Nathan Williams

I've finally got this recipe down. My yeast doesn't seem to be as active as Mark Bittman's, so I had to boost it a bit to get a decent rise.

( What, you think this is some kind of photoblog or something? )

An organization called the United Spinal Association (formerly the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association) contacted me about using my polling station picture in their newsletter. I don't know if I had even really registered that the picture included an accessible (well, marked-for-use-by-handicapped) voting booth.

Getting a picture published is pretty neat, but it reminds me that much of the point of digital photography was supposed to be taking lots of pictures to occasionally get good ones, so I should take more pictures, damnit.

I just finished three days at the American Homebrewers Association National Homebrewers Convention, aka "Beer and Loafing in Las Vegas". I'm writing up a few notes while the midday heat fades a bit before I hit the road soon for the next adventure - driving out to Mojave, CA for the X-Prize qualifying launch tomorrow, but here are a few remarks and pictures.

The structure was remarkably like other conventions I've been to, with informational seminars during the day and more social/party events in the evening. It's hardly unheard of to have beer at the evening events, but at this one there was frequently beer *during* the sessions - either given out as part of the talk to make a point, or simply brought in from the always-flowing taps in the hospitality suite, stocked 24/7 by various local clubs.

The evening events were a pro-brewers night, like any other beer festival except with the attendees asking harder questions; a club night, also festival-style but with the crazier brews and booths and tap systems that clubs had brought (jalapeno dopplebock! key lime mead!); and the awards banquet, which had a long, overly-sappy memorial service for a brewer who died last year, but was otherwise pretty good. Rogue kept the beer flowing that night, with a lot of people getting into the west-cost strong IPA styles.

I learned about and tasted commercial spruce beer, drank pulque, gushed at the authors of my favorite books, bought some new ones, met people from lots of different clubs, and even managed to stop groaning at the club names:

• Quality Ale and Fermentation Fraternity (QUAFF), San Diego
  
• Brewers United for Real Potables (BURP), Maryland
  
• Society of Akron Area Zymurgists (SAAZ), Ohio
  
• Urban Knaves of Grain, Chicago
  
• Maltose Falcons, Los Angeles
  

... just for starters.

I learned a bit about water chemistry for brewing, tips for researching historical styles and ingredients, heard a lot about yeast handling and oxygenation, and saw many cool gadgets, some more useful than others:

( Homebrewers know how to repurpose technology )

One of the cooler talks went into a lot of history and wacky research, like the use of chromatography on archaeological samples to determine the composition of ancient beers. He also has a book.
( The author series continues )

The demographics of the event were about what I had expected. Mostly middle-aged men (there were a dozen or so people under 30, out of 775 attendees), with a few spouses in attendance, some of whom were more enthusiastic about the beer than others. Many midwesterners, then west-coast types, then everywhere else, which probably just reflects the conference location. Almost exclusively white; I met the one black person there, pro brewer Michael Ferguson of Barley's Brewery here in Nevada (he calls himself "the other black brewer", the first one being Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery. Apparently we hit it off, because he signed a shirt for me and I have his email address in my notebook, but that part of the evening is a bit fuzzy.)

We had several arguments about whether the age/race/gender arrangements we saw here reflect homebrewers generally, or AHA members, or people who can afford to come to a conference in Vegas, or what. Out of the 90 medals awarded for the competition (the world's biggest; 4443 different beers submitted), 86 went to men and 4 went to what looked like husband-and-wife teams. I asked a few people if a woman had ever won a medal on her own, and while everyone could name a few female brewers who were good and prolific enough, nobody could recall any winners.

More later about the hotel, the lousy food, and general impressions of Vegas.

I recently submitted a beer I made to a competition (sponsored by the Boston Wort Processors) for the first time. The competition was held last weekend, and I'd been waiting to get my SASE back with the judging sheets.

Instead, this showed up in a Tyvek envelope:


I took first place in the "Novice" category; for this purpose, novice is defined as "first time in a competition". The judging sheets were actually quite critical, to my inexperienced eye: not enough malt flavor, too hoppy-bitter, slightly astringent, and over-carbonated (that last doesn't surprise me; I figured I wouldn't get the carbonation right since I've mostly been kegging recently). Nevertheless, I got 32 points out of 50, which is officially "very good" - no more than one minor flaw, but nothing singularly impressive, either.

I'm pretty stoked. This also qualifies me to enter MCAB VI, the Master Championship of Amateur Brewers, in July. It's in Warren, Michigan. I've never been to Michigan, but this seems like a fine reason to go.

(There's a full list of winners available for the curious)

This week's book event was at the Harvard Coop, where David Loftus read from his new book Watching Sex: How Men Really Respond To Pornography. I like the premise of the book - that both the anti-porn and pro-porn movements in this country have hypothesized and made accusations about the thoughts and actions of men (the primary consumers of porn) without doing much research into the validity of those hypotheses. In particular, he singles out the feminist movement that he once identified with as asserting a women's right to define reality for herself, instead of having it defined for her by the patriarchy, and then turning around and (rhetorically) denying that right to men who use porn. So far, though, what bothers me about the book is its entirely anecdotal nature. It admits up front that it is not a scientific study or a statistically representative sample, but I fear that its bias toward the more affluent and educated (90% of the interviews were conducted by email) undermines many of its points, or at least calls out for more research. I do hope that it will bring out some behavior options that were considered not to exist, or at least demonstrate that there is a demographic that can and does enjoy porn without apparent ill effects on themselves or their relationships.

I was a bit surprised by the audience. It was a full crowd (which at the book-reading area of the Coop is about twenty people, and the Coop staffer running the event told me that even filling that out was unusual), and I had expected a generally positive reaction. Apparently I have been hanging out too much at Grand Opening! and their porn events at the Coolidge; possibly a quarter of the audience was openly hostile to the idea that porn was anything other than woman-destroying trash. To stereotype a bit, all the people in that category appeared to be Harvard undergrads, with a feminist bent. Their complaints were based on the idea of "objectification of women" and supposed links between mainstream porn and the worlds of sex slavery and sexual tourism. They didn't have a lot of backing for those ideas; they fell back on a lot of "everybody knows". I had a discussion with one of them afterward, and we had a difficult time establishing common ground. Part of her concern involved the fact (undisputed by me) that most porn does not flesh out (nyuk nyuk nyuk) the characters portrayed by the actors, and hence she concludes that the male viewer perceives the female performer as a piece of meat, with no possibility of humanity. I don't agree that the failure to explain a character implies a total non-existence of character or humanity. We also had a disagreement that was difficult to figure out about the relationship between thoughts and actions; she seemed to be angling for the idea that sexual thoughts about unknown people (the girl on the street) are inappropriate, independent of the behavior of the thinker, and that since porn encourages thinking sexual thoughts about random people, it is therefore bad. I don't buy that, either. The book's preface actually cites Judith Martin on this tricky philosophical issue, firmly on the side of judging by behavior rather than thought.

Mr. Loftus, however, said afterward that he had hoped for an even more hostile audience (including "I wish the Christian Coalition would picket my condo"), because it helps sales :)

( Picture with the author )

Alton Brown had a book-signing event in Burlington a couple of days ago. He's just as cool in person as he is on Good Eats. He also made a point of properly introducing himself to and having a conversation with each person who came up to get a book signed.

( Picture in which Nathan and Alton look surprisingly similar )

If I somehow wound up doing something that cool in ten or fifteen years, that would be just groovy.