Month: August 2007

Homebrew Season

Summer is usually the off season for me in regards to home brewing. For one, I generally keep pretty busy doing other things I like, most of which involves being outside. For two, it’s just too friggin hot. Brewing is pretty BTU intensive when you mash your own grain. For three, I just don’t drink much beer in the summer during the week, because of the previous two reasons. I haven’t yet drank what I made this prior winter.

I’m thinking about getting one of these. It’s a plate chiller, called “The Therminator”. It would solve one of the big problems I have making beer in summer; the water coming out of the tap is too warm. Typically, in summer, my tap water is about 65 degrees, and it takes forever to chill 5 gallons of wort down with my self-made immersion chiller. In contrast, winter time tap water temperatures are typically about 50 degrees, which gets the job done much faster.

Counterflow chillers have their downsides, in that you have to work hard to keep them clean, and keep them sanitized. Immersion chillers can just be rinsed off, and that’s about it. Not so with counterflow chillers, which must be cleaned and sanitized. But being able to get my wort chilled and into the fermenter in just a few minutes would be a big help.

Related posts (automatically generated):

  1. Holiday Brewing
  2. Homebrew Chiller Update
  3. Got Nuthin’

New Anti-Gun Blog

I hadn’t realized in my past linkage I was actually dealing with a blog, rather than just a one off editorial.  But yes folks, it appears that Bryan Miller, President of CeaseFire New Jersey and CeaseFire Pennsylvania has a blog over at New Jersey Voices.  I notice a few people over there who I recognize, and a few I don’t.   Peter Hamm, Brady’s Communication Director, has made an appearance.   Be sure to stop over and hi (polite, respectful, yada yada).  Tell Peter to say hi to Macca for us ;)

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“Guilty of the worst kind of political posturing”

So says The Allentown Morning Call, in regards to Rep English and Peterson’s efforts to prevent tolling on I-80.   Political posturing?  I can’t help but notice that I-80 runs mostly through counties that didn’t vote all that heavily for Ed Rendell or the Democrats.

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Too Into Guns?

Lean Left thinks SayUncle is a bit too into guns.  SayUncle responds in the comments that tgirsch’s interest in beer might come close (though not so much these days because of trying to lose weight).   I think mine does too, probably.  But my passion for guns displayed here is a direct result of the political movement to restrict or ban them.

Bring back the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Snowflakes in Hell might very well become a beer blog :)

UPDATE: Reading that link down a bit more, the WCTU is still around!  This is a good example of how you can defeat a movement politically, even if the movements edifices remain in tact.  I had no idea the WCTU was still around and preaching against demon rum.  Thank god people have better sense today than to pay any attention to them.

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Philadelphia Weekly Article on Armed America

Philadelphia Weekly has a front page news item on the photo book Armed America, which I talked about here a few weeks ago.   To have a major Philadelphia media outlet giving the front page treatment to something like this is the kind of public relations coup you couldn’t have come up with if you tried.

Michael Bane has more.

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Loss and Liberty

Matt responds in the comments to my first Bryan Miller post:

Interesting, check out Mr. Miller’s lead post. His brother was Mike Miller, the FBI agent that was killed in DC in 1994.

Which means his niece is Dale Miller, who works for CeasefireMD and testified in favor of the AWB here last year.

We have a family here who blames the object and not the person. His loss, however, does not give him an unrestricted moral high ground. Taking him to task could get interesting.

Matt has more over at his blog too. I didn’t know this, actually, but it’s not too surprising. Many of core anti-gun activists are people who experienced some kind of loss through violence. It’s not something I’m unsymapthetic to, or can’t understand. Losing my mother to cancer when I was in college played a role in my desire to work in the drug discovery field. The desire to “do something” so other people won’t have to go through what you did is an understandable and even noble reaction to a tragedy.

But I do pretty firmly agree with Matt’s premise, that it doesn’t give him the moral high ground in this debate. Grief cannot be a reasonable basis for public policy, especially when a constitutional right is at question. As much as I might sympathize with someone’s loss, we can’t relent when someone uses that grief as a basis to remove other people’s liberty. That’s why, despite the fact that my mother died of cancer, I have vowed to give no more money to the American Cancer society. There’s things that are more important than my grief.

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