Portable Bar for NHC

The SRB guys thought it would be cool to have a decorative cabinet to surround the club jockey box for NHC in Seattle.  Being the sucker I am, I volunteered to take the lead on it and build one.  I had 3 basic goals for the design:  1.  It should look like a miniature bar from the outside, 2. It should be somewhat portable, and 3. It needed to support pouring of beer from the jockey box.  Sounds pretty simple, huh?

My design is a 3-sided frame & panel cabinet with hinges between the panels to allow the cabinet to be quickly broken down for transport and storage.  The front frame has 3 equally spaced panels and each side frame has a single panel.  The front and side panels are connected with a piano hinge in each inside corner.

To save some money, I cut the rail and stile pieces from 5/8" plywood and used 1/4" oak plywood for the panel inserts.  I used off the cap moulding to wrap the insides of the panels to add some detail and dress up the bar a bit.  All of the assembled panels were wrapped in 1" white ash to hide the plywood edges.  The top is also white ash which is segmented into 2 pieces to allow it also to be folded down to capture the sides.  The folded top will have a hook and loop latch installed to keep the sides from opening up during transport.
 
Here's a few photos of the assembled bar without finish applied.  I'm planning to apply a mahogany stain/polyurethane combination finish to give it an old tavern look.  I'll post a few photos of the finished bar when it's done. Cheers!

Front of the Portable Bar

 Back view of the bar with the jockey box installed

View of the folded bar ready for transport.

NHC Preps

I'm registered for the National Homebrewer's Conference this year for the first time.  I've been wanting to go for years and finally get the chance since it's coming to Seattle.  Several of my buddies in the Snake River Brewer's Club are also going to so we decided to participate in Club Night, which is essentially a homebrew beer festival with each club pouring their creations for 1600 of their closest friends... 

To get ready for Club Night, I'm building a 6-tap jockey box from a 100-qt marine cooler and a cold plate that a few club members donated.   Here's a few shots of the progress made thus far  (Thanks to HomeBrewStuff.com for supplying all of the dispensing hardware, tubing, and accessories):

All that's left is installation of the supply tubing from the kegs and we'll be good to go.  It's also going to have a decorative wood cabinet that wraps around the front and sides for the impression of a portable bar.  I'm also building that.  It will have have a frame and panel design on all three sides with hinges so it van be broken down for easy transport and storage.  I'll post some photos up once I get some of the woodworking done.  We're gonna represent in Seattle!

Yarn Swift for Beth

I got the idea to build Beth  a new swift when we went to Portland last summer and saw a vendor who was selling tabletop models that broke down for easy storage.  The design was rather simple and I knew I could make one for next to nothing.  After hearing Beth swearing about her current swift was a piece of crap, I decided to start this project.  I found some notes posted on the web from another woodworker that had the same idea and started the woodworking.

I built it out of 3/4" ash left over from the bookcases I blogged about in the post below.  These swifts don't require much wood to make (2 pcs 3"x24" and 2 pcs 1"x36"), so the whole project goes fairly quickly.  The toughest part of the project is getting the center holes aligned and drilled so it will spin true.  The prototype isn'rt perfectly centered but is close enough to spin effortlessly when Beth has a skein of yarn on it.

The design is nearly identical to the link above, with all parts able to be disassembled for easier storage.  The base legs and spreader arms go together using bridal joints with the whole assemble held together with a 4-1/2" bolt, a few washers, and a plastic knob.  I added a jam nut under the plastic knob to prevent too much friction being added from over-tightening.  The center hole of the spreader arms has a brass sleeve inserted to prevent run-out in the drilled hole.  Below are photos of the parts and the assembled swift when completed.  It takes less than a minute to assemble.  I finished it with 3 coats of a satin wiping varnish. The pegs were left bare wood to avoid staining or marring the yarn.  I already have a request from one of Beth's fellow knitters for another one!

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!