“I have seen the face freedom and eaten it.” – Eldridge Cleaver after schtupping Pat Nixon.

My nephew gave me some sausage he had left over from a boar he shot a few weeks ago. I wanted to do right by it.

This morning I cooked up a variation of my biscuits and gravy recipe. I didn’t have any butter so I used duck fat instead. I also added a little bit of thyme to the batter to make them more savory.

I don’t know if it was the duck fat or if I fucked up my measurements and put more than 8 tablespoons in, but these were the lightest biscuits I’ve ever made. Amazing stuff really. I also had larger chunks of the duck fat than I normally have with the butter so that’s something to think about for the future. I also added a pinch of sugar to the biscuits, something I haven’t done before but seemed like a reasonable idea.

The boar sausage is leaner than pork so I added about a half tablespoon of lard to my cast iron skillet before adding cornstarch to make the gravy. I also added 1 diced shallot, some chives, thyme and just a tiny pinch of cardamon.

I like putting cardamon in just about anything I can, I think it brings a really nice spicy earthiness to stuff. Be careful not to over do it though, this stuff can get away from you real fast.

I laid off on the cream/milk mixture this time, adding just enough liquid to capture the thickened fats. This was a good idea.

I topped it all off with some diced tomatoes and some more chives for color.

I could topple empires with this monstrosity.

Boingboing has been running some great pieces on Robert Anton Wilson in honor of the 5th anniversary of his death on 1/11/2007. It’s been fun reading the likes of Ken Goffman and Paul Krassner reflect on Wilson, explaining why he’s so important to them. It’s all made me uncomfortably nostalgic and forlorn.

My personal interaction with Bob was very limited, but very memorable. And, appropriately enough, confounding, absurd, educational, unforgettable, and wonderful. Much like his books.

It was 1998 and my girlfriend at the time and I drove up from Austin to go see Bob speak in the Masonic temple in downtown Dallas. There’s no word in the english language that can properly express the kind of fanboy emotion I was experiencing to be sitting in a fucking Masonic temple in the town that killed Kennedy with Robert Anton Wilson and only about 25 other people.

I sat about 30′ away from him, panting like a mutt, full of joy the whole time. I don’t remember his talk that night being necessarily great, he seemed to be in a bit of pain and slightly grouchier than normal.

The night was billed as a workshop with Robert Anton Wilson, but the extent of the exercises he taught us that night were limited to one. He asked us to shut our eyes and breathe, clearing our thoughts and settling down our minds. And then, when the inevitable inner voice would once again raise it’s borish head, we were told to shout at the top of our lungs at the persistent sod to “Shut the Fuck Up!” I’ve since applied this exercise to some fairly useful ends, it being an effective example of the old-world hucksterism cum mysticism that Wilson seemed to love. It was also a pretty great piece of performance art to get a room full of adults screaming at the voices in their head to “Shut the FUCK up!”

Driving home that night, my girlfriend and I talked about the evening. I’m not sure which one of us brought it up first, but we both seemed to notice that throughout the evening Bob seemed to keep turning into some kind of fish-headed creature. A green-skinned thing, his beard and hair extended and flowed, whiskers hovering out to the sides.

I’m not sure what the hell was going on there really. This was definitely an odd time in my life where events like that weren’t as surprising as they might be today. But even amongst all the circus lights and fireworks of my life at the time I remember us both thinking this was pretty startling.

About two weeks later my girlfriend and I were running some Saturday afternoon errands. She was thinking about trying to buy some kind of Volkswagon or something to replace a dying pickup truck, so we pulled into the VW dealership off 35. I was characteristically annoyed.

I walked through the lot looking at my chucks and thinking about anything but cars or my girlfriend. Maybe I was daydreaming about getting home to some freshly made GHB.

When I looked up from the ground there was a car salesman in front of me. He smiled and asked how we were doing and then proceeded through what I imagine was his usual song and dance used to engage potential customers.

Unfortunately, I was having a hard time responding to him, or saying anything at all, really. I was literally caught – for one of the few genuine times in my life – speechless trying to process what I was pretty sure I was seeing in front of me. As much as my brains wanted to protest, and as far as I could tell, the Volkswagon salesman standing right in front of me, sprawling some endless bullshit about the ’99 Passat’s power rating or some screaming deal he could get us on our APR, looked *exactly* like Robert Anton Wilson. The white hair, the droll mannerisms, the smile that reminded you with every verbal turn that he was indeed fucking with you. He even had Wilson’s Brooklyn accent.

I probably spooked the guy as I imagine it’s got to be more than a little unnerving to be stared at like a ghost or like you’ve just become the hand the universe is using to yank a young acid head’s dick. DoppleBob collected himself and slipped out of our presence as gracefully as was possible. But, before he walked off, he extended a hand to shake, encouraging us to let him know if we had any questions. I looked down to return the shake, as is customary in most human circles, and, on the ring finger of his right hand he had a ring of the same exact style - I shit you not - that Wilson had on the same finger of the same hand. The only difference between the two Bob’s rings was that inside the disc on Wilson’s ring was a chaos star. Inside the ring of the VW salesman was the VW logo.

I’ll let you come to your own conclusions on that one, you really need some time alone to unpack that origami octopus. I’m still rummaging through it myself after 14 years.

Standing outside the Masonic temple that night in Dallas I asked Bob about the specifics of the Sirius workings he mentions in Cosmic Trigger. He gave me what, at the time, was a frustratingly simple and, I thought, evasive answer.

He looked up and, blowing cigarette smoke at me, he said, “Art is Magick. It’s incredibly personal, you have to become it. Befriend it. Befriend it and it becomes you. William Blake would eat breakfast with his muse, talk to her over breakfast.”

I was too green at the time to see past my own insistence for specifics to be able to appreciate the exchange for what it was. I was also probably too arrogant.

But here I am now, a bit older, a little slower and in so many ways, even tonight, 14 years later, I’m still swimming around in that curmudgeonly bard’s very simple and mostly true words of wisdom that he dropped on an eager young toad that night in Dallas. And to me, that keeps Bob alive and still working hard in the world today when I need him most. And that is Magick.

Thanks for the laughs, Bob.

It’s getting cold here in Weedwolf’s Shitcago. In fact, today the lake front was shut down and manned by Escalades. I saw snow fall from the sky. I pulled the long underwear from my lingerie drawer.

All this means that my previous method of cooling our wort with a displacement chiller spitting upwards of 75 gallons of water out into the alley is no longer sustainable. Bummer.

Our first attempt at solving this problem was clunky and kind of retarded. Especially when I tell you how simple our solution was.

See, initially we thought we would daisy chain 2 displacement chillers together. We’d put one in the HLT with a bunch of ice and then run it through the pump, into the wort and then back to the ice to re-cool the water. The problem with this was that we had to introduce the garden hose to initiate the flow and without a T hookup this wasn’t going to happen.

While I was procrastinating getting the T I began wondering why we couldn’t just get rid of one of those displacement chillers and just pump out of the HLT full of ice water, into the wort and then dump the water back into the HLT. Which is exactly what we’re doing now.

The one pain in the neck is that we have to pull the chiller out of the wort and hold it below the pump initially to get it primed. Once primed, we pop the chiller into the wort and everything is fantastic and cooled to 70* in less than 30 minutes.

Now I just need to get one of those Blichmann plate chillers and all my life’s problems would be solved.

It would really hurt to put hot, liquid marrow into a syringe and shoot it into your arm or eyeball so Michael Ruhlman has this satisfactory alternative for using bone marrow to activate your pleasure centers:

“To cook the marrow, roll them in flour till they’re completely coated and sauté them in canola oil over medium high heat (too hot and the flour will burn, too cool and the marrow will melt before the surface is crisp), turning them to brown them well on all sides. On the day Powder made the marrow (that’s him grilling the bread and plating), he poured out excess oil when they were nearly done and added some butter to finish them off. This is a chef I love: when preparing a rich, highly fatty dish, finish it off with just a liiiittle more butter. Fernand would have approved. And in all seriousness, the butter browns and makes the crust especially flavorful.”

I will oblige.

It’s the 11th hour and I need to get this beer carbed up for Thanksgiving. I’ve basically got about 20 hours to get this stuff to a decent level of gas. So I’m going to force carb them.

Force carbonating is a black art, elusive and highly subjective in it’s execution. I’ve tried several techniques, but the one I prefer is found in Gordon Strong’s excellent book “Brewing Better Beer”. I can’t say enough good things about this book, Strong’s approach is sensible and informed by years and years of experience. And his jedi like approach to brewing gives legs to Papazian’s abused mantra of “Relax, Don’t Worry, Have a Homebrew.” Good stuff.

Anyway, here’s the long and short of Gordon Strong’s force carbonating technique pulled from “Brewing Better Beer”.

1) Chill your keg to near freezing.
2) Attach your gas and dial it up to 30 psi.
3) Slowly rock your keg back and forth about 50ish times until you don’t here gas bubble up into it anymore.
4) Take it off the gas and let it sit for a day or two.
5) When it’s time to check it, release the accumulated head gas and taste.
6) Rinse and repeat as needed.

That is it, go with god.

Our country of fat fucks are about to hit their annual apex of indulgence and I couldn’t be happier.

You see, I fancy my self a fairly learned sensualist. Certainly, at times, my adventures slant nearer towards escapes than escapades, but I’m comfortable with my batting average. And what kind of sensualist demands perfection anyway? Be it moral, idealogical or otherwise, perfection is anti-septic and boring. Sensuality lives in those lines between intent.

But there’s a great divide between properly dipping your neurons into the velvety rivers of impress and flat-lining your fat ass into a narcotic stupor with cheap, shitty food, lousy music and bad conversation. Which is why, every year at this time, I’m reminded of two of my favorite men of letters, Allan Watts and William S. Burroughs.

First, everyone’s favorite philandering philosopher, the Zoro of Zen, that drunk monk you know and love, Mr. Alan Watts:

“The commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists is pure bunk. A materialist is one who loves material, a person devoted to the enjoyment of the physical and immediate present. By this definition, most Americans are abstractionists. They hate material, and convert it as swiftly as possible into mountains of junk and clouds of poisonous gas. “

Amen, Doctor.

And then there’s Uncle Bill, who, in his inimitable way, can carve down any bogeyman to it’s proper size, weight and gravitational pull with a few choice words.

Between these two pillars I level my gravy boat.

This year we’ll have a few selected handmade beers to enjoy during our 4 day bender:

We’ve got a decent American Pale Ale I lovingly call the Maggie Thatcher as it’s very dry, extremely bitter and the yeast has it smelling a bit like eggs. I used the White Labs WLP060 in it, so I knew that the eggy smell would be around, but figured it would pass. Maggie’s been sitting for about a month now and she’s still a stinker. I actually kind of like the sulphur stink a bit and the agressive dryness of the yeast is impressive, but it’s hard to convince other people that her sulphur stank is all that “interesting”. I probably won’t be using WLP060 again.

We’ve also got a yummy belgian golden strong ale weighing in at 7.77% ABV and named for another brit, this one a queen. The Golden Dawn has been given it’s title in honor of that fat little cocksucker Aleister Crowley and his first hermetic society. This was made with the Achouffe yeast and some spices. It’s really quite good and a little fruity, just like Frater Perdurabo.

Lastly, we’ve got the Lemmy, an 11% coffee stout that clocks in at about 51 SRM, made with Metropolis coffee. We monkeyed around with a couple different ways to get the coffee into this, but found that racking on top of coarsely ground coffee and letting it sit for 60 hours was the best way to get the most flavor without any shitty side effects. Thanks to the Jamil show and the guys at Terrapin for this bit of insight.

There’s our beverage profile. Add into that a few bottles of decent bourbon, some Bailey’s and a theives ransom of coffee and we should be solid. Some red ambulance never hurt either.

For food this year I think we’ll try something different and make a Turkey on Thursday and then maybe eat shredded Turkey and mayo sandwiches for the rest of the weekend. But, seriously, why mess with success? There is a Platonic ideal that is the Thanksgiving Turkey and to stray too far from that premise is treasonous at best. But, since we’re talking about it, I did come across a recipe for braising the turkey that sounds amazing. Seriously, say that slowly with me: Braised Turkey.

So there you have it: turkey, beer, and booze. Throw in some guns and bath salts and we can send off this holiday with the panache it requires.

My money is on Green Bay.

I’ve slowly come to realize while building our brew system that the tools and techniques compiled to create our beer are as much a part of us and our creation as the finished beverage that comes out of it. And, like every good work of art, this one, too, will never be finished. Transcended, maybe – most likely abandoned – but definitely never finished.

It will also never be pretty.

I spent a lot of time before we built this beast looking at really sharp, elegant systems on line, fantasizing that that is what our set up would someday look like. Lots of polished stainless, clean enclosures for electronics, switches, blinky lights and maybe even some finishing wood that could compensate for so many generations of this scotch-irish curse. Thumbing through all that beer nerd porn I bedazzled my foggy head into believing those shallow lies about my fleeting attention to aesthetics.

Now, working out of a garage that’s got surge protectors for switches and air-exposed pumps half-bolted to rusting metal that sets below huge volumes of open and hot liquid, honesty about my approach is a bit easier to come by. My system won’t ever win a beauty contest – or instill much confidence in the unimaginative – but, I wouldn’t fuck a Howitzer either and that seems to do just fine.

We got most of the parts for our kettles from weldlessfittings.com. And for the most part I’m very happy with what they have provided. The high-heat washers and bulkheads stand up as promoted and the construction was remarkably simple. Their instructions weren’t always the best, but the guys at weldlessfittings.com were always quick to answer emails when the instructions were a bit lax.

One hole in the plan came in trying to get our diptube to set aligned and through the false bottom on our mash/lauter tun. We got our false bottom from Climax Homebrew (wait, what?) at a great price for the piece, but we cut our hole in our kegs just a bit higher than we really wanted to in order to get it to go through the false bottom. Not a big deal, I just cut about a 4″ piece of 1/2″ hose and slid it onto the diptube. This added an easily telescoping end to the tube which allowed us to get as close or as far away from the bottom of the kettle as we like.

Unfortunately, this didn’t solve the problem of keeping grains out of our sweet liquor when we moved it to the boil kettle. To solve that problem we started buying 3 packs of stainless steel brilo pads and wrapping one around the tube every time we brewed. This worked OK for the first half dozen or so brews, but we could see that the half-life on this jury-rigged hack job was not very long.

With each brew we started having more and more issue with our prime and saw more and more air moving into the hose during recirculation. Finally, last week when I had to dig around in 155* water to try and reset our lame ass filter during the mash, only to get my rubber gloves full of hot water over and over, I made a serious commitment to upgrading our mash/lauter tun’s filtering capabilities.

Enter the mash/boil screen, or, as I’ve mostly seen it referred to, the Bazooka Cage. This thing screwed right into the bulkhead and, with no issue at all, made my life and my brewing time so much easier. No air, no grains, no pain or issue at all and it uses the grain bed like a straw to help you get every last bit of sweet liquor into your boil kettle.

I love a simple solution to a problem and this little bastard is just that.

As much as I like turtles, I like history even more. So, in honor of tomorrow’s celebration of Guy Fawkes’ Night, where apparently a large demonstration is being planned on the steps of Parliament, I thought I’d post a little historical note on the beloved terrorist.

In 1604 Fawkes became involved with a small group of English Catholics, led by Robert Catesby, who planned to assassinate the Protestant King James and replace him with his daughter, third in the line of succession, Princess Elizabeth.[15][16] Fawkes was described by the Jesuit priest and former school friend Oswald Tesimond as “pleasant of approach and cheerful of manner, opposed to quarrels and strife … loyal to his friends”. Tesimond also claimed Fawkes was “a man highly skilled in matters of war”, and that it was this mixture of piety and professionalism which endeared him to his fellow conspirators.[3] The author Antonia Fraser describes Fawkes as “a tall, powerfully built man, with thick reddish-brown hair, a flowing moustache in the tradition of the time, and a bushy reddish-brown beard”, and that he was “a man of action … capable of intelligent argument as well as physical endurance, somewhat to the surprise of his enemies.”[5]
The first meeting of the five central conspirators took place on Sunday 20 May 1604, at an inn called the Duck and Drake, in the fashionable Strand district of London.[nb 5] Catesby had already proposed at an earlier meeting with Thomas Wintour and John Wright to kill the King and his government by blowing up “the Parliament House with gunpowder”. Wintour, who at first objected to the plan, was convinced by Catesby to travel to the continent to seek help. Wintour met with the Constable of Castile, the exiled Welsh spy Hugh Owen,[18] and Sir William Stanley, who said that Catesby would receive no support from Spain. Owen did, however, introduce Wintour to Fawkes, who had by then been away from England for many years, and thus was largely unknown in the country. Wintour and Fawkes were contemporaries; each was militant, and had first-hand experience of the unwillingness of the Spaniards to help. Wintour told Fawkes of their plan to “doe some whatt in Ingland if the pece with Spaine healped us nott”,[3] and thus in April 1604 the two men returned to England.[17] Wintour’s news did not surprise Catesby; despite positive noises from the Spanish authorities, he feared that “the deeds would nott answere”.[nb 6]
One of the conspirators, Thomas Percy was promoted in June 1604, gaining access to a house in London which belonged to John Whynniard, Keeper of the King’s Wardrobe. Fawkes was installed as a caretaker and began using the pseudonym John Johnson, servant to Percy.[20] The contemporaneous account of the prosecution (taken from Thomas Wintour’s confession)[21] claimed that the conspirators attempted to dig a tunnel from beneath Whynniard’s house to Parliament, although this story may have been a government fabrication; no evidence for the existence of a tunnel was presented by the prosecution, and no trace of one has ever been found. Fawkes did not admit the existence of such a scheme until his fifth interrogation, but even then he could not locate the tunnel.[22] If the story is true, however, by December 1604 the conspirators were busy tunnelling from their rented house to the House of Lords. They ceased their efforts when, during tunnelling, they heard a noise from above. Fawkes was sent out to investigate, and returned with the news that the tenant’s widow was clearing out a nearby undercroft, directly beneath the House of Lords.[3][23]
The plotters purchased the lease to the room, which also belonged to John Whynniard. Unused and filthy, it was considered an ideal hiding place for the gunpowder the plotters planned to store there.[24] According to Fawkes, 20 barrels of gunpowder were brought in at first, followed by 16 more on 20 July.[25] On 28 July however, the ever-present threat of the plague delayed the opening of Parliament until Tuesday, 5 November.[26]

So here’s to it then, the gunpowder, treason and plot. And here’s to everyone out on the streets protesting or drinking or laughing or building or somehow making shit happen.

Here’s to Alan Moore, one of the more effective wizards words have put to print.

And here’s to those grand spells that get spun, especially the one’s that take a bit longer to ferment.

Ok, so I finally got to the end of the two-week alcohol extraction of fenugreek seeds that I found digging four pages deep into a google search on fenugreek and maple syrup alternatives. The experiment was successful though I did need to make some adjustments.

I wound up using twice the amount of vodka as stated in the article since the fenugreek was very absorbent. Just use your eyes and best judgement on the amount of alcohol needed.

When I strained out the fenugreek yesterday, and after I spilled some of the extract being a knucklehead, I had about 50ml of extract remaining. That’s a pretty high absorption rate considering I probably had about 6-8oz of vodka in there initially.

To the 50ml of fenugreek extract I added a half a teaspoon of vanilla extract.

I mixed the fenugreek and vanilla up and put about a half teaspoon into 4oz of soy milk. The nose was pretty good, I was quite happy, it did indeed smell like I had put maple syrup in the soy milk. The taste was terribly bitter, however, so I added some agave syrup to balance that out. At that point, I’m happy to say, I had a tasty little beverage.

So what I know so far about fenugreek as a replacement for maple syrup is that the alcohol extraction works at 2 weeks (I’ll probably try a longer length extraction, too) but that further experimentation with adjusting the hop profile in the beer is going to be needed as the extraction requires some serious sweetness to off-set it’s bittertude.

The next step is to do a larger extraction and then start adding it to 1 gallon of beer adjusting the hop schedule as I go. From there I’ll scale it up.

Stay tuned, there is more to come.