Finally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God has been extremely good to me, as always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

MORE

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

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

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

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

Plus Hard Times for the Venereal Girl

The news makes me hope God pulls the plug on this planet quickly. What we are going through is too much, and it’s going to get worse.

I guess everyone knows about the Grammy awards. They’re like Oscars for musicians. The Grammys have a history of producing disgusting spectacles that insult God. In 2015, aging songstress Madonna sang and danced amid a throng of shirtless homosexuals made up to look like demons. Their costumes included fake horns. They worshiped her. In 2017, Beyonce did a ridiculous number in which she and other women had halos appear around their heads.

Now the Grammy people have outdone themselves. We were just subjected to an act featuring an obese homosexual dressed as Satan, dancing with another homosexual who had himself castrated and claims to be a woman. The one dressed as Satan is Sam Smith, the man who made people gag by singing a Bond movie theme song. Bond title sequences have historically featured songs performed by women, accompanied by lewd dance routines performed by dancers shown in silhouette. The other man in the act is Kim Petras, a German whose parents let a doctor castrate him when he was a minor.

A few years ago, no one disputed the fact that the age of castrati was over. Now it’s back. We used to look back on it in horror and disbelief. Things have really changed. In 2010, people generally agreed that castrating minors was barbaric. In 2023, people who object are considered barbarians.

Ever wonder who the greatest soprano of all time was? It wasn’t Beverly Sills or Kiri Te Kanawa or Leontyne Price. The greatest sopranos were men. As late as the 1800’s, greedy parents were having their sons castrated so they could become singers. Men, even eunuchs, have a stronger vocal apparatus than women. They’re a lot like the men who pretend to be women in order to win athletic contests.

Kim Petras looks like a woman if you don’t stare too close, but he’s a castrato.

It’s interesting how men are replacing women. Trannies are better athletes. Castrated ones have the potential to sing better. They are now taking over women’s role in feminism. It seems like we are constantly hearing from men who feel their mental aberrations and surgical successes entitle them to speak for actual women born with ovaries. The other day, one told the female author J.K. Rowling he was more of a woman than she would ever be, and people, including women, applauded him.

The Grammy performance was done by two men. If there were any women on the stage, and that would be hard to prove these days, they were relegated to supporting roles. Hollywood’s new take on barefoot and pregnant.

Smith and Petras sang a song with an extremely appropriate title: “Unholy.” I read the lyrics, and they are close to gibberish. Basically, it’s about people fornicating. That much I could figure out. It looks like it’s about a married man who has sex with female strippers or maybe other men who just claim to be female.

By “married man,” I mean a man who is actually married, not a man who pretends he’s married to another man.
A man who is married to a woman. Who was born with ovaries. An actual woman.

Here is what lyrics look like when intelligent people with talent write them:

And now the purple dusk of twilight time
Steals across the meadows of my heart
High up in the sky the little stars climb
Always reminding me that we’re apart
You wander down the lane and far away
Leaving me a song that will not die
Love is now the stardust of yesterday
The music of the years gone by
Sometimes I wonder how I spend
The lonely night
Dreaming of a song
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you

Here’s a little bit of “Unholy”:

Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy
He’s sat back while she’s dropping it, she be popping it
Yeah, she put it down slowly
Oh-ee-oh-ee-oh, he left his kids at
Ho-ee-oh-ee-ome, so he can get that
Mummy don’t know daddy’s getting hot
At the body shop, doing something unholy (woo)

See if you can see the contrast.

People think Christians are crazy for saying Satan is real and that he is taking over the world. Okay; let’s try to imagine what he might do if he were in charge.

How about having two homosexuals (including a transvestite castrato) go on an award ceremony televised globally, dress like Satan and a damned soul, dance on a set designed to look like hell, and sing about a husband who has sex with strippers?

If what we’re seeing now doesn’t look like Satan’s work to you, what will?

It’s funny how women don’t see the threat feminized men pose. Women do more to promote them than anyone, but these men are replacing them. Gays are envious of women. They resent them and want to take their places. They are moving into fields women used to dominate. They are shaming women who disagree with them. They are taking achievements and income away from women.

Don’t be mad, ladies, but men are just plain better at a lot of things. It becomes more noticeable when they decide they’re women and compete with women.

I think the world is finished. Revival is going nowhere. Churches are drying up or endorsing perversion. Clergymen are being fired for refusing to endorse perversion. Imagine that happening in the time of David. What would David have done if the chief priest had expelled someone for not endorsing queer theory? What would Paul have done if the church of Philadelphia had insisted on ordaining homosexuals?

The rapture can’t come soon enough for me. What are God’s children doing here? Not increasing their numbers. That’s obvious. More of us are falling away than receiving salvation. The kingdom is running at a loss. At least it looks that way. I can’t really know.

Today I had what I think is a revelation: while the kingdom of God is about love, and while God only leaves us in the world to reach others, your primary job is to look out for yourself and make sure you don’t go to hell. It does you no good to serve God all your life if you end up in the lake of fire. There will be no reward while you’re burning and screaming. You won’t be comforted by the thought that it was all worth it because you helped other people avoid the flames. Your consciousness is all you have, and if it’s in hell, what happens in heaven is of no importance at all.

I’ll be honest. I would rather see everyone I have ever known go to hell than go myself. Everyone who has ever been born, for that matter. That’s just common sense. I might be willing to die for someone, but I would have to be nuts to choose to burn for eternity.

The longer we stay here, the more of us will quit. Temptation is going to get worse and worse, and many of us will fall. The salvation of a few more souls does not seem worth the loss of so many people who have already been saved.

We have become such pigs. It’s astonishing. We barely notice blasphemy and obscenity that would have caused riots 60 years ago. We approve of these things. We celebrate them. We curse people who warn us about them.

Why hasn’t God destroyed us already?

Well, he has. In Noah’s time. But why has he let the current age continue so long? His patience is astounding.

Even if I were not a Christian, I would not want to live in this world any more. There is no place for sane people. We hide in the corners. We keep quiet. We hope no one will notice us. We hope they won’t come and make trouble for us and our children until we’re dead. It’s a sad way to live. Like a scared cockroach.

Certain types of things recur throughout history. Based on what we know of societies that become depraved, there are certain things we should expect to see. Sexual perverts should come to rule us, and they should start roaming in bands, raping men as well as women, with the government’s consent. Homosexuality should become the majority orientation. We should see more rioting. We should see more mobs looting stores and homes. We should see Holocaust-style persecution of Jews and actual Christians (not nominal Christians who support perversion and idolatry). Cuban-style confiscation of wealth must be on the way, too.

I think tattooing and mutilation will continue increasing. I believe demons use these things to deface the image of God and make people look the way they look.

One interesting casualty of the Grammys: Madonna. People are commenting on her looks. Her face is swollen and grotesque. The end has come. She’s shooting the messengers, claiming ageism and misogyny. That’s crazy. They’re just reacting to a freakish spectacle.

Rhodah and I were talking about her today.

I always think about Madonna and Cher when I think about people who have no hope for the life to come. Things went their way on Earth, while they were living in perishable bodies that had the potential to be attractive for 30 years at the most. Then their looks faded, and they scrambled to hire surgeons. They held onto youth every way they could. Who can blame them? If you’re a rich female sex symbol, no matter how well things are going for you, you are just a few years away from ugliness and rejection, and when you die, your wealth will vanish. In the afterlife, no one will give Cher a table at an expensive restaurant when it’s already full. No one will pay her just to show up somewhere. No one will care about her opinions. She’ll be just like everyone else around her. No one will know her name, because she won’t have one.

People call Madonna the Material Girl because she had a hit song called “Material Girl.” In the song, she confirmed everything I say about her, decades before I said it.

Some boys kiss me
Some boys hug me
I think they’re ok
If they don’t give me proper credit
I just walk away
They can beg and they can plead
But they can’t see the light (that’s right)
‘Cause the boy with the cold hard cash
Is always Mister Right
‘Cause we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl
You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl

Rhodah said people like Madonna have to buy men when they get old. Guess what? It’s in the song.

Boys may come and boys may go
And that’s all right you see
Experience has made me rich
And now they’re after me

Imagine what dating is like for a single woman who looks just like Madonna and has no money or fame. Imagine Cher, working as a TJ Maxx saleslady and trying to find a husband.

Madonna relied on her body, which is a material object. Now she’s angry because the thing she used to manipulate people repels them. If she used it to build a following of people she knew were shallow enough to be manipulated by sexual temptation, why should she be angry if they drop her when she becomes sexually repulsive?

Look, if I baked a cake to get people to come into my house, I wouldn’t expect them to stick around after it got moldy.

Life is fleeting, and our bodies fall apart and die. We should look at our lives here the way kids look at McDonald’s jobs. They don’t provide security for the long term. They are stepping stones to better things.

Madonna is trying to turn McDonald’s into a career.

I wonder how Satan is going to top the Sam Smith act. Whatever he does, it will have to be something very, very special.

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

Brewing is going well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If You Can’t Buy it, Mod it

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe it’s BPA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have some inquiries out.

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

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

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

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

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

I will digress.

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

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

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

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

Nose Caught in Kung Flu Grippe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe now Budweiser Will Taste Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stout on the Way

I had a busy day today. In addition to taking care of some nagging tasks, I made a pizza and a keg of Irish-style stout, and I worked on problems with my first post-hiatus wheat beer, which I kegged yesterday.

The pizza was nothing remarkable. An 8″ Sicilian with Boar’s Head pepperoni. I can crank those out all day. The beers were more interesting.

I drew my first wheat beer today. Sour with lots of head. The sourness concerned me a little. Wheat is supposed to produce tart beers, but you can overdo it, and I used about 75% wheat in this beer. A lot of so-called wheat beers are down around 30%, and back during the Bush II years, when I drew up my recipe, people thought I was nuts to go to 75%. Nonetheless, this beer is working.

You can’t judge a beer by the first few samples if you are drawing beer off the bottom of the keg. Yeast and hops flakes will make it bitter and sour. I threw out a little bit of beer, and after that, it seemed the balance between crystal malt sweetness on one hand and wheat acidity and hops bitterness on the other was way better.

Beer starts out as a sugar solution, and sugar is heavier than water. Alcohol is less dense, so as yeast does its work turning sugar into alcohol and CO2, beer gets lighter, and the alcohol content increases. This beer went from a specific gravity of 1.053 or so to about 1.0115, and this suggests it should have a light character and around 5.8% alcohol, which is not a lot. It’s very easy to drink, and cold temperatures don’t detract a lot from the experience. This means it’s a lawnmower beer, even though it’s a quality homebrew and not big-beer industry swill.

“Lawnmower beer” is a term homebrewers use to describe beer which goes down easily and isn’t very heavy. It’s a hot day, you’re mowing the lawn, and for some reason, you think it’s a good idea to quench your thirst with an alcoholic beverage while riding a 20-horsepower machine that can cut a person’s feet off. You want a lawnmower beer. It means you’re probably an alcoholic, but nonetheless, the term itself is useful.

Most people who think it’s intelligent to operate dangerous machinery while drinking will favor gross corn-and-rice-based beer substitutes like Bud and Coors, but any beer that goes down well on a hot day is a lawnmower beer, and it is possible for a truly good beer to fit into this category.

I have another lawnmower beer recipe. A long time ago, I tried to convince a Bud addict he should like real beer. I made a light lager that was partly corn-based, and I used a yeast similar to the one Bud uses. It turned out to be great, but I got nowhere with the conversion because my friend was an alcoholic and drug addict who was not interested at all in the quality of what he drank. He just wanted to stay high and drunk so he didn’t have to face himself and admit he treated people badly. I didn’t understand that at the time.

When I think of alcoholics, I think of vodka, not beer. When I was a kid, an older Irish lady lived next door to me, and she was a good example of a vodka alcoholic. My mother saw her turn up tumblers of pure vodka, and she said that as she drank it down, her Adam’s apple moved up and down like a jackhammer. One tumbler like that would make me very drunk and might even stop my heart, but she was used to it.

Addicts like vodka because they have the mistaken belief other people can’t smell it on them, it’s less likely to cause headaches than brown liquors, and there are a lot of cheap vodkas. But there are beer and wine alcoholics, too.

Anyway, what I drew from my keg today was full of yeast and hop sediment for various reasons too boring to go into. It will clear up as the beer at the bottom of the keg is consumed. The yeast and hops gave the beer sharp acidic and basic flavors, and the live yeast may produce astounding CO2 flatulence, but as I go through the lower layers of beer, the hops and yeast will be removed, and the beer will be outstanding.

What I have now could be called a beer lemonade. I used Amarillo hops, and they produce a strong lemony flavor. They belong to a family of hops, and believe it or not, related hops like Centennial and Cascade produce orange and grapefruit flavors. That’s how crazy hops are. I don’t know of any lime-flavored hops, though.

So I have a light, lemony beer that tastes great on its own, but what about adding things to it?

Ordinarily, I think adding things to beer is an indication that someone is misguided. Generally, really good beers don’t need any help. Wheat beers, however, seem to lend themselves to flavorings. Adding fruit syrups to wheat beers is a pretty old practice even in Germany, where people are so uptight about beer they take all the fun out of it.

I am thinking I may try adding grenadine, which is really cherry syrup. I may try to find raspberry and strawberry syrups. People add these things to German wheat beers from really stuffy companies, so I would not be committing heresy.

Today I brewed an Irish-style stout, sort of like Guiness and Murphy’s. It’s one of my old recipes. At the time, I wrote this:

It’s a bit like Guinness or Murphy’s, but it has tons of body and a silky feel to it. The chocolate malt gives it a wonderful chocolate smell and flavor. I used Munich malt and Maris Otter to make it rich, but it’s not TOO rich. The bitterness is high, at 47-something, but it’s still very smooth. I think it might be better if I dropped it slightly.

It’s in the fermenting freezer now. I have high hopes for it, but I don’t know if it will pan out. As you drink better and better beers, you lose your enthusiasm for old favorites because you grow up. I had a pub draught Guinness yesterday, and I found it thin, too dry, and lacking in complexity. I hope I won’t find these same flaws in my own stout, which I created during a time when I thought Guinness was pretty good. I liked Murphy’s better, however, and it had a friendlier taste, with less of an edge. I hope my feelings for Murphy’s pushed the recipe toward the sweeter, more complex end of the stout spectrum.

Incidentally, stout is dark because it’s made with barley that has been roasted until it turns dark brown. Now you know.

Next up is my orange lager. I am not all that excited about lagers because they are boring compared to ales, but this one can hold its own against an ale. It’s about the color of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and that means it has a lot of malt flavor. It has crystal malt to prevent it from being abusively dry. It’s smooth and full of interesting aromas and tastes. It’s like a lager that wishes it were an ale. Very, very good.

The big problem with lagers is that they have to be lagered. Lagering is storage at low temperatures. Lagers need it to refine them and dissipate off flavors. I’ll have to leave the keg in cold storage for several weeks.

I’ll just blurt it out: in my mind, lagers are generally inferior to other beers. They are the vodka of beer. If you want something extremely polished and inoffensive, there are a lot of lagers that will make you happy, and there are subtle pleasures in lagers. Those pleasures are real and not to be contemned. Still, if you want to get lost in a beer, it’s easier to do it with ales. That’s my opinion, but there are way more beers now than there were when I formed my ideas about beer, so I may be wrong.

I do appreciate a good lager. I love Spaten and Gosser. But I’ve had a lot of very good lagers that were like BMW’s. Well-behaved. Faultless. Relentlessly similar.

I don’t like dark lagers at all. They taste like light lagers flavored with burned sugar. A good dark ale is another matter. It’s a forest of unexpected flavors and aromas.

In a week or less, I should have stout ready to serve. It would probably be best to wait a couple of weeks after that to serve it, but I don’t plan to do that. I need to get a beer inventory going so I don’t empty kegs prematurely, and besides, the fact that a beer gets better with time doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start on the keg before it hits its prime. You can enjoy it for what it is as soon as it’s ready, and then you can enjoy the way it changes later.

I have this idea that God, or “Tod,” as I call him when I hit the wrong keys, would like me to be able to talk to ordinary people leading ordinary lives. That means not surrounding myself with Jesus buffs who only associate with each other. Beer, strange as it seems, could help me bridge the gap. I think self-righteous teetotaling Christians repel a lot of people. They make them feel dirty and ashamed. Maybe if I can have a couple of beers with people who have tattoos and spit cups on their dashboards, they will understand that Jesus, not I, is the one I want them to admire and love.

Invest $2000 in Equipment and Get all the Cheap Beer You Can Drink

I feel like writing about the beer business.

I can give new people some advice.

1. Don’t bottle your beer. It’s a miserable job, your beer will get infections, you won’t be able to adjust the carbonation, and there is nothing like the convenience of draft. If you’re excited about taking your beer on the road, use small kegs. You don’t need bottles.

2. Build a keezer (freezer converted to hold kegs) instead of buying a kegerator (refrigerator made for kegs). It will hold more kegs. It will look better because you can put all the tanks and junk inside it. You can build it so all the beer stuff lifts off and onto a new freezer if the old freezer dies. Virtually all fridges and freezers are Chinese now, so they are poorly made. Finally, appliance repair people often refuse to work on kegerators, and manufacturer support is negligible. It’s better to spend $250-$400 on a new freezer than it is to spend hundreds more on a new kegerator.

3. Use dry yeast whenever possible. Wet yeast requires making a starter, which is a batch of fermented liquid that increases the number of yeast cells. It’s a pain. It also requires adding oxygen to the wort before you add (“pitch”) the yeast. It has a short shelf life, it has to be kept refrigerated, and it’s more expensive. With dry yeast, you just open the fermenter and pour it in.

4. If you can afford an electric brewing machine, or all-in-one (AIO), get it, because it will cut the work in half. But realize you may have to brew smaller batches when you want to make heavy beers. AIO’s only hold so much grain.

5. Use Star-San to sanitize. Forget iodophor. Star-San is colorless, and you can use whatever you spray it on right after you spray it. No rinsing.

6. Get yourself some push-fit fittings and EVAbarrier tubing. Forget barbs and hose clamps. This stuff makes things much easier. If you find you have a place where you have to have a hose clamp, use a stepped or Oetiker clamp instead of the worm clamps they sell at the hardware store.

7. Buy brewing software. It will keep track of your recipes and your progress. It will do a lot of the math for you. Be careful, though, because it has been said that some calculations done by beer programs are better done by hand.

8. Keep very detailed notes, like a scientist. Every time you brew a batch, create a text document and write down everything that happens. Date every entry. This will help you repeat your successes but not your failures.

9. Figure out how to serve your beer correctly. You want a system that carbonates it enough while not blasting beer out of the faucet so hard you get a ton of head. Look into things like flow control faucets, beer line length, and flow control disconnects. You should also skip gas manifolds and go right to a multiple-body gas regulator so you can give every beer the right pressure.

I am still not positive I have my serving setup optimized, but then 23 days ago, I didn’t even have beer to serve. All I had was a bucket of unfermented beer.

It’s possible to have a situation where your beer has too much carbonation in the keg, too much head, and no gas in the glass. You can have a lot of head and flat beer. It’s important to get things right.

My second beer, a wheat ale, is done fermenting. I have a way of kegging it, but it’s not ideal, so I won’t be able to drink it until Saturday at the earliest.

When I started getting equipment, I decided to get a Fermzilla All Rounder fermenter. This is a round plastic jug with a bunch of valves and whatnot attached to it. The advantages are 1) you can see what’s happening through the plastic, 2) it’s easy to clean because it’s short with a big mouth, 3) it can be used for fermenting under pressure, which can be helpful with some beers, and 4) you can serve beer from it because it’s made for pressure.

I now think this thing was not a great investment. I can ferment under pressure in a dedicated keg, and a keg is easy to handle. I can put my wort in a keg and put the keg in the pool to cool. The stainless steel will conduct heat well and cool the wort quickly. I can’t drain hot wort into an All Rounder because it can’t stand anything higher than 130°. Finally, Kegland, the company that makes the All Rounder, stamps an expiration date on them because they get weak with time. No problem if you’re not pressure-fermenting or kegging, but what if you are?

I kept it anyway. But I don’t plan to use it to keg the wheat beer. It’s fat, so it will prevent me from putting a total of 4 kegs in the bottom of the keezer. I can’t have that.

I should probably send it back.

I found a salvage guy online selling used Cornelius kegs. Not really Cornelius kegs, but kegs made for dispensing soft drinks. Cornelius was a company that made kegs for Pepsi, and people tend to call all pop kegs Cornelius kegs, but a number of companies have made them. Homebrewers use them.

This guy said he had ball lock kegs, and he would sell them for $75 per pair plus shipping. “Ball lock” refers to the orifices that let CO2 in and beverages out. Most homebrewers like ball lock kegs.

He sent me 4 kegs, and they turned out to be pin lock kegs. Pepsi used ball locks, and Coke used pin locks. The hardware used to connect to them is different.

I complained, and he told me to keep the kegs. He refunded everything except about $37. Under Ebay’s terms, he was supposed to refund everything, and I was supposed to send the kegs back at his expense. I let it go, because I found a way to turn pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs. I bought some parts. For around $55 plus $37, I should end up with 4 good kegs, and that’s a great price.

In case a homebrewer is reading, turning Cornelius-brand pin lock kegs into ball lock kegs is very simple. Just order new gas and beverage posts for Cornelius kegs. Cornelius used the same thread on pin lock kegs and ball lock kegs. The story is not so simple for other brands like Firestone and Alloy Products. You’ll need to buy conversion kits. Right now, they run about $15 per keg. Different companies used different threads, so be informed before you buy.

Back to my problems. In the meantime, I had ordered more used kegs–ball lock–from another company. So when the smoke clears, I should have 8 ball lock kegs. Do I need 8? No. Let’s see. I can use 4 in the keezer and one in the fermenting fridge. That means I need 5 kegs. But it’s conceivable I may want to do a other things in the future, and Corny kegs, as they are called, never do anything but appreciate.

Ball lock kegs are thinner than pin lock kegs, so they will make my keezer less crowded. For that reason, I plan to make as much use of ball lock kegs as I can.

I hate to say this, because it’s just like me, but I could see getting a second keezer. Not a real keezer with taps. Just a small freezer for the garage to hold kegs of finished beer until the ones in the house run dry. As things are now, I will be able to store one new keg, but it will have to go in the fermenting fridge, so I won’t be able to brew anything else while it’s in storage unless I want to ferment at room temperature.

A second freezer would also let me store beers that benefit from aging. I make a stout that tastes too fruity for a few weeks, and I made a tripel-style ale that became transcendent after sitting in a freezer for months.

Over the last couple of weeks, I have developed a new appreciation for beer, and that’s saying a lot.

The only beer I’ve kegged so far continues to amaze me. The head is like the head on a Kirin, except that it has some color and tastes good. Kirin is like Budweiser made by Japanese brewers; an extremely well-made version of something no one needs. My beer is a little darker than a typical lager but not quite orange. When you smell it, multiple aromas come at you. They seem to pulsate. First you smell one, and then then another, and so on.

There are odors of spice, iced tea, caramel, and other things I can’t name. It’s hard to believe I didn’t throw a handful of spices into it.

Every glass seems to taste a little different. Some seem sweeter. Some more bitter. It’s like looking at a gem in different lights.

I have realized something interesting about beer. It differs from wine in that you don’t want to swish it around in your mouth. Not all beers are this way, but most of the time, swishing a beer around detracts from the experience. You smell it carefully. You taste certain things as you put it in your mouth. Then you taste and smell other things as you swallow it. If you hold it in your mouth, it feels uncomfortable.

Wine is not like that. If you don’t hold wine in your mouth for a little bit, you miss out on half the experience.

I am no connoisseur, but I can tell bad wine from good wine. I can tell Macallan 15 from Macallan 18, which isn’t as good. Maybe I’m not fit to judge, but I think beer is just as rewarding and interesting as wine. We think of beer as unsophisticated because we are used to bad beer, not because beer can’t be complex or refined.

Beer is a lot harder to make than wine. To make wine, you press grapes, ferment the juice, and put it in bottles. Done. Beer requires you to choose different malts, a yeast, one or more hops, a mash schedule, a fermentation temperature, a carbonation level, a serving temperature, and possibly other things like flavoring additives.

I am thinking of making mead because it’s so simple. It’s wine made from honey. Dissolve honey in water, add yeast, wait, and you have mead. So easy.

We are living in a golden age of beer. The big boys are still dominating the market with swill, but we now have more breweries than we did before Prohibition. It is now impossible for anyone to say he has tried everything. You can no longer be familiar with every beer sold in America. Even competition judges only get to try some of it.

There are 4 breweries in my rural Southern county, not including homebrewers. I don’t know if all are legitimate. There are probably people in America cashing in on the craft beer wave by offering crummy Bud-like beer in settings that resemble real breweries. It’s still impressive, and one place near me has won a statewide competition, so I would guess it’s the real thing.

In 2000, people here were probably suspicious of anyone strange enough to drink Heineken. Look where we are now.

Unpersons, Unite!

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

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

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

Here is what I said:

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

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

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

Today I got this in my email:

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

Yahoo apparently does not use periods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ice Breaks Under Hollywood Favorite

I just found out Alec Baldwin will be charged with involuntary manslaughter in the killing of Halyna Hutchins. This does not surprise me at all. I wrote about it a long time ago here, and I quoted the applicable law. I also discussed fundamental principles of firearms handling which are relevant to negligence, which is an element of involuntary manslaughter.

Every crime has a list of elements. An element is something you have to do in order to be guilty of the crime. Involuntary manslaughter is what they charge you with when your negligence kills someone, so negligence is an element.

Here is how New Mexico’s Supreme Court defines involuntary manslaughter:

All that it is necessary to establish for involuntary manslaughter by the use of a loaded firearm is that a defendant had in his hands a gun which at some time had been loaded and that he handled it, whether drunk, drinking or sober, without due caution and circumspection and that death resulted.

“Without due caution and circumspection.” Negligently.

How is negligence itself defined in a particular case, beyond the general definition? It’s not necessarily defined by laws or court rulings. It may be defined by common sense. It may be defined by rules and practices of everyday activities.

In Baldwin’s case, we have to look at the rules surrounding firearms use. Those rules prove his negligence. Every firearm user is obligated to follow them, even though they are not laws.

When someone hands you a gun, you open the chamber and look inside. You do this even if they just did the same thing in front of you. After that, regardless, you tread it as though it were loaded. You make sure you don’t touch the trigger unless you’re shooting, you don’t point the gun at anything you don’t want to shoot, and you make sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is in the bullet’s potential path.

While rehearsing for his film, Alec Baldwin 1) didn’t check the chamber, 2) put his finger on the trigger (and pulled it), 3) pointed the gun at someone he did not want to shoot, and 4) didn’t make sure nothing important was in the potential path of a round. As a result, he fired unintentionally, he hit a cinematographer, and he also hit the director, who was standing behind her.

The rules about not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot and making sure nothing important is in the bullet’s potential path aren’t all that distinct. Not pointing at anything you don’t want to shoot, and making sure nothing you don’t want to shoot is downrange, are almost the same thing, but the latter concept is intended to apply to things behind your target. It’s primarily about things like shooting a rifle at an animal and hitting property or a person off in the distance. It also applies to things that are not far behind whatever you shoot at, like the director.

Baldwin didn’t do what every gun user is supposed to know he is supposed to do. That makes him negligent. That makes him guilty. If he didn’t know the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t learn. If he knew the rules, he was negligent because he didn’t obey them.

Ordinarily, it’s foolish to make decisions about a person’s guilt without seeing all the evidence, but sometimes the available evidence stands on its own and can’t be overcome. This is such a case.

I’m not surprised the set armorer and a producer were also charged with crimes. I discussed that here in 2021. It’s very clear that anyone whose actions put a loaded gun in an actor’s hand is guilty of something. I was surprised to see the people who supposedly used the gun for target practice were not charged, but the report says the target practice claim was untrue.

Baldwin’s post-shooting behavior was not good. He was very arrogant. He tried to throw his employees to the wolves, in the bizarre hope professional investigators and prosecutors would take the bait. They did, and then they took him, too. You can’t just tell a prosecutor to go away because someone else did it. They don’t let defendants tell them what to do. It’s amazing that Baldwin’s attorneys let him make crazy remarks and argue with people. Unless they’re incompetent, they must have advised him to shut up.

What he was really saying was this: “Don’t arrest me. Please don’t arrest me. Maybe if I keep arguing, you won’t arrest me.” His posts were aimed at the police and prosecutors. He hoped they would read them and let him go. Law enforcement doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t respond to transparently manipulative Internet tweets.

Now his Twitter account is private. That suggests he hasn’t learned. Saying unwise things to a smaller audience isn’t going to keep other people from seeing them. Anyone can cut and paste, and prosecutors can get private tweets if they want. His “protected” tweets have been republished from time to time. Someone has surely saved all of them.

So what will happen to him?

If there are technical errors in the case, or if he gets a really good jury, he’ll walk. If not, he will be convicted.

His lawyers will do their best to pick a sympathetic jury. Defiant juries turn murderers loose every day. O.J. Simpson murdered two people, was proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and went home acquitted because a jury of black women wanted it that way. Maybe Baldwin’s lawyers will figure out which potential jurors like Baldwin.

They will hire experts to help them pick jurors. This case will be a windfall for experts of all sorts. Baldwin will not hesitate to get out the checkbook.

As for errors, Bill Cosby is definitely a rapist, but he is home now because of a technicality. If your case is sufficiently tainted, what you actually did is irrelevant.

Baldwin should have kept quiet. He should not have antagonized people in public after the shooting. It will make him look bad if he is sentenced, and it will also make this whole affair much more humiliating than it had to be. His enemies will be dancing on his prostrate body for at least the next two years.

He reminds me of Michael Avenatti, the Trump-hating lawyer who disappeared into the black void of the federal prison system not long ago. He was brash and self-righteous even after convictions started dropping.

He was still tweeting two days after his last sentencing. That is amazing. Federal prison–real federal prison–is like hell. It’s a Jonah fish that swallows you alive. Smart people drop their attitudes when they land in federal prison. It’s a subtle clue your pride is not helping you.

God punishes the proud and self-righteous, sooner or later. When it happens during this life, the punishments generally escalate with time. If you repent, things start to get better.

There are many people who double down with punishment. The harsher the punishment, the worse they get. There is no hope for those people. There is no limit to the suffering God will let them experience. I have no doubt there are people cursing God and saying he wronged them, even as they burn in hell. People are just that crazy. They are just that stubborn and dishonest.

That’s why hell exists. It’s for people who don’t listen.

What kind of sentence will Baldwin get? No idea. I assume it’s impossible for a healthy man to avoid prison time in a manslaughter case in New Mexico, but assumptions aren’t worth much. Right now, lawyers who like appearing on TV are looking for the answer so they will have something to say tonight. They will let us know. All I know is that the maximum is 18 months.

I just checked, and apparently, he is looking at a 5-year minimum because a gun was involved. The DA says so. Does that mean anything? Not in Florida. My last pastor raped a girl over and over and got two years, which was nothing like the mandatory minimum. A close relative was convicted of felony fleeing and evading, which carries a mandatory minimum, and she got probation. Maybe New Mexico is like Florida.

My guess is that he’ll get whatever minimums apply, at the very least, because this is a high-profile case. If my last pastor had been on the news and people had followed the trial, I think the judge would have applied the law correctly in order to avoid a backlash.

I don’t like Alec Baldwin because he’s a nasty person, but I don’t want to see him go to prison. He’s not a career criminal. He’s not going to shoot anyone else; I think we can be sure of that. I have prayed for him. In my mind, a dislike for an obnoxious person doesn’t justify wishing that person will go to prison.

I have done stupid things, myself. I have done things that could have killed people. You have, too. Own a car? The only big difference between Alec Baldwin and me is that the egregious risks I took didn’t produce disasters. I could have been in his shoes.

I have been arrogant. I have been nasty. It makes no sense to hope for mercy for myself and wish prison on someone else who is annoying but not really a major problem for the world.

It’s not like he’s going to go out and commit a slew of involuntary crimes.

I do think he needed to be charged. He needed to be alerted to his issues with pride.

Maybe they’ll offer him a juicy plea. I think I would jump for it if I were him. If he is sentenced at age 67, he could be looking at release at the age of 73, not counting time off for good behavior. The web seems to say he could be out by 70. That’s not great for an old man who has young children. In his situation, I think I’d be happy with anything under a year.

It may be that the only person who is really surprised today is Alec Baldwin. Someone should have sat him down after the shooting and told him this was coming.

They probably did.

I’ll keep praying things go as well as they can for him.

Can’t Wait to Meet the FBI

Today I had one of the stranger experiences of my life.

Back in December, I became convinced God wanted me to brew beer again. Within less than two weeks, I had a beer finished. During the time while I was getting the whole business back on its feet, I looked for sources of things like grain and tools, and I found a really excellent homebrew supply place in Orlando, over an hour away. I bought my first grain batches there. I went in person, and I was impressed by the service and prices.

As part of this process, I needed to look after my gas bottles. I needed CO2 and beer gas for draft beer. I always to go Airgas near me, but they said they could not deal with 5-pound bottles. I checked measurements to see if I could use a 20-pounder in my keezer, and I learned it would cost me a keg, so I gave the idea up. I emailed the supply place to see if they knew anything, and they recommended a gas supplier right around the corner from them.

Over the last week or two, I’ve had what I thought was dermatitis on my hands. My skin was cracking, and when hot water hit my hands, it stung. I thought maybe I had been in contact with some harsh chemical or other. I also wondered if it was just age. Maybe old people’s hands don’t deal well with all the cleaning involved with homebrewing. I thought about going to a dermatologist, but then I thought maybe I should just try lotion.

Before Rhodah and I went to Singapore, I applied for Global Entry, which is a government service that allows citizens returning to the US to bypass a lot of the DHS/Customs torment and waiting. You have to fill out an online application, pay a fee, and then make an appointment to be interviewed in person.

Because this is the government we’re talking about, appointments are scheduled far in advance, and you have to drive a long way to be interviewed unless you live near one of a small number of facilities. I applied in November, and the best I could do was January 6, which I somehow missed.

When I looked for a new appointment on the government’s site, I saw very depressing news. They wanted me to wait months. Then I learned about a private company that scans appointment schedules continuously and tells people when spots open up. The government doesn’t tell anyone when it decides to add appointments, and it does not inform people of cancellations, so a private company does it for $29 per month.

You have to love the government.

When an appointment pops up, you have to jump on it fast, no matter what time it is, because other people are also using the service.

I paid the fee, and I started seeing appointments popping up in my text messages. The closest places were Orlando, Sanford and Tampa.

I saw an appointment I liked. I took it. I saw a better one. I rescheduled. New appointments kept coming up, and I kept running to the PC to reschedule.I found myself in February. Then yesterday, I got a shock. I saw an appointment for today, in Sanford.

I grabbed it. I was thrilled. The wait would be over, and I had to go to Orlando anyway to run beer errands. This saved me a second set of tolls plus gas. Sanford is near Orlando.

As I got ready to leave today, I thought maybe I should plan a stop to get some lotion, but I decided to wait.

I went to the gas place first. They could not have been nicer. They gave me shiny new tanks, took my old ones that needed testing, and sent me on my way. I went to the brew store. Everything went well there, too. Then I drove to the Sanford airport, where they do interviews.

I was not happy about dealing with the government. It belongs to Satan, and I do not see the government as my friend. I don’t want to deal with law enforcement, ever, if I can avoid it. Homeland Security is close to the top of agencies I want nothing to do with. Who knew what questions they would ask? What if Bidenistas ran the place, knew I was a far-right Christian, and wanted to make trouble?

I resented having to go through this, but I really did not want to wait in any more long customs lines.

I went into the airport and sat down. The agent came out, asked who was next, and ushered me in, early. He held the door.

They ask you where you’ve gone in recent months. I was wearing a Singapore shirt and an Ephesus hat. He asked me how Ephesus was. I told him my wife and I had really enjoyed it. I said we were Christians, so it had significance to us. There is no other reason to go to Ephesus, so I thought I needed to explain.

He said he was a Christian, too. He said, “God bless you.”

I was more than a little freaked out.

I started telling him about Ephesus and the pizza-shaped ichthus signs the underground church left there. He told me he had worked in Israel for 6 months. He said, “I worked on a kibbutz.”

Most people would say, “What’s a kibbutz?” I got excited. I asked which one.

He worked at Nir-David, near Beit She’an. I didn’t know Nir-David, but I knew Beit She’an. It was just down the road when I lived on Geva. He also worked on a kibbutz near Jericho where they grew bananas. He said one of the places where he worked grew pummelos. Geva was in the process of replacing grapefruit with pummelos when I worked there!

We got into all sorts of things. We had been to the same temples in Egypt. We had both cruised the Nile, although he did it as a kid on a little rented sailboat, and I did it on a nice cruise ship. We had been the the pyramids. He had seen more of them than I had. He had been to Saqqara. We couldn’t go to Saqqara because Rhodah felt an attack of evil spirits inside the Great Pyramid, and we had to go back to the hotel so she could recover. I told him that.

He had been all over the Sinai Peninisula with a backpack. I told him I had turned down a trip. I said a Finnish girl on the Kibbutz had offered to pay my way so I could protect her from Middle Eastern men. Then we started talking about Israeli men and their abnormally high sex drive, and that got us to the subject of Israeli women and how unexpectedly attractive they were.

He had been to the Banias. He started to explain it to me, but I knew about it already. It’s one of my favorite topics. He knew how the pagans had thrown sacrifices into the spring there and how it was believed to be the site of Caesarea Phillipi, where Jesus called Peter “Satan,” told him to get behind him, and said the gates of hell would not prevail against his church. It is said that, “gates of hell” referred to the area of the Banias, because it was a center of demon worship. The Banias itself looks like a gate of hell. It’s a big hole in the side of the base of Mount Hermon.

Mount Hermon is significant to me because it’s believed to be the place where fallen angels came down and made a pact to have sex with women and then stick together when they had to account for themselves to God.

He said I was the first person he had interviewed who had known about kibbutzes. I think. Maybe he said I was the first one who knew about the Banias. He was amazed.

We talked much too long, and then he had me put my hands on the fingerprint machine, which didn’t see my fingerprints. He said I should try applying some hand sanitizer, but it didn’t help. He excused himself, went out, and got a bottle of lotion, which I put on my hands. The machine then worked.

I shook his hand when we parted, and he said, “God bless you,” again.

I thought I was going to have a creepy, scary government interview, but instead, I met a brother. I must have made 5 appointments while I was looking for a convenient time, and look who I ended up with. I picked his location and a time when he was working, and I had no idea who he was or even that he existed.

I got to my car and made a short video call to Rhodah and told her. She was amazed. I prayed after we hung up. Then I started the car and turned on Waze to find the best way home. I set home as my destination, and my phone said, “Have a blessed drive.”

I’m not kidding. Waze told me to have a blessed drive. I’ve been using it for at least 5 years. It has never said anything like that to me. I was actually scared for a minute.

The interview shocked me so much, I started asking myself if the government had had people look at my blog and investigate my past so they could have a plant pretend to be a Christian with amazingly similar experiences. It was hard for me to believe God had brought us together, so my mind looked for other explanations.

Of course, the government is far too stupid to do a thing like that. The government is only smart in movies and in the minds of socialists and other authoritarians.

As I was writing this, my approval came through, and when I got home, I realized my hands were better. The lotion did the trick, so now I know what to do about the cracks.

I wonder what’s on tap for tomorrow.

It’s all About the Data

The whole brewing enterprise is going very well.

Day before yesterday, I was finally able to get my first ale into a glass, and yesterday, I started drawing beer that was carbonated more correctly and had less suspended yeast in it. Yeast is bitter, and not in a way that improves beer.

I’ll post a photo.

The beer is still cloudy. It may stay that way. This is what I wanted. I can’t explain why, but this is a beer that should be a little chewy. If it turns clear as I take more out of the keg, it will still be great, but this photo shows what I was trying to do.

I bought 4 of those glasses. They’re called Brimley nucleated glasses. “Nucleated” means they stuck a laser or something in each glass and made tiny dents in the bottom. This creates what are known as nucleation points, and it means bubbles form on them and stream up into the beer.

I was not really interested, or even aware of the existence of, nucleation points when I started looking for glasses, but they don’t seem to hurt anything, and I was willing to compromise because it was so hard to find sturdy glasses with a good shape and a low price.

Brimley himself must be a Chinese guy, like Mr. Bauer from Harbor Freight.

Wing Wa Brimley, son of Mei Ling and Wo Fat Brimley.

I am controlling my food and beverage intake these days, but Saturdays…come on. I’m going to have a pizza or a Coke occasionally. Yesterday, I must have had a quart and a half of beer. It’s delightful. The complex aroma and flavor. The fine-textured Kirin-y head. And the satisfaction of finally getting it in my hand. These all drove me to go overboard.

Also, this stuff is just plain good. I have a problem when I create recipes: sometimes the results are so good, it’s very, very hard to stop eating. Beer is made from recipes, so the same problem applies when I get it right.

I will not say I make a great beer or a beer that should win prizes. It’s all subjective. I will say I really, really like the beers I designed. Really. A lot. Seriously.

I always say I don’t drink to get a buzz, but I will not lie. I want to be honest and correct myself. While I’ve been researching new beers and…wow, “researching” sounds so legitimate! Like saying, “I EXPERIMENTED with marijuana before being put in charge of document security in the Clinton White House.” Anyway, during my research, I have had several strong beers, and there is no way to drink twelve ounces of a 10%-alcohol beer without feeling something, especially if you have my Gary-Coleman-like moderation-induced tolerance. I have felt some pleasant sensations, and several times, I drank a little more to extend them.

I have been a little concerned. I don’t ever want to be drunk again, and my feeling has been that it’s a bad idea to see beer as anything other than a delicious drink. I’m not going to worry, though. I’m in the initial-enthusiasm phase of my return to brewing, so naturally, I will drink a little more now than I will in the future.

The Bible says God gave us wine to make man’s heart glad, so I suppose it can’t be true that it’s evil to feel a little sensation from beer. I don’t want to be a self-medicater, but being a Sadducee–a legalist–is worse.

I still want to make a couple of strong beers, but I have realized they’re not for every day. If I drink a bottle of imperial stout in the evening, I feel a little different when I get up the next day. The general rule is that I feel energetic and enthusiastic when I wake up, so I don’t want to face mornings with a vague sensation that reminds me I drank the night before.

I keep thinking about the relationship between Christmas and the rapture. I feel that beer is suitable for celebrations, as we see in Deuteronomy 14, and this is why I’m supposed to make it. I think I’m celebrating the rapture–the second Christmas–in advance. I’m ahead of most people. Last night, I lifted a glass and told God I was celebrating. I kept thanking him for coming for us the first time.

As for my views on how we see Christmas and gifts, I believe God told me this yesterday: Christmas IS the present. That’s really true. I told this to Rhodah, and she quoted John 3:16. God “gave” his son so believers would not perish but have eternal life. Jesus is a gift. The best possible gift. But we have Jesus-free Christmases during which we get excited about puny gifts like jewelry and gift cards.

Giving is essential to a blessed life. If you want to receive, give to others on God’s command. Not preachers in Lamborghinis. Actual human beings with hearts and needs. The things we give are seeds, and we receive harvests. God gives to receive a harvest, and so should we. He gave his son so he could have us. Jesus, who is God, even received a harvest when he gave away fish and bread.

If you don’t have a lot of money to give, you can give prayer, labor, a ride, a free professional service, or something else of value. Rhodah says T.B. Joshua said that if you have nothing else to give, give your ear and your heart. Sometimes people just need to talk.

I may crank out a wheat beer today.

Glerp Glerp Glerp

Your humble narrator has big news to announce.

Big to me. Insignificant and silly to the rest of the world.

I managed to draw a beer today!

When I started ordering things to make beer a couple of weeks back, I had to order things I needed so I could brew, ferment, and serve. Three things. Serving homebrew is complicated, because there are so many ways. Do you want a fancy bar with built-in taps? Do you want to be able to take a keg to a picnic? Do you like bottles? I wasn’t sure what I wanted, so I ordered a little hand faucet I could attach to a keg with a little bit of tubing.

Since then, I have started work on a keezer, which is a freezer with a temperature controller and taps.

Things took a while to arrive, and they came in dribs and drabs. The brewing stuff came earliest, so it only took a short time to get that going. I put a freezer in the garage for fermenting, and shortly, I had beer. But I could not get at it to drink it.

It was torture. That sweet little 5-gallon keg of excitement and old memories, sitting there locked up like Rapunzel.

Today, finally, some stuff I needed arrived, and I was able to move the keg to the keezer and pour myself a beer. I started by pouring off a little bit of the beer on the bottom of the keg, because that beer usually has floating yeast that makes it too bitter. Then I poured this glass and gave the beer a real try.

I remember this beer now. It’s exactly the beer I have been thinking about for the last couple of days. Hurricane beer.

I used this stuff to get through 2005 in Coral Gables. Wilma, Rita, and Katrina came through, if memory serves. I used to put a keg of this beer in a big cooler with ice along with lunchmeat, cheese, and bread, and I was all set. When the power went out, I was irie, mon.

It has a wonderful banana and allspice aroma. That comes from fermenting it fairly warm, I think. I designed it to be fermented at room temperature. This time around, though, it was a little cooler. Around 71°, I think.

It’s cloudy. I think that never changes for this beer unless a flocculating agent is used. A flocculating agent is something you put in beer to make stuff fall out of it. One such agent is carageenan, a seaweed also used for thickening root beer and ice cream. It’s also called Irish moss.

It has hops to burn, but I used crystal malt to make it sweet, so it’s extremely easy to drink.

The temperature control for the keezer arrived, and this is why I was able to move this ale there. I can get to work on a wheat beer any time I want. I already have the ingredients.

This is a blast. Finally, I don’t have to buy factory beer and live with disappointment.

I don’t drink much, but I do have a policy of forcing myself to drink three beers in one day, occasionally, to fight kidney stones, and I have not been doing it. Maybe this is just the loophole I need right now.

Beer Done Changed!

The brew biz is moving right along.

When I used to have a keg freezer, I used the technology of the time to connect gas bottles to kegs, and kegs to taps. Since I decided to brew again, I’ve been learning about new stuff that makes things easier.

One of the neatest developments is the Duotight connector. This is a tool-free connector that attaches beer and air tubing to things. You can use it on both the gas and beer sides. It works with a new tubing called EVAbarrier which is supposed to somehow reduce beer’s exposure to oxygen.

With the old tubing, to attach tubing to barbs, you had to use hose clamps, or at least I did. I didn’t trust friction. You would get yourself some tubing, cut it to length, heat the end of it in water, and then slide the softened end onto your fitting. If it was tight, as it was supposed to be, it would hold on for dear life, and if you wanted to remove it later, it was not very easy. The whole business required considerable work.

EVAbarrier slips right into Duotight fittings. You pull a little collar, and the fitting grabs the tubing. Then you have a seal that won’t leak. To take if off, you push the collar the other way, and off the tubing comes.

Leaks are one of the big issues with draft systems, and the new stuff is supposedly less prone to leaks. If true, that could save me a lot of aggravation.

Because I have been in a hurry, I have ordered some old-tech products to go between the kegs and taps, but now I plan to send almost all these things back. I have newfangled stuff on the way.

I am continuing to research changes in craft beers.

The other day, somebody told me about “juice bombs.” A juice bomb is a sweet beer without much hop bitterness. I believe they’re for soft millennials (but I repeat myself). Real beer is an acquired taste. It’s not Hawaiian Punch. It takes a while to learn to appreciate bitterness and hop flavors. To the detriment of humanity, beer has become cool, so there are a lot of people out there who want to be seen drinking craft beers. My guess is that juice bombs were made for millennials who want to be seen drinking the latest thing, without going to the trouble to learn to enjoy actual beer.

This is just a theory.

I also read about milk stout. I know it sounds revolting. The person who named it made a big marketing mistake.

It’s called milk stout because they put lactose in it. No milk. Yeast doesn’t like lactose, so after fermentation, the beer is still sweet.

I wondered: are milk stouts juice bombs?

Yesterday I tried one. It was quite nasty. The name is Nitro Milk Stout, and people give it good reviews. It comes in a big can with a little nitrogen charger inside it to give it nice bubbles and sweetness.

When I poured it, it looked a lot like a draft Guinness, complete with the little bubble waves going up the sides of the glass, but the waves seemed to shut down quickly.

It tasted a lot like Guinness, except that I didn’t notice much bitterness. What I did taste was sugar. It was like a stout egg cream.

At first, it wasn’t all that terrible. I felt I understood it. People like to compare Guinness to sweet things like milkshakes, so somebody tried to make a sweet stout. Maybe I needed to give it a chance and expand my horizons.

It was no good. I had to quit. After about 4 ounces, I was looking to get rid of it. Hop flavors are important. Bitterness is important. This stuff was not going to do anything for me.

It occurred to me that I had an ale I wanted to clear out of the spare fridge, so I decided to see if a half-and-half would work. I tried Bell’s Two Hearted IPA the other day, and I thought it was just okay. I found the malt taste watery, and the hop aroma was brutal and free from any type of complexity. Some character on the web claimed this was THE best beer, and all sorts of alleged experts are in love with it. I thought it was a little clumsy. But maybe it was bitter enough to save Nitro stout.

No dice. Together, these beers were worse than Nitro all by itself. Down the sink they went.

I wrote an unfavorable review for Bell’s and posted it somewhere. Boy, did it make people mad. Like I was wrong. Not liking THE best beer is incorrect, apparently. It was really funny.

I tried to redeem the evening with a Blithering Idiot barleywine.

Barleywines were developed by the British while they were feuding with France. Their wine supply was not looking good, so they created very strong beers to fill the gap. Their alcoholic content is up close to winy numbers.

I once made something I thought was similar to a barleywine, and it was spectacular. It was really more like a Belgian tripel, but anyway, it was magnificent. Complex. Sweetness balanced with nice hops. It got better and better in the keg. I thought bottled barleywines might be similar.

Blithering Idiot was a disappointment. It was syrupy-sweet. It had a heavy flavor sort of like caramel and sort of like horehound. It also smelled and tasted the way Carnation milk smells, only the taste was overwhelming. I thought Watney’s Red Barrel or Whitbread might have that smell if you spilled it on the floor and let it congeal for a month.

It may be a great beer for other people. Not me. I finished it, but I would never buy it again.

My big new beer discovery is Old Rasputin Imperial Stout. Imperial stouts were supposedly made by the British for export to Russia. Imagine Guinness with about half the water removed. These beers have very strong stout flavor and aromas. You drink them from wide glasses that have a lot of room for aroma.

Old Rasputin is about 9% alcohol, so you won’t want to drink it all day. One ought to be plenty.

I wanted to learn about imperial stouts because I had what I thought was an imperial stout at a party long ago, and I loved it.

Old Rasputin is so good, it changed the way I think about beer. I had been planning to focus on thinner beers, but this stout made me realize beer had more potential than I understood, and to exploit that potential, I would need to make some high-gravity ales.

The head was thick and high, and so dark it seemed to have hints of purple in it. The beer itself was almost black. The aroma was heavy and fruity, in a wonderful way. I would say a Chunky bar might smell similar if you burned one corner.

The beer itself tasted somewhat like coffee, chocolate, and fruit. It was just about exactly what I had hoped for.

As the beer warmed up, it kept changing. The fruit and chocolate flavors increased. I thought I tasted a little licorice.

I found myself moving the glass from one nostril to the other. You can actually smell things in one nostril but not the other. The smell sort of pulsated as it went from one side to the other.

I swished it around in my mouth and enjoyed the way the taste changed after I had swallowed it. The flavor sticks to your teeth and keeps giving you pleasure after the glass is empty.

I can’t say enough about this beer. I felt genuinely sad when the last one was gone.

I am used to telling people I like the beers I brew more than anything I can buy, but that is no longer true.

I don’t have the right glass for heavy beers, but a pint Ball jar works very well. The internal shape is similar.

There is a well-known homebrewing guru named Denny Conn. I used to interact with him on Usenet in the Dark Ages. He makes heavy beers. His online signature is the same now as it was then: “Life begins at 60 — 1.060, that is.” He’s referring to the original gravity of beer. A heavy beer starts with an original gravity of 1.060 or higher, and it gets lighter as it ferments.

I always thought he was a fringe case, but he’s onto something.

I’ve also tried Brother Thelonious, a dark ale made by the same brewery. Really excellent stuff, but after Old Rasputin, it’s not very exciting. Brother Thelonious couldn’t make me rething everything I believed about beer.

Back when craft beers started popping up, I learned that small breweries could make bad beer. Worse, big breweries pretended to be small breweries, and then they made bad beer. There were craft beers out there that were like Budweiser with dye in it. Now I see another danger: small breweries that use excellent ingredients and careful methods to make sugary beer that appeals to people who never liked beer in the first place.

If you think I’m talking to you, check your tattoos. You may be right.

The Shortage Glut

Are things getting crazy again? Looks like they may be.

There was a big increase in global suffering in 2020, as we all know. Coronavirus popped up and made us all miserable. Here in the US, leftists threw terrible, diaper-bursting tantrums, terrorizing the police, beating up people they disagreed with, and destroying property. And of course, there were shortages.

As time passed, we got used to coronavirus, leftists got their president and reduced hostilities, and there was some easing of shortages.

Now covid has erupted in China, defying the ridiculous zero-transmission orders their vile government imposed, and which our own death-fearing leftists still praise. Bird flu has quadrupled the price of eggs. Food packages have shrunk, and prices have gone up. I suppose riots will resume, since that’s the only part of the puzzle that’s missing.

China is really something, and so are our press and medical establishments, which are both dominated by leftists. If you go to Google and look up “coronavirus China,” you will get a government-doctor graph that says there are about 5,000 new cases in China per day. If you Google the news, you will see figures like 76% and 90%, describing the current infection totals in Chinese cities.

Clearly, if 76% of the people in any large Chinese city are currently infected, the entire country has a daily rate which is in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But our handlers still post absurdly low figures.

Why would the medical-government complex allow CCP numbers to be published in their names when even our feeble press is acknowledging statistics that prove those figures aren’t even close to correct?

If there is one sane thing happening in China, it’s this: if a Chinese person who has covid dies in a train wreck, they don’t call it a covid death. Here, death figures have been wildly inflated because hospitals and the government have financial and political interests in jacking them up.

It seemed like the official figures made a little sense early in 2020, but eventually, it became obvious they were being cooked, and there was no way to know what the truth was. Fall down an elevator shaft, and you were counted as a covid death. As long as you had the sniffles, you counted, and no test was required, so colds and the flu were good enough.

We will never know how many people got covid or died from it. It’s like asking about the Atlantic slave trade. Sure, over a hundred million people died during shipment. Whatever you say. Never mind that there were roughly a hundred million people on the entire continent of Africa in 1600, and only a tiny percentage were sold to slavers by their fellow Africans.

Slaves were expensive. Letting them die in huge numbers for no reason would be like loading ships with new Toyotas and letting them roll into the ocean. It never happened. There weren’t that many to begin with, and slavers tried to keep them alive so they could sell them. Slavery was a capitalist industry. Industries that lose money don’t last 400 years.

Talking to leftists about covid is like talking to flat-earthers about satellites.

To get back to the point, things seem to be getting worse again. This comports with the Bible’s warnings. The tribulation will come, and before that, there will be labor pains. Things will get bad, and then they’ll get better. Then the pattern will repeat. It seems we are entering a labor pain.

Today I read about eggs.

We have always had eggs. Chickens are mentioned in the Bible. We have always had influenza. There have been bird flu epidemics in the past. Now, if the establishment is to be believed, we have a unique epidemic which is expected to stay with us until some external force ends it. They are telling us it will not go away on its own like all the other bird flus. So we have had chickens for thousands of years, and during most of that time there was no science to help end epidemics, but somehow we never had a permanent poultry epidemic until this century.

The bird flu is like coronavirus in that it is firmly established in the wild. We can’t vaccinate every pigeon and crow. This is why you paid $7 for jumbo eggs the other day.

Just when I learned how to make creme brulee.

Will it run its course until birds around the world develop resistance, or will it be killing poultry until Jesus returns? Wish I knew.

If there have always been bird flus, why is this one different? Let me guess. Global warming. Or homophobia. Maybe if more male shop teachers were allowed to teach while wearing mammoth artificial breasts with protruding nipples, eggs would be cheaper.

Yesterday, I called a gas company and asked about buying a beer gas tank. Sorry; no could do. Steel shortage. They said that if I brought them my own tank, they could swap it, but they were not selling new ones.

There is no steel shortage. The Ukraine war, and probably other things, put a big dent in steel demand. Steel was a lot more expensive in the recent past. I suppose there must be a tank shortage. Maybe companies are hoarding them, or maybe the Chinese people who make them are bogged down by coronavirus. Anyway, one more thing that’s hard to get.

It’s not a trivial problem. Gas bottles are used for all sorts of things. Anesthesia. Welding. Weird industrial uses that are little known but very important.

Gas is also expensive. There is a CO2 shortage. On the one hand, we are told that CO2 is destroying the world, but on the other hand, there is a shortage of CO2 for things like beer and soda production.

Why is CO2 expensive? Because of coronavirus? Because of backward environmentalist legislation? No, it’s because gas supplies we have relied on in the past have experienced contamination, and it’s taking time to fix it. One CO2 source was contaminated by an extinct volcano. No human being, not even a white one, caused that.

Citrus is disappearing all over the world. Bananas are threatened by a devastating fungus. The king crabs and snow crabs just vanished; look that up. Of course, some are blaming global warming for the crab problem, but scientists who are probably more honest are blaming a complex and cascading combination of factors.

Deer are in trouble. Chronic wasting disease, which is like mad cow disease or kuru for deer and people who eat the wrong deer parts, is killing deer in large parts of the US and Canada, and in the Florida Keys, screwworms are literally eating deer alive. Deer have a high coronavirus rate, although they don’t get very sick. Yet.

I guess I’m wasting my time, telling people about shortages and diseases. We all see these things happening.

Here’s another shortage I find interesting: the gas stove shortage. It’s not here yet. Leftists have decided to try to ban gas stoves and ovens. That is amazing. How can anyone be that stupid? It can only be demons at work.

Gas stoves cause global warming, apparently. So what about grills and other portable cooking tools? Will propane be sold only with permits based on what we plan to do with it?

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s wonderful not to have to need electricity to feed yourself. Living in a hurricane state, I’ve had to grill my food many times. If leftists get their way, gas stoves and ovens will start to vanish as they age, and everyone will depend on the power grid.

This could kill a lot of old people. I’ll give you the example of a relative of mine; a diehard faux leftist hypocrite. She just got rid of her gas fireplace appliance and replaced it with an electric one, and she lives in an area where winter weather sometimes kills the power. She’s feeble and sick, and so is her husband. They’re not rare cases. I would hate to live in rural Minnesota or Montana and lose heat in the winter.

Oddly, ammunition is getting cheap. You can buy .22 rounds for as little as 5 cents each. I can get 9mm for $7.50 per box before tax and shipping. It was more like $30 not long ago.

For a long time, my feeling has been that God would see to it that the guns and ammo kept flowing, because humanity will want those things after the rapture. People will want to kill each other, and God will let it happen, because his children will not be here to intercede. Even when we claimed there were shortages, guns and ammo were selling like crazy. We used the word “shortage,” but it looks like the scarcity was only on retailers’ shelves. We were buying so fast, they could not keep up.

One of the curses of the tribulation is a spirit of murder that takes over the world. It’s going to happen. There is no way to stop it. God has predicted it, so that’s that. It makes sense that people would be armed very well during that time.

No one should consider it strange if a pandemic causes a series of shortages, but we have shortages that are only attributable to accidents and what insurance companies used to call “acts of God.” That should make people think.

A pandemic itself is like that. People don’t cause them. Well, there is the covid lab theory, but it’s not proven, and it’s an outlier. Labs didn’t create the bird flu or the deer diseases I mentioned.

Over the last week, I heard two charismatics predicting a bad year. One is a man who goes around healing people. I don’t know how accurate his prophecies generally are. The other was Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and teacher. He appears to get solid information from God. He compared the time we’ve just experienced to the eye of a hurricane. There is nearly no wind in the eye of a storm, so people tend to go out and celebrate as it passes, thinking they’re in the clear. Then the other side of the storm shows up and drives them indoors.

I was walking into a store two days ago, and I thought about my dependence on stores. I knew that if this one and the other local stores closed, I would be in a bad way. My little farming efforts amounted to nothing last year. Is this the year when we will start driving by stores with taped-off entrances?

It’s going to happen. If it’s not this year, it will still happen soon.

Maybe this year won’t be too bad. I have the feeling this will be a year of celebration for my wife and me. I feel as though we will be comfortable, and we will be full of the awareness Jesus will be here soon. I certainly hope this is true. I don’t look forward to begging for food or fending off hoardes of city dwellers who think I have it. They will be hit worse than anyone. They have no way to look after themselves, and they will be surrounded by desperate people who are in the same boat and who will do anything in order to get food.

In the Bible, Hebrews boiled and ate their own children, and they were no worse than modern Americans. If a person will eat his own child, what will people do to strangers?

If you don’t have a good relationship with God, you will sink when America finally enters the drainpipe. Biden can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Bags of junk silver, weapons, and a generator can’t save you. One of the purposes of the tribulation will be to show people God has always been the only source of provision and safety, so He will make sure they understand. Everything else people trust will be proven useless.