So, like most other people (especially males), I like to drink beer. Good beer. What's good beer? Essentially, any beer that I haven't had before or a very alcoholic/bitter IPA. While I was studying fluid mechanics in college I noticed that all the dimensionless numbers (i.e. Reynolds Number, Capillary Number, Mach Number, etc.) gave a quantitative number, but were qualitative in that the number would fall into a certain range that corresponded to a certain flow regime. Blah blah blah, engineering. SO, I devised the Fechtmann number, which is given by the formula:
Where V is the volume of the drink, A is the alcohol percentage, P is the price and v (a.k.a. nu) is Hershel's Coefficient. If you've had the drink before and liked it, Hershel's coefficient is 1.1, if you haven't had it before it's 1.2, if you had it before and thought it was okay, then the coefficient is 1 and if you had it before but didn't like it the coefficient is 0.9. So, basically the higher the Fechtmann number, the happier you'll be. It also says that you need to try new things and if something is very alcoholic and cheap, just order it.
Since I like IPAs so much, my brother and I decided to grow hops. Our dad didn't realize what he was getting himself into when he allowed us to build a trellis :) But now he thinks it's pretty cool.
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| My dad next to our trellis posts |
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| Hops about midway through the growing season |
