Category: Me and Mine

Red’s Dairy Freeze, South Portland, Maine

Illustrated is the “Chocolate Boston”, which is a chocolate milkshake with chocolate soft serve ice cream topped with chocolate sauce. The “Boston” can be had with other flavours but it is always milkshake plus soft serve plus sauce. Eaten with a spoon and a straw, it is apparently known only to Red’s of South Portland and their customers but we stand to be corrected.

I do not love chocolate but this actually inched me a little towards that affliction. I ate it so fast I got an ice cream chest ache.

Not The Cover Of The Rolling Stone

So there I am, in the last paragraph 14th story in The New York Times, Business Section, Media and Advertising page, web edition index at 6:37 am Monday morning with the precious URL, all live and linky:

nytbeerbloggingal
No seized web site or anything. No referrers yet as I can see. Oh well. Wait for the entire workforce of New York City to get to work and turn on their computers to slack off for the morning by flipping through the web edition, I suppose…

It was an interesting process being interviewed via email by the reporter who has lots of web industry writing experience but not a homebrewer or anything. She noticed this post I made January on the nutty idea of an “open source beer”. Too bad they did not use the full quote – which I thought was really helpful – but, true, would have needed a separate section:

I have not tried the but think from what is provided that I would not like to try to make it or drink it. Making the beer would be difficult for most homebrewers given the volumes provided. Most homebrewers brew in lots of 20 litre or perhaps double that but an 80 litre boil as required in this recipe would find the brewer facing over 200 pounds of boiling sticky sugar syrup needing transferring by the brewer, a near impossible task in the average kitchen. By contrast, even the small end of the microbrewing scene expects an entry point at the 5 or 7 barrel scale of brewery. One barrel of beer is about 170 litres. Here is some information from the brewery manufacturer DME: which may help understand the scale: http://www.dmeinternational.com/brewing/brewbup/naturalbrew.html. So it is unclear for whom this scale of recipe is devised. Recipes can be scaled up or down but you might want to start with a point that is useful – or even safe – for one type of brewer or another.

That being said, there are issues with the ingredients, too. Beer is basically made of four things: water, yeast, hops and malt. In this recipe, there is detail provided about only hops and malt. As a result, it the same ingredients were used and made with the soft water of Dublin or the hard water of Burton-upon-Trent, England, the resulting products would be very different. These effects can be reproduced by adding water treatments which mimic one location or another. But without any guidance as to water quality, there is a great deal of variation left to the imagination of the brewer. The same is the case of the yeast. The recipe does not tell us whether it is lager yeast or ale yeast, the two general hemispheres of the beer world. Further, it does not state which of sub-type might be used. Consider this web page of a homebrew supplier which offers 33 ale yeasts and 16 for lager, aside from the 18 for the specialized wheat and Belgian styles of beer: http://www.paddockwood.com/index.php. Selection among these yeasts will greatly affect the outcome of the brewing process. But no guidance is given.

Where there is some guidance, we are still uncertain. We are told that “1 kg of caramel malt” is required. That usually defines a class of malts with a sugary aspect but they differ in the taste they impart according, among other factors, to the degree they are roasted. As a result, a pale crystal malt may give a slight nuttiness to a beer where a dark one provides a strong raisiny flavour. Just saying “caramel malt” in not specific enough. Similarly, the recipe includes 4 kg of sugar but we are not told if it is corn or cane, light yellow or dark demarara or even whether Belgian candi sugar is to be used. Sugar is not sugar is not sugar.

So in the end it is very difficult to determine what a brewer might do with the recipe as it is really only part of a recipe. If you take the information provided and run it through a popular beer recipe calculator used by homebrewers for planning you get a beer which is somewhat pale and normal strength at 5.2% but a bit cloying due to the moderate hops and likely richness of some residual sugars. It would also have no to very rich yeastiness with anything from a slight nuttiness to a strong raisin flavour. Here are the results from when I ran the test: http://hbd.org/cgi-bin/recipator/recipator?6074722#tag. Except for the odd ingredient “300 g Guarana beans” this could be half the beers I have ever encountered depending on how the unstated variables are addressed by the particular brewer. It is interesting to note that guarana bean is included in the new Budweiser product, B-to-the-E: this author does not find that product very pleasant: http://www.wisinfo.com/postcrescent/news/beerman/beer_20024917.shtml

I do go on, don’t I.

Internet Memories

Along with the lack of any coherent or useful organization or indexing, this medium suffers from a lack of its own history. Sure there is the Internet Archive capturing something like one front page screen shot in every 12,486,081,230 and those high level no details stuff time lines about when the first email was sent.. but you were not there. What we need to do is create anecdotes to capture what the experience was really like when you first plugged in. Here are some of mine:

  • German Web TV – around 1996 or so someone had set up a system where you could watch screen shots from German TV. I do not recall any audio. I do recall they were about the first site to try to do this and there seemed to be about 15 channels or so. They refreshed every 3 to 10 seconds. Soccer was hard to follow. Blue movies at suppertime were a bit of a startler in the days of far fewer cable channels in smalltown Canada.
  • Operating stuff through web cams – sort of related to the above but interactive. You could run the switching of a toy train set in Germany and usually you had to wait a few minutes for your command to come up in the line up of global command givers. Somewhere else there was a garden in a small room which you could look around with a camera, dig a bit and even plant a seed. Probably the most nicest most innocent amateur sites you will ever see.
  • Usenet – an actually working uncensored universal bulletin board system where you could find the greatest nerds in any topic you wanted debating the issue of their affection in fine and incredibly nasty detail. Killed by cross posting porn spammers and, I think, take over by Google.
  • The coffee pot and the aquarium – just so someone else won’t mention them first, there were two sites with extremely early web video. The cameras were static, one aimed at a coffee pot and one aimed at a tank of fish. We stared for hours.

Some of these things may sill be there but I don’t go looking for them anymore.

Share your web anecdotes. It’s been ten years now since I started playing with this damn thing so its about time to get nostalgic. If you have a link to that German toy train, it would be a nice touch.

Fire At 9:00 PM

I just took these images from the roof of our building looking east to the other side of the City. I have not been able to find any local news service this Sunday evening to find out what is going on. I would estimate the fire to be at least 5 km away so it is pretty big.

Update: it was the reed march at the river on fire according to reports Monday morning.

 

 

 

 

And here is the article in the Whig:

Kingston Whig – 30 May 2005 “Firefighters suspect arson in massive marsh blaze”, by Ian Elliot

Firefighters suspect a major fire that burned a huge swath of the Great Cataraqui Marsh was deliberately set. Kingston firefighters were initially called to a large and fast-moving blaze just east of Weller Avenue right before 8:30 p.m. While they were battling that fire, which appeared to have started near the shore and burned out in a concentric ring, another blaze started about a kilometre north of the original fire and burned its way northeast towards Highway 401. “Field mice don’t usually carry matches,” observed Kingston Assistant Deputy Fire Chief Les Meers dryly after the second blaze broke out.

Kingston Police Staff-Sgt. Greg Sands said last night the fire will be investigated, although no one was in custody last night. “There were reports that two youths were seen running from the area shortly after [the fire] and that will be investigated,” he said. There were no reports of property damage as winds blew the fire away from the shore of the Cataraqui River. Nearby homes are protected by the CN Rail track which acts as a firebreak. “The winds were in our favour this evening,” said Meers. “They were blowing east and pushing the fire towards the river.” More than 20 Kingston firefighters were called out to fight the fire yesterday evening and it had been largely extinguished by press time. Several firefighters were to have been posted on the scene overnight to guard against flare-ups. Much of the firefighting was done by crews with backpacks holding several gallons of water, which they refilled from a tanker some distance from the fire. As the fire spread, they tapped into a hydrant on Shaw Street and ran the hose through a trench they’d excavated underneath the railway tracks. “It’s something we don’t like to do, but we have to,” explained Meers.

The fire was intense, and people watching it from their back porches along Montreal Street said, at its height, they could feel the heat from the flames on their faces from a distance of several hundred metres. The fire also drew hundreds of curious spectators, who clogged area roads and bridge overpasses that offered a view of the fire. A number of people also drove to a quarry on Highway 15 in the former Pittsburgh Township that offered a panoramic view of the marsh. There was a street-party atmosphere at the scene as people brought babies in strollers and carried digital or video cameras to snap pictures as the massive blaze spread. Cars also slowed or pulled over on the shoulder of Highway 401 to watch the fire burn and Kingston firefighters were ready to close that stretch of highway if the fire drew too close and interfered with visibility. Train traffic was slowed but not stopped as crews fought the fire. Several slow-moving trains passed through the area during the fire, with passengers on the trains pressing against the windows to see the blaze, which shot flames and embers 10 metres high at its peak and whose plumes of smoke could be seen for miles.

Bystanders lined the tracks and had to be shooed off by police and firefighters as trains passed through the area. The fire department has a boat but didn’t call it out last night. The fire department has been called to the marsh a half-dozen times already this year as a lack of rain has left it tinder dry, but yesterday’s fire was by far the largest this year. The marsh burns regularly in the spring and fall. While the spectacular fires rarely threaten houses, they do pose a threat to the phone lines that run along the east side of the tracks. They weren’t damaged in last night’s fire. In 1995, a particularly large fire destroyed 250 hectares of marsh and burned for almost 24 hours.

Zapshack, 1991

With the events in Rome, I find my self rummaging – amazed when I think of it that I was in eastern Europe so soon after the fall of Communism. I have nothing on Bruce “Hubely”, of course, who was on his second stint in Bratislava, later under the Brandenburg Gates on unification, when I flew into Warsaw to spread democracy, the cult of Walkman as well as jokes about President Jarulzelski looking a lot like Roy Orbison to Baltic resort town teens.

zapshack2

We lived well on chelb, pivo and ser but I dreamed of zapjakanky. We bought them in these zapshacks, above. Lody is ice cream, by the way, which is a hell of a lot easier to say than what Brucey had to order in Bratislave, zrma zlina.

Update: Watching the CBC Life and Times episode on the Pope last night, I was surprised how the Vatican was pouring money into Poland as part of the pressure it brought to undermine the wall and it got me wondering if all we twenty somethings brought into eastern Europe by tiny institutions in an oddly organized fashion was backed by Rome to some degree as well. Karol’s little army of westerners pushed out into little cities and towns who had little experience of westerners other than as tank drivers. My students thought we all used one brand, “Wash n’ Go” shampoo, as it was the first to make the market there. That and “The Final Countdown” by Europe was the height of current pop music as someone had a cassette. To counteract that I passed around the Walkman with Blue Rodeo and “My Definition of a Boombastic (Jazz Style)” by Dream Warriors.

Denmark, New York

There are places you hit the brakes. It can be a view but more often than not it is the question of what the heck was going on here. As you can see from these pictures, there are three great stone houses in a row on a rather quite back country road in Lewis County New York. The afternoon shadow across their fronts confirm their eastern orientation facing across the valley. But why, away from a river where mills could develop, did this small hamlet have such a grand life almost 200 years ago. The sign next to the pink sided Freedom Wright’s Inn gives some indication of the importance of the place at one time, as does the solid but closed up church.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first occupation by Europeans of the area comes relatively late or so sayeth the 1927 The History of New York State (pub., Lewis Historical Publishing Company, Inc.):

The settlement of the northern section of New York was greatly delayed by the ignorance concerning it. Old maps of the section named it Irocoicia. “The Land of the Iroquois,” or Coughsagraga, “The Dismal Wilderness.” Travelers who skirted the edges said it was a region of swamps and mountain barrens. Sauthier’s map, published in England in 1777 and supposed to be the beat and latest in its information, mentions it as “This marshy tract is full of beavers and otters.” There is no map earlier than 1795 that shows a trace of the Black River. Soldiers, possibly those of Sullivan’s expedition, knew something of the territory. But it is in no way surprising that when offers were made to the land commissioners of New York for these supposed waste barrens, that they should be accepted readily, and the land sold for mere pittances and on the easiest of terms. One of the many sales, and the, was that to Macomb. On June 22, 1791, Alexander Macomb made an offer for certain lands, the payment to be one-sixth part of the purchase price yearly until the account was complete, no interest to be charged. The price offered was eight pence an acre. Macomb secured net 3,670,715 acres, divided into six great tracts. The one numbered four included the larger part of the counties of Jefferson and Lewis. Macomb conveyed this tract, with others, to William constable, and he in turn part to others sop that the deeds to Lewis County are traced back to nine great tracts known as: Black River, Inmans’ Triangle, Constable’s Four Towns, Brantingham, Brown’s, Watson’s, Castorland, and Great Tract Number Four.

Early settlers included Bedells and many others. Denmark was the first township to be constituted in 1807 after the founding of the county two years before. Someone of local legal note – who attened Denmark Academy and who studied law… in Lowville – was born there in 1825 as was an Iowa banker in 1833 as well as a Mayor of Ottawa. It wasn’t until about 40 years after its founding that the now larger towns formed in the valley below:

In 1848, the towns of Croghan and New Bremen were formed by French, German, and Swiss immigrants.

These towns were likely created as part of the development of the Black River canal, an unprofitable spur off the Erie, which opened in 1855. Denmark was on one branch of the underground railroad, moving slaves from the US south to Canada. A golf club formed in 1925.

Train

 

Lake Ontario from the 5:35 am to the Big Smoke. Click if you must.

I met a man on the way back who took the train to and from Detroit every week. Ten hours each way to his work. I was tired of being on the train after two and a half hours. I do not seem to travel well anymore. Maybe it’s because trains in the past took me on holidays rather than work. Not complaining but sitting on a siding in Napanee waiting for the on-coming train to pass is not like heading to Belgium with a backpack when you are twenty three.

These shots are from the way there when I was more wowsie. I was very surprised to see that Lake Ontario was entirely ice-less at the shore near Oshawa. The clouds at the blue horizon in the photo above are the lake effect, laying more snow on Buffalo. VIA Rail could pick a more exciting interior colour scheme than beige and seafoam. They used to be more into navy blue and orange, didn’t they?

Kingston Brewing Company, Kingston, Ontario


Readers in the local area may have noticed I have yet to write about the Kingston Brewing Company, more commonly called the Kingston Brew Pub. It’s just that I have not got a set of photos that capture the place more than anything but I popped in mid-afternoon today and made a start.

I have been going to the Kingston Brew Pub for more than a decade. When we lived three hours drive away, during LBK (Life Before Kids) we planned long weekends around meals there. Now I work a block away and am happy because of it, even to pop in for the lunch special or a cup of coffee mid-afternoon. The beers on tap are mainly their own but they do have McAuslan Oatmeal Stout and Guinness – based on the belief, I think, that now one can improve much on these examples of the styles. There is a bloggers meet up tomorrow evening there at 5 pm so I will have more thoughts and notes on a couple of ales after that.

Later: Ok. I never took any notes. I blabbed about blogs and failed to note the Winter Whallop or the Dragon’s Breath IPA. But I did get a couple of pictures of the upstairs.