Noel Schutt

Franke Park on the Strava Heatmap

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Strava recently updated their global heatmap summarizing where people have recorded activity. I think it is neat how clearly the Franke Park trails and the Rivergreenway stand out.

Cider Made Simple by Jeff Alworth

Sun, 14 Jan 2018 00:00:00 -0500

Cider has become drastically more popular in the past several years, even in the time since I last reviewed a book about cider. There are now many more good ciders available commercially in my area, and some are even from large producers. Unfortunately, there are even more sugar-wines, apple-flavored lite beers, watered-down ciders, and other alcoholic drinks marketed as cider. This is where Jeff Alworth’s book, Cider Made Simple, comes in.

Cider Made Simple is different from the other cider books I’ve reviewed, it is a “cider-understanding” book, not a cider-making book.¹ It is about drinking and enjoying cider, not producing it. Alworth describes traditional cider in a way that is a good antidote to the big commercial ciders and cider-like beverages, covering enough of what goes into producing cider to help distinguish regional varieties, and to become familiar with the terms. The book covers an initial general overview of to cider, then covers the primary cider regions and the characteristics of their ciders. In each of the place-based chapters, Alworth describes the cider of a region intermixed with accounts of visits to cider makers in that region. He also describes the distinctive ways ciders are served in different regions.

Outline:

Cider Basics: Don’t Call It Hard
- What is cider?
- What are the characteristics of cider?
- Outline of cider styles and related drinks.
A Is for Apple
- About apples.
Sweating, Grinding, and Fermenting
- How the fruit affects cider.
- Types of apples from a cider making perspective: sharp, bittersharp, bittersweet, sweet.
- How additional ingredients are used in commercial ciders.
Proper English Cider
- Traditional English cider and how it devolved into alcopop and how it is recovering.
Cider Under Cork
- French cider, Calvados, and Pommeau.
Breaking the Cider
- Spanish ciders.
The American Cider Renaissance
- The history, disappearance, and revival of American cider.
- Three schools of American cider: traditionalist, modernist, and experimentalist.
Winter Harvest in Quebec
- Ice cider.

There is also some discussion of what will go in to good new American ciders:

Steve Wood thinks good cider will be defined by fruit. “You gotta start with something that smells good and then you have to keep delivering on the promise. Tannin, fruit, acid, and some kind of balance.” Cider won’t come into its own until we have the fruit to make it special. “Most of the ciders, the so called ‘craft’ ciders, are being made from apples that nobody wants anymore.”

– page 153, the end of American cider chapter

My only quibble with the book is the use of radar charts for “Flavor Wheels” to compare several ciders.

Cider Made Simple is good for someone who knows a bit about beer or wine and wants to learn a little to appreciate cider, and who wants to have an idea what they are getting. It is also good for those who have tried apple-flavored alcopops and want to know about true cider. This is not a complete overview of cider, and isn’t intended to be. But it succeeds in the goal Alworth announced in Cider Digest #1988:

The idea was to make a primer for people new to cider, giving them an overview so they can be armed with useful information when they head down to their local wine store/bottle shop.

This review is one in a series on cider making books.

BibTex reference:

@book{ alworth2015cider,
	Author = {Jeff Alworth and Lydia Nichols},
	Publisher = {Chronicle Books},
	Title = {Cider Made Simple: All About Your New Favorite New Drink},
	Year = {2015}
}

“cider-understanding” - Dick Dunn in the Cider Digest #2004 talking about this sort of book. ↩

Twisted

Sun, 28 Sep 2014 21:50:00 -0400

Wait a second, I don’t remember that twist!

This little adapter saved a lot of time on a recent car project, but wasn’t quite up to the last bolt. Can you tell how deep the adapter is recessed into the impact driver, and which way I was turning the bolt?

In space

Sat, 31 May 2014 20:41:00 -0400

A circuit board with my name on it was recently launched into space.

One of the circuit boards on TSAT included the names of the contributors to the original TUSat1 paper. I was one of the three students that lead teams building TUSat1, with most of my work being on the Satellite Command & Communication and Ground Station groups. Unfortunately, TUSat1 was never launched, but I did learn a lot and got three conference papers out of the project. The latest TSAT made it to space, and has since burned up in the atmosphere.

For more, see Taylor Small Satellite Launched.

Five batches of bottled cider

Sat, 17 May 2014 23:24:00 -0400

Today I bottled five batches of the cider I last racked on Christmas Eve.

All batches have fermented to completely dry. The batches are divided between wine bottles and pressure safe bottles. I back sweetened the batches in the champagne and swing-top bottles using apple juice that I froze fresh this fall. This brought the specific gravity up by 0.005. This should add a bit of carbonation if there is any live yeast left, if not, it adds a bit of sweetness.

The ciders are:

2013 Raspberry 71B-1122, 3 gallons split between wine and champagne bottles.
2013 D-47 cider, 3 gallons split between wine and champagne bottles.
WLP775 Cider, 3 gallons in swing-top bottles
2013 71B-1122 Cider, 1 gallon in pressure safe bottles.
2013 Blueberry cider, 1 gallon in wine bottles.

The cooling zombie strikes again

Fri, 04 Apr 2014 00:18:00 -0400

I was asked for my opinion on an article “Global Cooling - The REAL Inconvenient Truth” by Keith Schaefer, so here is a quick summary.

First, this is a reprint from “Oil and Gas Investments Bulletin,” which obviously is not a neutral source. All the alleged points are either zombie ideas (dead ideas that have already been shown false, but keep moving around), or just plain misinterpretations.

The author uses a strange mix of accepting the science and rejecting other tightly coupled knowledge learned the same way. The author accepts the historical record up to several decades ago, saying, “We know this because scientists have several methods to estimate historic weather…” But for recent years his facts are incorrect. His other points are simply things that have been included in the scientific consensus for years; they alter the temperature one way or another while still leaving the end result of human caused global warming.

Here is a partial list of problems in this article:

No, warming hasn’t stopped.
The terms “global warming” and “climate change” have both been used for decades. See, for example, the 1975 paper in Science, Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?.
The Medieval Warm Period was a warm period in the northern hemisphere, but it was mostly balanced by the souther hemisphere, so it wasn’t that much of a difference globally.
The Little Ice Age also has good explanations.
One cause of the pause in warming after WWII is due to other forms of air pollution counteracting greenhouse gases. We have since done a lot to reduce some of these emissions, including the reduction of sulphate aerosols as part of the effort to combat acid rain. For more on aerosols, see the AR5 Summary for Policymakers.
The statement about Arctic ice is false. It is important to consider the thickness and age of the ice as well as the area, all three of which are declining.
One reason for the increase in ice in some parts of Antarctica is actually because those places are now warm enough for the air to hold enough moisture for snow. See, for example, Is Antarctica losing or gaining ice?.
Once again, the old “Another Ice Age?” zombie strikes. See What were climate scientists predicting in the 1970s? and The global cooling mole.

PCKeyboardHack

Sat, 29 Mar 2014 17:46:00 -0400

As a software engineer and physicist, I spend a significant amount of time working in vim, typically the MacVim version. My years of living in vim give me a nice efficient way of editing text and code that is consistent across platforms: I even have vim installed on my WebOS phone and a popular legacy OS that I must use sometimes.

One thing about vim that takes some initial getting used to is the fact that it is a modal editor, with a ‘normal’ mode, a visual mode, and an insert mode. The normal mode is where one issues many of the time saving commands. Normal mode is reached by hitting the Escape key. If you aren’t familiar with vim, the choice of a modal editor and the Escape key to move to the normal mode seems odd. Until you see the keyboard that vi was designed on—vi is the predecessor to vim—which has the Escape key in the location that modern keyboards use for the Tab key. The now standard location of the Escape key can contribute to sore wrists, as can the wrist contortions required in other text editors.

But there is a better way! A few years ago I discovered PCKeyboardHack. Since discovering this program, one of the first things I do when setting up a computer is to swap the Escape and Caps Lock keys. This brings the frequently used Escape key down to the home row, making switches to vim’s normal mode easy, without the contortion required to reach the top left corner of the keyboard. This helps keep my wrists happy despite all of my keyboard time.

Between my brother and I, we have installed PCKeyboardHack on at least nine Macs of various ages with no issues. We both highly recommend installing PCKeyboardHack for its contribution to happy typing.

Update: PCKeyboardHack was renamed to Seil. I use Seil on both my personal and work computer.

Low gliadin banana bread

Sun, 29 Dec 2013 17:56:00 -0500

A couple weeks ago, I bought some red bananas that never ripened, until they became over-ripe. So I made some of my classic banana bread. With all the anti-gluten hype recently, I decided to make a split batch, half using rye and spelt, half using my typical wheat. I don’t think there is anything to the anti-gluten fad, but I intend to share this bread with those who do. As a near-vegetarian, whole grains are an important source of protein in my diet, so I eat a lot of gluten. Spelt is a type of wheat, but it does not contain the form of gliadin that causes those with celiac disease problems. It does have more protein than the typical red and white wheat though. Rye has half the gluten as wheat, but does not have glutenin. Gluten is the protein that allows bread to rise and gives it good texture, so I wasn’t expecting the rye and spelt batch to rise very well. I had about twenty pounds of wheat left, as well as a little rye and spelt. I ground the wheat on its own, and the spelt and rye together for these breads.

I was surprised at how well the low-gluten bread rose; my other high rye and spelt breads have not risen nearly as well. The regular whole wheat batch (right) definitely rose better, but both batches tasted very good. The red bananas give the bread a very banana-y taste without using too much banana. It will be interesting to play around with whole grain banana breads instead of pure whole wheat.

Cider after first racking

Wed, 25 Dec 2013 18:43:00 -0500

Yesterday I racked and topped off the ciders I’m making from the juice I bought a month ago. All had already fermented to nearly dry.

I moved the contents of one of the three gallon carboys of D47 cider into a five gallon carboy, and added one gallon of blueberries that I froze this summer. Before adding the blueberries, I thawed them and crushed them using an applesauce making conical strainer. I topped the carboy off with a bit over a gallon of fresh juice, leaving a bit of headroom. By this afternoon, the cider was vigorously fermenting, so I switched from an airlock to a blowoff tube. I split the three gallon batch of 71B-1122 cider into a one gallon jug and a three gallon carboy. I added twenty-four ounces of frozen red raspberries and some fresh juice to the three gallon carboy of 71B-1122 cider. I chose 71B yeast for this batch, because it should mellow the acidity of the raspberries without the eighteen months of aging that was required for my last batch of EC-1118 raspberry cider.

Christmas walk

Wed, 25 Dec 2013 18:23:00 -0500

I took a walk along the high, but not quite flooded, St Mary’s River today: