Monthly Archives: March 2012

My adventure making Apple Pie Bitters

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For the second time, I’ve set out to make my own bitters. This time I’m making a few different varieties, and I bottled the first of them over the weekend. Apple Pie Bitters.

If you’ve never made your own bitters, it is as complex or simple as you want it to be. You can put everything in a single container or use separate containers. Once you combine your herbs, spices or fruits with high-proof alcohol, all you need to do is store them in a dark space agitate the bottle every day or two. I highly recommend getting glass containers. I went with a variety of Mason style jars in four, eight and thirty-two ounces. For the apple pie bitters, I used three different extractions.

Pieces of cut appleThe first extraction is of apples. I took a few apple and skinned them. I then aged them for about a month in high-proof rum. Overall, they ended up being a beautiful red, but didn’t have as much of an apple taste as I had hoped. I think next time I’ll try using dried apples in addition or in place of the fresh.

The second extraction was mulling spices. These really came alive with flavor. Two weeks in a mix of high-proof rum and neutral grain spirit and these smelled and tasted fantastic. There wasn’t much of a color change, but I think that might be more due to the length of time that they spent. There was a reddish tint, but not nearly as much as the apples.

The final component is a general bitter mix that I am using for all the varieties. The liqueur is all neutral grain spirit. I used Green cardamom, Gentian Root, Birch Bark, Calamus Root, WormWood, and Humulus Lupulus. This might be the most bitter thing I have ever tasted and if it was possible for something to smell bitter, this would do it. A bit goes a long way and I think I used a bit too much this time around. It has a beautiful green color.

The final mixture is equal parts all three tinctures. The bitter green, light red and deep red combined to form a beautiful brown. I think next time I’ll cut the amount of bitter mixture in half and also increase the percent of apples. Next up is the more adventurous Fruit Punch Bitters. Ever since deciding to try that one I’ve been wondering what to mix it with. We will see how they come out.

Bottled up, with rye and sugar ready for an old fashioned.

Old Fashioned with Homemade Apple Pie Bitters

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I bottled my apple pie bitters tonight and made an old fashioned with them. A bit more bitter than I was aiming for, but the essence of apple pie definitely comes through.

Washington Post and WordPress

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Last night at the DC WordPress meetup, Greg Linch let it be known that the Washington Post was now using WordPress for all of the election live blogs. While the main site is still a homegrown CMS, this is a great step for open source.  Every tine a large organization decides that they would rather embrace free and open source software, the whole world wins.

Do Syrian Activists Want Peace?

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The leader of Syria’s most prominent opposition group has rejected Kofi Annan’s call for dialogue with the government.

Burhan Ghalioun, president of the Syrian National Council (SNC), said on Friday that any solution to the crisis must be accompanied by military pressure on President Bashar al-Assad.

via Syrian activists reject Annan's dialogue call – Middle East – Al Jazeera English.

Sad to see this, though I understand that the SNC views the need for al-Assad to be militarily removed. I think they are hurting themselves though with this position. They need to generate support from the international community if they intend to succeed, and they won’t do so if they are unwilling to attempt to find a peaceful solution.

Kofi Annan is set to arrive in Damascus this weekend. Hopefully he can find a way to get the two sides working towards an actual resolution.

IRC Notifications from a remote machine to my mac

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For IRC, I like to use Irssi on a server that I can always keep running and log into no matter what machine I am on. One of the initial challenges with doing this was getting notifications on mentions. I solved this by following the tutorial on Irssi, screen, fnotify and Growl on OSX. The only difference between his setup and mine is that my bash script to do the notifying is simpler. I’ve pasted it below for you to use.

#!/bin/sh

ssh harpua "tail -f .irssi/fnotify  " | while read heading message; do growlnotify  -t "${heading}" -m "${message}"; done

How do you solve the problem of IRC notifications from a remote machine?

In case you are wondering, all of my machines are aliased to Phish songs, hence Harpua.

EDIT: I’ve added the -s flag to growlnotify so that the updates are sticky and thus I see them when I get back to my machine if I’ve stepped away and I don’t leave people hanging.