Moonshinin'

Got myself a new maturing bottle today.

After the 'shine comes off the rig, it gets cut with water to 40% ABV and then goes through an activated carbon filtering system, which takes out any of the fractional fusel oils which might have carried over and can result in an off brew.  I honestly can't taste them at the worst of times (very efficient fractional column) but they are noticeable as an odour.  Most people do a single or double pass through carbon, I probably do 20 or so at least, until it smells like I want it to.  This amount of filtering also allows a certain minor amount of evaporation - this is not a bad thing, as the lighter fractions of ethanol (the pongy ones I don't want) evaporate off first, producing a cleaner product.

It then goes into wide-mouthed 5 litre flagons (which my loving wife refers to as hillbilly jugs - possibly not without some justification).

The purpose of these is wood chip soaking - I use a mix of lightly toasted American white oak and a small amount of well toasted French oak, which releases the tannins into the spirit that barrelling does for commercial hooch.  The degree of toast controls the complexity of the flavour, but at the same time you can't just use the heavily toasted stuff or you'll get something that would take the lining off your stomach.  The spirit needs to stay on the wood for around 4-6 weeks depending on how many batches the chips have seen - I can get about 4 batches out of them with the occasional light refresh before they are spent and need to be tossed and renewed.  That's where the wide mouthed bottles come in!

Finally, the stuff needs to just sit for a while.  It can be drunk right away, but it tends to be a bit bright and sharp.  If I let it sit for about 6 months it gets all mellow and smooth, which is what I want.

So I bought myself a new bottle at the brew shop today.  That's a normal stubby it's sitting next to.  Cheers!

Steak time

Barbecue tonight, I asked Calley to get me a decent steak for dinner.

Love that woman.  :)

I am so doing this

This illustrates the stupidity of the current furore over mobile phones perfectly.  I can quite legally eat my iPhone cookie, or drink a red hot coffee, or even use an electric razor quite legally while driving (I have heard senior police admit to the latter on live national radio) all while talking on a handsfree, but apparently if I hold the device I'm talking on the sky will fall in and I'm suddenly a menace to society.  (As if that only happened then.)

The reality is that mobile phone usage is an easily targeted, and more importantly easily detected "cause" for the cops to simplistically blame for accidents.  I see so many people who couldn't reliable drive their digit up their freckle with both hands on the wheel and what passes for full concentration that our licensing rules and driver training are a farce.

But as usual, it's easier to just tar everyone with the same brush instead of actually identifying and addressing the problem, because that would require someone to actually think about the issue.

And cops wonder why people don't have any respect for them.  Well done, morons.

So the handbrake gets to have day surgery next week...

Apparently the bottom wisdom took took a look at the light of day and decided to burrow.  They will be coming out like it or not next week.

Uninvited guests

Some family in-laws in Blackwater apparently had uninvited guests in the yard one morning earlier this week.  They had no idea until they woke up and found the mess.

 

The police crime scene team came and took fingerprint and DNA samples, which was fairly easy, because the severed fingertip provided both in one go.  Adult bulldogs apparently don’t make a lot of noise going in.

iPad stabbers

Had to take the handbrake to the dentist today, due to getting wisdom(?) teeth at 35.

The endless faffing about of dentist, different joint for an x-ray, back to dentist, WHOOPS referral to a specialist, took about 4 bloody hours aside, I noted one consistent theme across all three sites.

iPad stabbers.

iPads have a touch sensitive screen designed to sense the capacitative coupling of a living body.  They work with fingers, noses, and cat paws.  They may also work with other body parts as well, but only on your iPad, matey.  They even work with knuckles, which is surprising considering there is so little skin and flesh there.  With older capacitative screens, I often couldn't get them to register fingertips, only finger pads.

Of course, they won't recognise Cruella de Vil fingernails (or these efforts) because there's no capacitance to sense - if you really have to have fingernails that make you look like Edward Scissorhands, get a Jasjam from 2006 and enjoy your Windows Mobile 6 (mmm, attractive) and 5 minutes battery life.

If you have idiotic fingernails, I can understand your need for a stylus.  These have a nice, soft little hemisphere on the end with capacitative characteristics so the screen digitiser senses the input.  If you don't, I utterly fail to see why you need one.  It's a touch screen.  Touch.  You interact with it by touching.  What would you want to complicate it with a stylus that you have to cart around, which does what your own chubby digits do?

And why, oh why, do people seem to feel the need to STAB THE FUCKING SCREEN WITH THE THINGS????  It a TOUCH screen, *not* a STAB screen!  Multiple tens of millions of dollars went into that technology, but regardless I spend the morning watching people stab the living crap out of expensive touch screen hardware, like they are trying to play some bizarre combination of pin-finger and eating peas with a knife.

My mother even does it with her fingers, until I threatened to take my iPad away from her until she promised to attacking it and USE IT.  Is it somehow related to older people who don't quite grok the concept of sensitivity below what a mallet can apply or something??

Stop it, please.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled lolcats.

Not so much Breaking Bad as Breaking Naughty