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In January, I wrote about the “Green2Steam” mad-scientist tea party that Randy, Eric, Harold and I had at Harold’s studio: “Like a tea party. With fire. For MANS!“.

Eight months to the day later, Jim and Ellen hosted a second version of the “let’s make the most complicated cup of coffee possible” party on their deck. Eric and Sue roasted beans in his custom-built hot-air roaster. Harold Ross brought his hand-crank grinder and a freestanding clamp stand, so we could mount my siphon brewer over a white-gas coleman stove. Randy cranked. Andy Rodriguez’ friend Lana stirred the “upstairs” siphon precisely four times without touching the side of the siphon. There was a mountain of scones! Pots of eggs! Fresh homemade kombucha, waiting in never-been-opened bottles that might explode! All in all, I had one HELL of a time.

Fueled by three cups of freshly-roasted rocket fuel and Ellen’s elderberry kombucha, Chris Young made this fantastic video of the morning’s event!

Thanks very much to everyone that came. Parties where we do something are my favorite kind of party. Especially when that something is as complicated as possible. Maybe we can have Green2Steam III at Seven Stars Farm, and milk the cream for the coffee ourselves!

Oliver even came up with an official “Green2Steam” logo, since making logos and domain names is the twenty-first-century equivalent of doodling band names on the canvas cover of your three-ring notebook. So I’ll make some Green2Steam T-shirts, and some Green2Steam coffee mugs. I’ll also order some more siphon brewer parts, since the siphon bulb cracked from the lava-like heat of the Coleman stove that we put under it.

Once we’re up and running, we’ll do this again — follow @green2steam on Twitter if you’d like to find out about the next one!

Last week, we showed “The Great Outdoors” at Northbrook Canoe Company, with special celebrity guest, my high-school friend Chris Young.

We had a really, really wonderful time — highlights for me were the NINETY-SIX OUNCE STEAK(!!!) that Mary Bigham of West Chester Dish brought and grilled, as well as the old ninety-sixer eating competition, where we weighed each team on Northbrook’s old feedlot truck scale before and after dinner, seeing which team could come the closest to gaining exactly ninety-six ounces.

Break.com content producer Sam Greenspan and his colleague Matt came out from Los Angeles to see the show, shoot some footage, and ride around in a Shoei Rebel motorcycle helmet.

Here’s the piece they just put live on the break.com site (embed below):

Lydia and I were looking at videos of her from when she was a baby, and we came across this:

THIS IS MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME.

Kate, Lydia, and I are back in West Chester after a week on 15th Street in Avalon, New Jersey. Our friends Jonathan and Francine had the house next door with their two daughters, who Lydia describes as HER BEST FRIENDS IN THE WHOLE WORLD.

We had a wonderful, restful week. Highlights: trips to Storybook Land, where we saw an outdoor North Pole actually made of ice, and some ILLEGAL HIGH-PERFORMANCE SURREY RACING:

Kate’s brother Matt and I were TOTALLY in the lead with the yellow surrey. So far, in fact, that we decided to get out, stretch elaborately, and take a nap by the side of the road, at which point the mommies pedaling the girls came up from behind totally unexpectedly and passed us. Man, were we surprised and angry about that! I think Matt may even have taken off his captain’s hat and beat me with it, before we climbed back into the yellow surrey and pedaled as fast as we could to catch up.

Except that for some reason, our pedals kept reversing, leaving us puffing and blowing as our frantic efforts got us nowhere. Man, I tell you what, I absolutely do not understand how we lost that race to the mommies. It just defies explanation.

I’ve only got a little bit of the post-vacation blues to deal with. We had a really nice time.

Jack Renaud, the producer for the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric, called me this afternoon to let me know that the piece he put together on Guerilla Drive-Ins was probably going to air tonight. That was really nice of him; I didn’t know that Big Powerful TV News Producers did that. I suspect they usually don’t, and that Jack is just particularly friendly. Anyhow, thanks to him, I was able to get the word out, and TiVo the story! Here it is:

Hurrah, we’re all rich and famous now!

You might remember that when we wandered into Iron Hill a few days ago to watch Larry and Jean pour barley into the enormous copper “Mash tun”, Kate spotted a big pile of woven plastic grain sacks used to bring specialty grains over: “Munich Malt, Type 1”, they say in bold, no-nonsense sans-serif fonts. “Brau-,Röst- und Caramelmalzfabrik, gegründet 1879”. In some cases, these bags are marked with numbers identifying the farm the barley came from.

Kate wanted to try cutting up the strong plastic and stitching it into a bag. Which she did. And I think it turned out GREAT:

I think this idea has legs — the bags are strong, the graphics are big, bold, and interesting, and the whole thing is locally sourced. The material is number five plastic. Jean and Larry would have recycled them, but now they get to be bags, and THEN get recycled. Plus, THEY SMELL REALLY GOOD, believe it or not, with a kind of a grain-y smell from the malted barley they held.

So what’s the next step? Why, a WEB STORE, of course! Kate came up with the name “Last Call Bags“, which will be a web store with a big, beautiful picture and a “buy now” button.

And where do you go in West Chester when you need a big, beautiful picture? To Harold Ross, who uses a “painting with light” technique that is just the thing for capturing the wrinkly texture of a grain sack. Harold sets up the shot, then plunges his whole studio into darkness, then opens a shutter and waves a fiber-optic wand over the subject while a metronome goes “BEEP BEEP BEEP” in the background, allowing him to count how much light he’s putting where.

Harold takes a bunch of different exposures — some straightforward, some with hard side light to bring out texture, some with just the background illuminated so he can “punch” the subject off the background later without nine hours of bezier-tool craziness — then he assembles them all on a Cintiq tablet, sandwiching all the exposures and “painting” masks to bring one layer up and another down. Making edges crisper here, and smoother there, and generally polishing the image until it looks hyper-real, but not quite like CG.

Here’s how the photo of the bags turned out!

Kate’s friend Ericka is on board, and they now have a formidable pile of awesome bags from cool corners of the beer-brewing world. In addition to the great big Weyermann logo, my favorites are “Thos. Fawcett & Sons Ltd: MALTSTERS”, and the big stamped word “CHOCOLATE MALT”. Kate and Ericka are prototyping the bags. I want to pester them for a motorcycle-helmet bag and some BMW hard-case liners, but I think I should leave them alone to perfect the tote bag first.

UPDATE: The store is now open, hurrah! You can buy a bag for $12.00 at lastcallbags.com!

I got the idea for the West Chester Guerilla Drive-In from an article Kate showed me in ReadyMade Magazine in, maybe, 2001. The story was about a bunch of crazy anarchists in Santa Cruz that were trying to take back corporate brownfield space by showing movies in it, making community happen in it.. you know, doing people stuff in it, rather than just allowing it to be fenced off and barricaded away.

The Santa Cruz group are anarchists in the best sense of the word — they’re thoughtful, sincere, and not afraid to be blunt. My Guerilla Drive-In group is more of an “adventure movie club”, but they’ve got more of a confrontational Abbie Hoffman vibe — Rico Thunder, one of the group’s organizers, has a “Fuck the MPAA” tattoo that he’s not afraid to show (and will be featured in the CBS Evening News story about the Guerilla Drive-In movement, if they ever get around to airing it.

Rico (whose real name is Wes Modes) and I became e-mail friends after I sent them a mash note about how great their group was, and I started my own GDI. We get mentioned in the same newspaper articles, and when new GDI groups start to organize, Rico and I usually provide a spectrum of views for the new projectionists to select from:

• John: “If you want to be perfectly legal and above-board, here’s how you go about purchasing a non-theatrical license.”
• Rico: “Licenses? Fuck that shit!”

I’m not being sarcastic, here: between my “Render unto Caesar” .com vibe and Rico’s “Don’t suffer bad laws to stand” .org vibe, I think we’ve got both shoulders covered, providing balance.

But I’m not writing this to talk about the Guerilla Drive-In, I am writing to talk about what an UTTER BADASS Rico and his friends are. Each year for (about four?) years, now, they have made a Punk Rafting trip, which consists of traveling to a campsite, building rafts out of truck tubes and found objects, and then FLOATING THAT SHIT DOWN THE RIVER for two weeks. It’s the Mad Max version of boating. It’s unbelievably awesome. Rico is my hero.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been following Rico’s sporadic updates posted from his mobile phone to Twitter: “Raft hit a snag, we almost died”, etc.

I love how the rafts look like Conestoga wagons from the outsides when they have all theiir sun shades up. And from the inside, too! Here’s Rico perched on the couch on his raft. I think his raft was one of four or five on the trip:

On the photoset (click any picture to go to this year’s pictures), you can see them putting holes in the plywood with a brace and bit, in order to lash the rafts together. This is FANTASTIC stuff.

I just finished reading The Road to Woodstock, written by Michael Lang. His book drove home that the festival was made up of .01% True Countercultural Icons, like Wavy Gravy and the Hog Farm folks, and 99.99% Fellow Travelers; nice suburban kids that had come out for the show. This is not a bad thing, of course; if everyone was a Hog Farmer or an Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, all of us would be in Big Trouble.

But I feel like I know a True Countercultural Icon in Rico Thunder, and I’m immeasurably impressed by what he’s got going on, out there in Santa Cruz. Rico, congratulations on surviving another raft trip! I’m glad that you take this stuff seriously, and I’m quite sure that one day, I will tell my grandchildren: “Rico Thunder? Hell, yeah, I knew that guy back in the day!”

Coworkout is like the Guerilla Drive-In, except with cubicles. We pack our laptops and an EvDO-to-WiFi repeater, put a catenary shade tarp in the sidecar, and go do our programming work at interesting locations outdoors around Philadelphia, like Fort Mifflin and Shofuso.

Last Friday, we held Coworkout at the Lanchester Scenic Overlook, which is a beautiful, grassy hill eleven hundred feet above the Conestoga and Brandywine valleys. The breezes blow, the hawks soar past at eye level and the windmill above our heads spins, generating the electricity that we used to power our computers:

Ahh, what a beautiful spot! What a pastoral idyll! Did I mention that sheep gambol across the grass, cropping it neatly? That birds sing in the undergrowth? That on the other hill, giant machines frolic, pushing hills of waste into position, then crushing those hills mercilessly underneath inexorable spiked steel wheels?

The Scenic Overlook is a finished landfill. Below the grass is six feet of soil, which covers an impermeable clay cap. Below that is years of solid waste, decomposing deep underneath the ground as anaerobic bacteria works on it. Every few hundred feet, perforated pipes are driven deep into the hill, through the cap, and methane gas is collected and sent down the hill. There, some of the gas is used to fuel an enormous natural-gas generator and turned into electricity, which is then pushed into the grid.

Some of the gas is sold directly to factories, who use it for power. For instance, when we were there, we saw on a display screen exactly how many BTUs of methane gas were currently being piped to the generator at a plant that makes Taco Bell cheese.

We learned all this from Lanchester’s executive director Bob Watts, who took us in his big, black hybrid SUV all around the operation. During the VIP tour, we learned all sorts of amazing things, like:

• The twenty-foot tall fences surrounding the active landfill that look like electrified zombie-incursion barriers are actually to catch plastic shopping bags before they can blow away down to the farms below. The fences are made from commercial fishing nets strung on tall poles.
• Regulations require that the active bit of the landfill (where the trash is actually dumped each day) must be covered every night. A big part of a landfill director’s job is finding stuff to cover the area. Soil is too precious and expensive. Chemical foam doesn’t last. Giant, bulldozer-deployed tarps are often used. However, if you happen to have ten thousand tons of kiln ash or even (get this!) a hill of shredded cars, that’s like catnip to landfill operators. They love finding that stuff to spread on their hills.
• Everything is money to a landfill. Trucks pay tipping fees to drop off their trash — we saw a big compression truck dumping a load, for which they’d pay maybe six hundred dollars. Then the landfill is capped and used to generate electritity. Shipping pallets are shredded, dyed, and sold as hardwood mulch. Everything that comes in to the landfill is turned into (at least a little bit) of money
• Many counties pay to operate their landfill, but Lanchester actually pays the county. Bob wanted me to be sure to mention that they just wrote a check for half a million dollars to Chester County!

During the tour of the active hill, a garbage truck backed up, lifted its tail, revved its hydraulics, and started pushing out its load. The driver rolled down the window, leaned out, and threw his Dunkin Donuts bag directly on the ground. “Hey!” we all looked at each other for a moment: “That dude is totally litter-… oh.”

My favorite part of the day was when Chris Young brought and hooked up his Commodore 64 — not an emulator, an actual, by-God Commodore 64 that’s been in his mom’s closet for years and years — to the windmill power supply and fired it up, loading Summer Games from the 1541 floppy-disk drive. IT WORKED!

Back in the eighties, before becoming a producer, Chris played Bryce Lynch, the teenage-nerd inventor of Max Headroom, which as far as I’m concerned is one of the most important seminal cyberpunk roles out there. So having Bryce Lynch up there, hacking on his antique computer and CRT, USING METHANE POWER, OUTDOORS, in something that’s arguably close to an APOCALYPTIC WASTELAND? That’s about as close as it’s possible to get to cyberpunk in real life. Sheesh! I’m amazed we didn’t all come home with spiky mohawks, laser goggles, and motorcycle-tire epaulets.

I’m grateful to Bob Watts for the tour. Lanchester is an interesting and amazing place, and if you want to learn about the waste chain, which is pretty damn short (your trash bag -> a truck -> the top of a hill in Honeybrook), and you want to see all sorts of amazing ways that Lanchester is trying to extract value from their waste, then by all means give them a call!

This morning, as we were getting coffee on Market street before going to the office, Kate and I noticed that the door was open at the Iron Hill brewery, steam was rising off the giant copper kettle, and something was being poured from a spout in the ceiling. So we stuck our head in.

Now, a friendly local microbrewery doesn’t mind if you wander through the open door with your morning coffee and ask "Hey, what are you guys doing today?"

A REALLY friendly local microbrewery lets you climb up on the ladder, stand on the platform, and look down into the hot kettle.

An AWESOME local microbrewery lets you stir the mash and make a pirate face, then takes a picture of you doing it with your own iPhone:

 

I’m standing on a stainless-steel platform about five feet up, stirring barley as it’s poured into the brew kettle using a long auger that brings the ground grains from the grinder all the way in the back of the building (those augers usually move chickenfeed!)

I know there’s a correct name for what’s in the kettle: "Mash?" "Kibble?" "Proto-beer?"

Anyway, it looks and smells like oatmeal. Which is, I guess, because that’s exactly what it is (except with barley instead of oats!)

Larry Horwitz, Iron Hill’s friendly brewer pictured in my last blog post, says they’re making about 300 gallons of Hefeweizen in this tank.

It’s really cool seeing this beer being made. The kettle is huge, of course, but inside, it’s just, you know… food! There’s a really normal kitchen vibe — “Oh, yeah, that’s just barley! I’d eat that!” Kate and I are going to have to come back and try the beer sampler again.

While we were in the back looking at the barley grinder on our impromptu tour, Kate spotted a bunch of big woven-plastic sacks. “Oh yeah!” said Larry. “We go through about 100 of those a month. Do you want to take one with you?”

I can’t wait to see what Kate sews up with this graphically bold German sack.

Look out fellows, we’re all gonna be ETSY MILLIONAIRES! 🙂

As Kate, Randy, and I were walking past Iron Hill to get some lunch at Salad Works, I saw a couple of silver kegs lying on their side in Iron Hill’s window. The kegs had rubber, uh… well, I guess, rubber bungs in them. Hoses threaded out through the bungs, with the other end submerged in a plastic pail. Bubbles occasionally popped up through the water.

It looked a little bit like the setup we used to make jug wine in college (and in prison, of course.)

Just then, a fellow walked by holding a pair of long green rubber gloves; I asked him if he was making beer, and he said “Yes! This one (pointing to the keg) is with a pretty weird, funky yeast, so we’re trying a small batch. It has… farmyard notes.” He gestured to the enormous silver tanks filling up the rest of the long, tiled room on the other side of the window. “We don’t want to try making THAT much beer with this yeast.”

It turns out that I was talking to Jean, one of the full-time brewmasters at Iron Hill. We asked if he would show us the inside, and he was happy to take us in. Inside was like a cross between a swimming-pool pump room (with all the big flexible hoses), a sailing ship’s tweendecks (with the ladders going up and down), and a production bakery (with the big sacks of grain.) We got to see pressure casks for holding yeast, the great big filters (pictured) for straining sediment, lots of various banjo valves for removing beer and drawing off yeast starter, and ladders leading up to great big enormous copper kettles where the beer (wort? tun?) is cooked until it’s ready to ferment.

We asked about the big smokestack coming off the copper kettles, leading through the roof — did that make the funky smells that we sometimes get at the corner of Gay and High? Yes! And he pointed out that a lot of people get concerned because “it smells so nasty” — but actually that’s a good thing, because what you’re smelling is what’s LEAVING the beer. There’s an important life lesson there, somewhere.

I had never really given too much thought to the great big kettles in Iron Hill’s window, but now I’m totally motivated to go DRINK SOME BEER! It was really cool meeting guys whose job it is to turn sacks of grain, batches of yeast, and big sixty-gallon bottles of oxygen into the beer you can drink just five feet away. You also can see Larry and Jean and more Beer Science on Iron Hill West Chester’s blog

Previous reasons why you should move to West Chester:

• #4: Northbrook Canoe Company
• #3: Secret Mobile Robotic Pipe Organs
• #2: Rescue robots
• #1: Secret Skate Parks and Awesome Tack Shops
• …and many more reasons still to come.