Nov 14
I finally grabbed a bottle of this brew from the local beer store. I know that I'm lucky to be able to get this easily at a local shop, so I figured that I'd give it a try.
I am a big fan of IPAs, but this one was really different than any IPA that I've ever had. Granted, this beer is really not a typical beer by any standards, but DFH does bill it as an IPA. For me, the alcohol was a little bit overwhelming. It tasted a little bit like a beer liquor rather than a beer. The hop flavor was really sweet, mellow, and citrusy, which was not at all what I was expecting.
Overall, I'm glad I tried it, but I think I'll probably stick to the 60 or 90 minute IPA from now on. Kudos to DFH for having the guts to produce such an extreme beer though.
Nov 6
I replaced the wheels on my Wave Board a few days ago after having had enough of the worn ones wobbling around. However, I haven't had a chance to get out to ride it again until today. I've been riding the worn wheels for so long that I forgot what the board felt like with new wheels, what a difference!
The board feels like it is riding on rails with the new wheels. I was a little ginger on it for the first few minutes, since I suspected that the wheels might be a little 'soapy' and in need of a little roughing-up. After a while though I really started digging into some turns. The wheels won't chatter anymore when doing really sharp cutbacks, but they do seem to slide just as much. The board rides so much higher that it felt a little awkward at first. I think that I could get by with putting much smaller wheels on the board than I thought. I'll measure the old wheels to see how big they are.
I'm feeling much more comfortable at speed both normal and switch. This is a good sign that my riding is improving at least. Good thing too, since the board is a ton faster with the new wheels.
Nov 2
It's been a while since I posted anything about the Wave Board, but I have actually been riding it still, weather permitting. I haven't made any real snowboard training breakthroughs though.
I finally wore the wheels down to the point where they were so out-of-round that riding at any considerable speed became pretty uncomfortable. I never did wear them down to the hub like the first set, although in the picture you can see the black hubs starting to show through the urethane on one of the wheels.
Oct 30
In keeping with my fall seasonal tasting theme, I picked up some Samuel Adams Octoberfest. I've had this one before, but I haven't had a chance to document anything, so here goes.
The Octoberfest pours a medium amber with a one-finger head. The smell is a little sweet maltiness with a slightly-off mustiness. Taste is a medium malty flavor offset with some bitter hop flavors. I think that the hops used are a little bitter for this beer. The hops don't really contribute much aroma or flavor, however. There is a little spiciness to the beer, but it is quickly followed up by bitter hop flavors. The finish has more of the bitter hops than anything else.
The body is pretty light for an Octoberfest, making this a pretty easy drinking beer. Definitely a respectable beer, but compared to some of the other seasonals I think there are others that I'd grab before this one.
Oct 27
I had a bottle of Southern Pale Ale that I brought back from a friend's wedding in Greensboro, NC. The wedding reception featured three different beers: two were homebrewed just for the wedding and the third was the Natty Greene's Southern Pale Ale. One guest mentioned to me that there was an IPA being served, and much to my surprise, when I went to the bar to get one, I was informed that there was no IPA being served that night. Instead it was a Pale Ale that is probably hoppy enough to be considered an IPA by most standards.
The beer poured a light reddish amber. Very thin head is present, and carbonation appears to be light. The boquet is a sweet, citrusy hops smell - very aromatic. First sip is a light and sweet maltiness followed up immediately with an almost floral hop flavor. The hops aren't overwhelming, rather, they balance out the maltiness very well. Even though there is a good balance, the hops really seem to stand on their own.
This beer has a really nice balance of flavors that stays interesting sip after sip. The flavors aren't so overpowering as to prevent you from wanting to sample a second or a third beer, although I must confess that I am not dissuaded in the least by a lot of hoppiness. Toward the end of my tasting I started to get more of a honey flavor than hops. This is a little strange since most hoppy beers seem to increase in bitterness as you drink them.
I don't know if Natty Greene's Brewery distributes much beer outside of Greensboro, but this is a really nice beer to have as your local mainstay brew. I would definitely grab some of this again if I had the chance.
Oct 25
Now for the moment of truth in the saga of the pumpkin ale project. After about a week in the bottle I decided to do a tasting. This beer is a little young still, but much like the last batch, I'm having a lot of trouble resisting sneaking a little. Without further ado, here are my tasting notes.
I poured the beer from the bottle into one of my new Pilsner glasses etched with my nickname (thanks Rips and Olivia). The pumpkin ale pours a deep reddish-orange amber color, with almost no head. Carbonation appears to be very light by looking at the head and the carbon dioxide bubbles present along the sides of the glass. The nose is slightly spicy, with a tiny bit of a musty pumpkin smell evident. When I say musty, it is more of a damp warm smell rather than an earthy one.
On first sip, I was hit by a big smooth malty flavor with an understated spiciness. There are deep yet understated pumpkin notes present. Carbonation is very light, nearly to the point of absence. I can only describe the spice as rounded, muted, or blunt. I think that this is a good thing though, as many pumpkin beers are really more focused on the sharp and cutting spice flavors. This one is a slight departure from that trend. Mid way through, the spice builds a bit as expected, but still a muted dark spiciness. About half way in, I can start to taste a little bit of the sweet orange peel that was added during the aroma hopping stage of the boil.
I think that I would have liked to increase the carbonation by putting more corn sugar into the bottles when bottling. In my previous batch of beer I used table sugar for the priming sugar. I used the same amount of corn sugar this time around, and I think that I need to adjust the amount of sugar used when using corn sugar.
Oct 21
I got this instrument when I was in India last year. I had seen a few street vendors during the trip running around with these things and I was kind of intrugued, so finally I broke down and bought one of them.
The idea here seems to bethat there are 4 resonator strings and 2 actual bowed strings. Or maybe I have it the other way around. The way I have been trying to play it is using the outer strings as the bowed strings. The strings are plain steel, and they don't have ball ends like gutar strings or anything. They are plain steel wire. The bridge floats on a bit of skin or leather streched across a coconut, forming a resonator akin to a banjo. The tuning pegs are friction-fit pegs like a violin, and the body of the instrument is a piece of bamboo. The holes look like they were burned into the bamboo by a hot poker, evidenced by the singed edges of the holes (the thing smelled a little burnt too).
Plucking the strings can yield anything from a banjo sound to a sitar-like sound depending on what I don't really know yet. Bowing the strings is a little difficult right now, since I need to find some rosin for the bow hairs in order to get it working correctly. I tried to use a little pine sap, which worked but was a little too sticky, resulting in a kind of grating sound instead of a smooth tone. Before I dressed the bow hairs, all I was getting were 'whistles' from the strings.
If this is a real instrument, the one I have here is no doubt a cheap street-vendor knock-off. I kind of want to build a higher quality version of this thing, maybe putting an electric pickup on it. I feel like I could get some really interesting sounds out of something like this.
If anyone knows what this is actually called please, please let me know in the comments!
Oct 18
Not a whole lot to say, just bottled the
pumpkin ale that I have been brewing. The ale turned out to be pretty cloudy, we'll see if it clears up a little in the bottle. I didn't use a secondary fermenter, which would have helped considerably. The beer has more of a pumpkin taste than I had expected, hopefully it doesn't turn out to be too much. I kind of wanted to get a more pumpkin-y and less spicy beer, since that is not very commonly found.
Another note is that there was a lot more sediment in the bottom of the fermenter than there was when I brewed the Mr. Beer IPA. This is probably due to the increased amount of solids present from both the pumpkin and the steeped grains. I had to tilt the fermenter up a little bit to keep from getting sediment out of the spout during bottling, as can be seen in the pictures.
Oct 18
In keeping with my plan to sample some more fall seasonal beers, I grabbed some of the Red Hook seasonal that I spotted at the beer store when I got the Roxy Rolles last time around.
The Red Hook pours lighter than a lot of the other fall brews that I've been checking out lately. The smell is a light spice, but very faint. There is very little head on this one, even after a vigorous pour.
I don't really taste any pumpkin flavors here, but there is a light spiciness. This beer has a medium-thin mouthfeel, and a light, slightly sweet malt flavor. There is very little noticable hop flavor, although it might be mixed subtly in with the slightly spicy finish.
This is not one of those fall beers that has that dry and powerful spice finish. Rather it is a lighter, more easy drinking variant of the fall craft beers. This is a drinkable beer, but not one that I would go out of my way for again.
Oct 17
Forget `Internet years', we now have something moving at a completely different velocity. Or, maybe it is just the same curve but the acceleration of web infrastructure technology is beginning to hit a bend where we really start to feel the effects à la Ray Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns.
I was reading some cached posts from Marc Andreessens's blog that were posted to Posterous recently. The post dates are off, but I think that the post I was reading was from June 2007, about 3 weeks after the Facebook platform launched, where he recounts the story of iLike. Marc states:
The Facebook Platform is primarily for use by either big companies, or venture-backed startups with the funding and capability to handle the slightly insane scale requirements
Fast forward just two and a half years, and it seems unconscionable to release a Facebook application without the benefit of some cloud computing service to handle scaling. No one now is talking about pounding the pavement begging for spare hardware to handle a spike in traffic. Although it took place only two years ago, it felt like I was reading the story of a .com bubble-era company in the late 90s rather than a 2007-era launch.
