An exploration of ultracoffee, radiation safety, and more often than not a beer or two.
Now in our third day in the Rose City and the stats are pleasing. Beers consumed: 6 delicious imperial pints and counting Black Blood of the Earth Distrributed to Portlanders: 2.5L and counting Hours slept: not enough, but that’s the cost of fun. To the folks at the Lucky Devil, McMennamins Imbrie Hall, and Deschutes …
Continue reading “SCIENTIFIC DRINKING WORLD TOUR 2010 – Portland, OR”
To celebrate the nuptials of Jessica Johnson and Royal Hebert, joining together in a configuration no Transformer can defeat, I will be bringing a truly obscene amount of BBotE and a few extra steins. People of Portland…now is the time for your handoff!
Behold the 1L, 750ml, and 375ml bottles in all their labeled glory! Many thanks to the artist, Erin Hall, who created the erupting Mt. Caffeination and did the much more arduous template design to make things fit on the different bottle sizes. It is important for a man to be able to admit the things …
Okay, how did Black Blood of the Earth happen? Or skip my blather and go look at the goods! THE COLLEGE YEARS At some point, all of us start wondering how much coffee we can drink before our hearts explode. This typically happens when we are up, very late, in college with either the panic of …
Alas, I managed to break things in the most recent WordPress update, lost the operability of this tool, and do not have the patience to fix it. Drop me an email at funranium [at] gmail and we’ll take it from there. -Phil
THE STEINS OF SCIENCE: Available here on this website and on the associated Etsy for expensive, though reasonable, prices. (Note: I have not gone mad, the pictures from the Gallery of Steinwielders were removed during site migration and will return with more as we take them) Once upon a time, I was a cryogenics technician for …
For the week of April 1st, I chose to revisit an old favorite that had met with good reviews, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. Previous iterations of Yirgacheffe BBotE had been described as pleasantly earthy with peanut overtones, but this time came out different. In fact, there was a strong gender based difference in opinion on the flavor …
Continue reading “BBotE Update: The Lost Ethiopian Post & Guatemala”
I was going to try to recreate the post I made on 4/7/10 before communist fifth columnists who hate freedom destroyed it, but under the conditions of exceptional insobriety courtesy of the nice people at the St. George Distillery that’s not going to happen. They have just held a release party for the Firelit coffee …
Following a three week countertop exposure of Kona BBotE at room temperature in sealed bottles, the verdict is in: Black Blood of the Earth can survive shipping without prohibitive cold packaging. I did testing with both air in the headspace of the bottle and with carbon dioxide. A future test with nitrogen may need to …
A minimal jargon explanation, by Herr Direktor Funranium. Written while consuming a carbonated, no H2O Manhattan. Standards of insobriety, with corresponding misspellings and grammatical errors, are being upheld. The stupid simple, “Go away, yer botherin’ me, boy” explanation of how a dewar works is that it’s like a really, really good scientific-grade Thermos(TM). The average …
Herr Direktor Funranium is the after hours mad science alter-ego of the theoretically mild mannered health physicist, Phil Broughton. By day, I work in radiation safety as a health physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. My normal duties have an emphasis on radiation producing machines, radiation detection instrumentation, and (unofficially) the weird stuff you …
Coffee Science is a forever advancing field. Like other disciplines, it comes in fits and starts, though this could be due to caffeine. Even more important is the role of happenstance in the advancement in the body of human knowledge; the headscratching declaration of “Huh, well, that wasn’t supposed to happen.” This last Sunday, I …