Month: October 2005

Vermont: Magic Hat Brewing, South Burlington

Magic Hat is one of those breweries whose stuff I like but when it comes around to doing a review folks come over and drink all the beers I have and there is nothing left to review. So I have only reviewed one to date – Revell porter out of the winter 12 pack. This time it will be different. I am going to defend the stash against perps and foist paper and pen upon them.

What I like about Magic Hat is that they do light ales well. Not thin – light. It is easier to make a big beer than a small one and in this biggie world there is a mad rush to bigosity. This summer 12 pack says no. It says I will not bow to loud Lord Big. There is the lightly fruity #9, the gentle wheat beer Hocus Pocus, their wit by name of Batch 370 and Fat Angel which is something of a rich malty ale…but an unbig one. All displaying a deft hand. Their website displays something of a daft hand, by the way. One of the guys who started it is now a baker of treats near a pal of mine’s place. I will have to interview him one fine day on the whole nuttiness thing.

      • #9: Effervescent orange ale spewing masses of tiny white bursting bubbles. Peach juice. Aroma and taste of peach juice. In the mouth it morphs into a bit of grainy wheat or pale ale maltiness and twiggy hop. Not too far off the idea of a dry Irn Bru, the Scottish soda pop. Light not too sweet, quaffable and refreshing…but lots of peach. If you are against it, as some 12% of advocates are, you are really against it.
      • Batch 370: White foam and rim fed again my a very active carbonation, this time in a Belgian wit…but the BAers say it is a version of a German hefe! Hmmm…no banana or clove to hand that hat on. How odd. Amber with a bit of orange. Cloudy with yeastie floaties. Dry and orange peely over lemon. Again, twiggy drying hops. There is lots of yeast tanginess and nice spice. Not a real corriander or other spice presence but the raw wheat gives a flour-dusty and creamy effect that sets it apart and is quite likeable. Is this an ok US version of a wit…or a hefe…or what? I dunno. It is a light summer ale and in itself it is not neither wicked or the other sort of wicked. I’ll have another if that is the way the guest grabbing plays out.
      • Hocus Pocus: again a highly active ale, this time light straw under white foam. A bit grassy nicely offset by a touch of twiggy and metallic hops. The center is somewhat vegetative – not fruit but faintly like the green of celery or broccoli. Underneath milky yeast but still a dry beer. I think of the four this is my favourite. I am surprised that 21% of BAers do not like this as I find it a simple but clean balanced summer wheat ale with true real flavours.
      • Fat Angel: Again light but the least of the four. A hint of crystal malt and maybe even a hint of smoke. Reddish amber with a white rim. Quite still unlike the other three. The same signiture grassy tang. Like the Hocus Pocus I would call the light touch on the hops twiggy and metallic. I don’t think I like this one that much though I have been far more offended by ales in my life. There is again that dry heart that I would think is wheat malt but it does not meet well with the sweeter notes. The advocates rate it positively but with a low average.

     

  • It may be unfair to have these the weekend of the beginning of the World Series when they are clearly hot weather brews. Ice cold of a humid day they may all be perfect. But they are similar in a way that makes you wonder about whether at least three are variations on a core recipe. So I am still with Magic Hat and I admire them trying to escape the standards but taking a separate path carries risk.

NCPR Drive – Last Day


…radiation of pure thought…

It is the last day of the NCPR funding drive and I have been strangely attracted by the whole event. I gave my $75 bucks early on – and I hope you did, too. You didn’t? What is up with that?

You pretend that you can live in a virtual community, you look out your window and wonder why you live where you are and then you pass up joining a group that gives you the illusion of community better than few others. Think about it. If the web promises anything it is that you can rearrange the elements but what you still want after that rearrangement is a sense of place. And this place looks like this – pass Humblebub a hankie, would you?

And keep in mind I am not talking utopia. New York state politics is one of the most entertaining forms of screwy corruption meeting massively complex interests that you will ever come across. Ask NYCO. Plus it is that woodsy edgy bit of the state, way more Northern Exposure than Twin Peaks…mostly. And if you are in Kingston – did you know that you get 2-for-1 pizza from Tatas with an NCPR member rewards card? That alone may pay for my contribution. This is a great virtual space and one which is largely paid for by the people who listen to it. I think it could be the mega-station of NPR stations, one global smalltown.

So why not pick NCPR as the backdrop of your internet experience, like one of those screens with a picture of a forest scene used behind in photo studio portraits of children. Where else would be better?

Let us meet there all together one fine day.

Wow! Neato!!

Just two of the alternative adjectives which could have been used by Cory Boing in this introduction to a boohooery paste from Kottke:

One of Kottke’s readers is a writer named Meghann Marco whose publisher is joined to the suit against Google over the excellent, writer-friendly Google Print service. She has written an amazing open letter to her publisher…

What would have been really amazing would be if the author had actually negotiated terms in her publishing agreement allowing her this freedom before signing and before receiving and I would expect keeping the money she is being paid by said dark lord of the print shop. It would also be amazing to set up a publishing house that allowed for the realistic return of revenue and provided for multi-media options fairly and openly. Advocating for that would be excellent and writer-friendly and based on something better than mere complaint. Instead “excellent, writer-friendly” is reserved for a tool of an entity that is doing all it can apparently to corner the web in a manner that should have Bill Gates’s jealous head spinning; that seemingly avoids respecting the rights of the works of the authors like those backing the suit; that appears to want to breaks the association of thinker and thought to undermine the economics that allow for the slow and solid development of good thought; and which generally lives behind a creepy grey walls of silence upon which “do good things” or some other such banality is etch-a-sketched.

You know I own one share of the monoGoog, the bubble of one, as I plan to destroy it from within but that is my project not yours. Love it now. You may will fear it next. Hmm – how about an open-source search engine? Can I build one of those now that I know how to center an image?

More Web 2.0 And Symbols

Rereading that essay David sent and it strikes me as quite funny that Web 2.0 is not being called Bubble 2.0 as there seems to be a lot of repetition of mistakes – but as long as there are consultants and cash that is going to happen.

What is most interesting is how basic assumptions are so empty yet that is what you get for futurism. Nicholas Carr, the author of the essay, makes an obvious but excellent point about the quality of content and the web. It reminded me of when I first was listening to Mp3s with the lads in the day, I kept asking why the quality of the audio was so bad and got such insightful responses as “whatever” or some such thing. It appeared that somewhere around 1996 the focus on listening to music that had the highest performance fidelity got dropped as a mass culture interest in favour of music that cost you nothing but the 50 bucks a month for internet and, then, 4000 bucks for the computer. What I see Carr as saying is that understanding itself is going that same way – it does not matter that the facts are crap as long as they come out of the screen that lets me post words on it. He writes:

The promoters of Web 2.0 venerate the amateur and distrust the professional. We see it in their unalloyed praise of Wikipedia, and we see it in their worship of open-source software and myriad other examples of democratic creativity. Perhaps nowhere, though, is their love of amateurism so apparent as in their promotion of blogging as an alternative to what they call “the mainstream media.” Here’s O’Reilly: “While mainstream media may see individual blogs as competitors, what is really unnerving is that the competition is with the blogosphere as a whole. This is not just a competition between sites, but a competition between business models. The world of Web 2.0 is also the world of what Dan Gillmor calls ‘we, the media,’ a world in which ‘the former audience,’ not a few people in a back room, decides what’s important.”

It has been a long time since I picked up Wired as reading it always got me mad at these sorts of stunned ideas that were presented in it but it appears that there may be an ascendency of a new techo-doltery that has formed around this notion of Web 2.0 – and where better to link that from but wikipedia.

Is it dangerous? Maybe. At the heart of the keener interest in the web is a satisfaction with just the appearance of authority or perhaps the shrugging off of authority in favour of entertainment – without consideration for what is lost…because the Internet Archive does not record what pre-dates itself. So we no longer like the tough love of The New York Times or anything to which the label of the mainstream media attaches in favour of nice stories we like. Like a child eating candy instead of finishing her vegetables. But it means we also like crappier sounding audio, fewer specialist thinkers and not paying artists for their works – not to mention providing a communications medium for terrorists that is practically impossible to monitor.

Maybe the Internet itself is that grey goo seeping over the horizon that Bill Joy spoke of in “Why the Future Does Not Need Us” five and a half years ago.

Newspaper / Blog

Here is an interesting thing that I have not noted before. Toronto’s Globe and Mail posts story specific comments on its web version – this sports story has four comments this morning. It might be more interesting if the whole process were a centrally aggregated moderated thingie so that the paper could also present all or the best comments in one place accessible from the front page.