Time and Oak Whiskey Elements

A friend of mine got me an interesting gift for Christmas this year.  I saw mention of it on Gizmodo a while back and I was very glad to hear about their enormous Kickstarter success.

Time and Oak is a company that produces, for lack of a better term, charred wooden sticks.  Now I know it is hard to accurately relay tone via text so, before you read any further, be assured that that I have nothing negative to say about the product or the company’s business model.  

Consider that last paragraph your TL;DR.  

[Editors Note: Basically I have been “comparatively taste testing” this whiskey all night so this article might just turn into a TL;DW.  Or TL;POIHOWTB (passed out in hallway on way to bathroom). Only time will tell.]

The idea behind the Time and Oak whiskey sticks (according to the company) is that charred wood imparts a golden color to bottom-shelf alcohol, gives it a multi-tonal flavor, a rich aroma, and even sucks out a couple of toxins known to cause hangovers.  Their claim is that their invention - for which they have six patents - does all this stuff in 48 hours thanks to a process they refer to as “accelerated transpiration through capillary action”.  Boy, howdy, that’s a lot of 50-cent words - but do those words add up to the $6/stick price tag or should the townsfolk just have left these on the evil traveling salesman’s wagon in Passamaquoddy?   Let’s find out.

The sticks I got (a package of two) were five inches long, 1/2-inch wide, and 1/2-inch tall.  Eighteen notches were cut into the oak and four of the six sides were charred, as were the insides of the notches.  If my math is right, the notches increase the surface area of the wood blocks by a little more than 50%.  Also, the notches are important for another reason that I will get to shortly.

The instructions say to plunk one of these in a fifth (757 mL) of whatever and wait 24-48 hours. Turn the bottle occasionally.  Ok.  Can do. What to choose, though?  

I chose Jacob’s Ghost, an affordable clear whiskey I enjoy.  I didn’t want to choose an unknown, and I wanted to choose something clear so I could gauge the color change easily.  The makers say on their site to experiment with different liquids, even beer, but I assume there is a limit there.  I mean, these things ain’t gonna turn, say, a last ditch “I’m snowed in and totally unprepared” grape Pedialyte and Vermouth mixture into a Flaming Moe.  Look, this is all just stream of consciousness writing here. Try to keep up, ok?

Where was I?  Oh, yes.  Also, I didn’t want to drop one into the 95% still full bottle of Laphroaig 10 I have in the pantry.  I think I mentioned before that drinking that stuff was like trying to drink a shot of rubbing alcohol through a burning sofa cushion.  Mainly I was afraid if I were to try and drop the piece of wood into that stuff the wood would react at least 10 times more violently than my cat does when I try to put him in the carrier to take him to the vet.   Alchemy only goes so far, you dig?  So, better to have a mid-quality whiskey I am familiar with to start.

I bought two bottles of the Jacob’s Ghost.  I left the stick in one of the bottles for nearly two days (46 hours).  Here are some pics showing the transformation:

Hour 0: The stick has just been placed in the experimental bottle.

After three hours.  A light golden color is obvious already.

After twelve hours.

After 24 hours.  The wood became waterlogged at the 18-hour mark or so, and that's when it hit me that I was going to have to fish this piece of wood out somehow...

After 10 minutes of playing "Frustrating Claw Game" using a bent piece of wire, I was finally able to snag the oak piece and pull it from the bottle.  Thank goodness for the notches...

After 46 hours.

The pictures say a lot, but how about the smell and taste? My sense of smell is pretty good, but I don’t have as sophisticated of a palate as some but here is my assessment:  

After two days, the charred wood imparted the gorgeous color you see.  The bouquet had a slight sweetness to it in the experimental bottle that was not present in the control.  Unexpectedly, there was not what I would call a “smoky” smell or taste to the whiskey but there was “something" there that added an enjoyable complexity to the beverage.  Let’s call it “woody”.  Not “oaky”… Just “woody”.  Hard to describe.  A taste equivalent of the cool smell that lingers in the garage after table-sawing a piece of pine board, I guess.

I am not sure that I would believe it if someone tried to convince me that what they were handing me was a fine scotch and not a wood-gizmo-treated bottom-tier whiskey, but that really isn’t the point, is it?  The real question is “does the charred wood noticeably change the taste of the alcohol for the better in a short period of time”.  Based on this one experiment, I would have to say “yes”.  “Is it worth the six bucks?”  Again, I would say “yes”, because the new look and taste is noticeable, interesting, and pleasant. 

Thanks for the Christmas gift, bro!  My next experiment will be with three bottles of low end vodka— one control, one with another Time and Oak stick in it, and one with an equally surface-area’d piece of untreated oak. But that won’t be for a while.  After all, I can only handle so much experimenting of this nature before I onfnwoe c nnwoeindosn dmddddddd….sdad qr .

Fans of Cutthroat

Last year we stumbled across Cutthroat Kitchen and we quickly got hooked.  We figured, though, that the types of sabotages the chefs endure, however diabolical, have gotten a little routine and need to be enhanced a bit.  Here’s what we came up with:

You have the right to replace all of one of your opponent’s proteins with a single tarantula (a shout-out to my brother-in-law who actually ate one of those last November…)

Force a competitor to do all of their cooking using their own body heat as their only heat source.

Make one of your rivals insult the food taster the entire time they are at their station, focusing on physical appearance, national origin, and manner of speech.

If you win this auction item, you may shiv one of your opponents once in a place and time of your choosing during this challenge.

Each of your opponents must retrieve all of their food from the deep fryer or stove using nothing but their elbows.

All of your opponents must remove all of their piercings, cover their tattoos, and de-mohawk their hair before they can start prepping and cooking.  As you can imagine, this will be very, very time consuming.

Every time a chef incorrectly describes him/herself as attractive during this challenge or in the cutaways, it will cost him/her $5,000.

You may force an opponent to gather their ingredients from the pantry blindfolded. 

Your opponent’s final plated item must weigh at least five pounds and be uniform in color.

 If you lose this auction, you will be tied to three very large, very friendly, very hungry dogs for the remainder of the challenge.

Not a bad set of changes.  I’m sure viewership would climb...

The six-year-old also noted that each of the chefs could easily walk out of there with $25,000 since they all have a lot of knives and Alton Brown doesn’t.  

Way to think outside the box, kiddo.  You know, I think I’ll earmark the money we have in his college fund for “bail” instead…

Quiz On Chapter One To-Day!

Quick quiz!  Can you name the three famous books described below from just the Wordle word clouds of their first chapters?

Book 1:

Book 2:

Book 3:

Leave a comment with answers.  Good Luck, firstly with the puzzle and secondly with actually successfully posting comments... I am told the comment form can be a royal PITA depending on your platform.  Thanks, Google!

Quick, Look Polish!

Many, many, MANY years ago my sister came to visit and brought with her a couple of photo albums crammed full of stuff (she is the family historian, you see).

One of the items in the album was an old letter from one of our relatives to another.  It is sloppy, in cursive, and written in Polish - a language I don’t have a clue about.  Additionally, there were almost no clear indicators where the letter began or ended and I had no real context for what the letter could possibly contain.

I was curious enough to start putting pieces and parts into Google Translate. 

It was an entertaining couple of hours to get to the level of translation I show below and it is still pretty gibberish-y.  Whenever I saw I had obvious errors, like when the translator came back with “the nose is a lake” (I’m not kidding), I went back and tweaked what I thought I could make out of the cursive - sometimes it helped. 

I also learned that it is critical with a capital “C” that one understands that the “=“ means “continued on next line”.  I won’t get into the utterly tasteless mistranslation I ran into before I figured that out other than it made me think “Yikes!  This letter has taken a horrifying turn all of a sudden…”  I try to keep things clean-ish here at The 36th Lock.

In some cases I had to throw up my hands and just leave those words untranslated (those are the words in all caps).

Here is what I can make of the Polish:

list pisany dnia 18 listopada 1950 roku odzywam sie do ciebie kochany synu

Niech będzie Pochwalony Jezus Chrystu

list od ciebie odebrać za ktory ci dziekuje from sie dowie dzieci o twoim zdrowiu i powodzeniu a ja jestem zdrowy a powodzenie

moje jak zwykle i u nas sniegu 

zimna wcale i fajny czas

dotyk czas a dalej to nie wiadomo a od nas to duzo CHTOPOKOW

wzieli do wojska ale i nas to jeszcze dobrze

celka dziękówa dostata CHTOPOKA 

w tamten niedziele byty chrzciny i chamka

MANKOWA się oczy nieca znanego domu

i bryta na weselu i dotyk czas to ludzie zarabiają choc drogo bo funt mięsa kosztu je dolara i wicej

ci NIMOM co pisae tylko cie pozdrawiam kochany synu i zone i dzieci twoja matka

And here is the English according to Google Translate

a letter written on 18 November 1950 talk to you dear son 

May Jesus Christ be praised 

receive a letter from you for who you thank you from the children finds out about your health and success and I'm healthy and successful 

Me, as usual, and with us the snow 

cold and cool all the time 

touch time and further it does not know a lot of us CHTOPOKOW 

they took the army but we are still not well 

Thanked cell is insufficiently CHTOPOKA 

in that Sunday entities baptisms and low peasant 

MANKOWA eyes less than a well-known home 

and in abundance at the wedding and feel the time is people earn though expensive because a pound of meat cost them a dollar and more 

NIMOM you what to write only greet you dear son and wife and children, your mother

————-

Meh… Not great, but I think that’s the best I can do.  I have reviewed project proposals that were less elegantly worded than this translation, though, so I’m gonna call this one a victory (my bar is set really low) and move on.

Bread

This past weekend I taught my son how to make bread.  

Oh. My. God.  

While that last statement is technically true, I make it sound like I taught him to silently track and kill wheat, corral wild yeast, and mine salt using nothing but a rain-moistened stick, and guided only by the special quality the air takes on during a gibbous moon, just like my father and his father before him.

No.  I found a simple, minimalist article online on how to make a four-ingredient rustic bread and we followed the instructions.  There is the result in the pic.  The loaf was plain but good.

During the process I explained to him what all the ingredients were for - flour is the stuff bread is made from and is food for the yeast, yeast makes it fluffier (I told him how), salt keeps the yeast from making giant holes in the bread, and everything needs water to live.  I also told him while we were hand-kneading the dough that “a man who knows how to make his own bread will never starve”.

You read that right.  I actually said “A man who knows how to make his own bread will never starve”.  I even had the nerve to say it sagely.  As soon as the words left my lips I thought to myself “[insert slow, sarcastic clap here] Bravo!  What are you, a freakin’ bumper sticker, now?”  About one-quarter of a second after I had that thought, the six-year-old laughed and said “You sounded like Yoda when you said that.”

I smiled at his “joke” and said nothing.  What could I say?  “Ok, boy, you win this one,” I thought.  

I totally deserved that.

New Signature Items

I am sitting down to write this a little late so this will be short, sweet, and full of pics.

The pic to the left is the Geojunk Clock I made - and have been making - for my son’s room.  After I cleaned out my backpack this weekend I found there is pretty much no more space in which to cram Geocache treasures we find, so I will need to come up with another way to use the items.  Not sure how yet.

Not all the items you see are McDonald's toys and Dollar Store trinkets.  A few of them are signature items that people actually sit down and craft like those you see below:

The first one (the blue beaded bauble) was made by KBear757, and other was made by Wife2Aviator. (There are others in the clock, too, like custom bottle cap art pieces that are unsigned).

Speaking of which, I noticed I was down to 3 cipher discs and 1 fish plaque (see sidebar on non-mobile devices).  I knew I would run out soon so I made these guys… Not sure what to call them.  Scrolls of Pretention +1, maybe?

The sixteen scrolls are all the same and they should fit into smaller caches than either the cipher discs or the fish do.  The poem is one I wrote and posted many years ago.  I originally wanted to do something with Wordles but the print was too small to tell what was going on so in the end I just aged the paper with wood stain and went this route.

But not all is sunshine and unicorns in Geocache-land.  Check this out:

I have seen a lot of careless (or planned, I guess...) damage to plant life (ruined topiaries, snapped branches, etc.), and I have seen one instance of a clue on a multi-cache being destroyed - clearly ripped to pieces and chucked into the woods - but I have never seen an overt threat like this before.  I wrote an email tonight to the owners of the cache asking what the story was.  If they respond, I will post what they say... if they are ok with me doing so, that is.  [Pre-Publish Edit:  Just got word from the CO that they have never seen that behavior before.  Usually, caches just go missing, SNAP!!! said. ]

One last thing: the little rook Travel Bug (sidebar) is still on the move but seems to have slowed down quite a bit on its trip to the castles of Scotland.  Still, it's pretty cool to see it "out there, somewhere".

[Another Pre-Publish Edit: Just got another email - this one from SEBWheeler saying that they found one of the Cipher Disks I placed in a cache a while back.  Good luck, guys!]

Short Term Good. Long Term Probably Not So Good.

And the winner of Person Least Likely to be Elected Father of the Year Ever Ever Ever for a stunning sixth consecutive time is... SnowUrchin, for his shocking role in "Hey, I Know a Great Way To Get My Sick Kid To Drink His Yucky Medicine".

Awards be hanged, I think it's funny to have the six-year-old to angrily shout out "Bistore!" to an imaginary crowd then mutter it again before downing the liquid and slamming the cup upside-down on the table triumphantly.

Some sources put the word as "Pistole!", and the Nepalese dictionary I checked out wasn't helpful, but the method works.  Your results may vary.

Atco Barometer Maintenance

One of the gifts I got for Christmas this year was this German-made Atco barometer.  Although I don’t recall talking about it, I guess I mentioned liking it to my father-in-law a while ago when I saw it in his attic.  He remembered my interest in it and decided to gift it to me this year.  His father gave it to him in the mid-1950s - it was a souvenir they picked up on a trip to Virginia Beach.  He wasn’t sure if the barometer still worked but remembered his father saying it was pretty good quality.  

I looked up the local pressure and saw that the unit was reading way too high.  While I was turning the altitude adjustment screw in the back I noticed the needle was very “hitch-y” - it was only by tapping on the glass while turning the screw could I get the needle where it needed to be.  Even then the barometer only tracked as pressure changed it I rapped the front of the unit once in a while.

I had never done maintenance on an aneroid barometer before so success wasn’t really certain, but the Internet says they occasionally (rarely, but still…) need to be oiled and, besides, this one had a couple of tiny dead bugs trapped inside - it was really just a matter of time before their carcasses gummed up the works in a way that wasn’t easily addressed.  The first step was to make sure I wasn’t about to destroy a rare antique.  A brief check of eBay said I had no worries on that score, but I still needed to be super careful that I didn’t mess up a six-decade-old happy memory.

I removed and cleaned the glass, bid farewell to the dead bugs and their ghosts, then carefully applied machine oil with a sewing needle to the mechanisms it made sense to oil (one of the movements was noticeably squeaky).  I did not clean the brightwork because I like the patina on this thing.  After reassembly I moved the altitude adjustment around a bit to work the oil in.

The barometer is not nearly as hitch-y as it was and it seems to track pretty well.  Siri tells me it is 30.49 inHg, and this unit is reading 30.48 inHg, but the real test will be seeing its behavior during the next storm.  Regardless, it looks cool in its cubby in my new desk next to the Newton Thermometer, so there is where it will stay.

Thank’s for the gift, dad-in-law!

Worst. Afterlife. Ever.

So there I was, having the time of my afterlife downing beers and shooting pool with Emperor Constantine when all of a sudden WHAM here I am on an assembly line spot checking steering gear assemblies.  I’m telling you, rookie, always… ALWAYS… read the fine print on all the crap HR gives you, don’t just sign it…

New Desk; Old Puzzle

I got a new desk for Christmas. It replaces the old one I built about five years ago. Other than being too small, there was nothing wrong with the other one and I didn't want to donate it just yet so it got moved to the Island of Misfit Toys (attic).

I love the new desk. In addition to the increased real estate it is a lot more cozy to sit at than the other one - you are less "at" the desk as so much as you are "in" it. It goes with the darker furniture in the room, it has lots of cubbies that hold cool looking/inspiring stuff (ammonite fossil, Robot Chicken robot, wooden El Cid (I guess) statue I picked up in Spain) and was pretty inexpensive since it was the floor model and the manufacturer had gone out of business. 

The down side to doing woodworking as a hobby it that no matter how well built some store-bought item like this is any sort of flaws in the manufacturing process sometimes really stand out. Outrageous markups also stand out, but not this time.

I had to bolster the mounts that held the top part of the desk to the bottom part because, one day, it will need to be moved to get to some cables or the cat will attempt a daring bookcase-to-desktop leap and the whole shebang would have slid out of place or have come crashing down altogether.    Also, there are no holes that allow for the use of power cords or data cables so I needed to make that modification as well, and is part of the reason my printer in on the floor to the right of the unit. This really annoys my wife so I will be building a matching printer stand in the near future. I will probably mount the stand to the desk to further stabilize everything. 

But, hey it's easy to nitpick and say "I could build something better than this". While that is certainly true in this case and I enjoy building stuff 1) I didn't need to spend actual time building it and 2) unlike the manufacturer, I could take my sweet time customizing one and not worry about needing to rip out, like, 200 of these a month to make payroll.  It's not really a fair comparison.  

I will miss the old desk a bit, but I can already tell this place is going to work out great. Speaking of the old one, it's probably a good idea to put this out there again: 

What is this?  Well, when I build stuff, I like to incorporate some sort of puzzle into whatever it is. Many times the puzzles go unsolved, unnoticed, or both.  That's cool.   The ones that are discovered, though, I put on my Secret Puzzle Page (link in sidebar - top of page on certain mobile devices) and I sometimes put out hints (I haven't done so in a very long time but they are in the same place).   This is the wooden plaque I mounted to the bottom of the old desk. Since the old desk is probably going to spend many years in the attic I thought I'd post this here as well. 

Good luck!