Monthly Archives: August 2011

Re: Beer chauvinism!

Beer, ,

I think it’s pretty strange how some people get worked up about who makes the best beer, and other silly questions like that.  Obviously, it’s so subjective you’d never get people to agree.  On any given day, depending on the weather and what I was eating for dinner, I might have a dozen different favorites.  More than once, I’ve had a taste of a beer in one situation, and thought it was the best thing I’d ever tasted, only to pick up a bottle a few months later and find it pretty underwhelming.  You might as well argue religion and politics.

That post and the comments do talk about something a little easier to quantify though: actual availability of craft beer.  Within a mile or so walk of my house, I’ve got two grocery stores, a specialty wine/beer shop, and a handful of restaurants with beer on draft.  Of those, the specialty shop obviously has the best variety, with a decent selection of local and national craft beer, European imports, etc.  One of the restaurants has a couple taps from Swamp Head, brewed here in Gainesville (note to local restaurants: we go there all the time, in part because of this).  I’ve got two other specialty shops in town that I go to more often, mostly because they’ve got a better local craft beer selection, but also because their service is much better.

So I count myself lucky to have the selection I’ve got.  I’ve got friends in big cities with tons of options I don’t have.  But then again, lots of Americans don’t have anything within an easy walk of home.

Visiting Ommegang

Beer,

The other big event of my summer vacation was visiting Brewery Ommegang near Cooperstown, New York.  We’re both big fans of their beers, so we thought it would be great to go see where they’re made, and hopefully get to taste any special brews they had on tap at the cafe.

Alas, the cafe was closed due to unspecified “plumbing problems”.  So we knew as soon as we arrived that we weren’t going to stay for lunch, and there probably wouldn’t be anything special to sample.  So we took the standard tour which ends with a tasting of their standard beers (Witte, BPA, Hennepin, Rare Vos and Three Philosophers).  The tour was reasonably well done — walking around the outside of the brewery, getting a decent look at the goings-on inside (even if it’s mostly just big tanks), with a good overview of the brewing process and a constant focus on how Belgian-style brewing differs from the regular American brewing.  I’ve taken a few brewery tours and brewed a few batches myself, and I still learned a couple things (like they store their spent grains in a giant cow-patterned silo because they sell them for cow feed, and their kegs aren’t bottle-conditioned so they’re really quite different from the bottled beer).

The tour suffers from Ommegang being an uncomfortably middle-sized brewery.  I’ve taken the tour at a giant brewery like Guinness, and they’ve got a giant, slick production with museum-quality exhibits, movies about barrel making, and a gift shop that wouldn’t be out of place at Disneyland.  And I’ve toured a few tiny breweries, where you can wander freely around the brewery floor, and the tour guide is taking time off from brewing to show you around, and the older guy in the tasting room turns out to be the master brewer.  But Ommegang is a little larger, and obviously growing quickly.  They’re too big to let you wander around while they’re busily cranking out product, but they’re not big enough to have given up letting you watch them actually brew beer.

The tasting at the end of the tour was well done — out on the patio on a nice summer day, with a very good description of each beer, what they’d pair well with, etc.  The gift shop was crowded, but did have great prices for the standard Ommegang beers and nice glasses.  We headed into Cooperstown for lunch, and found a nice pizza place on Urban Spoon.

In all, I’d say it’s well worth the trip, but frustratingly fell short of the awesome experience I was hoping for.

Further adventures with felt

knitting, ,

I never actually admitted what happened to my (in hindsight over-) enthusiastic offer to knit Redbeard whatever he wanted, did I? Hmm, well, the good news is that I have found the perfect yarn for making a felted scarf. It is soft and pliable, even after being felted. Not stiff in any way, or even scratchy.

Too bad I was trying to make a glasses case with it.

Actually, even setting the yarn aside, this thing was just not the right shape for glasses. On the upside – it IS the perfect shape for knitting needles, so I now have my very own needle case….

 

A wet dry run

Beer, ,

Redbeard and I (mostly Redbeard) have been tinkering around with a new insulated mash tun that will allow us to more easily do all-grain brewing.

Yes, I know – but “insulated mash tun” sounds so much better than “10-gallon cooler with a bunch of weird hardware we shoved into it.”

A view from the inside:

Things were going so well, until we sprung a small leak at a little over 4 gallons. You can see the drips on the silver and then coming off at the bottom.

Oh, well… the search for the right-sized rubber washer continues…

Feeling All Spindly

knitting, ,

A couple weeks ago a friend of mine and I were talking about how fun it would be to learn how to spin, and now, lo and behold, we spin! She invited a veteran spinner (and spinning teacher) to our small knitting group (average size = 4) and away we went. Our teacher was great: patient, low-key and, most importantly, patient. I came away with a spindle of a pretty green and surprisingly yarn-like substance:

The stuff on the right is what I spun. Me! And it started like the stuff on the left! It was kind of magical. It even – and this is the importantly part -continued to work outside of the knitting group. Amazing! Why am I still sitting here typing when I could go spin?

Hitchhiker

knitting,

Now that it has been revealed to its recipient, I can release pictures of the hitchhiker scarf that I’ve been working on. This was a lot of fun, though a bit “back-loaded” such that the rows get longer and longer in a kind of ever-lengthening tunnel of garter stitching. Luckily, I had picked a yarn that I loved and so it was fun to watch the patterns in the colors emerge:

This is a pretty light-weight scarf, so I needed to give it to my mom in the summer so that she can actually use it. (Ah, Vermont….)

 

Family Beer Tasting

Beer, , ,

We went to visit family in upstate New York and brought some local beer to share.  We started with Swamp Head’s Saison du Swamp, which we’d been thinking of as a gentle introduction to saison.  But it was a much bigger shock than we’d expected.  We followed it up with a couple Cigar City beers: Sea Bass (which is very sour and funky, even compared to the average saison) and 110K +OT.

While we were there, we also had a few local beers: Saranac Summer Ale is a light, easy drinking Hefeweizen, and Southern Tier Crème Brûlée Stout is a crazy stout with an amazingly accurate crème brûlée flavor.  We also had some family homebrew: a wonderful strawberry mead, and a chocolate raspberry stout (which I liked a lot more than the Southern Tier).