31% Trapped Trappist

I recently began exploring Trappist beers and in a previous post I mentioned that I home brewed a clone of Orval with my own recipe. I am determined to try at least one beer from each of the 7 Authentic Trappist breweries. It worked out nicely that I received some Trappist beers for Christmas. Here is the tally of how many I have tried of each brand(B=Belgium, NL=Netherlands).

• 3/3 - Chimay (B)
• 1/1 - Orval (B)
  
• 1/3 - Rochefort (B)
  
• 1/2 - Westmalle (B)
• 0/4 - Achel (B)
  
• 0/6 - La Trappe (NL)
  
• 0/3 - Westvleteren (B)
  

Unless I am wrong, and I am never wrong,¹ I am at less than 32% of optimum. This is too low but I have hope for the future. Some of these can only be obtained directly from the Abbey breweries which will necessitate a Belgian adventure. Check out the International Trappist Association for information on these beers (and other Trappist products). There are even tasting guides for some of them.

PSA: The monks at Westvleteren (pictured above) have made it clear that their beer should only be purchased directly from them but some unscrupulous beer profiteers send incognito buyers to the Abbey and resell at a huge profit. The Abbey doesn't have the resources to control its distribution so don't add to the problem. Do not buy gray market beer. If you do the Flying Spaghetti Monster will curse you with a barley allergy giving you hives and terrible diarrhea.<sup>2

1</sup> I am wrong most of the time.
² If this happens I can recommend a good allergist in the Seattle area.

Followup: Grand Rip Railroad

Well the grand digital migration is nearly done. There are only a few CDs in odd places that need to be converted. I didn't have any problems converting with one exception. Tool's first full length album Undertow. If an indie movie were made of my life at least one song on this album would have to be featured as part of my coming of age music.

This album is so badass that I couldn't rip a single song without manual intervention. Some songs crashed the ripper while others confounded the MP3 encoder. I guess that even software 16 years younger than Undertow can't handle the hardcore-ness that is Tool.

Grand Rip Railroad

Recently, our Director here at French-Harrison Consolidated Living Corporation (my wife) went to our Deputy Director of Research and Development(me) with a new initiative: reduce the numerous, unsightly and hard to access compact music discs scattered about our headquarters (our house). The Deputy Director suggested we digitize all this hard media into a more accessible form such as MP3. That is when the Deputy Director of Information Technology(me again) was called in and tasked with sifting through and converting hundreds of songs to MP3s and then organizing them on the networked media server.

Making this even more painful was the fact that a major portion had already been converted in an shamefully ad hoc manner; some were in OGG, some in MP4, many in MP3 format with depressingly low bit rates. All these had to be reconverted to the new standard. To speed things up 3 optical drives were requisitioned and installed in a machine for parallel conversion. Despite 3 conversion pipelines this turned into major time commitment.

I love technology, but not as much as you(music), you see... But I STILL love technology... Always and forever.