• Please visit and share your knowledge at our sister communities:
  • If you have not, please join our official Homebrewing Facebook Group!

    Homebrewing Facebook Group

Beer brewing for the meme generation

Homebrew Talk

Help Support Homebrew Talk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Well, it blows my mind because I read both of those books in college but somehow never retained the 'meme' reference.

Presumably, it would have been in reference to something to do with genetics and not at all what its been appropriated for on the internet nowadays?
 
Nice vid, man. I appreciate the obvious love that went into it.
Very funny, too. You have sort of a Chris Elliott / Louis C.K. thing working for you.
What would make it even better would be to have a post-script with you enjoying/evaluating the finished product.

I mention that in the video, I will be doing a review in about a week from now.

I actually inspected the bottles and I am noticing now some sediment starting to form in the bottom which is a great sign, so I am very excited. It is going to be very hard for me to NOT open up this beer this weekend since it will only have been a week since I bottled it. :mug:
 
Presumably, it would have been in reference to something to do with genetics and not at all what its been appropriated for on the internet nowadays?
No, it was precisely what has been appropriated on the internet nowadays. Dawkins had jokes, urban legends, rumors, etc. in mind and saw how they spread, replicated, and mutated in ways similar to biology. (And, why not? At its roots Natural Selection is statistics and niche exploitation, something not exclusive to biology. Dawkins was *not* the first to have this idea.) Linguists and information scientists had studied language and meaning and had terms "phonemes" and "menemes" for fundamental units of information. A phoneme is a unit of sound that carries information and a meneme is a basic unit of meaning. Dawkins suggested the term "meme" to refer to a piece of reproductive information; the information science's equivalent to biology's "gene".

Now computers and Internet geeks *love* the concept of information systems of organic pseudo-biological systems (except for those who instead love the idea of biology as stochatic pseudo-informational systems). Why do you think we call it a computer *virus* instead of a ... well, dang virus is *such* an apt term I can't even *conceive* of a non-biological alternative. So early internet social geeks immediately saw the joke of the day email lists and said "That's *exactly* what Dawkins was talking about! That's a meme, that is; yessiree bob! That's a good old meme and its got legs on it!"

Who came up with the word "gene" anyway?
 
Thanks Woozy. Interesting stuff.

I think the genetic comparison ultimately falls a little short though. These GIFs or JPEGs that float around (a cat with bulgy eyes, a doodle, what have you) with a short message on them are static files. If someone appropriates it, they would most likely keep the file unchanged. Essentially, these things propagate, but don't evolve (in that sense, 'viral video' works a little better for me). And if someone does alter the meme, its with a specific intent (not spontaeous mutation with the most popular random changes surviving). In this respect, I think the old childrens "telephone" game of passing a message from person to person to see what sort of 'mistakes' spring up is more in keeping with the spirit of evolution.

And I know things aren't always named according to correct science.... merely an observation. I just get a kick out of imagining Richard Dawkins seeing his ideas applied to a 'grumpy cat' JPEG with the caption "I hate Mondays" or some such inanity. (BTW - my favorite meme is the Sean Bean/Boromir "One does not simply...")

Who coined "gene"? I dunno. I would assume it comes from 'genetic,' which would have the same etymologic origin of 'genesis,' alluding to genes as the source of an organism's characteristics? If you made me guess..... Gregor Mendel? Maybe he coined it for his pea pods. Are you an evolutionary biology major or something, Woozy?
 
I too thought it was a great vid. So many of the peeps that make brewing vids seem to take themselves too serious. It was refreshing to see a humorous take on a brew day/process! My favorite part was when it was fermenting and whether or not it was infected and to check it or not to check it. Good stuff mang! :mug:

I mention that in the video, I will be doing a review in about a week from now.

I actually inspected the bottles and I am noticing now some sediment starting to form in the bottom which is a great sign, so I am very excited. It is going to be very hard for me to NOT open up this beer this weekend since it will only have been a week since I bottled it. :mug:

Crack one open! This is one area where I have NO patience for. Rarely can I wait more than a week before I crack open my first bottle! Of course, depending on how green tasting the brew is determines how long I wait to crack open the next one... :cross:
 
Very nice video! Im gonna share it on my Business Facebook , Big Horn Basin Brew Supply, page so my customers can get a look at it. Im sure they will love it too! Thanks for sharing.
 
I bottled an American Amber Ale the same weekend, and I live not far away in Northern VA! Coincidence, or is there some amber ale karma coming from DC? ;) I've (so far) resisted sampling too; planning on cracking a bottle Monday, as I will be away this weekend. Great video - keep 'em coming. Love the curly W hat too! :)
 
I bottled an American Amber Ale the same weekend, and I live not far away in Northern VA! Coincidence, or is there some amber ale karma coming from DC? ;) I've (so far) resisted sampling too; planning on cracking a bottle Monday, as I will be away this weekend. Great video - keep 'em coming. Love the curly W hat too! :)

I did crack one open... it's promising... I have footage it's coming, the beer will be over-analyzed and reviewed to death this Sunday. :D

early indications this is more of a Märzen... even though it's Ale yeast.
 
Make sure to include, "Is it carbed yet??! Should I try one? WHY ISN'T IT CARBED YET DO I HAVE A LEAK OR IS MY BEER RUINED?!?"

Good job. I didn't know how to pronounce "meme" at first either. I'm 35. Either I'm old or just stupid. Either way, good video.
 
Classic,as usual. You really remind me of the panicky guy on Letterman. He was also in The Deep,which this more specirficaly reminds me of. Nice job!
 
So, when are you going to brew another? :)

yeah already thinking of other brews already... thinking about my next beer... yup it was just a matter of time.. :rockin:

Guess I am hooked, just have to make the time.

As I mentinoned the beer came out nicely and it's sort of an Oktoberfest but really not... sorta.. so it was not what I was expecting at all for an amber.

But it worked out nicely. I was happy to see a bigger head form after a week later, I thought maybe it wouldn't happen. Still have some other bottles conditioning and who knows if they will be different in a week also?

Still, lots of beer to drink, friends already want to get their hands on it. We'll see.

On a side note, I already spoke with ahem .. SWMBO and expressed interest in a trelis and a hop vine. We bought our house two years ago and have done lots of landscaping and plant work, right now we are out there every weekend wedding, tending my herb garden and such, and I told her I want a hop vine. We have lots of room, I just want to make sure it doesn't crawl on my neighbors fencing or anything else.

Not unfamiliar with them, but they are invasive and you have to be careful. We planted a trumpet vine in our old place and the thing went nuts. I am having visions of hop vine Citra, Amarillo and fresh hop beer... drooling just thinking about it.

Plus one woman I know wants me to make a pumpkin beer (I don't like pumpkin ale) and I totally told her I will make her one in October. Plus I need to make something peach/fruit oriented cause my wife loves peaches and we get great ones in season at our farmers market. She loves plenty of other styles (mostly lambic) but that would be much easier to go with.

There are no limits now, I already got an interesting peach/fruit beer idea, but baby steps... :mug:
 
We still have a lot of farms around here,so pumpkins & the like are pretty common in early fall fresh. I may just try a punkin beer this year. Maybe put the roasted pumpkin in the mash?. What ticks me off is that infection thing that went through all the beehives around here a few years ago. I'm having a lot of trouble finding fresh honey anywhere near here anymore. Raw wildflower honey used to be common. Wanted to do a fresh honey wheat PM beer with lemon. Now idk. Monsanto has made us machines...no heart or soul,but at least we're machines...more of us than there is of them!...:drunk::mug:
 
Back
Top