I bottled the amber ale last night. I had meant to dry-hop it with the extra half-ounce of Cascade I had left over from the original brewing process, but I tricked myself into believing that I had thrown out the hops when it came time to rack. Turns out I left the zip-lock baggie in the stock pot, which I discovered last night, only two weeks too late. Oh well. This thing still smells good. I’m ready for some. If only it were ready for me.

Here’s the specific gravity reading:

This shows a final gravity of about 1.012, which is probably high by 0.002 to 0.003. I took the sample from the beer after adding the priming sugar, which will certainly tweak the gravity up a bit. It tasted noticeably sweet, I thought, so surely there is some measurable effect. I was so sure my initial gravity reading was wrong that I didn’t even record it (don’t think I had the wort mixed up well enough at the time), so I won’t be estimating alcohol content on this batch. I know it’s a light one, so it will be a good dinner quaffer. Just how I like it.

I’ll give you a review next week when I’m ready to pop the top on the first bottle. I have high hopes.

Lileks linked to the original Macintosh commercial yesterday. I was eleven years old when this thing aired for the first time, and I suppose I was too enthralled with BYTE Magazine and my Dad’s Victor 9000 to notice the development. We laughed at Macs then–cuisinarts, we called them–just as we laughed at CGA and the Hercules Graphics Adapter that fell so short of the Victor’s built-in 800×400 monochrome graphics. (HGA was a few dozen pixels off of that, if you’ll recall. Something like 750×350, which is a huge technological inferiority when you’re a paranoid defender of an underdog platform. Never again. Never again…)

Anyway, my newfound affection for the platform hasn’t diminished in recent months. I appreciate the commercial much more now than I would have five, ten, or even twenty years ago. I’ll have me one of those boxes at some point, I think.

Say, was our Macintosh heroine wearing an iPod in the original? I’m guessing not.

Things are running well enough here that I decided to jump the Blogger ship and move to TimBerglund.com full-time. Much remains to be done with the template, features, etc., but I need to make the move now, or I never will.

Anothe busy day is in store tomorrow, so no big promises on blogging volume. I’m out all morning and all evening, so it’ll be light if it happens at all. And don’t worry; I’ll tape Average Joe 2 so I can give you the trenchant analysis you’ve come to expect. No later than Wendesday morning, D.V.