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.