Lars Marius Garshol

It can sometimes be hard to find out what's what, though. Breweries: Jovaru, Su Puta, Ramunas Čižas, Dundulis, in that order. Weird, exciting stuff may also crop up, if you're able to find it, like the Biržu Alus lager with green peas.

Oh, Alaus Kolonele is also worth a stop.

Beer in Vilnius falls roughly in four categories: craft, industrial lager, farmhouse, and weird LT-type stuff. The two last categories you cannot find anywhere else. Sadly, craft has eaten their lunch so they're becoming more rare.

Must-visit: Alaus Namai. Senoji Trobele. Šnekutis. Špunka.

If you can get to the Hochdorf exhibition of the "prince's grave" I strongly recommend that. I haven't been myself, but the find is spectacular and drink-focused, and what I've seen of it looks great. The "malting trench" was found a few hundred meters away.

En man i förkläde kranar upp en bärnsstensfärgad vätska från en 40-liters mjölkkanna i aluminium ute på en gräsmatta vid ett bord. Bredvid hon kommer en kvinna i förkläde med två tomma kannor för att fylla på.

Gotlandsdricke. Söt. Rökt. Humlad. Bananester. Serverad ur tillbringare påfyllda från mjölkspann. Ett måste på ett gotländskt bröllop.
// On a traditional Gotland wedding the homebrewed ale “dricke” is a must have. Sweet. Smokey. Juniper and hops. Made in an aluminum milk can, served by glass jugs.

The issue in the north was having enough fodder for the animals, which they never did because they kept as many animals as they could in order to have manure for the fields.

In the Netherlands it seems getting enough fodder should be even harder (no free land to get fodder from). Don't know, though

Yes, I wondered about that, too. I checked, and there is lactose in cheese and butter, but very little.

Were practices different in the past? Is it a regional thing? I don't really know.

I don't think it is, to be honest. You saw @akrennmair.bsky.social's comment on the German well.

I don't have real data on wells further south, but I would be surprised if they were safe. If anyone has data I'd love to see it.

banned beer brewing. When the farmers couldn't drink beer they drank milk instead, but then they had none to sell. Huge political issue for several years until beer brewing was allowed again. (Implicitly: they didn't drink milk ordinarily.)

Well, the thing is that people seem to have drunk very little milk, at least in Scandinavia. In Norway the cows only made milk in summer, and then they were in the mountains. The Danes say explicitly that people didn't drink milk.

In Bavaria there was a milk crisis after 1945, because the US ...

Then we disagree on what my conclusion was. You could often get away with drinking water, but water from wells was definitely not safe.

Photo of Härkeberga priest farm early 20th C. You see the well. That pile to the right is animal manure. This was a normal setup in both Sweden and Denmark.

No, water trom the well was not safe. Read the post.

Whether people boiled their water is not clear. What we do know is that cauldrons came into common use relatively late.

Did People Once Drink Beer Every Day? | Larsblog Personal blog of Lars Marius Garshol.

Did people ever drink beer against thirst every day? Yes, they bloody well did. Never let anyone tell you anything else.

Did they do it because they thought water wasn't safe? Well, that's more complicated.

Full story here www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html

Pretty decent elevation map of Nordics+Baltics, if I do say so myself.

In the end chose a more neutral colour scheme for now.

Moved the elevation code to the right layer, so that rivers, glaciers, and lakes are drawn on top.

Cleaned up the code reasonably well. Finally have something that's good enough for now.

Took the tan and the brown and manipulated them a bit in HSV space to make them more saturated and the brown darker. I quite like the brown, but I'm not convinced about the intermediate yellow. Hmmm. Not sure quite where to go from here.

That's better, but still not quite the right colours. Stole the colours (except the starting green) from this second map.

I could, yes. The trouble is that that doesn't leave me much in the way of colour gradations to play with, so it becomes hard to see smaller changes in elevation. That's why I want to map to something like:

- 0: green
- 800: tan
- 1500: dark brown
- 3000: white

The usual map, but higher elevations now get darker green before shading sharply toward a sort of poop-brown colour that's much paler. The effect is not pleasant to the eye.

Uh, no, maybe not quite like this.

(Generating colours automatically is pretty hard to configure because it's so difficult to visualize beforehand what you will end up with.)

Fixed the black vertical lines.

Next: try to come up with nicer colors. Then make it fill the entire map, and not just the lower part.

Black-and-white elevation superimposed on map of Nordics + Baltics, but marred by black bands running vertically across the sea in some places.

Almost got interpolation working, except sometimes it gets too eager horizontally. Note how elevation now looks black and white. It always was, but because the code used to leave untouched green in between the pixels it looked greenish. I'll need to come up with something nicer.

Sure, saison was usually aged for some months, but saison is just one kind of farmhouse ale. It's a tiny, minuscule part of farmhouse ale overall.

We also don't really know anything about how funky 6-month old saison was.

Any relationship with lambic is news to me.

2025 Kamchatka Peninsula earthquake - Wikipedia

Correct. The shakemap indicates shaking was not that bad on land. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Ka...

I am sort of doing that. However, the TIFF elevation data is in one resolution while my generated map is in another. So for every pixel in the elevation data I have to compute where that is in my rendered map.

This is why there are gaps: turns out the elevation data pixels are too far apart.

It's a 445Mb TIFF file from the NOAA. Given the size of the data and how primitive my code is I'm astonished I can render this in 50 seconds. Modern hardware is truly a marvel.

www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/metad...

Map has improved because there are no vertical lines in between the elevation data any more. Horizontal lines remain, however.

Hmmm, no. I don't have to go the other way (map pixels to elevation data raster), because I can interpolate the missing data instead. Managed to implement that horizontally. Vertically will be slow and complicated, so probably best to do interpolation as a separate step. Tomorrow.

That's a good point. There's nothing wrong with the beers themselves. The problem is the largely imaginary history that has been projected onto them.

Jeff makes the case that the only saisons we have definite evidence for are the "clean" saisons.

Were the stored saisons of old funky? Quite possibly. In what way? Nobody knows. The association between funkiness and farmhouse ale is mostly made up, particularly as stored farmhouse ale was rare.

Unfortunately, implementing that approach will require some fairly heavy math. (Solving a few equations.) It's getting too late to attempt that now, but great to finally make some progress on this after having to make do without this feature for so long.

Nordics and Baltics with height data clearly superimposed, but the northern part is missing height data. And the raster has strange moiré-like effects in it.

If the map is scaled up by 4x4 I can't draw just a single pixel. I have to draw it as a 4x4 to make it fill as much as it's supposed to once the map is scaled back down.

Once I fixed that my reaction was "whoa!" Getting somewhere, but I need a different approach to make this nice.

Close-up of Norway showing height data very, very faintly superimposed on the map

After a lot of reading code and back and forth I realized that, no, the elevations did not disappear. They were in exactly the right place, but very faint, because the pixels showing height were so far apart. I had to zoom in and squint to see it.

Then I realized there was another mistake.

Map of Nordics + Baltics, seemingly with no height data at all

Slowly figured out previous map was wrong because I forgot that I scale the map up by a factor of four, so that, by scaling it back down, I get antialiasing (smooth edges). So all coordinates must be multiplied by 4.

Did that, but was completely baffled to find elevations disappeared. WTF?