By an extremely lucky twist of fate, this commemorative homebrew (brewed with Third Assistant Stillwachs on location in Vallejo) is being hand delivered to Matt Cain himself tomorrow. Extreme thanks to Mike Strange. How cool is that!
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Here is the photo dispatch from my first all-grain beer crafting experience, brewed on location in Vallejo with Sir Thomas.
Utilizing thirty pounds of grain and almost one pound of hops for a mere ten gallons of beer, this has to be one of the more triumphantly excessive beer recipes I will ever pursue. That’s why I am writing it out here :
Grain Bill
22 lbs American two row malted barley
2 lbs Munich
1/2 lb Aromatic (what the hell is this?)
1 lbs 50-60 Brit.
1/2 lb Cara Muncih
1/4 lb Black Patent Chocolate Malt
1 lb Cara Pils
2 lbs 15L Crystal Malt
2 lbs 50L Crystal Malt
Hops Bill
2 oz Nothern Brewer (bittering)
2 oz Amarillo
2 oz Amarillo
8 oz Cascae (Dry Hopping)
Yeast
2 vials California 001 Ale Yeast
Laudered at 158°F, Preboil specific gravity: ~1.057
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Hi. I have returned from a long satisfying voyage, visiting friends and family in Israel, Berlin, France, Slovenia, and Scotland. I have a lot of work to do on feather2pixels, but for now here are some pictures waiting for your tender mousecliks.
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Oh shit, check this out!!!!
From Lincoln Park at Lands' End
See that??
Let’s zoom in:
…And clean up the picture:
That’s right: it’s the fucking Golden Coyote, sunning itself on the Lincoln Park golf course not 300 yards in front of me!
The only question now is what are the spirits trying to communicate with me?
Homebrew!
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How lucky are you when a friend finds a way to carry on a case of beer for you because it does not taste like rope and is therefore not available west of the Sierras? Now if I can only protect them.
Earlier this week I was in a bar. I got to talking with a friendly middle aged fellow with thick rimless glasses and a dangerously unruly gray beard. Over the course of several pints of Guinness, his modesty (“I’m just a computer hacker”) gave way to unbridled enthusiasm for discontinuous mathematics. This man is one of the ten or twenty people that Google seems to employ as a type of eternal graduate student.
“I spent the day finding a way to find the second eigen vector of a 50,000 by 50,000 matrix.”
See, the matrix entries are URLs and the second eigen vector sort of points towards the search result. Or something. He talked a lot about his day. Suddenly, his wife entered , explaining that she and the kids had been waiting for some time at the restaurant across the street and was he going to join them or just keep drinking at the bar? He stayed.
This all made me very excited, as it fulfilled one of my West Coast life goals of finally befriending the San Francisco Andy Capp.
Socializing has become less natural for me every year since college. Given a long enough exchange, meeting new people now requires me to confess that I work at a maritime academy in Vallejo. I have been experimenting with methods that prevent this from ending conversations.
On a cool night last week over cheap beer at some Mission District bar, I was doing my 2008 version of socializing with someone. The Academy eventually came up and this time it led to an inventory of nautical tattoos: she had two Popeye-style forearm anchors, a lobster on the bicep, something forgettable inside the lower lip, and a bunch of underwater stuff under her clothes. Then an 800 pound dog or something distracted me and that was that. Later, though, as is my custom, I let the episode get inside my head. When your life-changing decisions are another people’s personal aesthetics, is it time to find a new bar?
Instead of taking any kind of positive action, I think I’ll just keep screen printing useless postcards. Here’s the latest set, about San Francisco fast food, currently available at this place for approximately 1/500th of the cost required to make them.
I was laughing at this afternoon classic in car-defacement, sighted on Bartlett Street.
Then I realized that’s my car.
OK so for a moment, the idea of leaving it and driving around as-is seemed like a found art stunt for the ages. Plus, that way the terrorists don’t win. But then I thought about me pulling up to the faculty parking lot at my professor job like this. Makes it a thousand times funnier, but I don’t see myself pulling that one off.
So I am humbled. This is clearly the work of a master–From a purely prank based perspective, one probably couldn’t be more advanced in the craft. Brilliant word selection and execution flawless in its rudeness and legibility. Finally some conceptual art I can get behind.
On Thursday night I found myself holding hands with thirty-five tired educators in a circle, blessing each other. This could only mean one thing: teaching in Berkeley is over.
There were two last days, actually. That’s because there were two of everything this summer: two class sections, two talent shows, two Creative Geometry teachers, two closing ceremonies. In our final hours, we treated our kids to a final exam, a field trip to the Berkeley Art Museum and individual awards that Adrienne and I sewed out of fancy paper and ribbon. Awards like “Most likely to become the Warriors’ mascot and move in to Oracle Arena” were a cover for our secret that we really loved those kids. They seemed amused.
We all reconvened for the closing ceremony, which featured us trying to sound intelligent in front of parents and accepting thank you cards we urged students to write for us. Then there was a convocation featuring student speakers on the verge of shitting themselves with nervousness. If that’s what one is going for, this is the pinnacle of cute high school assemblies. You can’t manufacture that kind of earnestness, you can only force it.
Then I was suddenly at Triple Rock Brewery, drinking a microbrew that was all malt, shouting in someone’s ear about fathers. Asian fathers like to gamble, apparently. On some other level of consciousness, I was writing the last six weeks in the books as a success. It was hard and frustrating and I usually wanted to be doing something else. There were so many things I would have done differently. In some ways we even failed. But I got to do it with Adrienne, we noticed a glimmer of actualization in a few students’ eyes, and I’m reminded why I am a teacher: it is a thing that is impossible to do perfectly and in this way it is an honest human endeavor.
I seem to be back from the coast. The south coast. Of Lake Erie. Ben and Joe (barely) flew in from New York, I came in from Pittsburgh, and we all rendezvous-ed with Shal in his newish, possibly semi-permanent home. The night before, driving a Korean rental car upstate, I watched the aggressively uniform landscape of Ohio (is any part of this state uninhabited?) kind of give way to the sprawling, post-industrial mass bisected by river that is the greater Cleveland area. We spent most of time sprawling ourselves: in next-to-back row seats of a tight Indians/Yankees game, in corners of the kind of bars that pull you in with a seven thousand beer menu and keep you there with a Labatt special, and of course on Shal’s living room floor, where approximately one thirtieth of his media collection still fills an entire bookshelf two rows deep. Cleveland is a good place to hang out.
Then I got on the same United States Route 80 of my daily commute and drove East out of the state of Ohio and towards the state of squalor. I was headed to State College, Pennsylvania, where Danny was about to complete his last week ever of studying at the state college in question in a fantastically shitty shell of a house (further ravaged from a party the weekend before). At this point, studying is the generous description of what he does there, though we did wake up at 9:30 AM, after a night of watching DVDs in his warm bedroom, and slashed though a thicket of Ugg boots into middle campus to learn about monopoly. Later on, we went out with his friends to the kind of bars that pull you in with their $5 pitchers of bottom shelf liquor and keep you there because you are not physically free to leave. It was fun and it all made miss college. But not that much.
I completed my five hundred mile circle on PA Route 22 West, where central Pennsylvania transforms to western Pennsylvania via the Altoona Valley. Freight trains still do things like chug up proud green hills and cross sturdy steel truss bridges here. Once in Pittsburgh, I tried to make the most of my time there by visiting PA’s superior state college, eating a kielbasi fried pirogi sandwich, pinball, and meeting up with Stef and Alicia, who spend less on their new mortgages than what I’m thinking about spending on a studio space. As Alicia’s pup was licking my face over a distracted game of Guitar Hero, I thought, she’s got a pretty nice life.
Why is To-Shi-O dragging a keg?
For our third party is why! We had what I guess was technically a kegger on Saturday night and it was reasonably successful. That is to say people showed up to our apartment, drank, and eventually left. The only casualties were a shower curtain and a scrappy rug—just a shower curtain if you don’t mind the rotting smell of old trendy pilsner.
Speaking of people who don’t mind the smell of rotting beer, Danny humored me while I told him all about the weekend. Afterwards, he added, “Yeah we usually have a couple of kegs at every party.” A couple?! How often does Danny’s house have parties, anyways? “You know, a couple of times a month.” Lesson: never try and amuse a Big Ten student with your keg-obtaining exploits.
The Death Byke Stereo turned out to be a lot less loud outside, surrounded by rush hour traffic. I wouldn’t call it inaudible but, beyond a one bike radius, the Go Team definitely faded into the ether. To-shi-o was pretty disappointed: as a personal stereo it was brilliant, but he obviously had his sights set on bigger things. By the ride home, though, he was already brainstorming modifications and I admire his determination.
And the night wasn’t all defeat. We ran into Sylvia (from the Exploratorium), who helped us finish our water bottle of Jim Beam and who afterwards invited us East (Death Byke Stereo: satisfyingly loud in the BART station). People in the East Bay seem to be fascinated with life, death, and decay and in this way Sylvia’s place might be the most quintessentially East Bay apartment in the history of Oakland. It’s a vortex of plants, composts, found/made furniture, and quirky little messes. After a night of vegetable pizza and homemade beer, To-shi-o and I decided that it ruled.