Good and Bad

Just a quick note on something about which I have been thinking, rather than a full blog post.  It seems to me that some people like the simplicity of easily categorizing things into good and bad.  There are good chemicals and bad chemical.  Vitamin C is a good chemical; fluoride is apparently a bad chemical.  Selenium is apparently a good chemical in your multi-vitamin, but a bad chemical when the EPA tries to eliminate it from our water supply.

In reality the world is much more nuanced.  At high concentration naturally occurring fluoride in the water supply can have negative health effects.  At the concentrations in which it is added artificially to water supplies (700 ppb to 1.2 ppm); it's beneficial. Most chemotherapy drugs are really bad for you, but maybe they are better than cancer.  Pesticides are very dangerous compounds, but mosquitoes can be deadly.  Carbon (see Carbon: Poison in Our Food ) can be toxic as hydrogen cyanide, a nutrient such as a carbohydrate, a fuel like methane, or a greenhouse gas like methane and carbon dioxide.  Ozone in the troposphere is pollution, a result of photochemical smog. Ozone in the stratosphere protects us from UV radiation.

I suspect it is tempting to do the same with people.  There is a school of thought that people can be easily categorized as good or bad.  Good people are like us; they believe what we do; we can trust them; they would never hurt a fly.  People who do bad things must be unlike us.  We search for reasons to categorize them as unlike us, rather than recognizing that but for the good choices we happen to have made, we could be those people.  I suspect that this way of looking at the world is pernicious.  It isolates us from the understanding that our choices have consequences, and that we ourselves have to be ever alert that we do not become what we despise.

Carbon: Poison In Our Food

Learn about the new hazard THEY are putting in our food!!!

You will never guess what they are putting in our food.  Even organic locally grown food contains this poison!!!

Consider the Facts about Carbon:

1. Carbon is a principal component of the deadly nerve gas sarin.
2. In the history of chemical warfare, more people have died from phosgene gas than any other chemical agent used on the battlefield.  Phosgene contains carbon.
3. Deadly hydrogen cyanide gas contains carbon.
4. 100% of biological tissue from cancer patients contains carbon.
5. Carbon compounds are implicated in climate change.
6. Every human disease ever known can be associated with carbon!!!!
7. The Nazis ate food with carbon in it.

Tell Monsanto, Big Pharma, and Big Farm A that you do not want carbon in your food.  Join the movement to insist that our food producers start growing natural food without this toxic poison!

Stop Poisoning Your Body Today!

Sparkling Ginger Mead

In my last blog post, The President's Porter, I wrote about making a variant on the Whitehouse's Honey Porter. That made me think about using honey as the sugar for fermentation, which naturally led me to think about making mead.

The principal sugar used in making beer is maltose, a dissacharide made from two units of glucose. The sugar in honey, by contrast, is principally invert sugar.  Invert sugar is a mixture of  the simple sugars fructose and glucose. Fructose and glucose can also form a dissacharide called sucrose, cane sugar. The reason invert sugar has its name is that a mixture of fructose and glucose rotates plane-polarized light in the opposite direction from sucrose.

Invert sugar is very sweet and honey makes an excellent starting material for mead, a honey wine.

The President's Porter

In a previous post, I described the last batch of beer I made. It's time to start a new batch. As the Whitehouse recently released their recipe for a honey porter, I thought I start there. I also changed some of my methodology to correct some of the problems I encountered in my last batch.

The recipe I used is based upon the Whitehouse recipe. My local brew store was out of Nottingham yeast; so I am used Windsor yeast. I used a local organic honey instead of Whitehouse honey. I used 9.6 HBU of bittering hops instead og 10 HBU, and 1 oz. or aromatic hops instead of 1/2 oz., because the quantities are more convenient, and a little more aromatic hops never hurt anyone. I  used diammonium phosphate as a yeast nutrient, and gypsum for flavor. Also, I will use a process that is somewhat modified from the Whitehouse process that I will describe here. 

Amateur Summer Amber

I've brewed beer a few times, but I have not done so in quite some time. In the past, I have not kept very detailed notes about the beer I've made. This time I decided to do so, and as long as I was keeping notes, I thought it would be fun to blog about it.

I am far from an expert when it comes to brewing; so I decided to keep it simple by brewing a pure extract beer. I did create my own recipe, but it is very similar to recipes in a couple of my references below.

Sign Seen in the Neighborhood

The Laws of Thermodynamics

If one looks around the Internet, he or she can find a multitude of pages that state the laws of thermodynamics; so why add one more?  I've been writing a lot of posts on thermodynamics, but nowhere have I given a concise statement of the laws; also, I am not always happy with how the laws are described.  So this post is my contribution.

The Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics

The zeroth law states:

If two bodies are in thermal equilibrium with a third body, then they are in thermal equilibrium with each other.