Live 8 In Canada

Seeing as many of the good bands are still out there to be added to a concert, the Toronto part of Live 8 might work out really well:

Wherever it will be held — Downsview, the Molson Amphitheatre, Molson Park in Barrie — the concert, one of eight being held worldwide July 2 to shine the spotlight on poverty in Africa, promises to be a band-packed musical extravaganza. The Rolling Stones lead the list of groups that might take the stage here. The Barenaked Ladies, Jann Arden and Our Lady Peace have also been mentioned, but organizers say nothing official can be announced until early next week. “We’re just flying,” said Katherine Holmes, a spokeswoman for Canadian Live 8. “We don’t know the venue. All we know is that Toronto is confirmed. There’s a lot of work that’s going on to try and put it all together. “Many, many elements of the concert are being finalized as we speak,” Holmes added. “We anticipate Tuesday we will be able to announce venue, ticketing and the lineup.”

Coming as it does on the Saturday after the Friday holiday for the fastastically named Canada Day on July 1st, this nation is well set up to put its feet up and watch TV on a sunny day for this event.

In honour of Ian’s wish list, I hereby call for a Supertramp reunion rather than yet another Rolling Stone gig in Toronto. Supertramp was always way bigger in Canada than the US, outselling some albums here as opposed to there. Get back AC/DC as well as they were the best thing at SARSfest, the only “a-pa-looza” named after a disease I can think of. And that guy in the front row with the black t-shirt with some band’s name of it who jumped up and down all day with a clenched fist? Get him back, too. He was great.

Tantrama Summit Collapses!

You, Sir, are a fool and a fascist! The day we agree to this proposal is the day I see you in rotting in the bowels of Hell!!!

Ian Doyle, Nfld Min of Finance, responding yesterday to the summit’s closing speech by First Minister Designate John McDonald MacKay Archibald

Emotions ran high this week at the end of the summit in Tantrama City on health issues which extended well past the original four days. Some progress was made but not in areas where great hope for a breakthrough had been expected.


Angry Crowds At Tantrama City Yesterday

Despite the hope and, then, demands of all four provincial premiers, representatives of the breakaway regions of Cape Breton, New Brunswick’s Acadian Penninsula and, to a lesser degree, the Souris Downtown Region (Alleged) as well as (beyond the security fencing) crowds which grew day by day, no further funding for health care was extended beyond the levels in place before the irrevocable extension of direct access to the Federal Treasury was granted by Federal Order in Council to the Tantrama City, granting First Minister Designate of the Provisional Government, John McDonald MacKay Archibald, what some – including he himself – have described as god-like powers.

Rather than announcing changes in health care funding in accordance with resolutions of the conference sesssions, First Minister Designate Archibald announced an elaborate plan of subsidized ferry and hydrofoil building for local transportation as a means to achieve self-sufficiency for the shipyards of the Northumberland Strait “for generations to come!” to the wild – some say intoxicated – applause for the delegates from the Souris Downtown Region (Alleged).

Calls of a legitimization of the new intermediary level of government through a ballot providing responsible government and a referendum on the policies proposed by the Provisional Government were met with little action. Meanwhile, officials from the four Provincial Premier’s offices reported no longer being able to contact the office of Federal Prime Minister Paul Martin or, even more oddly, the offices of Opposition co-Leaders Belinda Stronach and Peter MacKay. All recently published Federal literature, including maps indicate the region to the east of Edmunston, New Brunswick, as New Atlantica with the capital at Tantrama City. When questioned by these events, First Minister Designate Archibald announced that he would be undertaking a region wide series of “mussel, clam and lobster feeds or gobstuffs” in preparation for evaluation of the policy research opportunities required in order to lay the groundwork for plans for the first free election for New Atlantica:

Through meeting with supporters and perhaps others throughout the region and eating clams with them, it is the hope that the Provisional Government may lay the basis for the introduction…err… continuation…ummm…use of responsible government throughout the region as is enjoyed in…other places…I think.

The first in the series of Regional Feeds was announced late today for a series of villages from Tidnish to Pugwash along Nova Scotia’s North Shore with the theme “Hydrofoil Production and You.”


First Minister Designate Archibald, Left, Undertaking Provision Planning
For The Upcoming Regional Feeds Earlier Today

Manners Question

Recently, I was at a meeting of people all fairly well known to each other where one person called another person “Jerry” when we all knew it was “Gary”. Although I have had the Hal/Al thing myself and not really been bothered as it is common enough when, instead, I watch it happening in front of me involving others I find it excruciating. I wonder why.

Dalek Found

A Dalek stolen from a Somerset tourist site has been found on Glastonbury Tor after thieves said it was “too hot”. The prop, which was at Wookey Hole Caves, near Wells, for a Doctor Who exhibition, was taken more than a week ago…

Last Thursday, staff found a Dalek plunger arm and a ransom note on a doorstep. The note read: “We are holding the Dalek captive. We demand further instructions from the Doctor.”

Now those are some good weirdos. ‘Cause they are not really real, right? Right?

The Benefits Of Fame

I got up here in the wee hours to check the stats from the citation in yesterday’s New York Times, page C4 for posterity, and was surprised to see that it does not alter the alignment of the planets.


Good Beer Blogs Stats – 13 June 2005

As you can see, last Friday when I was nothing and a nobody the beer blog had 965 visits from 519 sites. Yesterday when I was a star…I really was, you know…I had 1007 visits from 590 sites.

Woo.

Despite the extremely intersting process and the very intellegent and interested reporter, it appears that I am just never ever taking anything written on page C4 as important at all ever again. No way. That page is just for the likes of me and Sean Penn. You did notice I was one column and 2.5 inches from that big Sean Penn story, right? Oddly, there was a bigger bump here for some reason: 10453 visits from 1742 sites, both up 20% – but nothing on the “Gomery” googling insanity of early April. Sic transit gloria blogi. Google bots clearly do not drink ales and lagers. [You know, I should have gone with that sherry blog idea.]

Sadly it is clear that the goal would have to be getting into Section A of the globe’s paper of record…but Canada never appears in actual news section of the New York Times. Likely any chance of Section A fame would require slipping over the border, something about police tape encircling a northern New York shopping mall and a quote from my mother to the effect that I was, after all, a bit weird growing up.

Not The Cover Of The Rolling Stone

So there I am, in the last paragraph 14th story in The New York Times, Business Section, Media and Advertising page, web edition index at 6:37 am Monday morning with the precious URL, all live and linky:

nytbeerbloggingal
No seized web site or anything. No referrers yet as I can see. Oh well. Wait for the entire workforce of New York City to get to work and turn on their computers to slack off for the morning by flipping through the web edition, I suppose…

It was an interesting process being interviewed via email by the reporter who has lots of web industry writing experience but not a homebrewer or anything. She noticed this post I made January on the nutty idea of an “open source beer”. Too bad they did not use the full quote – which I thought was really helpful – but, true, would have needed a separate section:

I have not tried the but think from what is provided that I would not like to try to make it or drink it. Making the beer would be difficult for most homebrewers given the volumes provided. Most homebrewers brew in lots of 20 litre or perhaps double that but an 80 litre boil as required in this recipe would find the brewer facing over 200 pounds of boiling sticky sugar syrup needing transferring by the brewer, a near impossible task in the average kitchen. By contrast, even the small end of the microbrewing scene expects an entry point at the 5 or 7 barrel scale of brewery. One barrel of beer is about 170 litres. Here is some information from the brewery manufacturer DME: which may help understand the scale: http://www.dmeinternational.com/brewing/brewbup/naturalbrew.html. So it is unclear for whom this scale of recipe is devised. Recipes can be scaled up or down but you might want to start with a point that is useful – or even safe – for one type of brewer or another.

That being said, there are issues with the ingredients, too. Beer is basically made of four things: water, yeast, hops and malt. In this recipe, there is detail provided about only hops and malt. As a result, it the same ingredients were used and made with the soft water of Dublin or the hard water of Burton-upon-Trent, England, the resulting products would be very different. These effects can be reproduced by adding water treatments which mimic one location or another. But without any guidance as to water quality, there is a great deal of variation left to the imagination of the brewer. The same is the case of the yeast. The recipe does not tell us whether it is lager yeast or ale yeast, the two general hemispheres of the beer world. Further, it does not state which of sub-type might be used. Consider this web page of a homebrew supplier which offers 33 ale yeasts and 16 for lager, aside from the 18 for the specialized wheat and Belgian styles of beer: http://www.paddockwood.com/index.php. Selection among these yeasts will greatly affect the outcome of the brewing process. But no guidance is given.

Where there is some guidance, we are still uncertain. We are told that “1 kg of caramel malt” is required. That usually defines a class of malts with a sugary aspect but they differ in the taste they impart according, among other factors, to the degree they are roasted. As a result, a pale crystal malt may give a slight nuttiness to a beer where a dark one provides a strong raisiny flavour. Just saying “caramel malt” in not specific enough. Similarly, the recipe includes 4 kg of sugar but we are not told if it is corn or cane, light yellow or dark demarara or even whether Belgian candi sugar is to be used. Sugar is not sugar is not sugar.

So in the end it is very difficult to determine what a brewer might do with the recipe as it is really only part of a recipe. If you take the information provided and run it through a popular beer recipe calculator used by homebrewers for planning you get a beer which is somewhat pale and normal strength at 5.2% but a bit cloying due to the moderate hops and likely richness of some residual sugars. It would also have no to very rich yeastiness with anything from a slight nuttiness to a strong raisin flavour. Here are the results from when I ran the test: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator?6074722#tag. Except for the odd ingredient “300 g Guarana beans” this could be half the beers I have ever encountered depending on how the unstated variables are addressed by the particular brewer. It is interesting to note that guarana bean is included in the new Budweiser product, B-to-the-E: this author does not find that product very pleasant: http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/news/beerman/beer_20024917.shtml

I do go on, don’t I.

Wi-Fi Deadbeats

This is sort of funny if it were not a pathetic business model meeting rude nerds:

Even worse, when lingerers were confronted, they were bellicose. “We get yelled at by people who feel it’s their right” to use Victrola’s Wi-Fi without making a purchase, Ms. Strongin said. Tony Konecny, the shop’s head roaster, added, “It’s rarely a pleasant interaction.”…Some of Victrola’s customers were in a slight state of disbelief when the Wi-Fi was disconnected. One regular customer repeated over and over, “That just doesn’t work for me,” Ms. Strongin said…

More wi-fi freeloader backlash from last month and last year.

Not The Cover Of The Rolling Stone

So there I am, in the last paragraph 14th story in The New York Times, Business Section, Media and Advertising page, web edition index at 6:37 am Monday morning with the precious URL, all live and linky:

No seized web site or anything. No referrers yet as I can see. Oh well. Wait for the entire workforce of New York City to get to work and turn on their computers to slack off for the morning by flipping through the web edition, I suppose…

It was an interesting process being interviewed via email by the reporter who has lots of web industry writing experience but not a homebrewer or anything. She noticed this post I made January on the nutty idea of an “open source beer”. Too bad they did not use the full quote – which I thought was really helpful – but, true, would have needed a separate section:

I have not tried the but think from what is provided that I would not like to try to make it or drink it. Making the beer would be difficult for most homebrewers given the volumes provided. Most homebrewers brew in lots of 20 litre or perhaps double that but an 80 litre boil as required in this recipe would find the brewer facing over 200 pounds of boiling sticky sugar syrup needing transferring by the brewer, a near impossible task in the average kitchen. By contrast, even the small end of the microbrewing scene expects an entry point at the 5 or 7 barrel scale of brewery. One barrel of beer is about 170 litres. Here is some information from the brewery manufacturer DME: which may help understand the scale: http://www.dmeinternational.com/brewing/brewbup/naturalbrew.html. So it is unclear for whom this scale of recipe is devised. Recipes can be scaled up or down but you might want to start with a point that is useful – or even safe – for one type of brewer or another.

That being said, there are issues with the ingredients, too. Beer is basically made of four things: water, yeast, hops and malt. In this recipe, there is detail provided about only hops and malt. As a result, it the same ingredients were used and made with the soft water of Dublin or the hard water of Burton-upon-Trent, England, the resulting products would be very different. These effects can be reproduced by adding water treatments which mimic one location or
another. But without any guidance as to water quality, there is a great deal of variation left to the imagination of the brewer. The same is the case of the yeast. The recipe does not tell us whether it is lager yeast or ale yeast, the two general hemispheres of the beer world. Further, it does not state which of sub-type might be used. Consider this web page of a homebrew supplier which offers 33 ale yeasts and 16 for lager, aside from the 18 for the specialized wheat and Belgian styles of beer: http://www.paddockwood.com/index.php. Selection among these yeasts will greatly affect the outcome of the brewing process. But no guidance is given.

Where there is some guidance, we are still uncertain. We are told that “1 kg of caramel malt” is required. That usually defines a class of malts with a sugary aspect but they differ in the taste they impart according, among other factors, to the degree they are roasted. As a result, a pale crystal malt may give a slight nuttiness to a beer where a dark one provides a strong raisiny flavour. Just saying “caramel malt” in not specific enough. Similarly, the recipe includes 4 kg of sugar but we are not told if it is corn or cane, light yellow or dark demarara or even whether Belgian candi sugar is to be used. Sugar is not sugar is not sugar.

So in the end it is very difficult to determine what a brewer might do with the recipe as it is really only part of a recipe. If you take the information provided and run it through a popular beer recipe calculator used by homebrewers for planning you get a beer which is somewhat pale and normal strength at 5.2% but a bit cloying due to the moderate hops and likely richness of some residual sugars. It would also have no to very rich yeastiness with anything from a slight nuttiness to a strong raisin flavour. Here are the results from when I ran the test:
http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator?6074722#tag. Except for the odd ingredient “300 g Guarana beans” this could be half the beers I have ever encountered depending on how the unstated variables are addressed by the particular brewer. It is interesting to note that guarana bean is included in the new Budweiser product, B-to-the-E: this author does not find that product very pleasant:
http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/news/beerman/beer_20024917.shtml

I do go on, don’t I.

None