Wine bricks saved the U.S. wine industry during Prohibition (2015)

To me wines are actually less work to homebrew than beer. Especially if you're working from a kit, there's no need to cook anything - just dump everything in the fermenter and go. Beyond that the process is largely similar. Primary fermentation -> secondary fermentation -> bottling -> drinking. They're pretty forgiving too.

In general, whites take a bit more work to get a really good looking product than reds. For a white, I'll usually rack at least three times over about a week, and then filter it so I get a nice, amber-clear end product with no sediment. Note that this doesn't really impact the taste much, just the appearance. Reds I usually don't bother to rack more than once or maybe twice.

When I am done I usually sit my bottles upright in a cool, dark area for a few days before putting them in the wine rack on their sides.

This one [0] specifically is a family favorite. Has a nice light, somewhat fruit taste that's great for a warm summer evening. This one is best kept cool (I keep a few of my bottles that we're about to drink in a wine refrigerator.)

[0] https://www.midwestsupplies.com/collections/riesling-recipe-...

Not wanting to be pedantic or snobbish, but it is "vinho verde", because it is a Portuguese type of wine (I am Portuguese, and that is why I care about this :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinho_Verde

Cleaning any bottle with a narrow neck is extra work, but you can get it done with a pipe cleaner, and it's best not to clean at an elevation or to do so in a deep basin.

These are things that come naturally after handling significant glassware for a period of time.

As soon as I set this 5-gallon glass container of near-boiling liquid in the snow bank I realized my error because of the loud, CRACK sound. I lifted it up by the neck, but only the top half came away and I was left holding a comically large broken-bottle shiv. My roommates at the time all came out to properly laugh at me and I resolved to cool my wort before putting it in the fermentation vessel from then on. And also to stick with plastic fermentation vessels!

Also they make widemouth glass carboys which are very easy to clean. But they shatter all the same.

If your going to avoid glass go 304 stainless (SSBrewtechs BrewBucket etc.) plus it basically lasts forever.

DISCLAIMER: this is not an invitation to start debating these subjects, these are just crudely picked examples.

He's a total arse don't get me wrong, but baseline humanity using nothing but its wits and hard work to make 'heroes' who inherited their powers obsolete is a sentiment I don't imagine is too alien to the readers of HN.

The incredible (heh) thing about this is that My Hero Academia answers it. In the world of MHA, nearly everyone has a superpower, or Quirk, of some sort; but superheroes are still a distinct class of professionals who have honed their quirks through training and, in general, developed courage, self-sacrifice, and inner resolve way beyond even the average superhuman. The greatest heroes distinguish themselves by exemplifying these values the most (though having powerful awesome Quirks helps). It was the perfect thing to come along at a point of maximum capeshit saturation.

I think the woke culture is a bit flawed, because if there is something that is objectively bad, and something that is objectively good, why even have democracy at all? Let's just put there the sun king and move on?

The entire point of voting is that you are allowed to vote for whoever is running. Of course, the notion of a "bad policy" is as old as voting itself, but the noblest democracies are those which don't judge people for voting as they see fit, or else what's the point of voting at all? Just appoint a righteous elite to do all the political appointments for you.

However, just as there's been no consistently wise electorate, neither has there been a consistently wise elite class. In the end, in both cases, the best you can do politically is build a bulwark against corruption because you can't avoid it, which is why the stablest governments are the ones that make the job of the highest political seats as difficult as possible to actually do anything and put the bulk of the power in the hands of committees that have to argue about things to come to a decision.

> And so, if voting is good, maybe we should have more voting.

Voting on its own is not inherently good. Plenty of dictatorships operate under the guise of voting, where either candidates opposing the ruling party are entirely absent or voting for them is punishable in various ways (which is why the political polarization in the west is particularly chilling). There are plenty of "People's republics" out there that are neither republics nor representative of the people (unless, perhaps, you narrowly define "people", as the US originally did).

What is arguably good (at least in the liberal western mind) is maintaining a system of political friction (checks and balances) that ensure different parts of the government are effective limiters on each other's authority to make it as difficult as possible for a tyrant to seize control. IMO Trump was a pretty solid litmus test of the resilience of the American government against tyrannical takeover.

The downside of this, as we're seeing the recent competition between east and west, is that tyranny can be much more effective at getting stuff done than democracy can hope to be, at least in the short term. However, strong tyrants still die and eventually a weak tyrant takes their place and the country falls apart.

The (theoretical) strength of representative government is that it outlives any one or handful of strong rulers. I say theoretical because technically ancient Egypt's history spans more years than the entirety of human history after Christ (so far), but as can be seen in their history, they had plenty of royal family squabbles and foreign invasions in that time. How they retained national cohesion through it all would be an interesting study.

Democracy is a means of securing regular, peaceful power transitions. Whether the outcome is particularly good or bad is not relevant, because all power is transient.

The alternative is a civil war/revolution every now and then.

I never grew out of that, lol

Wine bricks were designed to get around a ban.

Why not? I've seen people go to a smoke shop to buy weird decorative vases before.

For instance this[1] one can achieve up to 25% under right conditions.

[1] https://www.whitelabs.com/yeast-single?id=146&type=YEAST&sty...

No yeast can digest starches afaik. It's why you need a mashing phase to turn starches into simpler sugars when brewing beer.

I dunno how it works but apparently you can get to 25%

True and that's kind of the joke. They aren't even allowed to do visitations without evidence of malpractice. But the laws surrounding it are even stranger: The beer produced should only be consumed at home, any outside consumption would require taxation, therefore homebrew competitions ask you to tax your submissions. They've actually went to homebrew competitions and busted people on the grounds of 10€ pP at most (But remember if I self report/pay it would only be a few ct - so even less). Homebrew meetups have never had problems before.

The background of the law (at least in folk telling) is that the big guys were worried about malt-extract making homebrewing so easy as to make commercial brewing superfluous.

And yet there are plenty of countries where this happened…

If you're ever in Bavaria again, you should make a visit to Bamberg. It has an incredibly rich culture around beer. They are famous for smoked beer, though its just two breweries of about 20 making it. The others all have absurdly high quality beer at fair prices all with a certain amount of personality.

His output was like 30 bottles of red and another 30 of white, so in gallons that would be a little more than 21 liters each or 5 gallons each.

He gave away most of it to family and his friends - we had a lot of his bottles on regular barbecues he hosted - and even had my cousin help him design and print funny bottle labels.

[0] A "Schrebergarten" with a small almost-a-shed house.

Little impact on many factors that had previously been put down to population growth.

It decisively proved that overcrowded infrastructure and inflated house prices were definitively supply side problems, rather than demand side problems.

Tell that to the families that had loved ones in the Unit 731 experiments?

I'm just saying that by prefacing something with "well since we're in a state of tyranny it would be neat to [do a thing]"... it doesn't always fly and not all data is necessary to have when it comes at a cost of human lives.

The biggest problem I run into is two lane highways where the semi trucks constantly block the left lane going just at the speed limit while trying to pass other semis in the right lane going just under the speed limit - literally a 1mph difference between the two. The speed limit for cars is 10mph above the truck limit but your lucky to do the truck limit consistently. California was particularly bad in that regard.

People from Oaklahoma are also a constant scourge on the road, they can not tolerate someone going faster then them, so if you try to pass on the left they will pull in front of you and bumble along at the speed limit or one mile over (def a culture thing, cops in OK have a zero tolerance policy for speeding, no margin, regardless of conditions, passing, etc.). On an open road you can just pass them on the right but in any moderate traffic they cause a lot of problems. Check the plates the next time someone does that, pattern isn’t hard to see.

Roads in West Virginia are basically paved over goat trails, I watched some douche in a pickup take a blind 5 mph turn at about 85mph trying to blow past a small sedan he obviously thought was going to slow and wedged himself in a stream about forty feet beyond the road. Luckily nobody was coming the other way around he turn or it could have been really tragic.

Looks to me like there's a general societal breakdown, also looking at the proliferation of videos of people walking out of stores with stuff they didn't pay for.