This morning, waiting for our weather to recognize that it was indeed spring and not still winter and stop for the love of god snowing, doodling to pass the time between cups of smooth imported coffee sent by one of my favorite ( read-generous with gifts ) minions ( I’m enjoying one can now, on the weekends, and will stash the other can which will either be enjoyed in the future as one of my last cups of java after imports have ceased or will be uncovered five hundred years in the future by archeologists trying to puzzle through why we weren’t using room temperature fusion to power our moving sidewalks as our cars zoomed through space between our office buildings ), I was penciling out how much money I was saving from the switch from cans of beer to bottles of vodka
for the wife’s continued inebriation. I’ve encountered these figures previously on the Internet as other folks have compared the cost of beer to hard liquor, as measured by cost per once of alcohol. I just couldn’t remember them, nor could I remember if they were current enough to account for the recent cost of energy and ore shortages. Obviously a twelve pack of aluminum cans takes far more energy to process than one plastic jug. As it turns out the vodka costs one half the cost of beer per volume of alcohol.*
But that isn’t what got me the most excited. Oh, I’m all tingly inside to be cutting my alcohol costs in half. Since that was included in my food bill ( as it should, the wife receiving most of her calories from booze ) it helps combating the rise in other costs. When meat goes up in price I just eat less of it. But things like flour doubling in cost, you can’t do anything but pay the piper. No, what got me excited was that once again, out of the blue and uncontrollable as always, I had a brain fart
. I’m all for religion as a personal tool. If it helps you deal, great for you. But it also has to be admitted that a lot of harm has been done through the ages by organized religion wetting its beak at the expense of others. Don’t even get me started. But I think one overlooked damage by religion has been its fight against Demon Rum
. By coloring the consumption of alcohol only in moral terms, by painting the drinkers in a negative light suggesting that they are mentally weak and physiologically damaged, are we missing a fundamental question? Is the consumption of alcohol a return-on-energy positive? I’m throwing this question out there with the understanding that I have no answers. But I was thinking, there has got to be another reason most folks drank constantly and heavily all throughout history. Besides wanting a buzz or needing to shield themselves from reality. Or even to purify contaminated water. If wood is scarce, rather than waste it by fermenting potatoes to kill water borne disease, wouldn’t it be easier to just not crap in the water? I understand germ theory is new, but cause and effect observations are as old as we were. Ancient man had no idea WHY alcohol was created, he just knew HOW. Same with contaminated water, surely.*
So, what other reason could there be to brew
and consume alcohol? If all scarce resources were husbanded by successful societies, why would a fuel scarce group brew booze? My theory, totally unanswerable due to my lack of research requiring resources I don’t have, is that there was less energy cost in turning grain into alcohol calories than into human feed calories. Did the fermentation process provide a multiplying effect? Sorry, once again my lack of hard sciences knowledge bites me in the ass. I could be wrong here, but it is an intriguing question. Okay, enough farting around. Time for today’s article which is another recent trend that could turn you around and take a huge bite out of your ass. The possibility of the disappearance of used plastic five gallon buckets
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I’m at one of my bakery pick-ups for the food bank the other day ( remember our talk about junk calories from sugar- I’m just as guilty pumping up my customer calories count in emergency food boxes, but increasing not substituting, with white flour and sugar ) and I get to talking to the manager. She wanted to know if we were interested in more from the store than just baked goods. I can also start collecting dairy and produce once the legal minions have covered the collected corporate backside. Cool, more food for us and more grant money for the boss to waste on back office activity. Everyone wins. Corporate profit increase ( sales down? Give to charity and get it back as a tax write off ), more slop for the trough feeders
, job security all around. But during the conversation it was mentioned that another way the company is saving money was by recycling plastic buckets. WOW!! Hold the horse, hoss. Full blown loyal minion alert news! Instead of throwing away ( or giving away, as concerns us ) poly buckets that the frosting and filling come in for the bakery, they are being sent back for recycling to recoup some costs. The semi pulls up, vomits out a load of processed food crap, loads up with recyclable material and brings them back. I don’t know if the buckets are washed and reused or chipped and remelted into plastic for a few bucks a ton. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that grocery store chain ( I won’t mention their name just in case I might get someone in trouble ) won’t be the source of used poly buckets for your cheap grain storage unit anymore. What if other chains start doing the same thing?*
If that starts to happen, you will be happy as a swine in slop
that you got all the cheap used poly buckets you could NOW. Even if you can’t afford to fill them now, they stack in each other and take little space to store. Do not delay. This could very well be yet another Diminishing Options moments. Remember when instant mashed potatoes 
used to be packed in metal cans at half the price as they are now in cardboard cans? Remember when Lee-Enfield’s
used to cost under $100? Remember when people weren’t living in used travel trailers
out of desperation and they sold cheap used? Remember when metal, oil, plastic, silver and copper were affordable? Remember when railroad ties were junk instead of Yuppie renovator high priced decoration? When it becomes cheaper to recycle than replace, the throw away society is dead. You will not be able to live or prep as cheaply. Avoid the rush to more expensive and act now.END
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17 comments:
It's already started. We used to get buckets from Walmart. My hubs would walk up to the bakery in his sharpest jack-booted thug uniform and the skittish ladies would hand over the buckets with a smile. Last time, a surly manager said "no more! We are supposed to recycle these." Now the bakery in town wants $1 for a bucket. I liked free better.
Organized religion is against alcohol consumption?
Someone ought to inform the largest denomination of Christianity about that--I hear that they make their followers drink wine at every Mass....
I work at the largest bakery in 5 states and we are recycling ALL buckets and barrels. We are charged a deposit for all the 5 gallon buckets and barrels which are recycled at the suppliers end. They wash and clean them then refill them and send them back out. It just became common about the first of the year.
The Kid
An alternative source is available: Used Cat Litter buckets. HDPE, holds 30 pounds, Square, so you can stack them in less space. I use the Value Time Brand myself, because they are solid white. Yes, they're a liittle smaller, but that makes them easier to carry. Put in your favorite Mylar Bags, 02 absorbers, and Bob's your Uncle.
As for the Beer, it seems than when the Pharaohs set up their Sheeple Submission Society, it was easier to feed the masses a Beer-Like Drink made of Wheat rather than tons of Bread. Think of a Liquid Diet. Plus, who likes to tend a Hot Oven in the Sahara with its lack of wood resources to fire up the ovens? And, it turns out, that some of it got old, and started to ferment, and it didn't taste too bad, and it's wet and it's hot and your muscles are sore from moving 5 ton blocks up ramps all day...So it spread from there.
Hope this helps.
We're big fans of the National Parks, and visit whenever we're in the area of one. Relevant to this discussion, the Ohio valley to the East coast shipping route via canals enabled Ohio valley farmers to ship their goods (mostly corn) back to the East coast, and the most "concentrated" way to do so was to make barrels of corn liquor. You can ship many bushels of corn in one barrel of corn liquor---so, could "demon rum" throughout the ages be as simple as a more concentrated way to ship trade goods? Once the actual need for the grain itself (for flour, etc) was satisfied, of course.
Non-fermented alcohol was mixed with the water to make the water safe. If you look at the Greek urns, they had one type for the concentrated wine mix and the other (larger one with wider top) for mixing with the water.
Alcohol is more transportable and stores more easily than grains. If you are in an area that has no rail or water transport this is a particularly important consideration if you want to use at least some of your crop as a cash crop.
I have been told by people who have gotten into it, that home brewing is not a great way to save money. However, learning the techniques would have obvious uses.
Vodka has been a popular drink for the thoughtful hard drinker. It was originally sold as the "breathless" alcohol (1920s?). If you have ever been around a heavy beer or whiskey drinker the day after a binge, you know that they reek of the stuff as it comes out of their pores. Vodka does not have this issue.
I paid $29.00 for a Model 98 Mauser, 8mm in 1950. Got it from Sears. Still got it. Much better than the poodle popper crap the yuppies keep fondling. Oil was 75 cents the barrel in 1947. Didn't reach $2.00 until 1962, but in them years silver still backed paper.
Mountain Rifleman
A note on recycling. A month or so ago our local recycling center would only take Delta marked 1 & 2 plastic. Now they take any plastic item marked with a Delta, any number. I thought this Info goes along with Jim's bucket observation.
Regarding plastic buckets - same goes for used plastic 55 gallon drums. Cheap and available now, but once recycling takes hold, not so much probably. Come the revolution, they will be scarce as hens teeth, just like buckets and Mason jars.
I've fallen in love with those big beautiful blue suckers recently and pick a couple up every few weeks even though I don't need them. They are very versatile. Been making raised gardens out of them, water barrels, composters, water filters, you name it.
"Give beer to those who are perishing, wine to those who are in anguish; let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more".
Proverbs 31:6-7
Yes, Christ's church has always had plenty of Pharisees who make up their own sanctimonious 'laws'. I tell them that Jesus turned water into wine, not the other way around. Interesting to note that he picked almost exclusively only poor white trash for his disciples. My kind of guy.
The poly bucket concerns reminds me of something that has really rung true to me. If you buy some commodity (e.g., food, guns, ammo, etc.), don't worry too much if you "overpaid" at the time you bought. Sure, you may have done a bit better if you had timed things just right or found a free source, but once you own the commodity, you own it (assuming you did not use credit).
I bought most of the buckets I use for storage. It may seem dumb to have paid $2.50 for something I could have gotten for free with some legwork, but at this point, who cares? What is important is that I own about 150 5-gallon buckets.
In regards to alcohol - I used to work in a soul killing call center job for an unpleasable piece of shit boss. The stress level in the call center was so bad that people held discussions about what to do when the "gone postal" employee came in to kill them all. I drank 4 beers every night after work. After 4 beers your life does not seem so useless and you can get some sleep to repeat the cycle. Alcohol at night and coffee in the morning kept the call centers running, until they moved offshore. I have read that Glasgow Scotland was a big steel manufacturer many years ago. The steel mill owners were upset by the number of hungover employees so they reduced the alcohol content of beer and stout. the employees rioted and shut down the mills. Then as now, the management did not have a Fucking clue Hail Darwin
You can't even get BANANA BOXES any more. Those, the swap-meeter's standard container of choice, and durable enough to last YEARS if cares for halfway decently, are now almost unobtainium.
This is all part of the gradual squeezedown.
I did some recycling today. Got my picture taken, and drivers' license Xeroxed, because I had some old house type wire in my wire bin. It was stuff I pulled out of a Dumpter 2 years ago, and never had a use for. There are that many desperate people out there, that will pull the wire out of a house.
In my experience with learning about brewing/homebrewing, the likely reason we fermented is as a preservation technique. Heating the grains helps to break them down to simpler sugars which yeast can digest to make alcohol which inhibits the growth of spoilage bacteria and fungus to some degree. In the middle ages if you had some questionable grain, you could grind it up throw it in a pot, heat it then seed it with yeast, and set it aside covered for a couple of weeks. The calories would be saved from going to waste a little longer.
I am not concerned about radiation from Japan finding its way to the Mohave but paying for buckets! Great Balls of Fire now that's worth getting worked up over.
religion hates alcohol because alcohol works way better than the holy spirit. It is quicker, cheaper and doesn't require you to throw what little self-esteem you have in the crapper.
I try not to miss a day of heavy drinking and I smell delightful. I smell guilt free.
I don't argue with religious people. Even if I convince you that you are wrong, you still are a dumb and boring person who I don't want to know.
I am taking the news about the buckets so badly I am going to drink now.
the rat
The loss of human usable K calories from fermenting barley into beer is right around 25%. Meaning if you have a million calories worth of barley and turn it into beer you'll have 750,000 calories worth of beer.
Besides beer you also end up with spent malt which can be used as animal feed.
The latest issue of Backwoodsman magazine has a great article about brewing hard cider with about a 14 percent alcohol content for cheap. Maybe you could keep the wife happy with cheap hard cider for less than liquors? Also, there are several internet recipes for a Finnish sugar wine called Kilju which uses only, water, white sugar, and yeast. Brew your own and get high while screwing the tax man :-)
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