Category: Me and Mine

A Bad Brewer Asks: “What The Heck Is That I Made??”

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I am a bad brewer. I think it’s important to brew to make sure you have a hand on the paddle, a sense of what yeast might actually expect from you. That being said, though people have admired my beer greatly, I know the truth. I’m a bad brewer. It has a lot to do with the effort I put in compared to the output I get. I brewed from five to eleven last night to make a pre-boil 16 litres. Subtract from that some for evaporation, for trub, for that last bit the hose won’t reach, for the unintentional spilling while filling and all the other sources of wort loss. I’ll be lucky to end up with 12 litres. And look at that photo – what sort of technique is that suppose?

Not that this was unintentional. No, back in 2002 or so, I used to brew in a sort of parti-gyle way making multiple runnings that are later added back together again with a further gravity adjustment, making a strong syrup and cutting it with sterile water before the fermentation stage. That got me up to 40 litres per brewing session. That mean around 50 bottles and a keg. It also meant way to much drinking beer at hand even with those new friends that suddenly identify themselves to the home brewer. I’ll be doing sit-ups until about 2011 to make up for that little error in judgment. alive1Funny how I realized almost immediately that the skills I had gained to make my first four pound batch of the best cream cheese you’ll ever eat were going to be my downfall. I ended my cheese making career there and then. But I have brewed badly for yeast, off and on.

But what sort of 16…err, 12 litres of beer do I have. I started with an all grain ESB kit, brewed it a bit thick so that it came away with an OG of 1.055 rather than my usual 1.040 or so. And I threw in 350% of the suggested hops plus two star anise pods as well as 1/8th of a cup of molasses and then pitched Wyeast 1968 London ESB yeast. I think this might turn out to be Crazy Old Man Ale. Maybe it’ll turn out great, if the fermentation ever actually begins. Hopefully by Thursday morning, I’ll be watching a fierce roaring mass of yeast farts through the carboy’s glass wall giving off the first scents and sense of what the heck is growing in there.

Update: 6:00 pm, Wednesday. It is churning now! Given the rate of activity, the dry yeast was likely unnecessary but never a bad call to be safe and kick start the batch.

Three Days And Three Side Orders Of Onion Rings

gpr6I got to tick two new to me diners off the list during this weekend’s central New York, The Glenwood Pines Restaurant in Ulysses down near Ithaca as well as the Crystal Restaurant in downtown Watertown. I think the first place dates in part from the late ’40s while the second is an all-1920’s kinda spot. I never did take a photo of the quite admirable onion rings at Shorty’s, also in Watertown, though. On Friday night, on the way south, we walked into selection of NY state fish fry specials. I had a slab of haddock on a bun the size of your forearm. I wonder where they got the fish? Maybe Norway.

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Saturday at noon, the double Pinewood special, as illustrated, set me back $8.95 and I had onion rings and battered corn nuggets, too. I had no idea what a battered corn nugget was but that was even more reason to try. Turned out to be a little lump of creamed corn in a sweet dough. gpr4Dandy stuff. I was seriously doubtful of my capacity to suck back the burger but it was delightful with a Genny Cream as the kids played the bowling game. A good place for having a beer as kids run around and the food was particularly good diner grub. Again, very reliable onion ring action.

The Crystal Restaurant was a different kind of experience but certainly still a good joint. As I mentioned, it is pushing 90 years and the interior is all original wood panel and tin ceiling with a deep patina of most of those 90 years worth of smoking. gpr7Warning: the angle of the backs in the wooden booths is particularly Presbyterian. Best diner coffee ever anywhere ever. Great smoky bacon and my hot pork sandwich was as creamy bland as the dish demands. The only way you can get me to eat canned peas is on a hot chicken or pork sandwich. A solid finale to a weekend of onion rings, too. The place is also a little quirky, enhanced to a certain degree by the young soldier, an assistant chaplain no less, who was talking on his cell phone in too loud a voice about how he was going to marry someone just to get an increase in his army pay. He seemed to have it all figured out even though the girl, astonishingly, seemed (according to the tale to which all were subject) to actually get wed to the heel.

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The pre-school girls of one family in their church clothes asked to help the waitress clear the table and they carried their own glasses and plates to the kitchen wearing big excited smiles, maybe like they did every weekend. Anyway, even though the place serves a solid all day breakfast and burgers and such, the bar was a stream of cocktails on a Sunday noon. Manhattans and whiskey on ice were the main drinks. Apparently the Crystal makes an old style hot egg nog or flip sort of thing at Christmas that the locals swear by. Here is an archived NCPR report on the place.

Being Hefty: The Laws And Lies

I’ve been a big guy most of my life, though when I look back now at pictures of me from when I thought I was too heavy makes me shake my head. You do what you can, put down the seventh Ring-a-Ding Junior, do an insane number of sit-up yet still you get to wake up to news like this:

While New York City proposes to force fast-food restaurants to post calorie information on their message boards, these three lawmakers have done the Big Apple one better – proposing to make it illegal for a Mississippi restaurant to serve anyone with a body mass index of 30 or more – the clinical threshold of obesity.

The funny thing is, as we learn through HB, that it is all a lie because the other news today is that “Healthy people place biggest burden on state“:

The study, led by Pieter van Baal at the Netherlands’ National Institute for Public Health and Environment, found: “The underlying mechanism is that there is a substitution of inexpensive, lethal diseases towards less lethal, and therefore more costly diseases.” By comparison, being significantly overweight tends to lower overall medical bills: “Obesity increases the risk of diseases such as diabetes, increasing healthcare utilisation but decreasing life expectancy.” They concluded: “Although effective obesity prevention leads to a decrease in costs of obesity-related diseases, this decrease is offset by cost increases due to diseases unrelated to obesity in life-years gained.”

What comfort. We die earlier leaving our children to carry the burden of paying for the thin. No word, however, on the specific effect that beer blogging struggling novice masters shot putters in training have on the public purse. Does this mean health insurers should adjust the tables? Reduce premiums for those who will not reduce?

Please Don’t Hit Me. Please Don’t Hit Me. Please Don’t Hit Me.

Drag. I just got the new shingles up this year – like 40 year shingles, you know. And now there’s space junk a fallin’. Space junk can look cool when it’s falling except when it’s falling on you.

I must have told you this but last summer, we were sitting out back in the early evening when someone said – what is that. Looking up there was this thing in the sky, a pivoting white cylinder falling and falling straight at us. I must have told you. Never? Well, there was nothing to give any perspective so we didn’t know if it was three feet long 300 feet up or 30 feet long half a mile up. It kept falling and we figured which wall were were about to hide up against when a cross current took it away off past the lake.

But a CIA spy satellite is not going to go that. It’s going to smash my new shingles. Please don’t hit the new shingles. Maybe ask the Chinese to help.

The Final Bullets of 2007

You realize, don’t you, that the decade that was brought in with Y2K and all the other millennial whoo-haa is now 80% gone. It doesn’t even have a name and it’s already a senior citizen. Time is flying. Heck, my holiday week off is almost gone. So we better do some prognostications for 2008 before another moment slips away. These are mine:

Sports: Morton will stay up despite being the most points by ties leaders again. Santanawill pitch in the AL East. I may watch an NHL playoff game. I will attend a Watertown Wizards game on a sunny afternoon in late June and consider it a very fine thing.

Canadian politics: There will be an election in 2008 and it won’t be pretty. By any measurement the Harper government has been a dud filed with blamery. What other PM at war could say he is uncertain whether Canadians at large understand the importance of remaining involved in the fight and not realize it is an indictment of his own leadership. The program to bring in accountability has been abandoned, the plan for Bali was to sit at the wet bar while others made a deal and the revival of and reliance on the team from Mulroney era as elder statesmen has been a botch. The opposition may have a GER plan (giving enough rope) but it is unclear if they know how to tie the basic knot required to do the job. In the end, we will have a less stable minority and it won’t matter who wins as the Tories have proven they will implement anyone else’s policies in order to avoid conflict or at least making a decision…and everyone else believes in the same thing anyway.

The World: this could be a nasty one. A year of American election during wartime as well as a Russian one and, perhaps, a Pakistani one. I am going to go out on a limb (ie be wrong) and say that Hillary will not be US president but she may be Vice-President. I will also say that the Republican candidate will be a man and, dare I suggest, a man who has been filmed with a shotgun and wearing hunter’s orange. In the end, it will not matter who wins as the US economy will be weakened further by the botch of a deregulated mortgage system and a consumer credit bubble economy. This will mean there is little or know choice to change course dramatically. China and Russia’s power will increase. A really bad thing will happen and a country somewhere may even be invaded. Magnetic pole reversal will or will not occur but movies (including TV movies of the week) about it happening will be made and we will all be left thinking fondly of the days of movies about meteors and killer waves that wipe out the east coast of the USA. People will reread and adopt both the Flushing Remonstrance and the Declaration of Arbroath to the current situation.

Society, Style and Art: I will continue to have none of the above. The recession will devolve much of the lifestyle columns into discussions about how to cocoon and make jam. Wine will be replaced by beer; tea will take the place of coffee; steak will become sausage; Lego over logo. Privacy will continue to be abandoned in favour of the will of the widget. The internet will become less important than it is even now though someone will make another killer app with mass adoption that will do absolutely nothing for anyone.

Me: through more foster parenting, we will have at least more extra kids in the house than I have fingers on one hand, just like we did in 2007. I will hit 20,000 sit-ups sometime in the summer as I have already hit 8,000 since September. I will have a book deal but it may be for a very short book and the deal may not be that attractive. The garden will expand with ornamental bushes being hacked down and forgotten forever in favour of another herb or one more radish. I will hit my 4,000th post and my fifth year here but attention will more and more be paid to the beer blog, given that it gives. I will finally acquire that trombone mouthpiece. Payments will continue to be made.

Is that all I can expect for 2008, uncertainty or more of the same? I have to be careful, you know. Maybe we can go with something or things unexpected will occur that will have the effect of improving or reducing the quality of our lives to one degree or another. I may go see a band play that I haven’t seem before. I definitely will BBQ a new and unexpectedly tasty mammal. Yes, that I can promise you will happen. There you go. El Predicto speaks.

Beer At Yule: La Moneuse SWA, Brasserie De Blaugies, Belgium

We’ve had a look at a few beers from Brasserie de Blaugies: Darbyste , a fresh figgy saison (that I was calling a lambic for some reason); Saison d’Epeautre spelt saison; and La Moneuse, their rustic straight up saison. This is the final of the brewer’s four brews to try. It’s an upgrade of La Moneause, their 8% special winter ale or SWA from the 2004 bottling that I have held in the now very attractive stash from last winter to this one.

After the cage was removed, the cork barely needed a touch to pop out of the mouth. The beer pours a slightly clouded amber butterscotch with a fine thick rich off-white head. Fabulous in the mouth, a great pale ale starting out with a light pear-lemon sour tang followed by honey apple juiciness morphing into pale malt bread crust grain subsiding into a hint of white pepper and pear at the end of the end. There is a hint of nutmeg in the yeast but the whole thing is pretty restrained and keep in balance.

Plenty of BAer love. A really wonderful saison that you should hoard and keep to yourself.

Beer And Philosophy: The Book Is Out!

bapIt is either out or I have just received my copy but either way it is all quite exciting to have a book in my hand with a chapter written by me. So, of course, I read my chapter first and found myself thinking that I could have written most sentences better and that I hoped I didn’t lose all the legal footnotes…though I suspect the sensible editing was afoot on that one. Then it strikes me – I don’t know – can I do a proper book review when I wrote about one-fifteenth of the thing? I don’t have any percentages deals or anything. But I can be pure of heart with the best of them can’t I? So let’s see.

Price? Reasonable. This is a trade paperback meaning it’s going to cost you a decidedly reasonable $13.57 on an Amazon pre-order. The book covers a lot of ground, partitioned as it is into segments entitled “The Art of Beer”, “The Ethics of Beer”, “The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Beer” and “Beer in the History of Philosophy”. Fascinating stuff. And with chapters by Garrett Oliver and Sam Calagione (not to mention me) as well as a forward by the late Michael Jackson (no mention of me) there is plenty of familiar names for the average beer geek.

But it is when the book goes beyond the expected that it gets really interesting. Except for the crew named above, the rest is written by Phds (pronounced “fudds“, professors and a dean. Egads! I See Eggheads! Yet, they bring the egg down off the head and…and…OK, I can’t finish that analogy but rest assured this is interesting stuff. An example: in the chapter by Rex Welshon, Chair of a Philosophy Department in Colorado, explores Nietzsche’s relationship with the drink opening with the philosopher’s observation that a “single glass of…beer in one day is quite sufficient to turn my life into a vale of misery.” I recall my philosophy professor recounting his wife’s observation that she was not so much disappointed that Nietzsche thought all those things so much as that he wrote them down. Perhaps the same might be said about him having that beer. Another example? Neil Manson, a professor from Mississippi has his bio right next to mine (which falsely claims he can drink more than me and you. Lie – I simply choose not to), has provided a dialogue of the Socratic sort (I think) on “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Beer” which seems to talk about God a lot as three characters drink. Neato. It’s like what you think your dinner parties were like the foggy-headed next morning. And there are about ten more of these sorts of chapters.

So…bottom line…get this book. I earn nothing more from saying so yet you will gain incalculably from the procurement.

Session 8: Food and Beer With Lucy Saunders

Most excellent! I forgot it was session day today and the topic is food and beer as picked by the poetical industrial complex behind Beer Haiku Daily. As it happens, a few weeks ago…or more likely months…beer cook extraordinaire Lucy Saunders was kind enough to forward a review copy of her handy book Grilling with Beer – with, I just noticed, a very nice inscription. And, as it turns out, I took today off to make an extra long weekend and as it turns out it is the last stinking hot day of the year here at the east end of Lake Ontario. So it is time to BBQ and we are ‘cueing and brewing with Lucy.

Updates throughout the day as I review my options, pick my victims and start the fire.

 

 

 

 

Later: OK. Things can take surprising turns as I seem to have wanted to deal with (by which I mean “eat”) the entire ark with a shoulder and center roasts of pork, beef and pork rib and lamb sausages – and corn…and bunch of peppers, too. My theory of BBQ is that if you are going to spark the dang thing up you may as well cook from match to the final orange glow. Going through Lucy’s book, I decided to do a dry rub and a beer mop for the most of it and cook everything on a slow smoke.

So I got out a bottle of Black Irish Plain Porter, chopped up some cilantro, red pepper and green onion for the mop. For the rub, I put together kosher salt, paprika, cayenne, ginger, cumin, fennel seed and a few other things. An hour and a half on the dry rub and then on to the grill with a steady supply of dampened smoking wood added as I went along.

In the end we were left with an insane amount of meat…unless you believe that is something of an oxymoron. As I mopped, I had a Southern Tier IPA as well as a Great Lakes 666 Devil’s Pale Ale, a new LCBO listing here in Easlakia. Both were solid BBQ brews for the last hot day of the year.

So was I cliche going with the BBQ? Should I have made beer ice cream or a lager and partridge tarte? Not a chance. Beer is the partner to the flaming pit and is where the sweet notes and smoky tones play out best. And that porter mop added a layer chocolate espresso over the bite of the pepper adding even more depth. Even though I didn’t follow a particular recipe, Grilling with Beer is a source of great inspiration if you are into this sort of thing and a book I will return to again and again for great ideas for cooking with beer outdoors.

I Get To Vote Next Week – What To Do?

This year’s provincial election confirms again that Ontarianada continues to define the nation but still is shy of itself. The issues here are the issues of the land but no one is really talking about them. The laws created here will be copied, the wealth will support schools and hospitals nationwide – with nary a peep of reluctance or, reciprocally, gratitude.

There is a new idea that has barely registered with an acronym that I honestly do not know the meaning of – though I will in about 14 seconds when I go read what brother #1 wrote over the weekend about MMP or “Mixed Member Proportional” voting. He points out some valid concerns but I will likely vote for it as the present concerns are too obvious. Anything to get a new voice or two into the public mindset and, hey, minority legislative assemblies work. In fact if there was a referendum allowing us to cap the seats of the biggest party at a majority or minority of the seats, I know which way I would be voting.

All of which leads me to the fact that I have not apparently written anything on this blog or the beer blog about the PPPP or Polska Partia Przyjaciół Piwathe Polish beer drinkers party of the early 90s that won seats in that country’s legislative assembly in the early elections after the fall of Communism. Sort of their Rhino party or the revived Neorhinos. I had to figure out why the kids in my class kept saying “pa-pa-pa-pa!” – not to mention why they always quoted Scandinavian heavy metal. I am sure I wrote about the PPPP. You know, it’s probably a vestigial memory of the world pre-blog when I actually emailed people I knew before the internet.

But whatever it was, now I say “MMP for the PPPP.”