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Re: CB's Patreon and entertainment for you!

Take note! My Patreon Patrons are getting excerpts from my new novel as I work on it.

Re: Adventures in bourbon - Bottled in Bond

Living as close to the bourbon trail as I do, it's rare that I learn something new about bourbon. Today I learned something new. Thanks Bobby.

GHoosdum

Adventures in bourbon - Bottled in Bond

Whiskey is awesome, and I wanted to share some of my recent journey into the distilled beverage with 'yall.

Recently I've been digging more into the world of bourbon, and man, there's some great stuff to discover. As a whiskey fan for a long time, I often find myself shelling out for top shelf, rare and expensive whiskies, particularly in the Irish Whiskey and Bourbon categories. And while these whiskies are always awesome, I've begun wondering if I've been missing out on any hidden gems that might be considered "lower" tier.

Enter Bottled in Bond, the bottom shelf bourbon you had no idea you should be drinking.

I stumbled upon Bottled in Bond when I read a bunch of rants from the whiskey punk scene. Drinkers were pissed that Jim Beam, a massive brand in its own right, had raised prices across their large portfolio of distilled beverages. One of the top complaints was in regards to Old Grand Dad Bottled in Bond (BiB). Old Grand Dad, to me, was the "unemployment whiskey", aka this stuff sucks but it's only $15 a bottle so whatever I'll buy it. This led me to research BiB.

Here's a quick primer on BiB. Introduced in 1897, the Bottled in Bond Act was put in place to protect whiskey drinkers. See, back in those days, it wasn't difficult for any random person to distill and sell whatever they want under the label of whiskey. As a popular alcoholic beverage of early America, it wasn't uncommon to find... unfavorable beverages being sold side by side with some of the legendary distillers that still exist today (like Beam). You might walk into a bar to buy a bottle of whiskey labeled as "Straight bourbon whiskey", only to find out it's mostly colored water, or worse - something legitimately harmful such as paint thinner plus a little coloring.

The Bottle in Bond Act set to standardize bourbon whiskey in America, both for the protection of the consumer, and to legitimize the beverage as a pure product of American craftsmanship. The requirements are as follows:

The liquor must be the product of one distillation season.
It must be made by one distiller.
It must be made at one distillery.
It must be aged, for at least four years, at a federally bonded barrel aging warehouse.
It must be bottled at 100 proof (50% ABV).

The bottle's label must identify all of the above before a whiskey can be sold under the label of BiB. The cool thing? This federal label is still in act today, and you can go out and buy Bottled in Bond bourbon at most bottle shops near you. Most modern distilleries don't bother with BiB labeling, as it can be costly and annoying to produce. However, there are still quite a few BiB whiskies to choose from, made by names such as Jim Beam, Old Granddad, Rittenhouse, and Old Forester.

You might wonder to yourself "so what? Why would I care about BiB when I can buy Two James Grass Widow?" There are a few reasons, and most of which favor the budget and adventurous bourbon seekers.

Firstly, it's important to note the 100 proof requirement for BiB bourbons. Most bourbons will be bottled at 60-80 proof, which will give you a light, watered down flavor. By picking up a BiB bourbon, you can guarantee yourself a big and intense flavor, most of which that will be very clear examples of what makes bourbon whiskey great - a sweet flavor of corn, rye, and heat.

Because of the intensity of these flavors, BiB whiskey makes for EXCELLENT cocktail bourbon. In fact, a well-kept secret is that most bartenders prefer to stick to BiB whiskey for all of their cocktail mixing (specifically rye-forward variants), because they impart huge flavor without the need of using a ton of whiskey from the bottle. That, and they're typically super cheap.

The price really is a shock with these whiskies. Most BiB bourbons found today can be purchased between 20-30 dollars. You've probably seen them, sitting on the bottom shelf of a whiskey isle, gathering dust. BiB bourbon has long been considered a hidden secret for bourbon lovers, and I'm only now beginning to understand why - they're delicious and a great bang for the buck.

Ultimately though, BiB whiskey is great because you're guaranteed to know what's in that bottle. Sure, we live in a world where we're not about to be duped by some punk selling paint thinner in a bottle. That being said, you don't always know where the whiskey actually comes from, or what the age statement actually is. When you buy Bottled in Bond whiskey, you know exactly what's gone into that bottle. That kind of transparency is pretty neat.

Here's a great article on Paste about Bottle in Bond, including a list of some of the best currently available Bottled in Bond brands. If you're a discerning bourbon drinker and are even the slightest bit curious, give some of these a shot (I'm sipping on Old Granddad BiB right now!). You might be surprised what you'll find in those dusty, ignored bottles.

UPSLynx

Re: What are you listening to?

Kwitko

Ryzen Motherboards Hype

I just read an article on Ars Technica UK about the Ryzen Hype Train. They quoted Robert Hallock in the article, @Thrax I presume? I felt a warm glow when I read his name .

"A lot of processors have pre-programmed clock speed voltage tables," explained AMD's Robert Hallock at CES. "We don't. This is very algorithmic. We analyse power consumption limits, thermal limits, silicon utilisation limits, and out of that boundary, if none of those limits are being met, you can just keep raising clock speed until one of them is. Then you level off the boost and then try to sustain it as long as possible. The system is smart enough to know what's going on inside itself, and adaptive enough to prevent sudden drops in clock speeds."

"There are a lot of discussions going on," says Hallock. "We're capturing the feedback. We wanna take share, we wanna be the best price/performance option, we wanna be the first on people's minds. That's part of the bounding box for pricing discussions as well as paying off the R&D investment... We're looking at what Intel does—and we're not gonna do that. We think people want the choice, and need the choice. The market needs the choice—hopefully we can turn it around."

CyrixInstead

Raid Summary 01/23/2017 NIGHTHOLD 9/10 already!

Wow! Massive progress in DAY ONE of Nighthold raiding for the guild. Between Sunday and Monday we plowed through 9 of the 10 Nighthold bosses. So many people got gear upgrades and we got some practice in on Gul'dan before having to call it a night.

We got the REALM 68th kill of N Ellisande, 84th of Tel'Arn, 82nd of Star Augur, and 99th of Tichondrius. We broke under-10000 WORLD kill for Ellisande as we were the 9177th guild in the entire game to kill her.

On a side note: We did it again: Beat a hard boss before the nerf. We nailed the Botanist Tel'arn fight yesterday and they nerfed him today.

Our next raid night is THURSDAY. See you at Nighthold!

primesuspect

STATE OF THE GUILD 2017

Hello Icrontic!

Now that we're in the middle of Legion, with Nighthold here and our raid team making excellent progress, it's time to talk about the guild and raiding in 2017

Our guild progress has been phenomenal. We got heroic Emerald Nightmare on farm very early on, plowed through normal Trial of Valor, and overcame two significantly challenging fights: heroic Odyn before he was heavily nerfed, and heroic Helya, one of those "guild-breaker" fights. According to WowProgress, we had the realm 84th kill on H Helya and the 91st of H Odyn. That makes us technically a "top 100" guild on Kel'Thuzad, something you can all be proud of.

We also have been making excellent mythic+ dungeon progress: one of our groups recently completed a +13 Court of Stars, and we've had a lot of people getting their Keystone Challenger achievements in addition to some great gear from weekly class hall chests.

Trial of Valor was a strange raid: it was short (we could clear both difficulties in one raid night) and short-lived (was only current for a few weeks between EmN and NH). We were able to make it through during the short window of opportunity and get Ahead of the Curve for several people.

The makeup of the active members of the guild has been in a lot of flux, like it always does with this game. When we started raiding EmN the group size and wide variety of gear/skill levels necessitated two separate raid nights; a "casual" group and a "progression" group. The goal was to have a small group of players who could push the content envelope for the greater guild and then come back to help others along so that everybody got a chance at loot and lore.

As time went on, though, the "casual" group slowly got absorbed into the progression team as people's gear and skills improved, while other casual players' schedules and situations changed.

Having only one night of progression per week started to become frustrating for the core of the guild as the progress team size remained steady (and even grew a bit), because at some point casual night became "well, I can't get anything for this so I'll bring an alt" and devolved into a night where people would practice different roles/specs/builds or bring alts to heroic raiding. The discussion arose: why are we even doing casual night when 90% of the people coming don't really need anything from these?

Now, we're at a point where we have a much smaller dedicated group, and almost no "casual" raiders, and a lot of content to push. Being that raid time is precious, we've decided to implement a second night of progression raiding. Icrontic in 2017 will just have one raid group.

Because of changing schedules, we have found the need to drop the Monday raid night and change it to Thursday. After discussing with everybody we have determined that a new schedule of Thursday/Sunday will accommodate the most people and make the most sense for the group. Therefore our new raid schedule until further notice is:

THURSDAY 7:45PM EST: Raid night, group assembly, summons, prep, trash, first boss pull 8pm EST
SUNDAY 7:45PM EST: Raid night, group assembly, summons, prep, trash; first boss pull 8pm EST

CONCERNS:

We do have guildies who want to raid but do not yet feel comfortable with progression content. We want to be perfectly clear that we still intend to help people with this. We will be instituting occasional "catch-up" or fun raid nights once in a while to help carry alts, low-geared toons, or anybody who wants to come through older non-cutting-edge content. If you still want Ahead of the Curve on Helya, for example, or Lingering Soul Fragments, this is the kind of thing we'll be doing. We will not be leaving anyone behind, we just will not be dedicating one night a week to this kind of content. The current idea is that we will have one of these raid nights every third Tuesday of each month; on this Tuesday raid night, everyone is welcome and we can figure out what everybody wants to do on those nights.

Those who want to be on the progression team but aren't: We want you! We want to help you become a better raider. If this means helping you learn your class better or optimizing your gear or practicing with you in higher mythic + (as a side note: mythic+ dungeons higher than 10 are EXCELLENT practice to learn your class REALLY well), we want to help! All you have to do is ask an officer (Maejah or Wolford for tanking, Protractor, Ryanfodder, Solenda, or Maejah for healing, Avisuku and Kethark for bad DPS advice) and we're ALWAYS happy to help you become better!

GUILD CHANGES:

Due to our new structure, we will be re-implementing guild repairs on raid night for ALL raiders. We will also be restructuring the guild ranks, and simplifying it a bit. New ranks will be:

Trial
Member
Raider
Officer

Guild bank Raid tab will be accessible to all raiders and officers. Repairs will be turned on during raid nights for raiders and officers.

Here's an important bit: AN AUTHENTICATOR WILL BE REQUIRED for raiders and officers. There's no excuse not to have one and we cannot risk the guild bank being compromised by WoW's shitty security (no case-senstive passwords in 2017, Blizzard? Shame).

We'll be making some changes to the raid structure and member levels in the coming days; if you see something change like your rank (demoted/promoted) DON'T PANIC. Nobody is getting 'demoted' or whatever, Blizzard just uses dumb words to indicate rank changes.

The only guild bank tab that will be accessible to non-raiders will be "levelling" stuff. Most alts will be "demoted" to "member" status since we're such a small guild and don't have the income to support repairs for alts, etc.

This is a good time to remind people that depositing HELPFUL items in the guild bank (especially gold!) is very much appreciated. Flasks, food, potions, and crafting mats are all extremely nice things to deposit. On the flip side, if you're a raider and you see something you need in the Raid Prep tab, it's yours. That's what it's there for. The general rule is: Don't be a jerk. If you see 80 flasks in the bank, don't take 80. Take 20. You understand.

Nighthold and beyond awaits us in 7.1.5 and 7.2. Icrontic is, quite honestly, in the best shape it's ever been in. We have tons of fun and lots of progress. It's a fantastic time to be in the Icrontic guild, and we are all very grateful to how awesome this team is.

Thanks everyone!

primesuspect