Roast your own coffee for cheap!

Wow! I just discovered that its really easy to roast your own coffee at home! There are several websites selling coffee roasters for about $100-$200 (www.morebeer.com is one of them). I thought about that, but then I did a little poking on the internet, and I found that you can do it with a hot-air popcorn popper! I found the right kind at my local Goodwill, and paid 4 whole bucks. I then bought a pound of green Ethiopian Yirgacheffe beans from MoreBeer (I was going there anyway for brewing supplies). Roasting took 15 minutes (including all the setup, the cleanup and stringing the extension cord outside and rolling it back up again when I was done). I had to do the roasting outside because the one downside to a popcorn popper is that it smokes like a chimney. Small price to pay - NOTHING compares to the coffee you roast yourself! For more information, also check out SweetMaria's.

my2way

While I'm on the subject of music, what is up with The Cure? I'm pretty sure they're not together anymore, but how could they have had hits? Their music is great in the technical sense, but who else could write a tender love song ("I will always love you") that leaves wanting to slit your wrists?

Keith Anderson, NP

TSO

Oh yeah. Check out Trans-Siberian.com Their show Rocks!

Keith Anderson, NP

whoa!

Man. A 7 month hiatus. Got to stop doing that. Still brewing, not fencing so much. Just surviving right now. My son has been diagnosed as autistic by the folks at UCLA's autism center (and they should know...). We are currently beating our heads against the school district (their psychologist seems to think that her one Ph.D in school psych trumps the 3 Ph.Ds and a Masters of the UCLA team.) If we don't fight it, she gets to say that he is high functioning, and deny services. It may also screw us up when we go to the local regional center, because they too can pick and choose who to believe, and then they can deny services too. My wife (the pitbull) has determined that we have the right to have documents removed from our son's file if they are "inaccurate." Think just plain wrong is pretty inaccurate don't you? We've written to the school district twice now, with no answer. We may have to actually retain a lawyer, a thought that gives me the heebies.

Meanwhile, I brewed my first all-grain batch of beer in November, an oatmeal stout. For you brewers out there, its now in secondary with 3 vanilla beans. I plan to bottle around Christmas, to be ready by new years (the forced-carbonated stuff - the regular bottled stuff won't be ready until a few weeks after that.)

I think the next batch will be an all-grain version of the Scottish ale that was my first brew. My brew buddy and I both really liked that one.

Thats all for now, more later, hopefully less than 7 months next time.