Topics to be addressed:

• Sunday’s brew session
• In Rainbows – the new album by Radiohead
• The upcoming Arcade Fire show
• My cubicle

Everything seemed to just work on Sunday, despite the fact that I was brewing in a small kitchen and that there is plenty of nice carpet that was just asking to be spilled on. The brew entailed the following recipe, which I adapted from the one here:

Grain

• 8lbs. Marris Otter
• 2lbs. Vienna
• 0.5lb. CaraHell (Crystal 10L)

Hops (Cascade only)

• 1oz. at 60 minutes
• 0.5oz. at 30 minutes
• 0.25oz. at 15 minutes
• 0.25oz. at 5 minutes
• 1oz. irish moss divided between additions at 15 and 5 minutes

Procedure

• Mash at 152°F with 3.5 gallons of water – about 1.33 quarts/lb. of grain.
• Batch sparge at 175°F to collect about 6.5 gallons of wort.
• 60 minute boil with hops and irish moss additions as listed. Collect about 5.5 gallons.
• Chill to 73.4°F and pitch Wyeast 1065 yeast.

Several factors made this brew day go really well. For one, my head is in a better place than during past brew days. I’m employed and not worrying about exams, senior design, etc. This means I wasn’t preoccupied and was thus less apt to make mistakes. Kat was also a big help. She weighed out my grains and made me food. We shared the kitchen surprisingly well even with all of my brewing equipment in the way. Upgrades I made to my equipment proved beneficial. I modified my grain mill so I could use my electric drill instead of a hand crank and purchased a wine whip and a six-gallon glass carboy. The modification to the mill and the wine whip took a lot of labor out of the brewing process. They were both fun to use and very effective. Above all, the carboy just looks nice. It allows me to watch the fermentation process. Watching the yeast go to work after brewing for most of the day is very rewarding. Here's a video:

I made two changes to my technique that made my brew session much easier. First, I made a large yeast starter over the course of the previous week. Doing so allowed for active fermentation to happen much sooner, which meant less risk for infection and less time for me to worry if I did something wrong. Second, instead of fly sparging, I batch sparged. I don’t know if I will go back to fly sparging. It’s too much work and there are too many opportunities for mistakes to happen. Fly sparging is too much like the examples in MATH 211, Differential Equations, where there’s a flow rate of fresh water coming into a reservoir with an initial salt content and a flow rate leaving the reservoir and you have to find a solution for the salt content over time. It sucks. Batch sparging is like taking a bath, where you don’t have to deal with rates. Batch sparging allowed me to achieve the proper malt content in my wort, as well as the proper batch size, which is something I was not able to do in previous attempts at fly sparging. I only regret not learning about batch sparging earlier in my brewing career and not brewing this particular batch a few weeks earlier. If I had, then it might be ready for Oktoberfest. Next year. Here's a slide show of the brew session.

I have a blog. I like Radiohead. Therefore I guess I have to contribute to the hype surrounding In Rainbows, their new album, available for free download on October 10th. Even though I haven’t heard the album yet, and it has just as much potential as any other new album to suck, I am more of a Radiohead fan than I used to be. Why? Because the band is taking something on that I’ve been advocating for a little while now: that freely (and allegedly illegally) downloaded music should not correlate with lower sales of albums in tangible format. From this argument, one must conclude that if there is no loss, there is no theft, and thus no crime in pirating music. There should be no correlation for two main reasons. First, digital music is typically lower in quality than unadulterated music from a CD or even vinyl. The uncompressed music from a hard format, omitting cassette tapes and the like, just sounds better. And mp3s, for example, are often fraught with glitches that have none of the charm of those found on vinyl. Second, you can’t hold an mp3. It doesn’t exist as anything more than data. It’s not collectible. It’s worth no more than the space used to store it and the bandwidth used to transfer it. Hard formats, on the other hand, can be held, can fit on a shelf. You’re careful with whom you share them with. They are worth more than digital music files. Selling a tangible album then is simply a matter of convincing buyers that the album is worth adding to their collections. Doing so is accomplished by proving to the buyer that the music is good and offering more in the tangible version than can possibly be had digitally. Radiohead is doing just that. In addition to the free download, an exceptional album package is available for preorder, containing the album, with a bunch of extra songs, in both CD and vinyl, as well as tons of album art. At $80 or so, it’s expensive, but if the music is good enough, I’ll buy it. Final summation: downloading an album freely, and then not buying it in hard format does not make you a thief since you weren’t going to buy it anyway. If anything, pirating music gets people to go out and buy CDs, because they can do so without fear of getting ripped of. Rather, it is the big record companies that are the thieves for lobbying for the right to push crappy music on unwitting consumers and for trying to sell low quality mp3s at tangible album prices and not offering anything tangible. But I digress. Props go to Radiohead for adopting a smart business model.

Tomorrow I am going to see Arcade Fire, Les Savy Fav, LCD Soundsystem, and Blonde Redhead at Randalls Island, NY. I am pretty pumped, although not as pumped as I was when I saw Arcade Fire in February 2005. Their latest album, Neon Bible, is good, but I don’t like it as much as Funeral or Us Kids Know. Nevertheless, I know that they put on a great show, and I’ve heard that Les Savy Fav does as well. It looks like tomorrow should be a pretty awesome day.

As for my cubicle, it needs some work. See what I mean:

I’m thinking that in addition to better organization, it could use a beta fish or maybe an ant farm. Let me know what you think.

Labels: Arcade Fire, beer, Blonde Redhead, concert, LCD Soundsystem, Les Savy Fav, music, other, Radiohead, work