QTN: Hale’s Ales Rudyard’s Rare Barleywine

More Northwestern beers for George today. The style known as barleywine is generally characterized by high alcohol level and high residual sweetness (it’s difficult to make a beer both very dry and high in alcohol, as substantial amounts of sugars are needed to encourage the yeasts to produce the alcohols).

This particular barleywine is a very limited edition from Hale’s Ales—so limited that it’s branded Rudyard’s Rare rather than Hale’s. Looking more like a British specialty beer than one of Hale’s usual brews, it nevertheless is clearly a Northwest beer, with high hopping balanced against the very malty sweetness. It’s perceivably strong, but remarkably balanced considering the high alcohol level (9.2%). Not a lunchtime beer. —Excuse me, I need a nap.

Remote update: Getting around statefulness

I’ve been continuing to play around with the Sony RM-AV3000 universal remote and may have actually found success. With a little help from RemoteCentral, I got around the gripe that I had about stateful buttons. Specifically, I found a setup that, from any input state, allows me to reliably choose the input on my Philips TV on which the DVD player and amplifier are providing input. It has nothing to do with the Input button, which is stateful. Instead, I can use the channel buttons. Use the keypad in the TV section to go to channel 002, then channel down three times for the cable or VCR (composite inputs) and four times for the component inputs. So now my DVD macro looks like: TV 002 Ch- Ch- Ch- Ch- AMP (DVD input) DVD Play. It looks a bit naff but it works great.

Maybe now Lisa will use the remote…