need to learn about pressure brewing because if it works as it should, I plan to make it my default method for lagers. It’s not great for ales because pressure discourages the formation of flavor chemicals that give ales their reason to exist. If I can’t brew under pressure, I can’t learn, so all I get from my next batch is beer.

Back when I wrote the recipe, I called it “Death Hop Lager.” This impressively witty name was intended to reflect the use of a ton of hops. It came in at around 60 IBU’s, which is kind of a lot. Budweiser, which has several similarities to beer, is said to reach about 10.

I am planning to do a version which runs around 43 IBU’s. I think a 60-IBU lager is more of a message or a protest than a beer, although it was very good.

More

The keg finally arrived. Of course, Fedex left it at the end of the driveway, 100 yards away, even though they have the gate code.

Right now, I have a wheat beer and an improved American Lager kegged and chilling. I have a stout which should be ready in 5 days. Because the keg is here, I’m in a position to make the lager I was talking about. Things are settling down. I have three acceptable brews on tap, two more should be ready to drink in no more than two days, a stout should be ready in a week, and a lager should be ready in two to three weeks.

I am almost at the point where I don’t have to be concerned that I’ll have to drink one beer over and over because nothing else is ready and everything else has been consumed or poured down the sink due to brewing problems.

I’m not sure what to call the improved lager. I think I’ll call it “Great Again Lager,” but I’m not sure. The wheat beer is full of esters, so I may call it “Aunt Ester Ale.” I’m considering calling my improved American lager “Yard Boss.” I thought about calling it “Lawn Ranger” and “John Beere,” but those names were taken. As was Mowinbrau. “Mower Low Life” isn’t taken.

Things are coming online. My draft system is becoming stable and reliable. I’m developing a stockpile of beers.

Being impeded is very annoying, but I’m winning, and God is on my side, so everything is fine.

Don’t try to tell me you don’t like “Aunt Ester Wheat Ale.” You know you love it.

God Wants to Give You the Things You Want to Earn

The other day, I dreamed I was at Thanksgiving dinner with my mother’s relatives, and they were hunched over their plates, bolting their food like starving hogs (even though they were fat) and blocking other people’s access to it. I saw this dream as God’s comment on the church. We go to satisfy ourselves, and we think very little about giving and helping.

Last night, my wife dreamed she brought food to her family, and she tried to put a plate together so she could give her dad his favorite dish. Her relatives swarmed the food and took it all so she couldn’t bring him anything.

Seems like our dreams are pretty similar. Relatives are fellow Christians because the church is supposed to be, literally, a family. Churches teach selfishness, and it comes from good authority, because so many preachers are selfish. They know the material.

She also dreamed she saw a man with a knife preparing to go into a church and kill people. She went in to warn them, and he attacked her instead. A man appeared and gave her a smooth stone. She threw it at the attacker, and it slammed into his forehead. A little man grew out of the wound and started choking the attacker. He represented the power of God.

The armed man is Satan, spewing his tasty but toxic doctrine, and Rhodah represented herself, warning people. The man with the stone must have been an angel. The smoothness of the stone represents the way we are polished and refined by the flow of the Holy Ghost and tongues. A smooth stone will fly truer than a stone that has peaks and flats.

When you try to curse people God has anointed, the curse goes back to you. The man with the knife tried to silence Rhodah, so God silenced him.

Both of us are rejected by preachers. Why? Because we expose grifters and proud ignoramuses, if you want to get down to the root of it. They preach whatever it takes to bring themselves money, financial security, power, and admiration. People who expose them and tell people what God actually wants us to have threaten their rackets.

We have been taught that God loves everyone, but that’s not in the Bible, and it’s not true. God hates some people. If you want God to hate you, be a hypocrite and a leech. It will be a good start. Starve his children of real food and feed them poison.

Sometimes I think there are so many preachers in hell, it’s hard for a whore or a murderer to find a place to stay.

Christians who say God loves everyone only have one verse to point to: “For God so loved the world…” But that’s very general. There are lots of verses in which God says he hates certain types of people. Is the Bible true or not?

The tribulation is described in the Bible as the day of God’s anger. A lot of people will still be here, unraptured. Their suffering will be unprecedented, and it will come from God’s anger. That’s not a sign of intense affection.

God has favorites. That’s what “favor” means. There is a privileged class among human beings, which is why leftists, who take talking points from their father Satan, are trying to shame people over what they see as privilege.

Doesn’t God love everyone equally? Doesn’t look that way. Speaking of Israel’s destruction, God told Ezekiel that if Noah, Daniel, and Job were there, they would deliver only themselves by their righteousness. He didn’t mention big names you would expect, like Moses or David. The Bible calls John the disciple Jesus loved, and the others didn’t get the same treatment.

In Matthew 7, Jesus tells nominal Christians he never knew them as he sends them to the outer darkness. He addresses people who claim they have prophesied, cast out demons, and done many wonderful works. Sounds like preachers to me.

It’s funny how much evil has been done because of a desire for security. We struggle to amass wealth because we equate it with power and safety; we see wealth as a sort of godhood. We try to get jobs with guaranteed security. We invest in things we call “securities” which have guaranteed interest rates.

I know human nature and preachers well enough to assure you that most preachers are very concerned about security. The Catholics provide their priests with everything, and guess who made that their policy? Priests. Preachers in other denominations work the crowds, accumulating money to stash away and invest, or just to spend on things like orange mansions, plastic surgery, tacky $9000 shoes, and sluts. They teach people the false doctrine of tithing, because it obligates people to give them regular payments.

We have this idea that we can stabilize ourselves with wealth. We can cement ourselves in place so nothing can touch us. It’s an illusion. Elon Musk could lose everything in a week. The tech era’s history is full of people who went from billionaire status to working every day to feed themselves. Social Security can fail. Tenure can be revoked. Companies that provide annuities can vanish due to mismanagement. Pensions can be stolen. Even if your financial blessings don’t disappear, things can happen to you that make them worthless to you. A billionaire can have an accident that leaves him paralyzed from the neck down.

Everyone wants a rock to stand on, but the only rock is God.

The world teaches us to give little and work hard to accumulate more. It says we can store up so much money, nothing will be able to harm us. Christianity is different. A Christian knows he has to give, and it can’t be a rare thing. He has to have a lifestyle of giving. You don’t say, “I’ll give Uncle Ernie 50 more dollars, and then I won’t have to give him anything any more.” You give to Uncle Ernie, and then you keep your knees bent and look around for the next person God wants you to help. You don’t glue yourself down and say you’ve given enough. You’re supposed to be a river, and rivers keep flowing.

Most preachers are preparing for old age the world’s way. They think if they have enough Social Security money and retirement savings, they’ll be able to live in a nice place and have nice people change their diapers. They want sources of wealth that come from worldly sources, with worldly guarantees. They don’t want to keep trusting God because they haven’t developed the habit.

God showed me we are afraid of 4 things: giving, believing, loving, and lack.

When Jesus gave the loaves and fishes, he wasn’t afraid of any of these things. He was not worried that giving would lead to bad consequences. He wasn’t afraid to love the people he fed, even though most of them turned on him later. He wasn’t afraid he and the disciples would go hungry if they shared. He wasn’t afraid to believe God would supply more.

When he gave, on one occasion, he got 12 full baskets of food back. One for each disciple, as I saw Mark Hemans point out. He had much more than he would have had, had he held onto what he started with.

Actually, the disciples did the giving. He just told them to do it.

He didn’t bury the food in a hole. He didn’t trade it for gold and hide it. He didn’t give it to the Roman government so they could send him Social Security payments later.

If you get used to giving and believing and loving as a lifestyle, God will look after you. But what happens to a preacher who teaches lies to get money, proving he has no faith in God’s generosity?

I got a funny revelation today. For a long time, I’ve been trying to get God to communicate more clearly with me. When I’ve felt his presence fall on me, I’ve asked him what I can do for him or what he wants to do through me, hoping he will help me hear him. Today, I realized the right thing is to ask God what he can do for me.

It sounds selfish, but the truth is that I can’t do anything for God. All success and power come from him, not me. Many people think it pleases God when they say things like, “Just give me this much, and I won’t ask for more.” I believe it pleases him when you say, “Please give me more and more and more.” After all, Jesus said we have not because we ask not.

Satan and his children aren’t shy about taking as much as possible from us, so presumably God is happy to give us a great deal. Deliverance. Revelation. Healing. Protection. Wealth. Families.

If you’re a person who can’t be cursed, then good things can’t hurt you. I remember saying there was nothing wrong with alcohol. There are entire peoples who don’t have serious issues with it. The problem is the person and his demons. Wealth is the same way. Some people can’t be hurt by billions of dollars. Others can take a hundred-dollar bill and destroy themselves in an hour. I know a person like that. If you give her anything, she uses it to torture you and destroy herself.

The other day I saw a celebrity bragging that she wasn’t leaving her kids anything. She said she and her husband were going to spend it all. She said she didn’t want money to ruin them.

What an imbecile. If money is a curse to her kids, they are already ruined whether they have it or not, because they are cursed. There is something seriously wrong with them. If her kids aren’t cursed, then all the money in the world can’t harm them, but it can be a blessing to them.

She is confessing she believes her children are weak, selfish, immature, and stupid. She’s saying she and her husband didn’t do their jobs.

Wealth does not corrupt people. It’s beneficial and harmless. Corrupt people destroy themselves when they get wealth.

Drugs are the same way. I’ve had access to things like Vicodin, Dilaudid, morphine, and codeine syrup. I never became addicted or had much interest in it. I never raided a stash, got hooked, and started buying Fleet enemas because opioids made it impossible for me to relieve myself. Many people can’t be in a house with opioids or even cans of spray paint. Is morphine bad? Is Dilaudid bad? Of course not. The effect depends on the person and his demons.

Inheritance is the difference between savages and developed nations. Savages don’t learn to write, so they can’t pass information down to their descendants, and their descendants end up just as weak and stupid as they are. They don’t accumulate wealth and pass it on. They don’t record and share what they’ve learned about God. They learn nothing about medicine. Lack of inheritance is why the population of the pre-Columbian Americas went nowhere while Europe and Asia filled up. When you build up information and wealth, your food supply goes up, and life expectancies increase.

If you don’t give to your children, they have to re-do and re-learn everything you did and learned. There is no progress. Nothing is built. Your family becomes like a family of rats or squirrels or ants. Go forward or back 10 generations, and they look exactly the same. A family of human beings is supposed to improve with each generation.

I want whatever God is willing to give me, and everything he gives me is an inheritance, which is why the volumes of the Bible are called “testaments.” I want the maximum. Health, protection, revelation, correction, knowledge, commands, love, faith, joy, power, and even money. Just shovel it over here. Make me a person who can’t be cursed, and then give me everything you want to give.

God is generous, and he is better than an IRA. We just don’t know it because no one teaches that giving and receiving are two sides of the same coin. So are doing harm and suffering adversity.

Satan is very generous with curses, so why shouldn’t God be generous with blessings?

I’m really disgusted with what has happened to Christendom. Theologically, we’re a nation of savages. We didn’t preserve what the early church knew. We didn’t inherit knowledge that would have made our lives easy. We went right back to the Greek excrement that was taught all over the Western World. The failed wisdom of pantheists, sodomites, and crowd-worshiping democrats. We are not as well off as we were 2100 years ago. That’s disgraceful.

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.

Next Up: Heavy Fake Belgian

I kegged my latest lager today. If I had to describe it, I’d say it’s an IPA made with lager yeast. I used a grain bill fit for an IPA and fermented it with lager yeast. This means I didn’t get the weird fruity flavors that make IPA what it is, and that sounds like a sacrifice, but it’s also nice to get the clean, unmolested flavor of a lager.

Is the lager any good? I’m not sure. I drank a glass because I’m impatient, and it seemed to me that it was too sweet and lacked the kind of aroma modern beers get from dry hopping, which is adding hops after brewing is over. I can’t be sure, though, because the beer still needs more carbonation. That will add carbonic acid, and that sharpens up the flavor. And lagers improve with age.

I fermented under pressure at about 66 degrees. Ordinarily, you would ferment a lager with no pressure down in the fifties, and after that, you would do various time-consuming things to perfect it. Pressure-fermenting allows brewers to create lagers fast, at relatively high temperatures, but I don’t know whether it completely does away with the need for aging. There isn’t that much information available for homebrewers yet.

The glass I drank was okay, but it needed to be colder and fizzier.

I transferred the lager from the fermenter to the keg under pressure. I cleaned a keg and hooked it up to the fermenter. I shot a lot of CO2 into the keg to reduce the O2 content. I then used my CO2 tank to pump the lager directly into the keg, with the keg and fermenter closed to the atmosphere. After that, I burped some of the gas out of the keg to reduce the CO2 further.

To really do it right, you fill the keg with sanitizer and water and use CO2 to pump it out, but I didn’t think that was necessary. That’s overkill. When you put 5 gallons of liquid into a Corny keg, you leave very little room for gas, and if you’ve already shot a fair amount of CO2 into it, you’re probably dealing with one gallon of gas which is mostly CO2.

I now have one incredible stout, a lager which will be, at least, okay, and a wheat beer which is drinkable. I had to fiddle with my draft setup a lot because it’s new, and I may have tainted the wheat beer with some kind of lactobacillus or something. It’s pretty sour, but not so sour it’s useless.

I have a wheat beer and an ale fermenting, and at least one will be ready to keg in a few days.

I need inventory. If you only have one keg of beer to drink from, you will empty it faster than you think. If you have 5 kegs, you will empty them slowly, and you will be able to maintain a variety of beers.

My stout is so wonderful, I’m afraid I’ll blow through it. I was so concerned, I ordered more ingredients yesterday, and they will be here tomorrow. I can’t even explain how good it is. I now think stout is my favorite beer. Oatmeal stout, which is what I made. Imperial stout. Wonderful stuff. Stout is full of sweet, sour, bitter, and full of flavors which have no right to be there. How can a beer taste like caramel, coffee, and chocolate when none of those things are in it?

I still can’t dispense 5 beers via mounted faucets in the keezer. I need four fittings to connect two more kegs to faucets, and the Ebay seller I used is taking forever. Once these parts arrive, I’ll be all set.

Every time I pour my first beer of the day, I raise it and thank Jesus for coming for us. I tell him I celebrate his return.

It’s too bad I have the tolerance of a medium-sized ant. Three beers, and my day of drinking is done. Things were very different when I was young, but of course, I was also an idiot, so there was a tradeoff.

Because I’m very interested in getting my beer endeavors working, I drink beer nearly every day, and I have realized it impacts my life. I’m not getting in the car if I’ve had more than one beer, so now I have to plan my errands and my drinking. Sometimes I ask myself what will happen if I really need to go somewhere and I’ve had two beers. I have to think ahead.

It looks like coronavirus is behind me, at least for the next few months. I think I can detect a tiny vestige of my symptoms, but it’s basically over. Looks like I’m not yet one of the cursed few who get the virus and die in two weeks.

I spend more and more time with God now. I see people I pray for and talk to doing better and better. Things are going extremely well. The revelation I got about closeness with God is paying off. It’s beautiful.

I have a friend whose wife is immature and malignant. She has put him through terrible suffering for 15 years. We pray for him all the time. She finally blew up and showed what she really was. She ran around with some man. She told my friend she would take his kids. She even beat herself up and told the police my friend did it, and she was dumb enough to do it in front of the children. She went on the web and researched poisons, and she left her handwritten notes where my friend could photograph them.

I keep sharing revelation with my friend, and he puts it to work. God has changed his mindset and set him free. The wife has done things so stupid, they pretty much assure he will get the kids and the house.

There used to be turmoil in his home. That was before she left. Now when I call, the kids are asking him what he wants for dinner. They’ve cleaned the house. They pray together every day. There is peace. They want him to get custody. He sent me a new family photo without the wife, and it shocked me. They seem to glow.

Things will keep getting better and better for people who stay close to God. Things will get worse for the rest. The world is being centrifuged. From my perspective, it’s beautiful. It looks different to people on the other side.

Get close to God. Let him fill you. Be like the ark of the covenant. Carry him with you everywhere you go. It will work. It’s his plan.

Goodbye Guinness

Yesterday, my new stout was finally ready to drink.

I kegged it a few days ago, but I made a mistake and confused two gas hoses, and I ended up pumping it full of CO2 when I thought I was hooking up beer gas, which is a nitrogren/CO2 mix. As a result of my mistake, I kept pouring glasses of foam, and when the foam subsided, the beer was flat. It was nasty. I have been letting the keg sit without pressure so CO2 would come out of it, and it has been working. Last night I poured beer I could drink.

It’s very sad. I guess I lost half a gallon of beer. But I’m still learning how to set up the system, and losses are unavoidable.

When I started drinking the stout, I thought it needed more alcohol, and it seemed too thick. As the carbonation balance improved, I realized there was nothing wrong with it at all. It was astonishing. For me, a two-beer day is a big deal, but I drank 4 glasses of stout, and I wished I could have kept going. It was mesmerizing.

I have several cold cans of Guinness pub draught stout, and I feel like pouring them out. I can’t drink that stuff any more. I used to think Guiness was wonderful, but comparing it to my stout is like comparing cube steak to a prime rib eye.

Guiness is a very light beer. It’s extremely dry. It has no body. It has very little alcohol. It’s low in calories. The aroma is lacking. The head is weak. It’s a very simple product.

It seems fantastic if Budweiser is what you’re used to, but the truth is that it’s just a cheaply made working man’s beer. A good product, but not something you can set beside a quality homebrew.

My stout tastes like coffee, dark chocolate, licorice, and dried fruit. It has a little sweetness, but not too much. It has a lot of body. The head looks like you could take it out and make couch cushions out of it. It’s not strong, but when you drink it, you can tell it’s beer. Guiness comes in at a little over 4% ABV, so it’s barely beer.

I can understand why a lot of old beers are weak. Beer used to be used like water. For example, British sailors drank a gallon of beer per day, at work. Moving a beer from 4.5% ABV to a respectable 6% would increase alcohol intake by a third. In the old days, people drank beer to get drunk, but they also drank it to stay hydrated, so I suppose weak beer was a necessity.

These days, beers fall into two categories: session beers and everything else. A session beer is a beer you can drink slowly all day. Guinness is a session beer. My stout is also a session beer, but it’s less sessiony than Guinness.

Budweiser has a reputation for weakness, but its alcohol level is around 5.5%, so it’s considerably stronger than Guinness. What’s really weak is the taste. Like carbonated dishwater.

My stout can be drunk liberally, but it would be hard to make myself do it. It’s too good. When I bring it up to my face, I have to stop and smell it. I move the glass from one nostril to the other and think about what I’m taking in. Then I take one mouthful and hold it briefly, experiencing the initial sourness, bitterness, and sweetness. Then I swallow, and all the flavors rise up in my head. After that, the beer seems to stick to my teeth. It makes my teeth taste good.

It reminds me a lot of Old Rasputin imperial stout, a much stronger beer with a more powerful flavor. It’s like Rasputin had a little brother. Old Rasputin is breathtaking.

In short, my stout is a success. I think I’ll still fool with it, though. I believe I’ll make a batch with a different finishing hop. The current version uses Kent Goldings, which are very good British hops. I think I’ll bitter with Kent Goldings and finish with Crystal, an American hop derived from European noble hops used in things like German lager. Crystal tastes like spices.

I’m a hack brewer, so when I drink my stout, I have to wonder what better brewers are making. I would think there must be some incredible stout out there in garages and game rooms.

I’m not sure, though, because I know most people can’t cook. Brewing is a form of cooking. If the ability to make and recognize good beer were common, Coors would have gone bankrupt decades ago.

It seems like a lot of new brewers are falling for gimmicks. When I got back into brewing, I was happy to see that a local grocery had a ton of different beers, but when I started looking for things I would actually want, I saw there weren’t many. A lot of kids are starting breweries and making ridiculous things. Strawberry cheesecake stout. Gluten-free hibiscus maple syrup IPA. Okay, these are slight exaggerations. But you get the idea. It’s like they’re trying to out-weird each other, and they are piling on flavoring ingredients instead of learning how to get flavor and aroma from grain, yeast, and hops. You can do beers that vary a great deal without resorting to dumping things like lactose and coffee into your wort.

Lactose beer is disgusting. Trust me. If you haven’t acquired a taste for actual beer, you may love milk stout, but if your palate is developed, you’ll be amazed that anyone would drink it.

Today I’ll try to make my wheat beer again. I think the first batch is infected. It tastes very bitter. I kept moving things around and changing things after it was kegged. I was trying to get the draft system right. I may have introduced bacteria or wild yeast.

I am now up to three freezers. A serving keezer, an upright fermenting freezer, and a new chest freezer for fermenting and storage. Because beers vary a lot in their temperature and fermentation-time requirements, one fermentation freezer is not enough. I could tie it up for weeks with one beer, and during that time, nothing else could go forward. If I have two freezers, I’ll always be able to ferment at least two beers at once and store maybe two below room temperature.

It sounds extreme, but I’m not so poor I can’t afford cheap freezers, and doing this wrong will take half the pleasure out of it.

I made a light lager two days ago. I thought I was making wheat beer, but I got the bags mixed up. I was going to pressure-ferment the lager, which speeds things up, but my pressure fermenter already has a lager in it, so I’m using a regular fermenter at 66°. The yeast I’m using will tolerate that temperature.

I’ll make the wheat beer and put it in the new freezer with the lager.

The new lager is interesting. I created it years ago to see if I could win over a Bud addict. It has corn in it to make it taste more American, and I originally used what is believed to be Budweiser’s yeast. Bud has a green apple flavor which may be from the yeast. A chemical byproduct called acetaldehyde can cause it. Anyway, the beer is light and easy to drink. I love it. The guy I created it for had no interest, though.