Craftsman Bookcases

The house we bought in Boise in great in so many ways, from the location to the garage. One of the few downsides is lack of available wall space for bookshelves as compared to the NY house, so we've had to be a bit more creative. One solution was to build smaller bookcases that could sit on the hearth in the family room. One full wall of our house is dedicated to the fireplace and hearth and is covered in stone veneer with built in glass curio shelves. We really like the wall, but it has limited functionality in terms of decorating.

So my charge was to find a design that the wife would like and would work in this space. I found one in issue 179 of Fine Woodworking magazine that fit both bills. The design had to be tweaked a bit to better match out needs, but the changes were modest. I stretched it out to 48" wide and shortened it to 32" high. And oh yeah...the wife wanted two. Here's what the finished products look like:

They're made of white ash, using traditional frame and panel design. All of the frames are assembled using mortise and tenon joinery and the panels (sides and back) were resawn to 1/4" from 4/4 stock. The back was also changed from the plan to accommodate the wider stance.  I was worried about shelf sag over a 48" run of heavy books, so I split the back in half and added a center rail with holes for a fifth shelf pin for added support.  The back consists of 1/4" thick slats that have ship-lap rabbets milled into them so they slide into the top and bottom grooves and make a nice paneled back surface.

The finish is golden oak stain followed by 3 coats of a satin wipe-on polyurethane.  Here they are on the hearth wall.  I'm very happy with how they turned out, and more importantly, so is the wife even though they took many more months to complete than originally planned.  Now it's up to Beth to unpack book boxes!

Partigyle Experiment

A few of us in the Snake River Brewers crew wanted to do an experimental brew to celebrate Nov. 11, 2011 (11/11/11). So what us geniuses decided to do was a recipe that had an OG at least 1.111 with 111 IBUs. We'll all age the beers a year and taste/judge them on 12/12/12. Cool concept, huh? I thought so too, but was somewhat horrified at the potential of brewing up 5-10 gallons of a pretty expensive beer that might end up tasting only slightly better than river sludge... So what to do?

To limit the potential damage, I decided to try my hand at partigyle brewing. It involves doing a single mash, but collecting the multiple "runnings" from the mash tun to make multiple beers of different strengths. This was a standard practice back in colonial times, where brewers would make a "strong beer" from the first runnings, a "table beer" from the second, and a "small (or children's) beer" from the third. I'm an all-grain brewer that uses fly sparging so hard could it be, right?

The recipe I used was based on Terrapin's Wake 'n Bake Oatmeal Coffee Stout, which is a strong american stout. I ramped up the recipe to make sure I could get ~2 gals of a 1.111 beer out of the first runnings and 6 gallons of a ~1.080 stout out of the second. Anything left over after that would be a bonus. I ended up hitting my targets on the first 2 batches with 4 gal of a 1.032 mild left over. Looking back, I could have made 10 gallons of a 1.060 stout but really wanted the "middle" beer to resemble the Wake 'n Bake. The brew day went very well but was long, since I ended doing 3 separate 1-hour boils.

At this point, all three are either kegged or bottled. The 1.111 will be cold-conditioned in a keg for a long time. The middle beer was racked to a secondary and had 4 oz of roughly ground, dark roasted Ethiopian coffee from High Desert Coffee Company in Mountain Home, ID (thanks, Jim!) added for 4 days. It tastes absolutely delicious! The Mild was bottled shortly after the primary. It ended up at 1.008 so it should be an easy drinking light brown ale at about 3.2% ABV. Samples I tasted so far have been promising, with a nice roasty nose, light body, and dry finish.

Prost!!

The Definition of Insanity (from Wall St Journal)

This was published in the Review & Outlook section of the Wall St Journal this morning.  Reading something like this makes me furious about the current state of American politics.  ARRGGHHHH!!

"The Obama health-care plan passed 18 months ago, and its cynicism still manages to astonish. Witness the spectacle surrounding one of its flagship new entitlements, which is eliciting some remarkable concessions from its drafters. The Health and Human Services Department recently shut down a government insurance program for long-term care, known by the acronym Class. HHS also released a statement claiming that reports that HHS is shutting down Class are "not accurate." All HHS did was suspend Class policy planning, told Senate Democrats to zero out Class funding for 2012, reassigned Class's career staffers to other projects and pink-slipped the program's chief actuary. Other than that, it's full-speed ahead. HHS is denying what everyone knows to be true because everyone also knows that the Class entitlement was not merely created to crowd out private insurance for home health aides and the like. Class was added to the bill because it was among the budget gimmicks that Democrats needed to create the illusion that trillions of dollars of new spending would somehow reduce the deficit. Benefits in the Class program, which was supposed to start up next year, are rigged by an unusual five-year vesting period. So the people who sign up begin paying premiums immediately—money that Democrats planned to spend immediately on other things, as if the back-loaded payments to Class beneficiaries would never come due. The $86 billion or so that would have built up between 2012 and 2021 with the five-year lead is supposed to help finance the rest of ObamaCare. The Class program would go broke sometime in the next decade, but that would be somebody else's problem. 

Corbis Opponents warned about this during the reform debate, and people on HHS's lower rungs were telling their political superiors the same thing as early as mid-2009, according to emails that a joint House-Senate Republican investigation uncovered. In one 2009 note, chief Medicare actuary Richard Foster—a martyr to fiscal honesty in the health-care debate—wrote that "Thirty-six years of actuarial experience lead me to believe that this program would collapse in short order and require significant Federal subsidies to continue." He suggested that Class would end in an "insurance death spiral" because the coverage would only be attractive to sicker people who will need costly services. It could only be solvent if 230 million Americans enrolled, which is more than the current U.S. workforce. An HHS Office of Health Reform official, Meena Seshamani, rejected Mr. Foster's critique because "per CBO it is actuarially sound." But of course CBO only scores what is presented to it, no matter how unrealistic. Despite this false reassurance, later even one HHS political appointee took up Mr. Foster's alarms, writing that Class "seems like a recipe for disaster to me." In February of this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius finally admitted the obvious, testifying at a Congressional hearing that, gee whiz, Class is "totally unsustainable" as written. By then Class had become a political target of vulnerable Senate Democrats looking to shore up their fiscal bona fides, despite voting for it when they voted for ObamaCare. Bowing to this political need, Mrs. Sebelius has repeatedly promised to use her administrative discretion to massage Class's finances until it is solvent. But given that the office doing that work has now been disbanded, this evidently proved impossible, as the critics claimed all along. 

All of this would seem to make repealing Class an easy vote for Congress, but, this being Washington, it isn't. Since the CBO says Class's front-loaded collections cut the deficit to the tune of that $86 billion, HHS has to pretend that the program is still alive to preserve these phantom savings. Some Republicans are also nervous about repealing Class because, under CBO's perverse scoring, they'll be adding $86 billion to the deficit. Others would prefer not to repeal any of ObamaCare until they repeal all of it, on grounds that some of it might survive if the worst parts go first. So an unaffordable entitlement that will be a perpetual drain on taxpayers may continue to exist because of a make-believe budget gimmick that everyone now admits is bogus. Congress can't reduce real future liabilities because it would mean reducing fake current savings. This is literally insane. It's rare to get a political opening to dismantle any entitlement, much less one as large as Class. House Republicans ought to vote to repeal it as soon as possible as an act of fiscal hygiene, forcing Senate Democrats to vote on it and President Obama to confront (even if he won't acknowledge) the fraud he signed into law."

Highway Cleanup & Hop Farm Tour

I went along with the Snake River Brewers on the annual Fall highway cleanup and tour of Mike Gooding's Hop Farm in Wilder, ID.  The brew club sponsors a 2 mile section of Hwy 95 that not so coincidentally runs through a sea of hop trellises.  Very good planning for our civic duties if you ask me.

Picked up about 10 garbage bags full of assorted trash from the roadway including everything from beer cans to strange  DVDs titled "Private Collection."  I'm still waiting to hear what was on those disks...

After the cleanup, we headed over to Mike Gooding's hop farm, where fall harvest is in full swing.  Mike is a great guy, and is very generous in offering tours of his facilities and letting us hang out and have a cookout.
I took a bunch of photos of the process since I was impressed at how efficient it all was.  Plus seeing it all on this scale was amazing.

 A standard hop field.  The bines grow up on hop twine that's tied to the overhead wires.  The bines grow to about 16' tall.  They harvest by cutting bines and twine together and loading them on trucks.

Here the trucks back in and attach the bines to a conveyor that takes them into the processing plant.  The hop cones are sheared or shaken from the bines and collected on more conveyors for drying.

 Here's what a standard drying bed looks like.  About 100' long and 3' deep OF HOPS! They run ~140 degree air through the beds to remove moisture prior to bailing.  I learned on this tour that some varieties (CTZ especially) are so oily that they can actually spontaneously combust if they get too hot.  I had no idea hop farming could be so dangerous.

This is a view of the drying bed from the other side.  The lady is working to fill the second bed with a new batch of hops.  This view shows just how thick the bed actually is.  Her job is to remove stems, leaves, and other debris from the beds so the finished hops are as clean as possible before baling.

 After drying, the hops are brought to a warehouse where they are staged before going to the baling station.  That pile is ~38,000 lbs of CTZ!  We "borrowed" about 5 pounds from this pile and split them up.  can't wait to use them!

And finally, here is the baling station.   The hops are compressed into 200 lb bales and sewn up manually with a reinforced fabric prior to shipping. 

We finished our day by drinking some homebrew and collecting hop samples that Mike and his daughter Diane set aside for us.  This is a huge plus for us homebrewers.  I ended up with about two pounds total of Centennial, Chinook, Calypso, and CTZ .  A great take for making IPAs and Imperial IPAs.  I can't wait to make another Pliny clone with all of these fresh hops!

Trip to the New Brickskeller

I got so lucky today and discovered that RFD, the bar that essentially took Brickskeller's place as best beer bar in Washington, DC, was within walking distance of my hotel.  Luck?  Good fortune?  Kharma?  I would vote yes to all 3.  Needless to say, this discovery put the finishing touch on a great day in the DC area.  Here's what I had at this fine establishment:

1.  Flying Dog Raging Bitch - both keg and on cask.  The latter was dry hopped with simcoe so naturally it was my favorite.
2.  Heavy Seas Loose Cannon on cask.  Smooth, hoppy and delicious.
3.  New Glarus Vintage Belgian Red - last taste of this beauty from their last bottle.  It was flat, but still tasted like a slightly tart slice of awesome cherry pie.  Well worth the effort to get a taste of what this highly touted brewery puts out.
4.  Finished up with a Bells Two Hearted Ale.  Not much needs to be said about this beer.  It is consistently voted #2 or #3 best beer in the country in Zymurgy's annual poll.  Perfectly balanced and absolutely delicious. 

What more can I can say than I am a blessed man.  If only all of my road trips can be this satisfying... Cheers everyone.

Travellin' Blues

Let me just start by saying my travel day wasn't all that bad.  I just stuck on a plane in Minneapolis for 2 hours due to bad weather in Washington DC.  That's not exactly pleasant, but compared to some other experiences I've had and one particular John Hughes Movie, my day was rather pleasant.

I took this photo from the window of my hotel room.  Kinda sums up DC pretty well if you ask me.  A lot of chaos in the foreground with nice scenery if you look for it ;)

NY is finally behind us

This week marks the official end to our relocation adventure to Boise. The sale of the house in Montgomery, NY finally closed on Thursday after a year of being on the market and 1 deal that fell through in the process. It also felt good that the lady buying it fell in love with the old bitch just like we had done 10 years ago. When selling an old house, you need someone who sees charm, history, and potential; not one who sees issues or problems. We were luck enough to find someone who saw the house just as we did.

It's strange since I'd actually gotten used to the feeling of the house not selling. When everything you hear from friends and the media is how crappy the housing market is and how nothing is selling, you tend to believe that your house may end being bound to you forever like the proverbial ball & chain. Now that that part is over, I kinda feel like there must be something else to do... I know this feeling will fade and we'll finally get to begin our Idaho adventure without fear of disaster or imminent doom.

I think I'll celebrate by having a brew day :-) Plus how can I be anything but happy when I see this view from my backyard?

Start of the weekend in Portland

Just arrived in Portland after a 7.5hr drive from Boise. Settled into our room at the Marriott and about to have our first of many microbrews for the weekend. First stop, Deschutes Pub downtown. The photo is the view from the hotel room with the Columbia River and Mount Hood in the background. Very nice!

A Good Weekend Is On The Way

Tomorrow I'm hosting a group brew for my local homebrew club, the Snake River Brewers. About 15 of us will pack my garage and backyard to make 70 gallons of a British ESB, eat some good food, and drink even better beer (mostly homebrew). Should be a great time for all. Getting together tonight too for setup and prep activities, including milling ~150 lbs of grain! Prost!

What Would Michael Moore Do?

A buddy forwarded me this analysis of how we can "eat the rich" to help pay for the current budget shortfalls we're experiencing. Doesn't quite achieve what some would like it to, but it's still entertaining. Enjoy.

Being touristy in LA

Only in Hollywood

I saw this billboard on the side of a building in West Hollywood last week. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that this "religious beacon" looks alot like a marquee since many of the most well known proponents of it are movie stars. Regardless, the sight of it did make me throw up in my mouth a little bit...

New Motorized Grain Mill

I have been crushing my grain the hard way ever since I bought a hand-crank 2-roller barley crusher from Northern Brewer a years back. Recently I'v ebeen using a portable drill to speed up the process but it's still a P-I-T-A. Luckily for me, that's all over now. I saw an article in December's Brew Your Own magazine for a homemade motorized mill and decided to start compiling the equipment needed to make it happen. Found a 1-hp motor on Craig's List for $40, bought the sheaves and belt from Grainger for another $40, and spent about $4 in other assorted hardware. All the wood is scrap or leftovers from the shop. Finished assembly and testing over last weekend. Here's a few photos:

The motor is controlled by the mounted switch and the sheaves cut the speed of the motor down about 8:1 to a speed closer to what is recommended by the manufacturer (200 rpm). Gave it a test run last night and it works great. No more 2-hour grain crushing sessions!

Cheers.