flog

This is the annual rant at the inability of Christians and their moneychanging brothers to wait until the Christmas season to start peddling Christmas shit. October 8th I saw a commercial (for K-Mart this time (Wal-Mart is the usual offender)) which mentioned getting your Christmas shopping done early because "K-Mart has Lay-A-Way".

For a long time, I thought "Lay-A-Way" was just a counter where disused merchandise and lazy workers congregated to watch people go in and out of the bathrooms (I was young, I never questioned why they would need to watch me go in and out of the bathroom). I'm not sure when I realized that Lay-A-Way is white trash for "have to buy gifts on the installment plan - even from K-Mart". Now, instead of finding it weird, I find Lay-A-Way sad. Not sad like pathetic but sad like I want to cry a little bit.

Maybe it's my inner communist speaking, but I think everyone should be able to buy cheap Chinese crap from K-Mart without having to make 4 easy payments, but then I think everyone should be be able to find the means to live and provide for their family on minimum wage, too.

My last several brews have all been variations on hop explosions and I have kind of burned myself out on hops for a while, which is why I had a dream recently of brewing a beer that would be like an Oktoberfest style beer (malty, with a beautiful brown color, and easily drinkable), but would be an ale (because brewing lagers is pain in the ass without a fridge to ferment in). So I started tinkering and settled on a recipe that looks to be rather alt-like, which led me to start doing research on altbiers during which I found this graph.





I don't know where Mr Brewsupplies got his numbers from, but I love graphs and this quantifies making hop additions in a way that just tickles me pink.