Thread: What do you want for Christmas?

Originally Posted by laserlight

The lacquer + gold/silver/etc powder techniques required to get the artistic design on the ebonite body.

Plus, Ebonite has a very low spawn rate, and can only be mined with an enchanted diamond pickaxe. [citation needed]

I can't really poke fun though, the art supplies I buy are ridiculously expensive. Even the 9*11" sheets of paper are around 3 dollars a piece (but they are extremely smooth and thick, and can absorb all the graphite you want).

Originally Posted by Nominal Animal

I like rougher paper, with a bit of cotton content, or even paperboard -- but then again, I prefer crayons. (Well, oil pastels on black canvas.) I've got supplies for building a small tiltable drafting table, but living in a city apartment don't have a place to build it, and the local woodshops are too full/busy and annoyingly expensive.

Yeah, it will depend what materials you are using. The general rule is: the harder the pencil, the smoother the paper (and in reverse as well). Rougher paper is good for things like charcoal, because charcoal is generally better able to fill in the tiny gaps that make the paper rough. For graphite, it simply won't crush enough of itself into the grain of rough paper, and you will have to use something like a "smudger" to grind it into it.

For very photorealistic (like portraits) work with graphite I don't use smudges or brushes to blend the shading, because it's too imprecise. Also the paper tends to wear out, and create what I think of as a "dead zone" that won't take any more lead (it can ruin a piece that you've put a lot into already).

I haven't had a good table since my swivel table that broke a few years ago, but I've been using this portable board with clamps to hold the paper. It's decent, but probably not good for my back lol. My table was cobbled together anyway, it broke when I tried to lay a TV I was carrying on it.

Originally Posted by Matticus

I would like the money needed to build my dream homebrew set-up.

I'd up the yield from five to ten gallons. It would be all electric (no propane burners required). I'd create a neater mash tun - an insulated kettle with built-in thermometer and a proper false bottom. I'd install a thermometer and electric heater directly into the boiling kettle. I'd create an electric chiller using peltier devices. And I'd like it all arranged on a custom-built tiered stand so each stage can gravity feed to the next. I envision having the grain mill built right into the stand, mounted beneath the highest tier. And lots of hooks and shelves for equipment and other doodads.

It would be a clean, bright, efficient beer-brewing machine.

Nice. I used to have a big-batch set up which I could pipeline and put down two 15-gallon batches in one day. That's like a sack of grain in a day. I had lots of plans for improving it but was always too lazy or busy with other things. Eventually I had to stop because drinking beer was not really going so well for me any more.

Originally Posted by Matticus

Impressive. That was a homebrew set-up? Sounds like an involved operation.

My friends and I have recently started using a 3 barrel system for our commercial endeavor. I was amazed to see how much grain is required for that level of brewing.

It was far too manual, I could have made life much easier on myself. It took about 2.5 hours per batch (1 hour mash, 1 hour boil, 30 minutes of liquid transfers) and I could start another mash at the same time I started a boil so my throughput was 2x. It helped to have an assistant. But after two batches I never wanted to continue. It was a lot of work, my hoses and pumps always had problems, sparge getting stuck etc. It was like a fun nightmare.

You have to watch those assistants, they will sometimes do stupid things. One guy tried to taste the wort straight off the boil... No idea why somebody would do that. Of course he spit the super-hot sugary liquid straight back into the kettle.

I would really like a Springfield Armory XDs .45ACP 4-inch. My XDm .45ACP 4.5-inch is just a little too big to carry every day.

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

Ew, extract brews. I still can't drink Hop Stoopid...

Is Hop Stoopid an extract brewed beer? Or it just reminds you of one? I used to love drinking that.

My take on quality of extract brews is, it depends on the brewer skill level. Less-experienced brewers tend to start with extract, so it's hard to say the beer is bad because of extract -- it could just be a lack of skill and experience. Novice brewers usually don't make a proper starter, they don't take care to prevent oxygenation of the hot wort, they maybe aren't as clean about things as they should be. I think all those factors are a lot more significant than the fact they're using extract.

O_o

I was just handed a card (My birthday is Friday.) for a six month subscription to LootCrate.

*shrug*

I'm just bragging in the spirit of the thread... ^_^;

Soma

Originally Posted by MutantJohn

Hop Stoopid uses a hop extract. Everything by Lagunitas is God-like except for Hop Stoopid.

Oh. Hop extract. That's completely different from what me and Matticus were talking about, which is malt extract. Never used hop extract myself. But I can see how a large commercial brewer might use it to achieve a higher IBU -- the amount of whole hop cones needed to get 100+ IBU often leaves up to a third of the boil kettle filled with goopy hop muck at the end of the process. Not only wasting a huge amount of boiler space, but making it very difficult to clean up.