Come on, Roger, bring it to Houston!

Brought to you by the My Cage duo of Ed Power and Melissa DeJesus, the first eight pages of Dracula vs Santa will make you wish for a ninth.  Especially if you've just finished reading Watchmen.

Look!  Up there under the Beer menu.  See that new line?  It says RSF Merchandise.  Click on it and be miraculously transported to my little place on Zazzle.com.

Hey, the country needs an economic makeover, so do your part by getting yourself a brand new Randy Stoat t-shirt.  President Obama will thank you.  Your friends will appreciate the new sense of style you have at your command as they wait in line behind you at the gas station while you pay for your week's worth of lotto tickets, Red Bull and Jagermeister.  Most of all, I'll thank you for my half-cent cut of Zazzle's profits.  While you're there, go ahead and treat yourself to a frosted mug so you can pound down those RB&J cocktails in style.

You are a winner, my friend, and the whole world should be able to tell at a glance.  With clothes and other merchandise from Randy Stoat Femtobrewery, there are no more excuses.

Please read this.  It is just right on!  I’m sure nothing will come of it, but damn it sure feels good to see that somebody else is thinking the same things I do.  The only thing I’d change right away would be to send it to my state and local governments as well.  Why hold them harmless?

I’m going to make sure everyone who claims to be my representative gets a copy of it, too.  Even if you won’t read it, some lackey in their office should.  Maybe one of them will see it and think a revolution is in the offing and show it to their boss.  Maybe one of them will feel shame for a tenth of a second.

Oh, who am I kidding?

Write your representatives, too.

• The White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/
• US House https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
• US Senate http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
• Texas reps: http://www.fyi.legis.state.tx.us/

Use Google to find your local thieving bastard representatives.

I’ve added a recipe page to the site.  It has the Irish Stout recipe from below in both BeerSmith and plain text formats.  I’ll upload some new (actually, they’d be older) recipes in the near future.

I racked my latest brew from the primary fermenter to the secondary fermenter, yesterday.  The final gravity is 1.015, giving it about 5.3% alcohol by volume.  It tastes pretty gosh-darn good and I’m glad I added that little bit of acidulated malt to the recipe.  I’ll let it sit for at least another week to clear out and then keg it.

Here’s the recipe:

RSF Dry Stout (April 2009 KGB Meeting KOM)

The other day I was walking around the house with an odd song in my head.  When it dawned on me what I was singing, I realized it was from a cartoon I haven’t seen for something like 40 years.  The thing that amazed me was that I still remembered all of the lyrics.  I was pretty sure I had some wrong because, who would think that the song would really say, “Softness in his eyes; Iron in his thighs…”  I was sure that was wrong, but nope, check it out.  Here’s the whole song (ref):

Hercules, hero of song and story
Hercules, winner of ancient glory
Fighting for the right
Fighting with his might
With the strength of ten
Ordinary men

Hercules, people are safe when near him
Hercules,only the evil fear him
Softness in his eyes
Iron in his thighs
Virtue in his heart
Fire in every part
Of the mighty Hercules!

I have no idea what triggered the memory of that song — probably some short string of notes from the tv that approximated a piece of the Hercules tune.  The thing that really scares me about this is that this is something I haven’t even thought about in decades.  What if this song is the last thing flowing through my addled brain when I’m 105 years old and drooling strained peas all down my robe?  Over and over and over…  The nurses will hear my strained rendition of it from down the hall and know that, “Dangit! Old Man Rogerson hasn’t kicked the bucket, yet.”

Hey, you’ve got to be remembered for something, don’t you?

Here’s one episode I found on YouTube.  The animation is laughably horrible and reminded me of Clutch Cargo, another ancient memory from my early days.  Enjoy!

I wish I understood Cascading Style Sheets.  I upgraded the site software yesterday (DNN v4.9 to DNN v5.0) to patch over some recently discovered security issues.  Fine and dandy, you say, but now the blog isn’t formatted correctly any more.  In fact, I think the text might be messed up site-wide.

It’s always something.

Update:  I'm going to call the text formatting issue resolved for now.  It is at least close to the way it was, so I'm happy again (and what else really matters, anyway?).

Stout might not be the first beer that pops into your mind when crawfish is on the menu, but that’s what the Keg of the Month (KOM) will be when the KGB has its crawfish boil this coming April.

The only homebrew I have on tap right now is a Samichlaus clone that my buddy, Donald Sajda, and I made in 2007.  We kegged it in mid-November and it’s getting rather infrequent pulls because the stuff is cloyingly sweet.  That was the second time we brewed Samichlaus as a team and we brewed it again on the 6th of this month.  I think this year’s batch will be the last time I brew this beer.  Each year the brew is bigger than the last (for our latest, the OG came in at an obese 1.200), and each year the resulting beer has more residual sugars than the one before.  I think the batch we brewed the other day will be pretty much undrinkable.  Add the distinctive flavor imparted by the yeast and five gallons is just too much of a good thing.  Luckily, I have an aunt and uncle who seem to have no limit to their sweet tooth capacity, so they will be put, happily and unwittingly, to some good use.

The point of that digression is to show that I need something not-so-sweet in the refrigerator.  When I saw stout on the list of beers needed for a future KOM, I jumped on it.  I love the stuff.

I tried brewing this beer on the 29th, but the sparge wasn’t just stuck, it was impacted.  Rather than try to salvage a lost cause by lautering through a colander and ending up with a very oxygenated wort (which would lead to papery, cardboard flavors and aromas – I speak from experience, folks), I dumped the mash and ran back to the store to restock on grain so I could try it again the next day.  This time, though, I added rice hulls to the mash and the sparge went like a Swiss clockwork.

For all the hard work (not to mention the mileage of two trips to and fro the homebrew supply store), the beer gods smiled on me with exceptional brewhouse efficiency.  I planned on fermenting 11 gallons of 1.047 wort, but I ended up with 11.5 gallons at 1.056.  According to BeerSmith, that’s a whopping 92.6% efficiency rate, and I’m right proud.

Now if I can get some more luck, the brew gods will get the weather gods to warm us up a bit so the yeast can do their work in a nice 64° environment.  If not, the fermentation will struggle along in chilly lethargy.

If you've never seen this blog before, I have something to say.  If you have seen this blog before, I still do.

Which brings me to the point.  One of my pet peeves goes like this:  Somebody will say something like, "If you've never seen the show before, this is how it works," then they'll go right on ahead and describe how the show works without regard for whether or not you’ve seen the show.  Drew Carey used to say that at the beginning of every episode of Who's Line Is It, Anyway?

Similarly, during NBC's Early Today, as they come back from one of their numerable commercial breaks, you will invariably hear the news reader du jour say, "If you're just waking up, this is Early Today."  Well, lady, what if I've been awake for hours, huh?  What's the name of the program, then?  Is it, Not-Quite-As-Early-As-We-Thought-You'd-Think-It-Was Today?  Hell no, it's still the same, lame old Early Today show.  So just say, “This is Early Today” and be done with it.

Please think about what you’re saying, people.  Some of us are listening.