I doubt that it’s even possible for anyone to be a regular visitor of this site and not have heard of the travel blog I’ve been pimping on Facebook, but here’s the address anyway: 2guys1trip.wordpress.com
Danny and I are making good on our promise to take the whole world on vacation with us, so make it worth our while and check it out.
A little more than a month ago I saw the Mr. Beer Premium Home Brew Kit on sale at Woot! for $20, about half what it typically sells for in stores when they pack the shelves with them around Christmas time. I’ve been curious for a while about home-brewing as a hobby so bought it on impulse without even really knowing what goes into beer making.
Mr. Beer makes brewing a fairly simple process by selling malt extracts chosen for their flavor profiles in the exact proportions you need to make beer in the 2 gallon fermenter that comes with the kit. There are plenty of flavors to choose from, lots of ways you can combine them, and you are free to add any other fermentable sugars or aromatics, or purchase different strains of yeast if you want to enhance the recipes. So it saves a lot of work, extracting sugars from gains, etc., but there is still plenty of room to be creative.
Anyway, I took the beer mix that came with the kit - the West Coast Pale Ale, and to make it interesting, I pureed three small jars of Strawberries and added it to the mix. If you add fruit, you are supposed to use pasteurized fruit from jars or cans to assure that you aren’t adding any foreign bacteria into the fermenter. It turns out that about 75% of the work that goes into making beer is sanitizing everything that comes into contact with your beer to prevent it from becoming a breeding ground for various non-tasty bacteria strains.
Sprinkle in the yeast that comes along with the mix, and stick the whole mess in a closet somewhere while the yeast colony converts the sugar into alcohol.
After about 10 days I gave it a taste - and it tasted like hot flat beer. That’s good, it means its done its initial fermentation. The next step is to carbonate the beer. This requires adding more sugar and sealing it into its final serving bottles to trap the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation. Here’s where it gets a little more complicated. I could have spooned table sugar into the 24oz plastic bottles that Mr. Beer came with…but the pros prefer corn sugar and beer drinkers in general prefer to have it served to them in a glass long neck.
So before my first beer, which I call Strawberry Alice, was ready for bottling, I made a trip to the homebrew store for some dextrose and some more bottling equipment, I picked up another Mr. Beer kit from a seller on Craigslist, and I ordered more beer ingredients from mrbeer.com. So my beer making operation has expanded somewhat and now looks something like this…
So after bottling Stawberry Alice (a process that involved collecting bottles from parties like a bag lady and the purchase of bottle-capper that cost as much as the entire Mr. Beer Kit), it sat in the closet for another two weeks. I took one out to cool it down and on the same day started my second brew.
This one has no fruit, but I did add brown sugar to the wort, and am adding hops (pictured below) to enhance the flavor.
So my second, as yet unnamed brew is bubbling in my bedroom closet, and Strawberry Alice is conditioning in the fridge. During the conditioning phase, the beer gains clarity and complexity as it ages in the refrigerator, but of course I took one out to try it as soon as it was cold.
And its good. It’s light and very drinkable with a gentle fruit flavor and most importantly - bubbles, which was the part I worried about most. The flavor ought to improve over the next few months so it ought to make a great summer beverage.
So you should come by for a cold one this summer because there isn’t going to be any shortage of beer in my fridge. I’m honestly more interested in making it than in drinking it in large quantities. Does anyone out there have an excess of meat? Maybe we should plan a barbecue.
Tonight is my last night working as an assistant editor on Bridezillas, and if I have learned one thing during my short stay it is that this show is produced and edited in the creepiest building to be alone in at night in the whole of Los Angeles. In the nine days I was here I heard multiple stories about how this building was once a hospital, how it once housed the screening room where Howard Hughes locked himself up and started peeing in milk jars, how there may or may not be a tunnel underneath of it built by bootleggers during prohibition, and how the woman who comes in at night to clean carries a bible to ward off mischievous spirits that would otherwise knock over her vacuum cleaner. I was here by myself between 2 and 4am a couple times and did not relish the experience.
So that’s probably the worst thing about my last two weeks. The BEST thing about where I’ve been working (aside from several very cool people, some of whom forced me to do karaoke, which is something I swore I would never do, and to a terrible song no less, but who were very supportive at least), the BEST thing, is this framed fucking cereal in the kitchen.
It displays 12 cereal pieces, their manufacturer, and the year they were introduced, and I would fight a dragon to have one of these in my kitchen, or oddly enough in my bathroom. Here’s a closer look.
Kix has been around since 1937. Who knew?
While I’m on the subject of cereal, I was breakfast shopping the other day and saw this incredibly dubious claim on a box of Lucky Charms.
I searched the box for some legalese that said something like “these marshmallows do not grant extrodinary access to the flow of time,” but didn’t find it.
I love time travel. LOVE IT. But have time travel stories become so mainstream that kids are thinking about it while they eat breakfast? Thanks, I suppose, is due to Heroes which features mostly entertaining but laughably inconsistent and nonsensical time travel story arcs and Lost which features time travel story arcs that are remarkably logical and consistent at the cost of staying true to the characters and draining the show of any dramatic tension. Someone needs to do righteous time travel fit for public consumption, or just let the nerds have it back.
Wow, I took it there didn’t I. Until next time.
If you’ve been watching Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse (as you should be) you may have noticed in the opening credit sequence their use of a very cool photographic technique often referred to as “tilt-shift” photography. Wide angle shots characteristically have a very deep focus, but by changing the angle of the lens to the film plane (by tilting and/or shifting the lens) you can create wide images with a very narrow depth of field. When you take a wide image from a high perspective and apply a very selective focus, it mimics the results of a macro lens shooting something very small from above. In other words, you can make things look like they are tiny miniatures by manipulating the focus. It makes things look dollhouse size (get it!) and a really good tilt-shift video can be startling and confusing when you see people walking around inside something that is apparently a miniature.
Here’s an ok video of the effect from YouTube. Turn down your volume though, the music counteracts all the effort that went into making it watchable.
A tilt-shift lens that creates the effect in camera is prohibitively expensive, so I tried following some internet tutorials to create the effect in Photoshop. The first picture is an unaltered photo I took from the balcony of a resort hotel I stayed at in Puerto Vallarta. The second picture is the tilt-shift version I worked out, and it isn’t perfect but the difference is pretty interesting. Click the thumbnails for full size.
Download a high resolution version of the tilt-shift image here.
Now that I know I can do this, I plan to let the wide angle lens off the leash in the near future.
You can view some of the work I’ve done in various capacities by following this link.
I’ve had a presence, minimal as it may have been, on the internet for over ten years now, since before the word “blog” existed. If I was a more talented web designer or had a lot more free time to devote to my digital footprint maybe I could maintain something that could legitimately be called a “website,” but blogs are just so much easier now and if I’m ever going to make the fun little posts that make a site worth checking, I really need it to be super easy. So here it is. My fucking blog. I plan to re-post all or most of the entries that made my previous site so blog-like, so if you forgot to write down the list of my favorite movies from 2006 - don’t despair.
Hello Internets,
If you didn’t know already, my name is David Holland and The Cloud Pit is the world wide web receptacle for the refuse of my mind. I’m hoping that by redesigning the site as a wordpress blog will make it easier for you to navigate, easier for me to update, and overall more interesting to look at. As you can see by the categories listed in the header, I plan to move all of the content from my original site into this new format and add a lot more on top, so I hope you’ll bear with me during the construction and check back often.
David
I don’t actually have any real plans to do a podcast - just let me fantasize about being an internet movie pundit for a little while longer.
As soon as I get a chance I’ll be adding all the photos from my old site plus more under this category.
As soon as I get a chance, I’ll be adding my resume and making work related posts in this category.