Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

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  • Saturday Morning Shabbos Shalom Links

    I’m in a weird situation, going from a work environment which was, let us say, very WASP and Catholic to one where there’s a mezuzzah on the door and I’m greeted every morning with, “Boker tov!” My climate shift is both literal and figurative. So the links might be a little Jewier than usual.

    Today’s birthdays are nearly 100% goyish, though: we start with elitist W.E.B. DuBois; director Victor Fleming, whose 1939 might be compared to Einstein’s 1905; organist and composer George Handel; voice of the Enterprise, Majel Barrett; arguably the greatest wide receiver in NFL history, Fred Biletnikoff; and albino shredder Johnny Winter. It is also the anniversary of the day Heisenberg dropped his great notion on Pauli, but I can’t be sure of that. Maybe it’s tomorrow. Or it was yesterday.

    On to the news.

    This one starts out bad and gets worse. I think even SugarFree could not have written this as a story.

     

    Of course, increasing cost of labor in places like California have nothing to do with this.

     

    I shouldn’t laugh my ass off at this, but I’m laughing my ass off at this.

     

    This story is particularly sad to me. I don’t know how to break the news to Wonder Dog.

     

    “O’Rourke is now on the precipice of running for president with “losing Senate candidate” as the most impressive line on his résumé.” Hilarity ensues.

     

    Dogs playing frisbee, nothing new. But this is Florida, so…

     

    Lots of deflated balls jokes on the Robert Kraft story, but the important question remains, “Is this good or bad for the Jews?”

     

    And this guy really needs to get a few tips from Kraft on picking the right massage parlor.

     

    Bad dogs, bad dogs, whatcha gonna do?

     

    Y’know, if you didn’t poison customers, you might get another star.

     

    There’s the old joke about “chutzpah” meaning “guy kills his parents, then asks the court for mercy because he’s an orphan.” This is the modern version.

     

    What I love about this story is how the actual numbers are put up front (increased speed limits on highways have had little to no effect on death rates), then followed by all sorts of “experts” telling us that increased speed limits will vastly increase death rates. And that irony seems to be lost on the person writing the story. What would we do without experts? And dumb reporters?

     

     

    Old Guy Music continues the theme. What if Leonard Cohen had stayed true to his roots and written his classic Hallelujah in Yiddish? OK, this is very self-indulgent of me, but it really made me feel good to hear this. I suspect I’ll be the only one here with that reaction, but hey, it’s my post so I can do what I like. The Yiddish aside, this is some fine guitar and vocals. And I bet Swiss will understand about half of this.

     

  • Economics Corner with Winston’s Mom & Paul Krugman

    Note from the Glibertarians.com editing staff:  Here at Glibertarians.com, we are constantly searching for new features.  We noticed a niche in our features was lacking:  macroeconomic analysis.  Because of this, we reached out to Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand institute.  Unfortunately, that guy wants to get paid for his work.  So we found the next best thing:

    Winston’s Mom.

    First thing I want to say is, hi Winston, Mom got a new gig!

    Now that we got thst out of the way, let me begin here,

    In 1961, America faced what conservatives considered a mortal threat: calls for a national health insurance program covering senior citizens. In an attempt to avert this awful fate, the American Medical Association launched what it called Operation Coffee Cup, a pioneering attempt at viral marketing.

    Here’s how it worked: Doctors’ wives (hey, it was 1961) were asked to invite their friends over and play them a recording in which Ronald Reagan explained that socialized medicine would destroy American freedom. The housewives, in turn, were supposed to write letters to Congress denouncing the menace of Medicare.

    In 1961, I recall a doctor that would send his wife down to Biloxi, MS with her girl friends.  He was into fisting for some reason but that didn’t stop him from penetrating everything.  He was a lousy (((tipper))) as I recall.

    What do Trump’s people, or conservatives in general, mean by “socialism”? The answer is, it depends.

    Sometimes it means any kind of economic liberalism. Thus after the SOTU, Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, lauded the Trump economy and declared that “we’re not going back to socialism” — i.e., apparently America itself was a socialist hellhole as recently as 2016. Who knew?

    Ever try telling the lady at the methadone clinic you’re on Medicaid?  What a bitch.

    Other times, however, it means Soviet-style central planning, or Venezuela-style nationalization of industry, never mind the reality that there is essentially nobody in American political life who advocates such things.

    That broad from NY, always on TV, always smiling with her squeaky voice.  Whats her name?

    Trump’s economists clearly had a hard time fitting the reality of Nordic societies into their anti-socialist manifesto. In some places they say that the Nordics aren’t really socialist; in others they try desperately to show that despite appearances, Danes and Swedes are suffering — for example, it’s expensive for them to operate a pickup truck. I am not making this up.

    What about the slippery slope from liberalism to totalitarianism? There’s absolutely no evidence that it exists. Medicare didn’t destroy freedom. Stalinist Russia and Maoist China didn’t evolve out of social democracies. Venezuela was a corrupt petrostate long before Hugo Chávez came along. If there’s a road to serfdom, I can’t think of any nation that took it.

    Who was it that wrote that book and who was he writing about anyway?

    So scaremongering over socialism is both silly and dishonest. But will it be politically effective?

    Probably not. After all, voters overwhelmingly support most of the policies proposed by American “socialists,” including higher taxes on the wealthy and making Medicare available to everyone (although they don’t support plans that would force people to give up private insurance — a warning to Democrats not to make single-payer purity a litmus test).

    On the other hand, we should never discount the power of dishonesty. Right-wing media will portray whomever the Democrats nominate for president as the second coming of Leon Trotsky, and millions of people will believe them. Let’s just hope that the rest of the media report the clean little secret of American socialism, which is that it isn’t radical at all.

    I do have a story from 1973 about a Danish john named Viggo.  We bargained a bit, but he started small.  First he asked how much to finger my ass, so I said 5 Kroner, and when he said he had real money i said $5.  Then he asked how much to finger his ass and I’m all well the first one is free dear, but the second will cost another $5.  One thing lead to another, and eventually we built up a lather using the hotel soap and I had an bottle of vodka in his ass while I was rubbing him out.  Doesn’t seem so weird now, but back then I might not have opened up the bottle and taken a swig after the fact.

    What were we talking about?  Right, slippery slopes.  It starts small but if you keep slipping, it might net you $58 in the end.

     

  • Friday Afternoon Links!

    Happy Friday to each and every one of you. Except that one guy. Stick around this weekend when Mexican Sharpshooter rises to my defense, and Paul Krugman gets taken down a notch by an independent business owner. Lots of good things in store. Me, I’m at a conference all day tomorrow. yay.

    Robert Kraft gets busted for going to a massage parlor in Florida. Yes, yes. We have made all the jokes about deflating balls. Jesus, the guys richer’n hell and gets the rub’n’tug by your standard old Asian lady? What’s wrong with you man?!

    He was supposed to be at a black tie affair, but wore the wrong monkey suit to the wrong address.

    It seems weird to me that the Fed uses the stock and bond market as its primary gauge of what to do. On the one had, marketz!!1! on the other hand, if the more accurate valuation is not what the current valuation is, what’s the problem with volatility? Of course, not mentioned in this is that as the government’s debt to GDP ration blows past 1:1, they have an interest in keeping borrowing cheap.

    It looks like Mexico isn’t the only place Americans can go for meds. Another place I’m of mixed opinions on. On the one hand, it would be great if the American market wasn’t the primary subsidizer of pharma’s R&D market. On the other hand, I have no idea what part of the total cost for developing and certifying a new drug is jumping through FDA hoops.

    We’ll go throw back to my high school days here.

  • What Are We Reading – February 2019

    This has been a month of transitions for the secret cabal of Glibertarians who run the site. Location changes, states of being changes (J.W. has finally had her top surgery and would like to be known as Jedwina going forward), so most of us haven’t done much more reading than rental, tax, medical consent or estate paperwork lately. So if you’ve read something, please fill the howling void left behind and let’s give Jedwina some great suggestions to pick for next month.

    jesse.in.mb

    Not a whole hell of a lot to be honest. I keep chipping away at “Roadside Picnic,” which makes video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro 2033 make more sense, but I always have a hard time with the cadence of Russian genre fiction (translated to English) that I can’t quite put my finger on. I burned through a bunch of the Nightwatch series by Sergei Vasilievich Lukyanenko a few years back, and while I enjoyed them immensely as fluff sci-fi/fantasy, something about the storytelling tripped me up while reading them. I’ve also been picking away at Aristotle’s Rhetoric which is equal parts interesting and dry. Some of the allusions to classical figures allude me for I am not well educated, but it’s been very neat to read up on the art and science of making good arguments.

    Brett L

    I re-read most of Nathan Lowell’s Trader’s Tales from the Golden Age of the Solar Clipper they’re not super complex books, but kind of easy to get into. Its basically Merchant Marines in Space. Some might find them incredibly boring, but I really like them. I also read Smoke and Summons, kind of a weird, steampunk meets magic book about a woman who is somehow bound to and can be forced to channel a demon. She escapes from her evil magician owner and falls in with a thief who just happens to be the son of the head of the church. It was an interesting read, but obviously part of a much larger work. Written by the woman who wrote the Paper Magician, which, come to think of it is how I would describe that book. Oh, and I re-read Seveneves by Neal Stephenson. I wish he’d spent a third less time describing TEOTWAKI and a third more time describing the post-human future. Oh, and a metric fuckton of Microsoft Azure documentation.

     

    Old Man With Candy

    As you can imagine, my normally limited reading-for-pleasure time has been more limited than normal. But being sent back to the frigid prairies last week, I had books with me on the airplane, chosen less because of an urge to read them, but what’s tolerable among the few that have been unpacked. It had been decades since I had read the Foundation trilogy and my memories were not as fond as the books’ reputation. I spied Second Foundation among the small pile of available books and grabbed it. It’s readable but… that’s about it. It suffered from every fault I remembered: too stuffed with stilted and unlikely dialog, cardboard characters, predictable plot twists. Meh.

    No excuses needed for Frederik Pohl’s The Siege of Eternity, a sequel to The Other End of Time. I think Pohl was incapable of writing a bad book. This isn’t great Pohl, but it is in every way a better book than Second Foundation. And as a libertarian, I enjoy imagining a future where rebellion against government has broken out everywhere, in this case at the instigation of theologically-driven aliens as part of their attempt at conquest.

     

    SugarFree

    Backed up to read Charles Stross’ The Delirium Brief before finally reading the newest Laundry Files novel, The Labyrinth Index. Still an enjoyable read, but I think Stross is getting bored with writing the series. Another installment without Bob, this time focusing on his psychobitch ex-girlfriend Mahri and her attempt to deal with the United States version of The Laundry, variously referred to as The Black Chamber or the Nazgûl. Anything more would be spoilers.

    It read a wide smattering of short stories about cannibalism and then Shane Stadler’s nasty little foray into torture porn, Exoskeleton. If you’ve been longing for a mash-up of Martyrs, Carrie, and The Boys from Brazil, this is the answer to your prayers…

     

    Mad Scientist

    Jason Fagone’s Ingenious is a story about several of the colorful characters competing in the automotive X-prize: 100 MPG (or equivalent, for battery power) in a car that could be mass produced. The author knows almost nothing about cars or engineering, so this is mostly a tale of the teams building the things, and which of their teammates they don’t get along with, who they love, and blah blah blah. The book isn’t long on environmental doom and gloom, but it’s definitely in there. Some of the teams surprise you with a decent finish in the competition despite their duct tape and bubble gum build. Others, attempting to use a Harley-Davidson engine to spin a generator, drop out early with completely unsurprising problems: too loud, too much vibration, and too unreliable. But made in America, so, you know, fuck yeah. Overall the book is an engaging read, but you won’t learn anything about vehicle engineering.

  • Vosotros tenéis todas las enlaces…en la mañana de viernes…

    Buenos dias.  Esta mañana yo voy a practicar mi Español.  ¿Por qué?  Porque esta articúlo mio, y porque quiero hacerlo.

    Okay, I’m done, now for the links from down south….further south.

    Nicolas Maduro closes the border with Brazil.  Not to keep Brazil out of course, rather to keep Venezuelans in.  Not to worry, Brazillian Trump (aka Bolsonaro) only encouraged Venezuelan’s to flee.

    Presidential spokesman Gen Otávio Régo Barros said on Tuesday that, in co-ordination with the US, food and medicine would be available in the border town of Pacaraima to be collected by “the government of acting President Juan Guaidó in Venezuelan trucks driven by Venezuelans”.

    A prominent Mexican environmentalist found shot in the head.  Unlikely this was a suicide, being he was shot in the head twice.

    Mr Flores was a longstanding opponent of the Proyecto Integral Morelos (PIM), a development project that includes two new thermoelectric plants and a 150km natural gas pipeline in the state.

    Activists fear that the pipeline will contaminate the local water supply, which would predominantly affect the indigenous communities who live in the area.

    The project is due to put to a referendum this weekend – and environmental and human rights groups in the state believe that Mr Flores’ death is linked to this vote.

    You have got to be kidding me…

    In Utah last year, the Public Employee Health Plan took this idea to a new level with its voluntary Pharmacy Tourism Program. For certain PEHP members who use any of 13 costly prescription medications — including the popular arthritis drug Humira — the insurer will foot the bill to fly the patient and a companion to San Diego, then drive them to a hospital in Tijuana, Mexico, to pick up a 90-day supply of medicine.

    A transgender woman from El Salvador was killed shortly after being deported from the US. She(or he whathaveyou) applied for assylum to the US.

    ¡conseguir un poco!

    A German court convicted two former employees of (in)famous gun maker Heckler & Koch for illegal arms sales to “troubled” Mexican states.

    The court said the company delivered 4,219 assault rifles, 2 submachine guns and 1,759 ammunition magazines to Mexico, and they were sold on by the central purchasing body there to Jalisco, Chiapas, Chihuahua and Guerrero states. The exports took place in 2006-2009.

    It found that the exports to Mexico in and of themselves were covered by German government permits, but that they were fraudulently obtained through knowingly incorrect information based upon unreliable declarations from Mexican authorities on where the weapons would end up.

    Human rights groups say firearms delivered to Mexico often end up in the hands of drug cartels.

    Easy enough to facilitate given the Mexican army issues the HK G-3 rifle. Make of that as you will.

    Panama!

  • Crackpot Corner: A Million-Dollar Idea

    Welcome to Crackpot Corner, the randomly appearing column where I (and other Featured Content Providers) make a low-effort post without doing the research of one written by Animal, Neph, Kinnath, Eddie, Hyp, or any of the more worthwhile authors.  What makes this different than other posts, is this column will cover topics that are plausible, as long a) you don’t know enough about the topic for it to be ludicrously incorrect, b)you’re drunk or c) both.

    So I was at the more mall-ninja of the gun shops in town (the only one that carries CZs) and hanging on the wall I saw one of the 25-round magazines for a 10/22.  Now, since NYS bans magazines with capacities of more than ten rounds, I was intrigued.  Maybe there was an exception for .22 or rimfire cartridges?  I asked the sales guy and he told me that “Law enforcement can still buy them.”  I became fucking enraged.  I kept my cool (how stupid do you have to be to lose your shit in a gun store?) didn’t buy anything, and left.

    And then I thought.

    And then I had an idea.

    I bring this idea to the Glibertariat, because to make it work, it will take some legal eagles and residents of accommodating states.  It may not even be possible.  But if it is…

    The basic idea is, just like you can buy an ordination online, we set up a way of becoming a certified LEO online.  The Law Enforcement Officers safety Act does make reference to “private agency/firm” being able to qualify someone to be a “Qualified Law Enforcement Officer.”  We got Glibs with land.  Let’s get the Glibertarian Legal Team to work drafting up the paperwork to give “Suthern’s Forest Preserve, Tactical Training Center and Muscadine Wine Bar” its own armed security force with arrest powers onsite.  I will totally chip in to make this happen.

    The Million Dollar Idea part comes in where we create a website to accept names to be added to the SFPTTCMWB police force and charge for a background check and “administrative costs.”  The payments will need to be automatically converted to Bitcoin and downloaded to an offline wallet, naturally.

    The site might not last too long unless we can generate enough money to bribe the appropriate politicos.  Hopefully, though, the original members of the SFPTTCMWBPF will have prior to the discovery/media outcry retired and become “Qualified Retired Law Enforcement Officers” so I can run standard capacity mags in my CZ.

  • Thursday Afternoon Links

    You know what they call the guy who got the lowest passing score on the bar exam? A lawyer. You know what they call this guy who got the lowest passing score on a Microsoft certification exam? Certified. Thank god. Hopefully, I never have to do tech certs again. I’m getting too old for this shit.

    I can’t imagine why this guy is going to prison for 47 years. Couldn’t have anything at all to do with his anger management issues.

    Classic Florida (young) Man. I guess it is still too soon for “shoot up the school” jokes.

    All these vegans and vegetarians bitching about global warming are aggressing against my Neanderthal DNA.

    I dunno about the big boat, but I’m pretty sure any five random guys with fishing boats in Florida could take on “Iran’s elite Republican Guard” navy pictured here.

     

    RIP Peter Tork

     

  • Evan Goes to Sri Lanka: Part I

    I’ve wanted to go to Sri Lanka since I was a child. Something about it enticed me. I had an opportunity to make the journey, and it ended up being a profound mix of geographic and emotional exploration.

    This trip represents the downfall of a relationship that was once precious to me. It tarnishes my recollections of cultural and romantic adventures alike. We fell into our doomed love in Korea. During our honeymoon phase, I chose to go to America to get my first hip replacement and was gone for several months longer than I had planned. She cheated on me while I was gone. We had been together for such a short period of time and I was away for so long. I let it slide.

    When we reunited, our spark had dimmed but it was not yet snuffed. When we floated, we floated high. Way up there where you’re afraid to look down for fear of getting Wile E. Coyoted. But we had so many fights. In front of strangers, our friends. There are encounters that neither of us are proud of. Knives were thrown. I ducked.

    It was difficult to navigate our spiraling descent. It was such an unhealthy relationship, but we were still desperately in love. We’d been together for a few years when we decided to switch things up. I knew the idea to move to Singapore together wasn’t a good one. So did she. But we wouldn’t dare talk about it. Polite fictions. We simply couldn’t escape our orbit. We didn’t want to. We were terrified that any push would send us hurtling apart. Hoping without promise, we lied to ourselves and each other, secretly knowing and ignoring the truth. We were such stubborn magnets.

    ****

    I had ten days off and I finally got the chance to go to the Teardrop of India. As often is the case, I didn’t know to expect and I was going to do it alone. Mostly. Before I left Singapore, I had casually mentioned my vacation plans to a coworker. We were friendly but not friends, if you know what I mean. A few weeks later she also decided to go to Sri Lanka. We were on the same plane. As soon as we landed we both went on our separate paths.

    This is one of the rare adventures where my plan worked out perfectly. I had a rough idea of what places I wanted to visit, what routes I needed to take, the food I wanted to eat, and what things I wanted to do. Went off without a hitch. This is how I like to travel. Do research, but always leave plans loose and untimed. You never know what you’ll find. You’re here to explore, not to punch in-and-out.

    I arrived in Colombo very late at night. Having read that it’s a very boring city, I immediately bailed. I took a four-hour cab up north to Sigiriya. I slept in the car and awoke to hot air balloons drifting in the dawn light. Cows were being herded through the half-paved streets.

    Sigiriya is an ancient ruin of a city. It’s a towering butte and is best described as the Machu Picchu of the Sri Lankan jungle. Lion paws carved into the rock flank the main entrance. Monkeys roamed freely.

    Through the bustling crowd, I climbed up the steps. Erotic paintings decorated the walls during the ascent. They had my undivided attention.

    It was heavenly, but a bitch of a climb with dreams of an elevator. At the summit, you can see the foundations of the ancient capital. My imagination built upwards from those stone rectangles, recreating the lost city.

    The Lonely Mountain in the distance fed the idyllic lake napping below. It took a lot of effort to convince myself to head back down. It felt like leaving a lover behind. I suppose I was.

    Monkeys were darting along the staircases and cliff sides on the descent. You get used to them.

    I moved onwards towards Kandy, a city surrounded by tea fields. It was an interesting town but mostly served as a waypoint in my journey. I randomly met with my coworker for dinner and a drink.

    On my tuk tuk ride back to my hostel, I asked if I could drive. He shouldn’t have let me in my drunken state, but he did. I exuberantly sped up the mountainside in that foreign vehicle, somehow safely making it to my domicile. The gate was locked. I had to scale the iron palisade to get in. The more bizarre your adventures are, the deeper the images burn into the silver iodide of your memory.

    I needed to catch a train from Kandy to Ella, supposedly one of the most scenic routes in the world. The train departed at 6:00, which was going to be a difficult task. With my lifestyle, 6am can be the end of the night, but never the beginning of a day.

    Nevertheless, I (somehow) dutifully awoke and rushed to the station. I even had time to jockey myself in position for a seat. BUT. I didn’t want a seat. I wanted to go with my legs dangling off the train car.

    I got want I wanted. This was an experience that reminded me of why I live the way that I do. The geography made the trip longer than it should have been. It was only 82 miles and yet took over six hours to traverse. I knew if I got up then I would be overthrown from my hobo throne, so I held my ground for the duration of the trip sans bathroom break. When the game is on the line my body can pull off some shocking upsets.

    At a random train station, I took my favorite photo of the trip. I love how his skin and garb mirror the backdrop. Being intensely amused by minutia is a very good way to keep life interesting.

    Well, there was one exception to my exuberance. I wanted to take my shoes off and let the air sweep through my toes. That was the type of Huck Finn fun I wanted. Luckily, I nodded off without removing them. The train had come to a station and my feet smashed against the concrete platform. Thankfully it was only at about 30 miles an hour, and my rubber soles took the brunt. Barefoot I would have broken many bones. The torsion from the impact bashed my rib cage against the carriage wall. The bruises became abstract art that changed color and shape over time.

    The station had a sign warped with age and flecked with chipped white paint. The top row of the sign was written in Sinhalese, the second in Tamil, and the third was Romanized.

    It read “Ella–52km.”

    ******

    Thus concludes Part I. In the final installment, we will continue our journey to Ella. Then we will go on safari before finishing the trip at a 16th-century fort.

    Stay tuned and I hope you enjoyed.

  • SEA SMITH THURSDAY MORNING LINKS

    THIS ONE IS SEA SMITH FAULT.

     

    SEA SMITH WANT HELP TOO! HE SEE COUSIN STEVE SMITH DO MORNING LINKS, CALL GLIBS, SAY “SEA SMITH TURN!” GLIBERTARIANS.COM LAND HOOMANS NO ARGUE. THEM ALL RUN AWAY FROM SHORE. SO LINKS ALL SEA SMITH’S! MAYBE HAVE LINK PARTY WITH SEA FRIENDS…

    NINGEN
    SIGMUND

     

    BUT FIRST, LINKS FOR LAND HOOMANS:

    • THEM NO EXTINCT! SEA SMITH HIDE SOME FROM SOUP MAKING CRAZY LAND HOOMANS.
    • SEA SMITH WANT SEE CRAZY RUSSIA INTERNET. ONLY BE HACKERS, SCAMS, ADS FOR HOOMAN WIMMENZ?
    • WHO SAY “”Without respect of the law, there is neither peaceful coexistence nor democracy, but insecurity, arbitrariness and ultimately, the collapse of the moral and civic principles of society”? … A KING SAY IT! YOU KING, SILLY HOOMAN, WHAT “DEMOCRACY”?
    • HERE GOOD WORKOUT FOR ATHLETE.

    COME IN, WATER FINE!

  • Mmmmm…Beeeerrrr

    Or, “How Nephilium Popped My (beer) Cherry”.

    So with all the posts by Nephilium and Kinnath, I decided to dip my toe into the beer making hobby. I don’t drink the quantities I used to (not a bad thing), so I opted to follow Nephi’s advice and go with nano brew kits from Brooklyn Brew Shop. The kit with brewing supplies was just under $60 but I will be making many batches with it. The recipe kits run about $16.

    Okay, before you IPA haters jump on your soapbox(and not a peep out of you, Ted), I chose single hop IPAs for a reason. I wanted to learn about the flavor and aroma profiles of the different hops. So there.

    Anyways, the kit comes with pretty much everything you need. Grains, hops, yeast, sanitizer. For the process, it has a gallon jug, an airlock, thermometer, plastic tubing, and a racking cane. Since I made this batch, I’ve added a beer hydrometer and grain bags(you’ll see why). Everything else I needed I had on hand.

    First off, everything gets sanitized. The instructions direct you to mix half the sanitizer with a gallon of water, the rest will be used during the bottling process. I’ve done a couple of modifications that I think make the process easier for me. I weighed the sanitizer and now I mix up a quart and also have a small spray bottle filled with sanitizer. It really made my life easier.

    After that, comes the mash in. It takes an hour, and you have to keep track of the temperature. It needs to stay between 144-152 degrees, with it being stirred every so often. You’re basically making oatmeal here. You don’t use the whole amount of water. There’s a pot of water at the right temperature waiting to be added later. You also need an extra pot because the “wort” that’s created by steeping the grains gets poured over the grains twice.

    So after an hour, “mashing in” is done. You raise the temperature to 170 degrees and strain into another pot. The liquid and additional four quarts of 170-degree water get poured over the grain twice.

    As you can see from the photo, this is why I went to grain bags. I made a bit of a mess.

    Next, we go to the boil. For this particular kit, it’s a 60 minute boil with hops added at specific times based on the recipe. Once the boil foams, you reduce to heat to a point where it’s just boiling, and start the process. I used the digital scale I use for charcuterie for weighing out the hops.

    You lose 20% of volume during the boil, which leaves you a gallon of wort. Cool it on ice to 70 degrees and into the jug. I added a hydrometer to my supplies because this is what tells you if you achieved the specific gravity(sugar content) the wort needs to ferment to the proper alcohol level. This is also where you add the yeast(“pitch”) and shake to mix and add oxygen.

    The sanitized tubing is stuck through the cap about an inch, and the other end sits in a bowl of sanitizer. The first couple of days is where the most aggressive fermentation takes place, and the airlock isn’t up to the task. After a couple of days, the tubing is replaced with the airlock, and then it’s time to wait for two weeks while fermentation does its thing. I’m using the guest bedroom closet that doubles as my “root cellar”. Close the vents and it stays a consistent 60 degrees during the winter.

    The other purpose for the hydrometer is the determine if the beer has reached the proper alcohol level. I didn’t have one for this batch, so I crossed my fingers and hoped the recipe was correct.

    At this point, the fermented beer is siphoned out of the jug and into a pot containing a half cup of water and three tablespoons of honey. The beer is flat, so this is the sugar that will ferment and provide carbonation. The beer is siphoned into sanitized bottles and placed back into the cool, dark closet for two weeks. I screwed up and lost my prime towards the end, so I ended up with six pints, instead of seven.

    After two weeks, it’s time to chill, pour, and see if I made something actually worth drinking.

    Hey! That ain’t half bad. Citrus notes from the Cascade hops, creamy mouthfeel with just a little bitterness on the finish and just the slightest hint of residual sweetness that will probably go away over time.

    I’m enjoying this hobby, so far. It’s not saving me any money and given that we’re in the Golden Age of craft brewing, it’s not like I can’t find dozens of awesome beers at the local grocery store. I chalk it up to my toddler “me do it!” mentality. It goes well with gardening, canning, charcuterie, etc. The second single hop IPA is in the closet and I have a Cream Ale cold fermenting in the bar refrigerator. Next up is a batch of raspberry mead from the recipe Kinnath posted. When Spring comes, other things will take place of brewing to keep me busy, but when it’s like this outside, might as well make beer!