Author: Alan

More Testing

There is much to learn with the new and beautiful administration system that my blog masters have blessed me with today. I am now able to manage comments with four status levels which are selectable specifically for each comment. I can set a time for a post to appear later. I have a specific podcast file upload display as well as the ability to select from among different visual themes for the blog. I also upload photos per post and not first to a folder tree from which I then associate it with a post. This is excellent. I have to learn the XHTML tags finally, my use of 2001 era tags now being out dated. Bear with me.

David, there is an RRS comments feed to the lower right. Look between the archives and the search.

None

Ontario: A Dry Visit To County Durham Brewing

Spending the day with the kids at the Toronto Zoo on a field trip, I thought on the way back I would pop into County Durham Brewing in Pickering just to grab a few brew and have a chat with brewer, Bruce Halstead. Instead, I got a brief glimpse into the most trim and most successful small Canadian breweries I have ever seen.

County Durham seems to be a one man operation – all Bruce all the time. When I got to the door he took a break from cleaning the place but had to explain that there wasn’t even any beer to buy as he is casking it all for pubs entirely within the downtown of Toronto, half an hour’s drive away. In the past he had been servicing accounts in St. Catherine’s and Hamilton but has found success supplying the high standards of the beer geekdom of Canada’s biggest city. He has a van but, unlike other regional brewers, doesn’t have to spend half his week delivering to spread out customers. It’s one van load a week, one trip into town. He did mention he need a bigger van.

 

 

 

 

Another thing that makes County Durham’s brews stand out is that they are the only brewery in Ontario – and perhaps further afield regionally – that uses only whole hops. Bruce works with one farmer in the US north-west and has developed a relationship that has provided him with the quality and supply that perfectly fits his needs. I wish I could have tried some. But it was all gone out the door or heading that way.

A niche market that overtime has evolved to suit a very profitable small brewery. What any community could do with. Bruce mentioned a number of pubs where I could get his fresh beer any time, like C’est What or Volo. Trouble is they were all in the community half an hour in the other direction to the one I was heading in. He does supply the LCBO with two ales, C’est What Homegrown Hemp Ale and County Durham Signature Ale, but he needs to replenish those stocks as well.

Busy enough to be right at the edge, County Durham has to be one of Ontario’s more interesting success stories.

Group Project: McCain’s Visit To Ottawa

I don’t usually get caught up in the bashing of various news sources. The Toronto Star gets its share of grief from folks with a variety of levels with incoherent thought – leaving the brighter stuttering when they see the error of their ways. But this column/article/piece, for me, is worth a bit of finger pointery:

He brings to Canada his message that Barack Obama’s desire to unilaterally renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement damages relations between steadfast allies and he will highlight the benefits of the trilateral deal in his speech Friday at an Ottawa hotel. The Conservative government in Ottawa and the Canadian Embassy in Washington are seeking as much cover as possible from the McCain visit, but the optics hurt Prime Minister Stephen Harper and everyone around him. Having the man most Canadians would see as the embodiment of the third George W. Bush term extolling your policies is no favour for the Conservative government.

Most Canadians?!? First, I would think most Canadians really have no opinion on McCain and his position on Canadian policy. Most Canadians think BBQ is a chicken wiener on a hibachi. We like to talk up how much we know about the US but most Canadians are fairly ignorant generally of our neighbour’s governance and specifically who John McCain is. Second, Canadians will gush because US breakfast TV shows may be broadcasting from Canada. Nothing excites Canucks as much as being noticed by US media. Canada could be on fire from coast-to-coast but, as long as there were US camera crews up here, there would be a silver lining. Third, Canada has done very well under trade agreements – as long as we didn’t have an artificially inflated dollar primed by speculators pumping up the cost of a barrel of oil to the benefit of the few.

So why do the optics hurt – why would Harper hide? – well, you know other than he seems to always hide as a first tactic. Sure his policies are a bit anti-trade, ensuring the short term gains for commodity vendors are undermining the solid economic gains made for twenty years in the 80 cent dollar world. Even if you aren’t conservative don’t you like your conservatives standing up for themselves proudly?

Or maybe it’s because McCain was an activist for funding reform and bipartisan cooperation. Maybe it’s because McCain is the sort of politician who Canadians want – engaging and fiscally conservative but a bit of a red Tory in some areas social and libertarian in others. Maybe it’s because McCain knows how to smile. Maybe because side-by-side Harper does not look as good to Canadians as his putative US right-wing counterpart.

We Live in George Carlin’s Joke

About 35 years ago when George Carlin used to appear on TV’s Sonny and Cher Show and things like that, he used to pretend he was doing a TV news anchor man reporting on quirky items – the sort of thing SNL ripped off a few years later. Once he told this joke: “Scientists have discovered that saliva causes cancer – but fortunately only when taken in small amounts over a long period of time.”

Belgium: Chapeau Lemon and Kriek, Brouwerij De Troch

Girlie Drink Drunk. There was a Kids in the Hall skit fifteen years or so back called “Girlie Drink Drunk.” It seems to be on YouTube. That’s all I can think of when I see these super sweet lambic offerings but I buy them hoping they will be more fruited than sweetened. And I didn’t mind the pineapple cousin to these two – except for wondering why anyone would want pineapple in a beer.

The Kriek is the red of warning or lollipop rather than fruit but a bright cheery red nonetheless. Pink foam and rim. Candy and cough drop on the nose. Some acidity to cut the sweet but pretty sweet, cough droppy. If this was a fruit juice I would think it too much. The acidity is more than lingering – and not pleasantly so as it leads to no sense of funk what so ever. Slightly plastic finish. The Lemon? Gimme a sec.

Slightly clouded amber ale under white rim and foam. On the nose, lemon furniture polish meets real lemon peel. In the mouth the lemon is more honest than the Kriek was a reflection – or even the shadow – of a cherry. Maybe because both have a overwhelming (added?) citric acidity. With that acid bite, there is lemon peel and lemon juice but also a little bit of wheaty cream. Still, even though this is really not super sweet, the effect is more annoying even if not cloying. Enamel stripping. Can’t finish it. Both tip the scale at only 3.5% – meaning, unfortunately, you will not have the benefit of having your senses dulled the slightest bit thoughout the entire experience.

By the way, the BAers are strangely attracted. Upon reflection I should have placed the dart in the photo one inch to the lower-left.

“When I Was Your Age, We Ate Maple Leaf Cookies!”

The New York Times has an article on strategies kids take to get by living in the most expensive city in North America. Funny how it reminds me of something:

Peter Naddeo, a 24-year-old musician, earns $15 an hour working as a temp in Web development in Chelsea, and has perfected the tricky art of stretching lunch into dinner. He moved to New York from Pennsylvania last fall and can barely afford his $80 monthly college loan payments. He listens to a hand-me-down CD player because iPods are out of reach. He pays $600 for a 10-by-10-foot room in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, that has one saving grace: a window that faces east. For lunch, Mr. Naddeo usually orders a $3.50 plate of yellow rice and beans from a Latin American diner on Eighth Avenue, and eats late to ward off hunger pangs. Sometimes he hits up a bar in his neighborhood where a $6 pint comes with a small pizza. Or he relies on friends to feed him.

In the ’80s this was called living through a recession and no one had pals who fed him. Though that isn’t quite true as I recall buying groceries for a roommate who was down to eating carrots only. She was getting a little orange. One pal had a bag of maple leaf cookies that were put out on a plate whenever we came over. No one liked them so it was a cheap way to be hospitable. He was on mini-wage and there was only tea, cookies, cards and hockey of the black and white when we were over there. I do like the line above about a “hand-me-down” CD player. Boo frikkin hoo.

Isn’t this just called being young? Don’t you have to be broke for at least half a decade after school? And where is the New York of Archie Bunker? I blame George Jefferson, movin’ on up and all that. Everyone wants to live like people on TV.

The Web 2.0 Ideas That Won’t Go Away

How do you know that Web 2.0 is past, long gone and uninteresting? Reading yet another article about how the law needs to be changed to allow people to do things that no one wants to do anymore:

Earlier this month, some fans of the NBC television programs American Gladiators and Medium found themselves unable to digitally record the shows on their personal computers. The reason for the blocked recordings raises important technical and legal questions about the rights of consumers to “time shift” television programs in the digital era. The blocked recordings affected people that record television programs on their personal computers using the Microsoft Windows Vista Media Centre. Most people are unaware that Microsoft has inserted a feature that allows a broadcaster or content owner to stop the digital recording of a show by triggering a “broadcast flag” that specifies its preference the show not be recorded. When the user tries to record it, Microsoft’s software recognizes the flag and issues a warning that the program cannot be recorded.

So? None of them paid a license fee for the right to record the show and, in any event, it’s American Gladiators for God’s sake. If anyone thinks we need to law of copyright to be altered so that folks can bootleg a hack summer repeat of a 1980s joke, they need their head examined. The things that have not taken off and become part of general society like mashing-up, creative common licenses, YouTube, podcasting, Facebook and (frankly) blogging as anything other than internet diarizing are not vicitms of copyright law but illustrations why we do not need to tamper with the law to respond to another short-term trend. Legislators don’t rush to fnid out what the hobbyists are up to.

And have you noticed that no innovation of the internet is not really having an effect on the US Presidential election?

Belgium: Canaster, De Glazen Toren, Erpe-Mere

can1Here is a hint when you are traveling. If, after a tiring 600 km drive (to be followed the next day by another 600 km drive) you notice contract street sweeping equipment in the parking lot, get a new hotel. Street sweepers come and go in the night, you see. After idling their massive engines for fifteen minutes or so. It was like sleeping in a public works depot.

My only consolation was the bottle of Canaster I had brought. Labeled as a winterscotch-style ale I had brought it along as a reward for being me. It’s by the same good folk at KleinBrouwerij De Glazen Toren who made that saison I had last Thanksgiving. The beer is basically a Belgian brown with plenty of round brown maltiness, burlappy nutmegged yeast and some black tea and perhaps black malt astringency. It pours a thick sheeting cream head over chestnut ale. In the malt there is date and maybe dark raisin with a bit of a tobacco effect. It could have done with another something something but it was a very pleasant 9.5% brew that came across nothing as big as that. Plenty of BAer approval.

Not needing anything was the bottle of The Lactese Falcon Flanders Sour Brown Ale I picked up at Church-Key on the way home – you know, as a reward for being me. Yum – but I like the tastes of Parmesan cheese and Flemish sour beer and here they are in one brew. Plenty of roasted beef broth notes, vanilla, pear juice, balsamic, Worcestershire and Parmesan. Herself gets only molasses on schnozzal analysis. Somewhat controversial when it first appeared, here is a beer that intends to be itself – and one that may sort the style huggers from the brave and the free. I have another put away for a long sleep. I want to make sauces with it, soak meat in it – make welsh rarebit with it.