Bronze-age petroglyphs at Boglösa, Uppland.

I recently came across this book-excerpt from Mark Manson, head-lined The Feedback Loop From Hell , and it related with me. I suggest you read it, before continuing here.

The reason I can relate to what is written there is that it builds on a simple yet profound insight:

You are not your feelings. Your brain can be wrong.

Simply put, it means that you can disagree with what (some part of) your brain feels, or thinks is right. This kind of outside view on oneself takes some practice to aqcuire, but it can be learned and practised. Once able to take this point of view on your feelings and desires, vicious cycles like the ones Manson descibes become visible and can more easily be broken. I would go so far to call it empowering, that is gaining a new way to take control over yourself.

I beleive this attitude has been a singificant factor in my own happiness and satisfaction in recent years. For example, blaming my brain (instead of myself) for all kinds of mistakes and mishaps makes it so much easier to laugh at myself, I mean it, instead of getting embarrassed or sad.

As a side note I want to mention that considering myself somewhat separate from my brain does not imply that I believe that there are any magical, religious or other non-materialistic things going on. It's all neurons, in this case just some part of the brain that reflects on what some other parts are up to.

So while I agree with Manson's general gist, I am not so sure about his advice to care less. His book is even called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. (His choice to not write "Fuck" properly, not mine.)

The objection that I have is that, yes, happiness might be achieved by giving up desires, being content with what you have and trying less hard. But I think persuing and fully realizing this goal easily leads to a worsening of actual living conditions. After all society rewards people with "drive", people that want to "achieve something", more than those who lack these traits. It is therefore less likely for happy people, who have transcended their desires, to end up in positions of influence, which in turn means that the rules of the world are not made in their favour.

Manson might not mean care less in that way, but for me this is connected. In addition, while caring less about your fears and pains, distancing yourself somewhat from them, is certainly positive for you, as argued above, I am left to wonder what happens with positive thoughts. When we learn to care less about negative feelings, can we prevent this mechanism to also make us care less about pleasure and love?

We did it; the house finally got a new layer of paint. Falu red again, of course, but a ligher variant that was popular in the 1800s, they say.

Isn't it a beauty? The picture does not fully convey its size, but this 3 liter Erlenmeyer flask is an impressive piece of glass. Yes, as you can see I've taken another step deeper into the homebrewing pit and have been making yeast starters for the last three batches of beer. This is to multiply the number of yeast cells in advance, in order to achieve the optimal "pitching rate" for good fermentation.

Shown in the picture is the starter for our #13 Weißbier which turned out fantastic, exactly to my taste. A light and fruity summer beer, topping our previous wheat beer, and many of the ones you can buy, if I may say so myself. Naturally, it is all gone by now.

Following up on the last brewing post, I have to correct something I wrote there. The #11 Bockbier was a disappointment after all. It had a very strong buttery taste, coming from diacetyl which in turn resuls from poor fermentation. The strong wort got far too few yeast cells, so they did not manage to clean up this unwanted byproduct. Now I know better.

Then there was a technical mishap. I had the brilliant idea to get some cool air from my beer fridge into the fermentation box beside it, to regulate the temperature better. So I drilled a large hole into the fridge wall to place a ventilation fan there. But I did not know that modern fridges' cooling lines run within the side walls as well, so I accidentally cut one off, effectively destroying the fridge. Luckily, used fridges are cheap and I have gotten another one meanwhile. Another lesson learned.

On to more joyous things; while I write these lines, I am having a glass of our #14 Stout which I think is quite a success. Subtle roast and chocolate aromas, not overdone; black as night, fittingly low carbonation, and tasting mature already two weeks after tapping to bottles.

Still in the fermentor is the #15 Dunkles, a dark lager in typical Munich style. I will bottle it this week-end and brew the next batch at the same time, #16 YAPA. The Erlenmeyer's airlock is bubbling away already.

Bonus picture: When cooking the Stout, I maxed out the 30 liter pot, filling it to the brim.

Two pygmy owls that we say the other day in a nearby nature preserve. They looked confused and were watched by a third, slightly larger and more shy one, so we guessed that these two were young who just left the nest.

Let's ignore the direct effects of the transatlantic buffoon-in-chief for a moment; these are discussed quite enough already. I think there are two competing secondary effects that he has on the attitudes of people elsewhere, one good one bad.

First the positive: A clear enemy helps unification. Very visible right now is the common outcry of otherwise not united groups and individuals about the USA leaving the Paris climate treaty. There are plenty more examples and making fun of the Orange one is a favourite pastime for many.

But. It is all too easy to feel good about ourselves doing this. We are lucky to live elsewhere and not be affected. Our politicians seem competent in comparison and it suddenly looks like we don't have it that bad after all. Is it then a surprise that Merkel will win the German elections later this year? Or that recently unloved Swedish prime-minister Löfvén has turned around the polls for his social democrats?

It is perfectly understandable to become complacent when others have it worse. How content we humans are always depends on whom we compare ourselves to. Observing the quagmire "over there" means we relax the pressure on our own polticians to fix the problems in our countries, which have not magically gone away. Just to name one, do we have a plan to do something about the constantly rising wealth gap that is expected to only get worse with further increases in work automation?

Which way the net balance between stonger unity behind good causes and lowered expectations tips, I do not know.

Following up on my previous post about homebrewing beer, it is about time to mention batches #8 to #12 that we've been making since March. As before I'll link below to the GoogleDocs that we use for keeping logs.

But first let me mention the most important thing I've learned since that last post: water adjustment. Looking at the analysis from our own deep well I found a good explanation for why our light-colored beers had a harsh and unpleasant bitterness to them; turns out that our water has a high rest alkalinity, causing a too high ph-value of the mash which in turn causes this astringency. The best compact explanation and adjustment calulator I've found so far is this one, in German though. The link has our water values pre-filled, so you can easily see that we would have needed to add 7ml of lactic acid to the mash water to compensate the alkalinity for a Pilsner like our #5.

When it comes to equipment I've only made a few minor improvements, like lautering into a newly-bought 3l-beaker instead of the boiling pot. This shortens the time until boil because the heat can be on as soon as the first beaker is emptied into the pot on the stove. It also eliminates the critical moment of liftig the full pot up onto the stove - dropping it, or one of the handles to break off would result in 27 liters of sugar solution being spread all over the kitchen floor, not a pleasant thought. On the other hand, we now have to be careful to not let the beaker run full; yeas, it has happened once already.

I am also more than halfway into reading J. Palmer's How to Brew which I bought recently. It nicely summarizes what I had learned so far from various sources, it explains the why behind certain rules and practices, and generally goes into much more detail than I had expected from an all-encompassing book. Highly recommended!

Finally, the beers:

The #7 Copper Cascade Lager already mentioned last time turned out very good. Red and dark-ish, it was nicely malty and lacked the astringency of the ligher beers before. In hindsight this is as expected, since darker malts work better with alkaline water.

The #8 Weißbier was fantastic, my favourite so far. When poured without the yeast from the bottle it was perfectly clear (Kristallweizen), and very pleasant and easy to drink. Which meant it did not last long...

#9 A&K Festbier was a light Ale after a recipe that matched more or less the ingredients that I had left. It turned out nicely, perfectly drinkable, but not spectacular.

The #10 Blonde was a failure in the sense that I wanted to re-make the Weißbier from above, but messed up when ordering ingredients online; I thus had no wheat malt. But the WLP300 yeast needed to be used so I improvised the malt mixture. Recipe-wise it somewhat matches a light Belgian ale but the yeast made a "Weißbier" out of it anyway, with a clear resemblance to #8, but quite not as good. Still surprisingly drinkable.

#11 Bockbier was the birthday present to myself, trying out a stronger beer for once (OG 1.062, 6.8% vol.alc.), in the style of a light-colored German Bock. This was bottled almost two weeks ago and I just tried the first one this evening, prompting me to write this post. Because it is amazingly good! Very pleasant, not astringent (water adjustment seems to work), and hiding its high alcohol content well - the kind of stuff that is dangerous! In the sense that it is all too easy to have one too much of. I'll give the other bottles a few more days of conditioning before they go into the fridge.

#12 IPA. Finally, we also gave in to the trend and made an India Pale Ale, first time dry-hopping from day 8 to 12. I bottled it today (see picture above, together with #11) and it will stay at room-temperature for a little less than two weeks, as usual. Report on how it turned out will follow.

The next two batches are most likely to be a dark Lager (Münchner Dunkles) and a proper re-creation of the #8 Weißbier. This time with yeast starters to have the proper pitching rate of yeast cells - many of the previous beers had a too-low amount of yeast added in the beginning, according to Palmer's wisdom.

This is probably only funny to German sysadmins, but seeing those labels made me chuckle. W

This litte bat fell into an open trash bin in our shed yesterday. Luckily I heard it scratching and helped it out. It flew away after a short while, circling twice before disappearing into the forest.