Science Is Awesome!

I’m a little late coming to write this, mostly because I’ve been on vacation.  And to make matters worse, our hotel room didn’t have free wifi.  Really?  No free wifi?  Because your guests have no interest in the internet?  Even my dogs are equipped with free wifi, and they only use it to google “poodle” over and over again.

Anyway, it was while in our hotel room one Monday morning that I heard the latest news on the Mars Curiosity rover.  (It had landed just after midnight, while I was asleep.  I couldn’t manage to stay up for the Olympics, either.  I’m getting old.)

I looked at my daughter and said, “Do you know what happened while you were asleep?”

“What, Daddy?”

“While we were asleep, some people landed a car on Mars.”

"It's the red one.  No, the other red one.  Maybe we should stop and ask for directions."

 

I could tell immediately that she understood what this meant.

“Whoa,” she said.  “Does Mommy know?”

She thinks planets are pretty cool.

I like to think she gets that from me.  I’ve always been a sucker for space exploration.  I was born a decade too late for the moon landing, but I remember watching the first shuttle launch.  I even remember a family vacation to Florida where I watched a shuttle launch in person, from the parking lot of an IHOP.

And yes, I admit, sometimes science can seem boring.  Did you need someone to explain the Higgs Boson particle after the Large Hadron Collider announced they might (or might not) have discovered it? 

Did you manage to not fall asleep? 

The Higgs Boson particle is really important, and its discovery will change our understanding of the entire universe, but explaining WHAT it is and WHY it’s important is frankly dull to anyone without a PhD in quantum physics.

That’s the sad truth of a lot of science.  Very cool, if you understand it; very boring, if you don’t.  It reminds me of Harrison Ford at the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade explaining that most archeology is done in the library.

Bo-ring!

But every once in a while, science puts on its fedora, and sets off on a badass adventure of exploration and discovery that leaves all of us mere humans totally awe-struck.

And this time, they apparently did it with Batman.

That’s the only reasonable explanation for the bizarre method they came up with for landing the rover. 

Heat shield?  Standard issue. 

Giant parachute? Cool. 

Rocket powered sky crane?  Batman.  Totally Batman.

This is a big comeback for the space program, from retiring the shuttle fleet last year and the announcement that the next manned flight program would be cancelled.  That seemed like an end to NASA doing really cool stuff in the name of science, at least for awhile, and I was disappointed by the decision.  But then, it seemed that NASA’s gamble paid off, as private companies started competing to build rockets for the mostly mundane tasts of sending cargo and, hopefully, in the future, people, up to the International Space Station. 

That left NASA free to do other stuff, like building rocket-powered sky cranes!

By the way, that incredible feat of physics serves as the best answer ever whenever some child looks at the chalkboard during math class and says, “Why do I need to know this?”

Because when Apple launches its iRover, all that trigonometry is going to come in really handy.

Trigonmetry, calculus, quantum mechanics, relativity, all subjects sure to make the average person’s eye lids grow suddenly heavy, all matter because hundreds of years ago, Galileo decided to point his telescope up at the moon, at a time when no one really understood what the moon even really was.  Galileo knew that curiosity was the beginning of discovery, and tireless observation, experimentation, and relating solid facts without personal bias could reveal the truth of the universe.  

And he was tried by the Inquisition for doing it, and forced to never speak of his discoveries again.

It’s sometimes easy to think we haven’t come that far from Galileo, that science is still butting heads with religion.  It's easy to hang our heads in a long collective sigh and wonder if the human race will ever grow up.  But science and religion are two entirely separate things, and only one of them involves rocket-powered sky cranes.  (Unless the Pope is planning to upgrade the pope-mobile...)

As for me, I look forward to taking my daughter outside on a summer night, and turn her head upwards, to the stars.  And maybe we’ll even see a shooting star.  I assume her reaction will be something along the lines of, “Whoa.”  If not, maybe I’m not raising her right after all.  Because if a shooting star doesn’t elicit some amount of wonder, I’m not sure anything will.  And wonder excites imagination, and imagination inspires the future.

"Dad, that's just a flying unicorn, looking for a rainbow.  I've seen that, like, a hundred times..."

 

Maybe my daughter  will grow up to be a scientist, or maybe she won’t.  Whatever she grows up to be, I just hope she’ll live in a world where science will, once in awhile, put on its fedora and leave all of us awestruck, just like it did two Sunday’s ago.

And hopefully, it will do it with a rocket-powered sky crane.  Because that was awesome.

Sexy and I know it

I recently read an article on how sexy stay-at-home dads are.

And he’s right, we are sexy.

But I found myself at odds with some of the points in the article.

(Before I start, I really shouldn’t identify myself as a stay-at-home dad.  My wife and I tag-team parent.  We both work 40 hours a week, bring home a steady income, miss family events for work, and all that stuff, but just do so on opposite schedules.  It so happens that my job involves lots of nights and weekends, so when we talk about stay-at-home moms and stay-at-home dads, we’re talking pretty strictly about moms and dads who are home during traditional working hours, between 9 and 5, and that, more often than not, is when you’ll find me with my daughter.  I don’t consider myself the primary caregiver, because I don’t think of either of us as primary.  We raise her together.  But for the purposes of this post, I identify with many of the qualities cited in the stay-at-home dad.  Like sexy.  Especially sexy.)

And the article gets some things right, like that images and ideas of masculinity are rapidly changing.  Going to the gym, getting those perfect abs, having the coolest clothes, the nicest car, the biggest wallet, it might be that guys have miscalculated what in fact “sexy” really is.

Except for this guy.  This guy is sexy. 
Even my wife thinks so, and I really can't argue.

But the article’s author tries, as other similar articles on fatherhood I’ve read recently, to link the Rise of Dads with the recession, pointing out again and again that most of the jobs lost since 2008 have belonged to men.  So, you have point 1: Men being laid off; and you have point 2: More dads staying home and taking on childcare responsibility; and, most importantly, point 3: You can give it a clever man, like “mancession.”  Conclusion: Recession is causing men to be more responsible dads.

Pardon my French, but that’s crap.

As I have tried to explain elsewhere on this blog, there is a world of difference between a guy who has participated in the biological act to beget a child (kudos, by the way), and a Dad.

Having an unemployed father sitting around the house more often is as likely to turn him into a Dad as having lots of books sitting on a shelf is to make your kid smart.  Context is everything. You buy your kids lots of books, but never read to him.  Your argument is invalid. Put a stroller in front of a Dad Lite, and he’s still a Dad Lite.  Put a stroller in front of a Homebrew Dad, and observe him in his natural habitat.

"You know what the difference is between you and me? I make this look good."

Without a doubt, more guys are out of work, and more guys are choosing to work from home or stay home with the kids, which, for a Homebrew Dad, might be one of the few bright spots in an otherwise dismal economic situation.  But that doesn’t mean that being out of work equates to being a better Dad.  Interrelation does not equal causation.

No, the rise of my archetypal Homebrew Dad predates the recession by quite a bit.  It has many causes and many antecedents, but some of the ones that I’ve identified revolve around revolutions in childrearing that differ drastically from the way we Homebrew Dads were raised, and the rise of other seemingly unrelated movements, like homebrewing, Slow Food, organic foods, and the environmental movement, all of which share the common threads of challenging the previous generation’s way of doing things while consciously trying to do the right thing of the next generation, principles that helped pave the way to a different approach to fatherhood.

As fathers, we tend to reflect oour own fathers.  For some of us, we choose a straight mirror image; whether that is for good or ill depends on the kind of father you had.  Some, myself included, see our fathers and strive to be more of a curved mirror, reflecting back the same, but opposite of how we were raised, an inverted image of the old Dad Lite.

So, guys, if you’re still on the fence about this whole Homebrew Dad thing, if you think you can stick to the old Dad Lite social roles, buy yourself a nice sports car, and hit the gym rather than the playground, go ahead.  I’m long past the point where I’d even entertain the idea that I’m sexy to anybody, but for some reason, my fantastic wife has stuck with my old, cranky, graying, balding, stinky self for all these years, and it just might be because, at least to her, this Homebrew Dad is one sexy beast.

And that’s good enough for me.

Chocolate Stout: a Tutorial

Ok, folks, today we’re going to talk about chocolate stout.

Should be pretty simple.  (It isn’t.)

This is chocolate.

This is stout.

Combine, chill, and serve.  Goodnight, everybody!

Of course, it’s not really that simple.  In fact, I should probably let you in on a minor, insignificant beer secret:

There’s no chocolate in chocolate stout.

Oops, cat’s out of the bag, now.

In fact, stout is one of the most commonly misinterpreted beers out there, with all kinds of labels used that fail to accurately reflect the beer itself, not entirely unlike Taco Bell’s “beef” tacos.  (Lawsuit!  Oh Taco Bell, I kid, you know I love you.)

Even the name itself, Stout, was originally an adjective attached to another style of beer popular among working-class English, namely porter.  Our first president loved porter, though it is unclear if he liked a relatively light brown porter, or the stronger, darker, “stout” porter.  Eventually, the “porter” part was dropped and stout became synonymous with the working-class Irish, whose Guinness stout was, and still is, considered the stout by which all others are measured.

The term “stout,” I should mention, if a reference to the strength of the taste, and is completely unrelated to the strength of the alcohol.  Dry Irish stout, like Guinness, comes in at a very modest 5% (4%, if you’re in Ireland).  The strength in the taste comes from the malt and the roasting method used.  Ah, chemistry, is there anything you can’t teach us?

Over time, variations began to appear, and were given names that sort of made sense at the time, like Imperial stout.  This stout is high in alcohol and bitterness, which has nothing to do with being Imperial, that’s just the kind of stout that was exported to Russia for the enjoyment of Catherine the Great.  And as for milk stout, it contains no milk, but is so named because it contains lactose.  The lactose isn’t added to give the beer a milky flavor, it is added to make the beer sweeter.  Sweetening beer is tricky, since yeast eat sugar, but yeast don’t eat lactose, so lactose because a natural choice for sweetening brews.  To make matters worse, milk stout can also be referred to as cream stout, which seems to relate it to cream ale, which contains no lactose.  Cream ale is simply a top-fermented beer that is chilled to lager temperature during fermentation, creating a unique taste.  I have no idea why it’s called cream ale.

Chocolate stout is named in reference to the barley malt used in its production, which is roasted to such a degree that it imparts a slight bitter-sweet flavor to the beer, reminiscent of chocolate.  Hence, chocolate stout.  See?  Chocolate roasted malt.  Not chocolate.

But I like chocolate.  Especially Belgian chocolate.

I also like milk stout. 

(I’m not a hop-head, if you haven’t picked up on that yet.  Sure, I can brew a beer with a dozen different kinds of hops, like most of the other homebrewers I know, but I wouldn’t like it very much.  Hops are wonderful little herbs, absolutely essential to balance the taste of the malt, and a bitter lager can be the perfect refreshment on a hot summer day, but for the most part, hops don’t thrill me.  Sour beers, now those are interesting.  I like a beer that I can order in a brewpub and the waiter will actually ask, “Are you sure?  That’s a sour beer…”  True story, that really happened.  The guy tried to talk me out of buying a beer because it was so sour.  Point is, when I comes to stout, I like ‘em a little on the sweet side.)

So, if chocolate malt contains no chocolate, what’s a homebrewer who likes milk stout to do when a friend of his delivers right to his door fine Belgian chocolate that he brought back from a business trip to an undisclosed location?  (I hope I didn’t give anything away there.)

Why, make a chocolate milk stout, of course!

Contains no chocolate milk.  Sorry.  But it's still yummy.

This is why homebrewing is the best hobby ever.  Sure chocolate stout needs no chocolate, but does that physically prevent you from dropping in a few ounces of good Belgian chocolate at the end of the boil?  Hell, no!  Add some lactose, and that dry stout made with chocolate malt and bittering hops transforms into delicious chocolate milk stout, sweet, rich, creamy, with just a touch of bitterness to keep the chocolate from being overpowering.

There are times when I think I must be a genius.

But don’t tell anyone.

I try to be humble.

Homebrew Dads for Obama (Update: 8/20/12)

Happy Independence Day, everyone!

Today, July 4^th, 2012, it is my pleasure to announce that Daddy Makes Beer officially endorses Barak Obama for reelection as President of the United States.

While President Obama is a Kenyan-born secret muslim socialist, he’s clearly the candidate for homebrewers.  Over the course of his first four years, he has passed no laws infringing on my right to keep and bear hops, so he’s got my vote.  And he’s the only candidate you can imagine sitting down and having a beer with.

That, plus I, too, am a secret muslim.

UPDATE (8/20/12):

Now, I knew President Obama was pro-beer, but I had not idea that he was a HOMEBREWER!

That's right, the White House makes its own homebrew.

Let me say that again, to be clear:  HOMEBREW IN THE WHITE HOUSE.

Without doing too much research, this looks like it might be the first instance of serious beer brewing at the White House since Thomas Jefferson.  (Yeah, he liked wine, but he made beer.)

(Washington probably homebrewed, too, but he never lived in the White House.)

And plus, Obama is also a dad, making him a Homebrew Dad!

I have to assume he reads this blog...

Daddy Makes...

It’s a hot one today.  A scorcher, you might say.

Ninety degrees, feels like 100, no breeze, no relief.

What’s a dad to do on a day like this?

Ice cold beer?  Great idea, but much less so for my dear little daughter.

Fortunately, this dad makes more than just beer. 

Daddy makes waffles.

Daddy makes dollhouses.

Daddy makes a mess.

Daddy makes cheese.

Daddy makes fire.

And on a day like this, Daddy makes ice cream!

Ice cream in a ball!  Totally taking this thing camping.

I thought the perfect thing on a blazing hot summer day like this was homemade, soft-serve blueberry ice cream.  Delicious!  (Since our blueberries were still looking a little green, I used blueberry preserves.  Don’t judge me.)

Now, time for some air conditioning and a nap.

Sometimes, Daddy makes himself tired…

Let them sell cake!

Bake sales!  Don't talk to me about bake sales!

As a parent, I try to keep up with my daughter's education. And like many parents, I have my opinions about education.

Being me, my opinions sometimes get me into trouble.

Lately, there has been an inordinate amount of media attention and opinions focused on a law that is designed combat childhood obesity , which bans, among other things, bake sales on school property during school hours.

And people are mad as hell!

Am I mad as hell? Yes, but not for the reason you think.

The problem is, I don't see any reason to be mad about this. I think we should do something to combat the constant onslaught of advertising designed and honed to the single purpose of getting junk food into our kids' mouths. So a few common sense steps along those lines sounds pretty good to me.

And really, should we be having bake sales during school hours anyway? Shouldn't the kids be, you know, in class, maybe? Save the bake sales for weekends, or during football games, or something. And if you have to sell something during school hours, there are other things to sell. Sell flowers. Sell books. With the internet, you can get your own t-shirts made in no time and sell those! It doesn't have to be a bake sale.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think bake sales are evil, and I don't think home-baked pies and cookies are necessarily junk food.

So what am I so mad about?

Maybe that my daughter's education is being funded by a BAKE SALE!

Seriously, a BAKE SALE!

Can I pay for her college this way, too?

Now PTOs and booster clubs and other school-related groups do a tremendous amount of work and their fundraising adds much to the schools, but have you ever stopped to wonder why all that fundraising is necessary?

Because our schools, the institutions charged with educating our children and preparing them for adulthood, are chronically underfunded.

And everyone's just ok with this?

Why can't we ban bake sales, and JUST GIVE THE SCHOOLS THE FREAKIN' MONEY!?

Now, maybe you don't agree with my "tax and spend" bleeding-heart liberal politics.  It's a free country.  You can complain all you want about retaking our country from the Kenyan Muslim Socialist president, I don't really mind.  If you want to be willfully ignorant, or just plain misguided, hey, go ahead.  But none of that changes that fact that our schools are being funded by BAKE SALES!

The future of this country, funded by BAKE SALES!

Now do you see why am I mad?  No?

BAKE SALES!

I guess what I'm trying to say is, if you're going to get mad, make sure you're getting mad about the right things.

Boy, am I worked up!  And all this bake sale talk has made me hungry. 

Daddy needs a cupcake.  Anyone know where there's a bake sale?

One of These Days, Norton!

I don’t plan my vacations around alcohol.  I really don't!  It just happens that way.

I try to plan my vacations around fun stuff my daughter might like, and what we all might have fun doing together as a family.

Yeah, it's a real place.

And sometimes, our vacations come about because my wife needs to travel somewhere for work, which is the only possible explanation on how I ended up in Normal, Illinois.

I’m going to refrain from making any Normal jokes.  Not that any of my jokes are ever normal.  (See? The damned things write themselves!)



Funny thing is, there's not even a
Krispy Kreme on this road.

I have to say, despite the ominous tornado warnings, Normal was a fun place to hang around.  The hotel had a swimming pool, where we spent no less than four hours each day.  And Normal also has a fantastic children’s museum, not to mention tons of nice playgrounds, a mall, Toy R Us, good restaurants, with kids menus, in short, everything a parent could possibly need.

We loved the Children’s Discovery Museum in Normal, and my daughter helped me find a geocache in the parking lot. I don't think I've blogged much about geocaching before.  I could go into it here, but better to save it for its own full entry, except to say that a couple days later, in Chicago, between deep dish pizza and baby back ribs, my daughter found a geocache all on her own. Such a proud moment.

“It’s around here somewhere.”

“Oh, Daddy, I see it! I’ll get it!”

I’ve raised her well. Even my wife was impressed. More than worth the price of visiting the two-story American Girl store.

But a beer nerd on vacation in Illinois is still a beer nerd, and some time around our second day there, I realized how close this part of Illinois is to Missouri, and realized this might be my best chance yet to get my hands on a Norton.

What, you ask, is a Norton?  Is this some kind of anti-virus joke?  Ed Norton joke?  And what does Ed Norton have to do with beer?

No, nope, and nothing.  In fact, none of this has anything to do with beer.  This is about wine, and about Thomas Jefferson’s dream for America.

I told you I was a nerd.

Thomas Jefferson, like most of the Founding Fathers, loved wine (except for John Adams, who was a hard cider man).  And Jefferson also saw agriculture as the key to this nation’s future.  One of his greatest dreams was the rise of a wine industry in America to rival that of Europe.  To that end, Jefferson, among others, sought to make wine from any of the native North American grapes that grew profusely in Virginia.

"The tree of liberty must
be refreshed, from time
to time, preferably with
a good wine."

Just one small problem: the wine was crap.  North American grapes, it turns out, while fine to eat, make terrible wine.  So Jefferson executed his Plan B.  He brought vines over from France, to create French wine on American soil.

Here, a second small problem arose: the vines all died.  Virginia, and North America in general, has a very different climate than central Europe, and that climate is all wrong for wine grapes.  And so the dream of an American wine industry died, at least during Jefferson’s lifetime.  But as we know, that is not the end of the story at all, since it turns out that parts of California are perfectly suited to growing Europe grape varieties, hence the Jefferson dream has come true.

Except, Jefferson dreamed of a uniquely American wine. 

And during the late 1800s, that dream almost came true, thanks to another Virginian named Dr. Daniel Norton.  He discovered a variety of native North American grape that made a decent wine.  Not only decent, but good enough, complex enough, to compete with European wines.

German immigrants in Missouri started growing the Norton grapes, and America’s first wine industry was born!

Unfortunately, America’s first wine industry was soon destroyed, like its beer industry, by Prohibition.  And while the post-World War II wine industry has focused on California, vintners in Missouri are still making Norton wines, and by God I was going to get my hands on one!

This turned out to be easier than I thought.  I found the largest liquor store I could find and found the local wines.  There, I quickly found bottle after bottle of Norton.  Mission accomplished!  It was off to more child-oriented activities.

Returning home, with a camera full of memories and a suitcase of wine, I tried the Norton for the first time.  I found it to be okay, while my wife thought it tasted like artificial cinnamon-covered pine cones.  I think I'll put that one in the "Not terrible" category, call it a victory and move on.  Besides, who cares how it tastes.  I have a bottle of wine that says Norton on it!  Time to find some more geocaches!

Before I finish off this entry, I would be remiss if I did not say a few words about the people of Normal.  Both my wife and I were amazed at how friendly, kind, welcoming, and genuinely nice everyone we met there was.  Compared to everyone else we met on the trip, they were anything but normal.

 (Sorry!  I can’t help myself!)