Rubbish, With Occasional Music

So, after hearing back from Scott, boiling the pureed pears may not have been the brilliant stratagem I had envisioned. Apparently, when you boil fruit you activate a little thing called Pectin, which would be great if you were making jellies, but perhaps not so much for making beer. I transferred it¹ to the secondary fermenter for dry hopping last Sunday evening and took the opportunity to taste it. It tasted fine, with a soothing pear aftertaste, so I’m still optimistic. Hazey, carrot-juice looking beer be damned.

However, on the other earlier brew front:

Success!

¹ Possible names: The Devil went up To Oregon, PearBear, Parrotjuice

For my sophomore homebrew effort, I had originally planned on trying a 1554 clone recipe I got from a fellow homebrewing flickrite, flickeree, flickerer. However, once I got to Austin Homebrew Supply I started discussing beers and recipes with Billy and inevitably the conversation lead to the Golden Monkey.

Unfortunately, they don’t have a Golden Monkey clone available, nor were they aware of one, but one of the AHS guys recommended their Devil’s Brew Recipe. At checkout, another AHS guy Scott mentioned that a friend of his recently used the recipe and added some pear juice, which resulted in a brew he was extremely happy with. Simple enough, so I jotted down a note to add a pint of pear juice to the mash.

Simple enough indeed! I couldn’t find 100% pear juice anywhere. Even in the grocer’s hippy section. Never mind that I only searched one grocer. Being very set on Pear beer at this point, I opted to take matters into my own hands. I ended up with about 2.5 lbs of pears, which I skinned, quartered and then pureed in a food processor. I boiled 2 cups of the resulting pear sauce in 2 cups of water for 10 minutes, which was then shortly added into the mash along with the flavor hops. The resulting wort had a subtle enough pear scent, but now that it’s been fermenting for almost a week in my closet, the delicious aroma of pears is nearly overwhelming.

I’m still excited about this beer, but not nearly as excited as I am about the prospect of all my clothes smelling like pears.

This is sort of late notice, but Turner Classic Movies is playing Miyazaki / Studio Ghibli movies every Thursday this month.

Starting at 4:00 (CST) this evening they’ll be airing:

My Neighbor Totoro (1993)
Porco Rosso (1992)
Whisper of the Heart (1995)

Beginning at 9:15, they’ll be running them again but with subtitles.

Next thursday, again starting at 4:00, they’ll be screening:

Only Yesterday (1991)
Pom Poko (1994)

Then again airing them with subtitles at 8:30.

The other thing about this retrospective that’s so great is that all of these films have finally been localized with dubs and subs. Scanning through Amazon’s catalogue, it seems as though the entire Ghibli collection, with the exception of three films, has already been released. Those currently unavailable should be released on March 7th, along with the re-release of My Neighbor Totoro which will finally include the JP language track.

TCM has a brief essay about Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli along with full showtimes and synopses.

Last friday evening I discovered one of the more entertaining things to ever grace Austin’s airwaves, an off-schedule performance of These Aren’t The Droids Your Looking For. TATDYLF, as I now know, is a weekly show on KVRX devoted to Star Wars. Prior to May 19th, 1999 I would have proclaimed it the best thing ever, but I’m no longer so easily swayed. While KOOP was off the air, KVRX DJ’s had been filling in, and TATDYLF took advantage of the situation to perform an Empire Strikes Back radio drama. I have no idea what the show’s normal format is, but what was broadcast that evening was pure gold. Unfortunately the show was nearly over by the time I got home, but here’s all of what I was able to record:

Dr. Scissors and Friends - The Empire Strikes Back

The episode features Obi-Wan without a British accent, a more than passable Chewbacca, the poutiest Lando ever (@ 00:30), and a remarkably unenthusiastic Leia. If you like what you hear, the show airs every Monday from 8:30 to 9:00 on KVRX.

Just as an aside, you’ll probably notice a change in quality half way through the recording. That would be because I chose the worst possible method to record the first 5 minutes of the show. Using Windows Sound Recorder, I recorded the broadcast one minute at a time at an embarassingly low sampling rate. The remainder of the show was recorded using the Record .WAV functionality in Exact Audio Copy that I didn’t even know existed until that evening.

I was later browsing through sourceforge and shortly stumbled upon Audacity, which was a real treat. As far as I can tell, the software is just as capable the last version of Cool Edit Pro (aka Audition) I had used, and a much improved interface. While I was playing around in Audacity and stitching the one minute blocks together it struck me just how much I miss the work I used to do for the hockey team back in Amarillo.

hucklebuck

Originally uploaded by gina pina.