Grätzer is one of those almost-extinct beer styles that people have started talking about again these days. The basic idea is that it’s a 100% smoked malt, low-ABV beer. We’re talking serious smoke, and seriously low ABV, like 3.5% or less. Sounds good to me, so I decided to make some. Thing is, that’s a more involved proposition than I first imagined.
Category: GENERAL
A Question to my Readers
For those who who are still occasionally (or often?) reading this blog, a few questions/observations: In the last 48 hours or so, I’ve remodeled the site extensively, with a lovely new theme by Presswork. I think the site looks a lot better now than it has in years — at least, on my Ubuntu system and Miss Jiwaku’s huge-assed Mac monitor — and the change in decor has gotten me feeling like blogging a bit more again. Of course, I’m working on getting the older posts sorted into categories and tagged.This is not a small job, since I spent the …
Tidying Up
I am currently on the verge of despairing with regards to getting my post categorization tidied up. I was using a mass editor plugin and somehow — I suspect because of the plugin, but it may have been something else I did — I discovered that a vast number of my posts prior to sometime in 2010 have had an extra category added — FILMS&TV. I’m not sure why, but at some point just about everything is categorized as that, albeit sometimes also as something else. While I do plan on cleaning up the mess eventually, I have a month …
Pardon the Mess…
Pardon the mess, all: some of the links around here are not going to work so well for the next few days, until I finish tidying up my template stuff around here. The good news is, I love my new template (courtesy of PressWork) and I think it makes my blog much more readable and professional-looking. (And it’s much easier to tinker with settings as well, thanks to the theme’s frontend.) I’ve wanted to change my template for a while now, not only to get rid of pages that aren’t useful, but also so I could reorganize categories and also …
Gobble-Gobble
Yeah, for you Errol Morris fans, that’s a double-gobble: Well, here are some links for you to gobble down, and think about later: I’m a little dubious about the idea we’ll have enough energy to fuel anything as expansive as what is discussed in this video featuring a talk by Jesse Schell (a Carnegie Mellon University Professor), but I do imagine we will be going about receiving points for all kinds of daily activities, and in fact I’ve been thinking about shifting a couple of my courses to an XP-based grading system next semester. I think this notion is likely to work its way …
쓰레기 같은 학생, or, Why You Might Need Pepperspray
“Grabage-Like Student” is the title I’ve written in Korean. But a better translation is, “Asshole Student,” I suppose. It’s a reference to the guy who threatened Jihyun today, when she took the city bus that passes by the front of campus. To make a long story short, she (very politely) asked him to stop cursing and complain to the bus driver about the change in route, if he was so annoyed. (After something like ten minutes of his cursing in the nastiest tone.) It ended with him standing over her at the bus stop, his friend in tow, calling her …
Happy New Year
I’m told that not long ago, Koreans tended to reserve the phrase “Saehae bok manhi baedusaeyo!”1 for Seollal, the Lunar New Year (or what we in the West call Chinese New Year). However, people tend to say it a lot more now for January 1st, so that’s what I’m wishing you all out there. For Miss Jiwaku and myself, it was a quiet New Year’s, and a busy week before it. Well, quiet compared to some, I suppose, but we had a lot of running around to do, things to get done, and so on. That cooking at home thing …
Happy Newtonmass
So it’s Newtonmass. I hope it is (or was, depending on your time zone and when you read this) fun for you all. We had dinner last night with Miss Jiwaku’s cousin and her family, a gathering to which we brought a little of my beer, and cookies and smoked almonds we’d made that day. Today had a couple of friends over. The food included all kinds of wonderful things. (For my part, I made the caramelized carrot soup and smoked peppers stuffed with rice and cheese. Miss Jiwaku made braised spinach and maki — Japanese-styled sushi rolls. We collaborated …
Movetoamend
I’ve been thinking a lot of these things since the early 90s: I’m obviously not the only one. This is salutary. I think there needs to be more than just this. I think we need to rein in corporations to the point where they’re in service to human beings. I think it should be illegal to run a company where a percentage share of the profit, and of the responsibility, goes to every employee. Maybe not a huge percentage, but a percentage. We like the idea of democracy: it’s time to apply it to corporate structure, too — that is, …
Getting Pickled
So, lately, I’ve had a few experimental fermentations going on. One of them is a simple revisiting of the sauerkaraut I made last year. It’s a much smaller batch, and made with non-iodized salt, but with one difference: Yeah, I used red cabbage. I salted it in exactly the way I had the white cabbage, but to my surprise, the cabbage didn’t sweat as much, and there wasn’t much brine. Probably it’s because I used only one small head of red cabbage, not two very large heads of green cabbage. In any case, the problem was easy to solve: I …