I have joined a hops-farming co-op. We’re a bunch of local homebrewers who have started a hops farm not only to hedge against rising hop prices, but also to have an excuse to play in the mud every rainy weekend.
For the last several weeks, we have been getting the ground ready, planting the hops, and last weekend, erecting the poles that will support the lines that the hop vines will grow up.
Progress and photos can be found at: http://zenzele-brewery.blogspot.com/, the blog of our fearless leader (I’ll put a link on the sidebar too).
I had chat with a friend on Monday. It went like this:
him: is it possible to brew a bacon beer?
me: BACON BEER!?? Hmm. I will have to research that. Sounds interesting. Getting the flavor without the grease will be a challenge… but I bet I can come up with something.
him: Ever since having the jalapeno I can’t get the meaty flavor idea out of my head. The jalapeno is good and almost meaty in taste.
Well, that link above is from a blog that is SEARCHING for bacon-related things, so of course anything even remotely resembling bacon will show up there. I was interested enough to go search out this beer and am lucky enough to have a place between work & home with an awesome variety of bottles.
AECHT SCHLENKERLA RAUCHBIER MARZENGoing so far as saying this is beer is “bacon flavor” is just plain wrong in my opinion. It is “meaty” and has so much smokey flavor that any hint of hops, malt, phenols, or anything else that resembles most other beer styles is almost entirely covered up.
That said, it is GOOD. If I hadn’t already been thinking “bacon” that certainly would not have entered my mind. It’s more like smoked pig… and the “pig” is only because that is the only animal I have ever had that was smoked to that extreme level… it’s SMOKE, not MEAT.
Rauchbier is a relatively underrepresented style even in the diverse American craft/import world. Rauchbier simply means “smoked beer” in German and gets it prominent flavor from smoking the malts over an open fire before brewing. Probably the main reason it’s not more popular is most breweries or maltsters don’t have the equipment.
Drinking this makes me want to give homebrewing this style a shot. It would be an interesting experiment to roast my own barley and pour myself a pint of this while grilling meat. I’ve heard of some homebrewers smoking barley themselves… so who knows, maybe this summer I’ll expand my brewing bag-o-tricks a little. If it’s not bacony (is that a word? it should be.) enough the first go-around, I make no promises that the second batch will be vegetarian-friendly.
Last night was the monthly meeting of my local homebrew club.
It was a nice evening so I had my windows down on the way home. I also happen to have a homebrew 12oz bottle sitting next to me that one of my fellow brewers had given me while walking out.
Pulling to a dead stop at a red light, with my window down and a begger standing right next to my car, I was forced to acknowledge his presence. As a general rule I carry no cash and this particular night I didn’t have a sandwich or anything in my front seat to satisfy his “hungry” sign.
So, I asked him “Do you drink alcohol?”.
He looked a little shocked, moved uncomfortably close to my car, and whispered “I ain’t gonna lie to you, I do like me some alcohol”.
So I dug a little deeper, “How about homebrewed beer? You ever had that?”
“No”, he replied.
“Well, I’ve got a bottle here. If you think you can find a bottle opener, it’s all yours”.
“Hell yeah, I’ll take it. I’ll get it open”, he said as I handed him the brown, unlabeled bottle.
As the light turned green and I drove off into the night, I wondered about that hobo. Did he think I was tricking him? Did I do him a disservice by not mentioning he should pour that homebrew into a glass to avoid the yeast trub? Would I drink an unlabeled bottle from a stranger that drove by and handed it to me with little explanation? I hope he doesn’t hurt himself trying to open that. And…. Should I always keep a few bottles of homebrew in my front seat for other opportunities like this, or did he really want a sandwich?
This morning, most of those thoughts had fled and my main concern was whether I would title this post “Homebrew for Hobos” or “Beer for Bums”. I think I made the correct choice.
I had an unfortunate 7 hour layover in the Osaka, Japan airport a few weeks ago. There was a coffee shop open the second half of those 7 hours, and they had free wireless internet, so it wasn’t that bad. The best thing I found in the Osaka airport was this:
The 2nd photo is a zoom-in of the sign hanging on the front of the coke machine.
That’s right, a Coke Machine in Japan that only takes US Dollars. If that wasn’t strange enough, there was a sign ON the Coke machine with a map to a Beer Vending Machine. So great; although they apparently didn’t get the memo that US Dollars are now play money and should not be accepted for anything.
Unfortunately, I found this literally minutes before I had to board the plane, so I didn’t get a chance to use the treasure map. Maybe next time.
I grind and brew a pot of coffee every morning. Normally, I buy coffee that was either roasted locally, has some interesting marketing, claims to be organic/freetrade or whatever hippie word I might be into at the moment of purchase.
That said, I love going down the coffee isle at the grocery store. It smells so good. I will occasionally buy a pound of either bulk, Dunken Donuts, or whatever whole-bean coffee looks interesting if I am running low on the other stuff.
Last night, I made a discovery that will effect the next several months of my coffee consumption. While browsing the coffee isle of the local grocery store HARRIS TEETER, I saw a little sign below their store brand coffee selection that said “Buy Two Get Three Free”.
I am a regular shopper at the Teeter and have never seen a sign like this, so I was a little confused. My first thought is surely someone has made a mistake and it should say “Buy Two Get Third Free”. So I went up to customer service for clarification. I was wrong. It truly meant “Buy Two Get Three Free”. Very strange. Who has ever heard “5 for the price of 2″? Not me.
A pound of H.T. Trader brand whole bean (or ground) coffee is $6.99. So, for $13.98, I got 5 lbs of coffee.
That is $2.80 per pound.
I wish I knew approximately how many cups I was getting from a pound, but I am going to take a very rough guess and say 40. (this may be a future dranktank study, now that I think of it). Using that estimate, I will enjoy 7 cent cups of coffee for the next few months!
I usually would not buy that much coffee in advance, knowing that freshness is a key part of quality, but c’mon…. 7 cents!! I would have been an idiot to pass that up.
Holy wow. These videos are some of the most awesome things I’ve seen. My friend Aaron pointed this out in the comments of this blog a week or so ago and I hadn’t had time to look at them until now.
It’s a TV show on MOJO where this guy, Zane, travels the world to find interesting drinking traditions… and he participates in all of them.
Her: “I won’t be home until 7:30, can you make dinner?”
Me: “Sure”
It’s the first beautiful weather evening in many MONTHS that I have not been busy. So instead of slaving in the kitchen, I hope she is okay with me mowing 1/2 the yard, riding my bike to the Mexican market, then grilling meat and drinking beer.
April 7, 2008 marked the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition. Well, not exactly the END of Prohibition, that would come several months later… But April 7 was the day that Roosevelt successfully redefined “alcoholic substances” as anything OVER 3.2% alcohol… which means that on April 7, 1933, beer became legal again!
It is simply amazing that there was a 13 year black spot in our history where alcohol was illegal.
On the road between HCMC and the Mekong River Delta, I kept seeing stands of jugs and bottles for sale. There were dozens of them, and all looked shady, unclean, and in front of a shack. Like this:
So I asked my tour guide what was going on with those… I really had no idea and was kinda assuming it had something to do with scooters (there are so many scooters in Vietnam, it’s hard to describe… they don’t really have roads; they have scooter rivers).
My tour guide, who our only common language was broken french, proceeded to tell me the story. Because of the language barrier, I didn’t get it all, but from what I gather it is a distilled rice wine. The locals in this region make it, usually each family having someone who supplies it for their family, or group of families. It started several generations ago and now has become somewhat of a tradition for the HCMC city folk to drive their scooters out to the “country”, pick up a jug, and get hammered on it on the weekends.
So of course I had to get me some. When I got to the little village on an island in the Mekong River Delta, my tour guide took me to a little hut/cafe that made their own rice wine and banana wine.. The place looked like:
The rice wine is really a lot like moonshine, but for some reason less painful that the Appalachian corn-based stuff. The Banana wine I know very little about, except it was darker, and actually better than the rice wine.
The name for the rice moonshine stuff in Vietnamese is “Ruou”. It’s really cheap, I guess because:
Rice is so plentiful it’s practically free
The only other ingredient, water, isn’t really a problem since they live on a river
And of course, labor is pretty damn cheap (somebody told me the typical factory worker makes about $50/month).
So cheap, in fact, the lady offered me a used plastic water bottle full for $1 (and I think it’s a Vietnamese tradition to ALWAYS mark stuff up at least 200% for tourists). I didn’t buy from her because I didn’t want to carry it (or drink it) the rest of the day. But I did taste it and did get find a more interesting version of it (more on that in future post).
Oh yeah, this little place made their own honey too… although I didn’t see any evidence of mead being made.
