Category Archives: Cool Shit

Beer

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So, I just starting making my own beer. Brewing your own beer is damn easy, and relatively inexpensive. I’ve decided to share my methods.

Clean the crap out of everything that is going to come in contact with your beer. SANITIZE everything that will come in contact with the beer after the boil. Germs can cause some rather awful tasting beer (so I’ve heard). Do not use a scrubber that will scratch the surface — pathogens love to grow in the grooves left behind, and are almost impossible to sanitize. Rinse well, then soak briefly in a bleach or iodine solution. Rinse off bleach before using items using very clean potable or distilled water.
Put your special grains into a grain bag (a mesh bag to contain the grains – like a tea bag, only a lot bigger) and steep them in the large pot in three gallons of hot water around 150 degrees for about 30 minutes. Remove the grains and allow the water to drip out of the grain bag. Do not squeeze the bag, because you may extract tannins that will give your beer an astringent flavor. Add the malt extract and bring everything to a boil. This is some really sludgy stuff, so you may want a large sanitized spoon to help scoop it out. The hops are usually added at various intervals to add flavor, bitterness, or aroma and the times are spelled out for you in the kit’s instructions for your style of beer. In general, hops added early in the boil will contribute more bitterness, but at the expense of flavor and aroma. Hops added at the end of the boil will have a more pronounced flavor and aroma, but will not contribute significantly to the bitterness of the beer. After you have boiled the liquid (called wort – pronounced wert), you need to cool it as quickly as possible. The easiest way is to put the whole pot in a bathtub that is full of ice and water. Once it’s around 80 deg you are ready to transfer it to the fermenter (a big plastic special bucket). Pour the cooled wort into your fermenter. And thats as far as I’ve gotten. I’m really excited about this, but having to wait stinks. I feel like a little kid, counting the days until christmas.

I’m internet famous

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well, sort of. Yesterday, my girlfriend and I posted photos of my friend Patricks recent journey across the country to the social news website, Reddit. The post went something like “So my friend decided to go on a road trip completely alone. He returned, 100 days and 10,000 miles later with these photos..” For those of us unfamiliar, Reddit is a social news website where the registered users submit content, in the form of either a link or a text “self” post. Users then vote the submission “up” or “down”, which is used to rank the post and determine its position on the sites pages. Each submission has to be assigned to a “subreddit”. There is a “subreddit” for pretty much any topic you can think of, e.g. r/pics, r/food, r/politics, r/programming, r/skyrim. The more upvotes you get, the longer your post stays at the top of the subreddit. But there is also the “front page” of reddit which is the “homepage” for anyone that types in www.reddit.com. The front page is an accumulation of all the submissions users have deemed worthy of the front page. Note* IT IS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TO GET ON THE FRONT PAGE

so yeah, we make this post to r/pics (since it involved the photos my friend took on his journey) at around 4pm yesterday. While I’m in my 5 o’clock class I get a text from my girlfriend, “17 upvotes so far:)”. I was thrilled. We’ve posted quite a few things and barely get 1 or 2 upvotes. Not more than a few more minutes pass by and I get another text “holy shit, 150 now!”. If you could’ve seen the grin on my face. Then another “310!”. The thing with these posts are that once enough people “upvote”, the growth is exponential. I quickly rushed home so that we could sit in front of the computer and watch the votes and comments come in. It seriously feels like winning the lottery. Cha-ching cha-ching cha-ching. Before you knew it, we were not only the top post of r/pics, we had made it to the front page. THE FRONT F* PAGE! Never did I think we’d be on the front page. The rest of the story gets a little convoluted as we invited some friends over to celebrate our 5 seconds of fame.

24 hrs later my friend Patricks pictures have been viewed by over 345,670 people and counting all thanks to the community of Reddit.

your voice, your vote

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As I’m watching the democratic convention, I can’t help but to think about President Obama’s speech writer, Jon Favreau. Yeah, Obama is great at delivering heart-touching, “truthful” speeches, but know this America, he didn’t write it–merely approved it. That’s not to say delivering a speech does not come with great difficulty, because it does. I can barely keep from passing out when talking in front of my peers in a small classroom setting, while this guy does it almost flawlessly in front of a crowd twenty thousand strong. Not including the millions of tv/online viewers. That’s a lot of pressure. But, what kind of pressure do you think lies with the person responsible for the words the president will say? What I found most interesting about Mr Favreau is that he’s been Barack’s speechwriter since he was first elected to the senate. It leads me to believe that Jon Favreau is a huge part of the reason why Obama is the president. I know it sounds far fetched, but I mean c’mon, this guy writes the stuff that people eat out of the palm of Barack’s hand. Back in 2008, most of what the general public knew about presidential hopeful Obama were the words that another man wrote. Kudos to you Jon Favreau.