Very true, and we carry those basics in stock...the cooler, the sparging bag, cheap thermometers. I'm not sure what you used for a kettle, they generally will set you back $80 or more just for a basic stainless steel pot unless you can get an enamelware pot (which we carry as well) for about $40. So I'm including the pot in the cost because your average kitchen does not have a 10 gallon pot.
True, and brewers at your level have been consistent customers. It's the people doing the 5 gallon extract batches that are more fickle and inclined to stop brewing if reasonably priced quality beer can be purchased at a comparable price. For all grain brewers like yourself it definitely is cheaper to brew at home, although there is a significant investment in gear required (or significant time if you make your own gear). The gear can set you back a few hundred to several thousand dollars depending on what quality and size you select. It can become an expensive hobby, but for several of my customers it became a profitable career (they opened brewpubs or got employment at breweries).
it became cheaper and easier to locate decent beer so people that brewed just to get good beer no longer needed to brew at home
That's like trying to argue that people only cook at home because there are not enough restaurants. "If they'd just open a Thai restaurant around here, then architects could stop putting kitchens in homes". Don't think so...
Not really an accurate analogy. Cooking at home is cheaper than eating at the Thai restaurant, usually significantly. When you cook your Thai meal you don't need to wait two or three weeks to eat it, and you make much less of a mess in your kitchen than if you were brewing beer. Brewing beer at home costs the same as or more than equivalent micro-brews (assuming you have a decent beer retailer in your area), plus you need to do the work (cook, sanitize, and wait for fermentation to complete). So if you run out of India Pale Ale you can drive to Stop & Shop and plunk down $19.99 for a case of Sierra Nevada IPA (in the fridge), or mail order homebrew supplies (two cases worth of ingredients for $45), wait a week, brew the beer, wait a week, rack the beer, wait a week, bottle the beer, wait two weeks, and then drink it.
From my experience selling homebrew supplies for over 17 years, the increased availability of micro-brews definitely encouraged the casual home brewers to store the gear and stop brewing. In the mid-1990's there were many independent homebrew shops in our county, but they all went out of business by 2001. We considered dropping the products when business dipped, but as each independent shop closed we picked up a few more customers so our sales stayed basically level during this tough stretch. Many of the people that stopped brewing have started again as they enjoy the hobby, but the reasons for brewing at home are now purely for the enjoyment of the hobby versus the late 1990's when the lack of micro-brews was a big factor.
Interesting to note that homebrewing has been popular in England for much longer (it was essentially illegal in the US until 1979), but in England people brew to avoid the high beer taxes. They use sugar instead of malt for many recipes as they are brewing to save money. You can still see this when you read recipes on cans of British beer kits as they all refer to adding sugar, whereas most US homebrewers avoid sugar and use malt extract instead.
Yeah, in our community kids are always spending $100+ to buy homebrew gear, cooking and then fermenting, and two to three weeks later getting s**t-faced on their homebrew. Or more likely they head to the local Kwikee Mart with a fake ID buy a cheap case of light beer in cans and get s**t-faced immediately. The article is not about consuming alcohol, it's about the brewing process and technology.
When I first started brewing at home (about 1987) it was because all that was available locally was the watery American beers. As more and more craft brewers sprang up the price of quality beer dropped and it was easier to find it at local retail shops. Even my Stop & Shop has about 12' of decent craft beer (Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn Brewing) and at a reasonable price. I think for a while this caused a decline in the hobby...it became cheaper and easier to locate decent beer so people that brewed just to get good beer no longer needed to brew at home. Just the die-hards continued to brew their own beer, but in the last five years it has bounced back.
Sanitation is important, but it's really just at two or three points in the process. Sanitize the primary fermenter, then just before transfer you sanitize the secondary fermenter, and then sanitize the bottles/keg before bottling. Air dry sanitizers and a bottle drying rack makes it pretty painless.
It does work best as a hobby if you work with someone else. Brewing alone can be tedious, brewing with friends or your spouse is an enjoyable way to do something together.
I sell home beer and wine making supplies and ingredients in my hardware store. We've carried products since the mid-1990's and after a decline in activity there has been a big increase in the business in the last five years. I attributed the decline in home brew to the wide availability of micro-brews, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the hobby become popular again even with the large selection of craft beers in supermarkets. More and more of the brewers and wine makers are husband and wife, brewing as much to make drinkable beer/wine as they are trying to learn about the process. It's a small sample and our store is in an affluent suburb, but I'm encouraged by the number of people diving into this hobby which really touches on so many areas (cooking, science, and engineering/design to name a few). It's a natural product line for a hardware store because so much of the gear is just home-built gadgetry requiring plumbing, hardware, and housewares goods.
Facebook can't share anything you don't put on there.
Share with whom is the issue. Facebook has certainly had issues with exposing information beyond what users had configured to share. That does not excuse the people who freely post all sorts of personal details without considering the potential for exposing it to a wide audience, but there have been instances where faulty coding allowed too much information to be shared with the "public" even if privacy settings were set to prevent this.
Exactly right. If they were really interested in protecting the privacy of their users they would require a warrant before providing even that information.
Of course this is Facebook we're talking about, so privacy usually has a different meaning to them.
Our POS system steers anything under $25 to credit card and does not prompt for a signature, so the discount rate isn't a killer. We wind up paying 2% plus a couple of cents, which still sucks for a small sale but is better than the debit flat fee of.25 (or whatever it currently is). Thankfully for retailers the debit fees were dropped last fall.
I think a hardware store is the only place you can actually buy something for less than a quarter. In my hardware store we sell loose fasteners, and we'll have customers buy two washers for.07 each. We've considered putting a minimum of.25 for a fastener purchase but I think customers get a kick out of buying something for so little. The standard line the customer gives at the checkout is "Guess you can go home now" after we ring up the.14 sale.
The evidence is everywhere that Gmail has better spam protection. I use Gmail all the time, and my spam filter just fills up. Misses something every few months; always a surprise. And I've never come across a false positive. However, logging into Hotmail just now, it had 2 messages in the spam folder, but all the inbox had were 6 spam messages.
I don't use Hotmail, but I do have a Gmail account that I use as a backup to my primary email. I get three or four emails a week in my Gmail nbox, all spam. Of course your experience and my experience mean nothing in terms of any real analysis.
Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail are probably the biggest targets for spammers, especially those using dictionary attacks. If you are going to send spam you certainly will be including those providers in your target list.
Unfortunately for these providers they cannot implement certain restrictions that smaller email providers or businesses might set up. For example, we run our own email server and reject outright email connections from a number of countries. We have the luxury of not needing to exchange email with someone in Russia or China (for example) which allows us to filter out huge blocks of IP ranges (using the country specific RBL's).
So Hotmail users may see spam in high quantity, but it's likely a very small percentage of that actually was targeted to the user. I did not RTFA, perhaps I should do so now, but it makes sense to me that Hotmail may actually have quite a good anti-spam scorecard.
I was also a big fan of Alan Parsons Project 30 years ago. Lately, I "accidentally" found a torrent of their discography, and gave it a try. It was not a good idea.
LOL, I think I'd be the same way if I took out the LP's and listened today. I did a lot of college radio, mostly on the engineering and production side, and I collected a lot of albums that had strong production values (clear recording, cool effects, etc). Alan Parsons Project albums were so well recorded and produced, but the actual music probably doesn't stand the test of time. I used to snap up anything recorded or produced by Mutt Lange and Roy Thomas Baker as well, and there are hits and misses in their musical resume as well.
There are certainly are noticeable differences in the sound produced by different speakers, different amplifiers, etc. However, if the source material is compressed and equalized so there is minimal dynamic range then the differences in sound from one setup to another will be less noticeable.
Although I was a fan of Alan Parsons Project albums, I think the vast majority of music listeners would say "Alan Parsons?", with the logical response being "He engineered Dark Side Of The Moon".
Probably been posted already on a prior thread, but if you want to support the blackout on your website, blog, twitter, facebook, etc. there is useful info here.
"There is aging of many resources. We need to optimize everything. We need to modernize," Popovkin said.
"It’s also aging of human resources," he added. "Given the troubles we had in the '90s, quite a lot of people left and nobody came to replace them."
Maybe some of those things should be done before you just fire off another rocket. Those sound like serious, deeply-rooted issues. To do "rocket science" you need "rocket scientists" and apparently quite a lot of them have left the program.
why in the world would you assume that all athiests are scientifically educated? That is a gross over assumption.
I made no such assumption, I obviously was talking about Hitchens specifically and not atheists in general. Hitchens was clearly well educated and familiar with the health effects and scientific body of evidence about smoking.
You are the one guilty of a gross over assumption, but hiding behind anonymity I'm not surprised.
Because it will elongate his life including the time period when he can enjoy it (let's concentrate on smoking)
Statistically this is true, but I know a number of smokers that lived to mid-80's and beyond. Hitchens took a risk like we all do each and every day...we climb into a car, eat raw sushi, or do other activities that we enjoy even though there are statistics that prove that our behavior can kill us.
I am also not sure how being addicted to a substance equals "shorter, exciting, experience-filled existence".
Never having smoked I can't relate from personal experience, but I know smokers that while they are happy they quit they often miss the experience of smoking. They are almost jealous of those they see continuing to smoke. So Hitchens decided that he didn't want to deny himself the pleasure that smoking provides. I agree 100% that it's an addictive, harmful habit, but like most addictive substances it provides measurable pleasure to the addict.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true, and we carry those basics in stock...the cooler, the sparging bag, cheap thermometers. I'm not sure what you used for a kettle, they generally will set you back $80 or more just for a basic stainless steel pot unless you can get an enamelware pot (which we carry as well) for about $40. So I'm including the pot in the cost because your average kitchen does not have a 10 gallon pot.
True, and brewers at your level have been consistent customers. It's the people doing the 5 gallon extract batches that are more fickle and inclined to stop brewing if reasonably priced quality beer can be purchased at a comparable price. For all grain brewers like yourself it definitely is cheaper to brew at home, although there is a significant investment in gear required (or significant time if you make your own gear). The gear can set you back a few hundred to several thousand dollars depending on what quality and size you select. It can become an expensive hobby, but for several of my customers it became a profitable career (they opened brewpubs or got employment at breweries).
it became cheaper and easier to locate decent beer so people that brewed just to get good beer no longer needed to brew at home
That's like trying to argue that people only cook at home because there are not enough restaurants. "If they'd just open a Thai restaurant around here, then architects could stop putting kitchens in homes". Don't think so...
Not really an accurate analogy. Cooking at home is cheaper than eating at the Thai restaurant, usually significantly. When you cook your Thai meal you don't need to wait two or three weeks to eat it, and you make much less of a mess in your kitchen than if you were brewing beer. Brewing beer at home costs the same as or more than equivalent micro-brews (assuming you have a decent beer retailer in your area), plus you need to do the work (cook, sanitize, and wait for fermentation to complete). So if you run out of India Pale Ale you can drive to Stop & Shop and plunk down $19.99 for a case of Sierra Nevada IPA (in the fridge), or mail order homebrew supplies (two cases worth of ingredients for $45), wait a week, brew the beer, wait a week, rack the beer, wait a week, bottle the beer, wait two weeks, and then drink it.
From my experience selling homebrew supplies for over 17 years, the increased availability of micro-brews definitely encouraged the casual home brewers to store the gear and stop brewing. In the mid-1990's there were many independent homebrew shops in our county, but they all went out of business by 2001. We considered dropping the products when business dipped, but as each independent shop closed we picked up a few more customers so our sales stayed basically level during this tough stretch. Many of the people that stopped brewing have started again as they enjoy the hobby, but the reasons for brewing at home are now purely for the enjoyment of the hobby versus the late 1990's when the lack of micro-brews was a big factor.
Interesting to note that homebrewing has been popular in England for much longer (it was essentially illegal in the US until 1979), but in England people brew to avoid the high beer taxes. They use sugar instead of malt for many recipes as they are brewing to save money. You can still see this when you read recipes on cans of British beer kits as they all refer to adding sugar, whereas most US homebrewers avoid sugar and use malt extract instead.
Yeah, in our community kids are always spending $100+ to buy homebrew gear, cooking and then fermenting, and two to three weeks later getting s**t-faced on their homebrew. Or more likely they head to the local Kwikee Mart with a fake ID buy a cheap case of light beer in cans and get s**t-faced immediately. The article is not about consuming alcohol, it's about the brewing process and technology.
When I first started brewing at home (about 1987) it was because all that was available locally was the watery American beers. As more and more craft brewers sprang up the price of quality beer dropped and it was easier to find it at local retail shops. Even my Stop & Shop has about 12' of decent craft beer (Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn Brewing) and at a reasonable price. I think for a while this caused a decline in the hobby...it became cheaper and easier to locate decent beer so people that brewed just to get good beer no longer needed to brew at home. Just the die-hards continued to brew their own beer, but in the last five years it has bounced back.
Sanitation is important, but it's really just at two or three points in the process. Sanitize the primary fermenter, then just before transfer you sanitize the secondary fermenter, and then sanitize the bottles/keg before bottling. Air dry sanitizers and a bottle drying rack makes it pretty painless.
It does work best as a hobby if you work with someone else. Brewing alone can be tedious, brewing with friends or your spouse is an enjoyable way to do something together.
I sell home beer and wine making supplies and ingredients in my hardware store. We've carried products since the mid-1990's and after a decline in activity there has been a big increase in the business in the last five years. I attributed the decline in home brew to the wide availability of micro-brews, so I was pleasantly surprised to see the hobby become popular again even with the large selection of craft beers in supermarkets. More and more of the brewers and wine makers are husband and wife, brewing as much to make drinkable beer/wine as they are trying to learn about the process. It's a small sample and our store is in an affluent suburb, but I'm encouraged by the number of people diving into this hobby which really touches on so many areas (cooking, science, and engineering/design to name a few). It's a natural product line for a hardware store because so much of the gear is just home-built gadgetry requiring plumbing, hardware, and housewares goods.
Facebook can't share anything you don't put on there.
Share with whom is the issue. Facebook has certainly had issues with exposing information beyond what users had configured to share. That does not excuse the people who freely post all sorts of personal details without considering the potential for exposing it to a wide audience, but there have been instances where faulty coding allowed too much information to be shared with the "public" even if privacy settings were set to prevent this.
Exactly right. If they were really interested in protecting the privacy of their users they would require a warrant before providing even that information.
Of course this is Facebook we're talking about, so privacy usually has a different meaning to them.
Our POS system steers anything under $25 to credit card and does not prompt for a signature, so the discount rate isn't a killer. We wind up paying 2% plus a couple of cents, which still sucks for a small sale but is better than the debit flat fee of .25 (or whatever it currently is). Thankfully for retailers the debit fees were dropped last fall.
I think a hardware store is the only place you can actually buy something for less than a quarter. In my hardware store we sell loose fasteners, and we'll have customers buy two washers for .07 each. We've considered putting a minimum of .25 for a fastener purchase but I think customers get a kick out of buying something for so little. The standard line the customer gives at the checkout is "Guess you can go home now" after we ring up the .14 sale.
The evidence is everywhere that Gmail has better spam protection. I use Gmail all the time, and my spam filter just fills up. Misses something every few months; always a surprise. And I've never come across a false positive.
However, logging into Hotmail just now, it had 2 messages in the spam folder, but all the inbox had were 6 spam messages.
I don't use Hotmail, but I do have a Gmail account that I use as a backup to my primary email. I get three or four emails a week in my Gmail nbox, all spam. Of course your experience and my experience mean nothing in terms of any real analysis.
Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, and Gmail are probably the biggest targets for spammers, especially those using dictionary attacks. If you are going to send spam you certainly will be including those providers in your target list.
Unfortunately for these providers they cannot implement certain restrictions that smaller email providers or businesses might set up. For example, we run our own email server and reject outright email connections from a number of countries. We have the luxury of not needing to exchange email with someone in Russia or China (for example) which allows us to filter out huge blocks of IP ranges (using the country specific RBL's).
So Hotmail users may see spam in high quantity, but it's likely a very small percentage of that actually was targeted to the user. I did not RTFA, perhaps I should do so now, but it makes sense to me that Hotmail may actually have quite a good anti-spam scorecard.
Write code that messes with their technology, perhaps something that might wreak havoc on centrifuges or other industrial machinery?
Those people.
People who would buy this cable for example. :)
I was also a big fan of Alan Parsons Project 30 years ago. Lately, I "accidentally" found a torrent of their discography, and gave it a try. It was not a good idea.
LOL, I think I'd be the same way if I took out the LP's and listened today. I did a lot of college radio, mostly on the engineering and production side, and I collected a lot of albums that had strong production values (clear recording, cool effects, etc). Alan Parsons Project albums were so well recorded and produced, but the actual music probably doesn't stand the test of time. I used to snap up anything recorded or produced by Mutt Lange and Roy Thomas Baker as well, and there are hits and misses in their musical resume as well.
Sorry, I wasn't clear in my narrative.
Me: Did you read that article about Alan Parsons?
Average music listener: Alan who?
Me; Alan Parsons. He was the recording engineer for "Dark Side Of The Moon".
Average music listener: Oh, I know that album, didn't know the name of the engineer.
Probably trolling, but what the heck....
There are certainly are noticeable differences in the sound produced by different speakers, different amplifiers, etc. However, if the source material is compressed and equalized so there is minimal dynamic range then the differences in sound from one setup to another will be less noticeable.
Although I was a fan of Alan Parsons Project albums, I think the vast majority of music listeners would say "Alan Parsons?", with the logical response being "He engineered Dark Side Of The Moon".
Probably been posted already on a prior thread, but if you want to support the blackout on your website, blog, twitter, facebook, etc. there is useful info here.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
FTFA: "The partitions resemble animal-cell cleavage"
FTFA:
"There is aging of many resources. We need to optimize everything. We need to modernize," Popovkin said.
"It’s also aging of human resources," he added. "Given the troubles we had in the '90s, quite a lot of people left and nobody came to replace them."
Maybe some of those things should be done before you just fire off another rocket. Those sound like serious, deeply-rooted issues. To do "rocket science" you need "rocket scientists" and apparently quite a lot of them have left the program.
why in the world would you assume that all athiests are scientifically educated? That is a gross over assumption.
I made no such assumption, I obviously was talking about Hitchens specifically and not atheists in general. Hitchens was clearly well educated and familiar with the health effects and scientific body of evidence about smoking.
You are the one guilty of a gross over assumption, but hiding behind anonymity I'm not surprised.
Because it will elongate his life including the time period when he can enjoy it (let's concentrate on smoking)
Statistically this is true, but I know a number of smokers that lived to mid-80's and beyond. Hitchens took a risk like we all do each and every day...we climb into a car, eat raw sushi, or do other activities that we enjoy even though there are statistics that prove that our behavior can kill us.
I am also not sure how being addicted to a substance equals "shorter, exciting, experience-filled existence".
Never having smoked I can't relate from personal experience, but I know smokers that while they are happy they quit they often miss the experience of smoking. They are almost jealous of those they see continuing to smoke. So Hitchens decided that he didn't want to deny himself the pleasure that smoking provides. I agree 100% that it's an addictive, harmful habit, but like most addictive substances it provides measurable pleasure to the addict.