Beer Tasting, Round 6: Kilt Lifter and Boont Amber

I'm still catching up on my Beer Tasting 2022 project with a beer blog backlog from about a month ago. With this Round 6 I clear it out! ...Well, until it grows back up again. 🤣 I've already got tasting notes from Round 7 waiting for a writeup. But for now it's Round 6, *ding* ding*! 🍻



For Round 6 I put two beers head-to-head that had competed previously against other beers. Kilt Lifter went up against Fat Tire in Round 5. Boont Amber Ale squared off against Alaskan Amber Ale in Round 3.

I've remarked before that this isn't like a knockout/elimination contest. One indicator of that is that neither of these beers won their previous round. Both of them I judged to be overall less drinkable (by me) than their competitor. That's not to say they were bad beers. I'm pretty much not letting anything even close to bad into this contest! These beers lost because they weren't quite as good. Both were slightly too sweet when paired with food. They slightly overpowered it. That's why I wanted to taste test them against each other.

Unsurprisingly (to me) Boont came out ahead of Kilt Lifter on this one. Kilt Lifter is just too strong with its 6.0% ABV and sweet taste. That strength not only overpowers food rather than complement it but also makes it a tad too rich to enjoy sipping on its own. I prefer Boont for sipping.

Neither of these beers are top of the list so far. ...Nor even second. That comparison will come next. Stay tuned as the top two beers so far face off in Round 7! 🍻

Shop at CVS, kill a tree! Still!

For years I've been joking, "Shop at CVS, kill a tree." Except it's not really a joke because, going back at least 10 years now, the drugstore chain has printed ridiculously long receipts even for single item purchases. How long is ridiculous? I blogged about it 8 years when I bought 2 items and was handed a receipt over 31 inches (79cm) long.

Over the intervening 8 years CVS has done better by allowing customers to choose emailed receipts instead of paper. Many of the employees stubbornly press the "Kill a Tree"— I mean, "Print Receipt"— button despite our account preferences being set to email, but it works at least half the time. Except yesterday I specifically asked for a receipt (I need it for records purposes) and, ooh boy, the printer started going....



And going, and going, and going....



43.5 inches. More than 3 1/2 feet. 110 cm. For one item that cost just $6.54. Ridiculous.

Do better, CVS!

Covid Death Toll Almost 3x Official Figures, WHO Estimates

The true death toll of Covid so far is far higher than official figures, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated in a report released today. While official reports count 5.5 million Covid deaths worldwide, a method of analysis called excess mortality estimates nearly 15 million more people died in 2020-2021 than in two normal years. Link:  WHO publication, May 2022. Example news coverage: NY Times article, 5 May 2022; CNN article, 5 May 2022.

"Excess deaths" analysis looks at the number of deaths in a period compared to averages from beforehand. The approach catches differences between official figures and reality. Why might official figures be inaccurate? One big cause, particularly for developing and middle-income countries, is that there aren't medical and government resources to identify and track the cause of every death.

Another big cause is that countries outright lie about deaths, for political purposes. This is notoriously true for autocratic countries. Russia and China, for example, have boasted repeatedly about how well they supposedly controlled the spread of Covid compared to "corrupt", "ineffectual" democracies. Meanwhile they grossly undercounted cases and death to maintain credibility both domestically and on the international stage.

It's not only autocratic countries with state-run media that have misled. The greatest number of excess deaths occurred in India. An estimated 4.7 million excess deaths occurred there in 2020-2021. India's official Covid death toll from the period was 481,080. That's a staggering difference of nearly 10 to 1. India has resource challenges as a middle income country; but it also has political leadership that bragged about how well it was doing, to the point that it exported millions of vaccine doses it produced because they were "not needed" domestically.

The US came in close with its official figures. Officially 824,338 died of Covid in 2020-2021. The WHO's estimate is that there were 100,000 excess deaths beyond that. There may have been some political manipulation of the figure here. Recall that former President Trump notoriously opposed Covid testing because "They're just trying to increase my number." But in the US the agencies that report deaths are decentralized so it's harder for one leader to suppress such statistics.

An interesting aspect of excess mortality analysis is that it counts people who died— or avoided death— as an indirect cause of Covid. This is where differences like the ~12% in the US may arise. People who were turned away from hospital ICUs when they were overloaded with patients, and died when otherwise they would have been saved, count toward excess mortality. Interesting, excess mortality also counts the reduction in deaths from other causes Covid led to. For example, while we curtailed trips and travel in 2020, there were far fewer deaths due to traffic accidents. Those deaths averted reduce the excess mortality estimate.