Every fall calls for a pumpkin ale; or at least the Thomas Ave. Brewery faithful do. Until three years ago, Pumpkin ale was a conceptual style that couldn't offset the mediocre number of 'fall brews' released by major breweries in the midwest. I've tinkered with the idea of including squash, zucchini & the titular gourd into a pumpkin ale, but their fermentable contribution is suggestible at best. Anyone who's had a dish made with a gourd component can attest that the pulp from these seasonal vegetables is more like a plate for a greater dish; one which the chef needs spices & other accompaniments to truly create a dish worthy of bearing the name of whichever fall field gourd hath fallen into their skillet.
So, this season's Pumpkin ale falls back onto the old trusty malt bill:
70% American 2-row Barley
14% German Munich Malt
12% Blended Caramel Malt
4% American Special Roast Malt
An overall toasty-sweet compromise that does well for both late hop additions & spice character via pumpkin pie spice. I deny some recipes that go for Cluster hops as a sole bittering addition. I've always held true to the idea that spicy late addition aroma hops add a special something to a beer that only comes once-per-autumn and possibly once in the dead of winter. This year's recipe will have a 2 oz./5 gal. first wort hop addition of German Spalt hops, and a late addition of American Mt. Hood. In past years, I've gone for more citrusy or floral late additions, but my Oktoberfest hybrid ales proved to be a waste on my selected yeasts. Worthy lessons, but lessons that yielded to a sudden availability of Spalt pellet hops.
Lucky beer, indeed.
American ale yeast, as gospel. Three weeks fermentation before a week in the keg. Oh, you Autumnal traditional beer!
Beer details aside, I should notify that my inaugural post begat some poetic justice. Only two weeks after I'd made light of a flat panel TV on an Iowa roadside, my cat pushed my wife's TV off our record cabinet before my occupied eyes. It was a physical feat for such a small feline that begat the later evening into becoming a trip to WalMart for a replacement.
Yes, humbled am I.
Now we have an LCD TV & Bluray player, though Wally-world's selection of Bluray discs was so reprehensible that I chose no additional titles to compliment my new array of devices. What follows is my current commentary on HDTV & its hegemony over innocent consumers. Though I found it strangely perverse to be pushing a flat-panel TV & hundreds of dollars in et cetera equipment through WalMart aisles in a single shopping cart. Don't ask why I didn't go elsewhere. My most satisfying intention overall was denying Best Buy my dollars in credit.
- Anything short of a roof-top antenna provides paltry reception, even when bathed in transmitter reception. Satellite TV is a crap shoot for equipment quality. Comcast/Xfinity will do you like Ving Rhames in Pulp Fiction.
- 90% of major network programming is uninteresting 'reality' TV or shows that are akin to karaoke showdowns. If I wanted to be bored by this kind of culture, I'd go to a townie bar.
- WTF Family Guy?! Just because you have a 1.77:1 aspect ratio doesn't mean you need to devote half of your waning comedic intellect to 3D animation. I prefer Aqua Teen Hunger Force & Squidbillies for a reason. Namely, more of those shows' bugets are devoted to making me laugh, rather than confirming that two or three animators can work in a three axis environment. To hell with advanced shading, I want less motion, more throwback humor via obscure acronyms & minimal animation over a 12 minute span.
- HDTV was supposed to be the death knell for pan & scan or full frame edits of current movies. So, why are so many syndicated digital broadcasts catering to people with 4:3 TVs? I've seen full frame broadcasts with letterbox aspects being broadcast over the so-called HD channels of UHF stations. It's time these stations do like the big networks & devote HD broadcasts for intended aspects & resoultions & leave the reduced versions for the x-2 channels on their transmitters. I'm looking at you My-Network-TV affiliates & your crappy 30 Rock reruns! Also, if Netflix doesn't rescind their BS 1.85:1 version of Pulp Fiction, I may cancel my subscription.
- Oh, and Youtube.com... Just friggin' go 720p already! You're the biggest video site aside from Netflix from 6-10pm! Just let me watch Brewing TV in HD! I will never choose to get any content from iTunes, and you should take advantage of that!
- 1080i, I hate you. I actually hate any broadcast format that ends in 'i'. So just, upgrade to 'p' already!
Oh lord, what have I already become?
Silver Sliver City
From Saint Paul, to elsewhere. A meandering saga of places, travels, beer & food with ample punctuation and sprawling adjectives.
Wednesday, September 28, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
An Increasingly Manic Share of the Seasons
We busted out of a wretchedly hot summer & into a clenching hold of Canadian air this week in Saint Paul. I recall last November found us thrust back into the 80 degree territory with little explanation or warning. So, I'm not calling an end to summer heat yet, especially with 100,000 acres of the Boundary Waters still burning & sending smoke down to brew town. If the heat returns, we'll rejoice cautiously as we await enough early winter snow to construct a redux to last winter's 5 foot tall snow den in our backyard.
Fear aside, it's a fairly pleasant time to enjoy early autumn. There's no word of a pumpkin shortage, thusfar. And though Minnesota Harvest in Jordan has closed, my sights are set on the Mississippi River valley's apple cider offerings in early October. Scancy & I are poised to camp out in Nelson, WI at our friends' farm party; we would like to seriously consider camping near the silo should temperatures remain fetus-friendly.
Random Thoughts
(#1) I've come to believe the key to brewing a flavorful English Bitter ale lies in fresh base malt combined with light Carastan & a generous portion of Biscuit malt. Hop amounts are also important, but vary with the breed & accompanying acid ratios. Luckily, it's a style that doesn't take long to compare recipe to result. In that spirit, I'd like to think my bitters have come a long way this year.
(#2) Too much attention is focused on various psychoses and either the fear of or bureaucracy surrounding the drugs that are said to treat said psychoses. Rarely are the societal causes investigated.
(#3) Macrobrew beer sales are faltering due to young drinkers being turned onto an ever expanding world of microbrew offerings. Though by cutting up the plentiful pie that is craft brew offerings within their increasingly meager take home wages, the market is already stifled. Except for homebrewing; that market will flourish until consumers take the idea too far & try to establish their own brewery (like I often muse on).
Sweeny's Saloon
Sweeny's would be my go-to pub if it weren't over a train line, freeway and up a hill. That being said, when I already find myself beyond such obstacles (or have had my arm pulled by outgoing friends) it is a fine establishment. Plenty of good beer tastes among the owners & staff lend to a well-established tap selection. They also have a fancy gold Perlick rear-sealing faucet system at the main bar that is a shining beacon of malty treats.
As for the food, I've had their burgers & fries to much delight. In a densely-packed area of foode eateries & craft beer destination bars, Sweeny's is a crowded tradeoff on weekends and a neighborhood who's-who on weekdays. Fine service & an expansive patio keep this Dale Street pub popular. Rogue Dead Guy is always on tap, and happy hours are exclusively Summit Brewing-geared. Happy hour also features 50 cent tacos, which aren't much more than your regular grade Minnesotan, barely seasoned hard shell munchies, but for 50 cents apiece why would you, sitting at a neighborhood bar east of Uptown, gripe?
Drunk: Summit Oktoberfest, Oatmeal Stout
Fear aside, it's a fairly pleasant time to enjoy early autumn. There's no word of a pumpkin shortage, thusfar. And though Minnesota Harvest in Jordan has closed, my sights are set on the Mississippi River valley's apple cider offerings in early October. Scancy & I are poised to camp out in Nelson, WI at our friends' farm party; we would like to seriously consider camping near the silo should temperatures remain fetus-friendly.
Random Thoughts
(#1) I've come to believe the key to brewing a flavorful English Bitter ale lies in fresh base malt combined with light Carastan & a generous portion of Biscuit malt. Hop amounts are also important, but vary with the breed & accompanying acid ratios. Luckily, it's a style that doesn't take long to compare recipe to result. In that spirit, I'd like to think my bitters have come a long way this year.
(#2) Too much attention is focused on various psychoses and either the fear of or bureaucracy surrounding the drugs that are said to treat said psychoses. Rarely are the societal causes investigated.
(#3) Macrobrew beer sales are faltering due to young drinkers being turned onto an ever expanding world of microbrew offerings. Though by cutting up the plentiful pie that is craft brew offerings within their increasingly meager take home wages, the market is already stifled. Except for homebrewing; that market will flourish until consumers take the idea too far & try to establish their own brewery (like I often muse on).
Sweeny's Saloon
Sweeny's would be my go-to pub if it weren't over a train line, freeway and up a hill. That being said, when I already find myself beyond such obstacles (or have had my arm pulled by outgoing friends) it is a fine establishment. Plenty of good beer tastes among the owners & staff lend to a well-established tap selection. They also have a fancy gold Perlick rear-sealing faucet system at the main bar that is a shining beacon of malty treats.
As for the food, I've had their burgers & fries to much delight. In a densely-packed area of foode eateries & craft beer destination bars, Sweeny's is a crowded tradeoff on weekends and a neighborhood who's-who on weekdays. Fine service & an expansive patio keep this Dale Street pub popular. Rogue Dead Guy is always on tap, and happy hours are exclusively Summit Brewing-geared. Happy hour also features 50 cent tacos, which aren't much more than your regular grade Minnesotan, barely seasoned hard shell munchies, but for 50 cents apiece why would you, sitting at a neighborhood bar east of Uptown, gripe?
Drunk: Summit Oktoberfest, Oatmeal Stout
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
Fine Drinking: El Bait Shop & Yankee Clipper
I got to take a sun on the horizon laden trip to Des Moines this month around Labor Day. The sky still has that orange-fading-to-blue hue that's downright enchanting, like the colors you see on a the label for Schell's Dark in the clear bottles. I always make too long of a list for my visits to Iowa. From a distance, I can't recall how hearty the food & drink is around Des Moines. I eat myself into a food coma & get a satisfied gut full of what I believe to be session beers on the typeface of a menu, but end up going down full of fortified barley like it had been harvested & malted just days before it went into a mash tun.
What I still have left on my list includes Jethro's BBQ near Drake University campus, the Chicago Speakeasy restaurant (what I've been told is an uncompromising supper club equidistant from its namesake & the grilled midwest steer it's reputed to serve so finely), and a perpetually expanding selection of craft eateries that pour an ever expanding selection of Iowa-brewed beers.
Des Moines has become a small pill version of Chicago - another city I never get to fully take in (for many more geographical & financial reasons). Though I have to give it to the Iowans that never seem to stop sprawling out from their city's core; they still manage to give plenty of time to the core of their capitol city, never treating it like a remote destination filled with urban dangers. The later is likely because for a city of over 100K people, Des Moines' social concerns still seem very trailer park-eque when I watch their local news channels from my hotel rooms.
El Bait Shop
After three prior visits with this airy downtown Des Moines pub on my list, I finally penciled it into my itinerary as my Tuesday morning, beer & breakfast destination. El Bait Shop should be in Chicago, Philadelphia, or even Tampa, just somewhere you'd expect a more than worthwhile selection of breweries from all corners of the US & the world. Hundreds of beers, fine offerings that form a list that seems to prove Iowa liquor distributors have the advantage of being central to the major transportation pathways between the biggest populated metroplexes.
El Bait shop had Rogue, Lakefront, Stone, Summit, Bells, New Belgium, Left Hand, Shipyard, Lost Coast, and on & on & on through a list of premier craft brands. Their selection of Iowa brews could teach a course on the state's breweries. What I love about Iowa's microbrewers is the purity & clean finish of their product they get into the kegs & bottles of damn near every brew in any season. Take Peace Tree Brewing from Knoxville... Their Hop Wrangler IPA isn't some overhopped caramel malt bomb that's rushed to market, it's a malt-developed ale with excellent citrus notes that wouldn't overpower a lager drinker. The well-read bartender mentioned Hop Wrangler is fermented with Belgian yeast & its malt character lightened in the kettle with candy sugar. A pour from the tap (its handle gaudily wrapped with a belt buckle) complimented the Mexican-spiced chicken wings that the kitchen served up without haste.
El Bait Shop's menu has plenty of American pub grub, representing border-to-border styles to compliment their well traveled drink selection. Fine wines & whiskeys are also on site, and Thursday's happy hour features free samples from Des Moines area homebrewers... A loaded deck of glad-handed offering that ranks El Bait Shop & IA liquor distributors as good sports in my book. Also, come for the scavenger hunt decor, the mural to Where the Wild Things Are, and the library of beer-related stickers adorning the bar.
Also drunk: Madhouse Coffee Stout (Davenport, IA), Summit Honeymoon Saison (St. Paul, MN).
The Yankee Clipper
The Ankeny bar that a respectable amount of my childhood found me in was a no-brainer stop on my way out of town, for little more than the actuality that it was a Tuesday. Taco Tuesdays are no rarity among the townie bars I frequent, but for more than 15 years I have known how uniquely special, nay important the Tuesday tacos are at the Clipper.
Take a deep-fried flour tortilla, stuff it with Iowa beef, season it with Iowa butchers' spices (or whatever makes the Clipper's grill taste so uniquely Iowan), add Cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, & line the top of that mother with some deep red sweetly hot sauce... That's a Clipper taco. I was only there for an hour, but in the time it took me to polish off two PBRs & a pint of Boulevard Wheat the staff of four running the lunch rush made & moved more than thirty tacos both inside the pub & out the door for locals on their lunch breaks. At one point, ten tacos sat brown bagged & tagged, awaiting their hungry recipients whom I'm told come from four counties surrounding Des Moines, every Tuesday for this lucky feast.
The tacos haven't changed since I was a kid, either; that's the magic part of the experience. No downsizing has occurred for this perfect meal. It still fills the belly, never seeming any smaller in the hand than it did when I was nine years old. The Clipper is a friendly local tavern with a library of 70s-era backlit Lite beer fodor, Iowa State University effects, and various other scraps from the locals that keep it a nightlife destination even though it's in the old downtown Ankeny, far from the big box retail encampments that line what once was farmland & villages surrounding this exurb turned suburb.
Also noted: the cozy, but well-equipped men's room.
Finally, one for the 'Yeah, I Really Saw It!' file. While en route to the Clipper, on the edge of the village of Marquisville traveling north on US highway 69 near it's interchange with I-35/80, I noticed a discarded plasma TV box in the median near a turn lane. As I approached it, I was stunned with neo-luddite happiness: not only was it a box for a plasma TV, a brand new flat panel TV laid scuffed & weather-beaten, still wrapped in its shrink wrap, having apparently fallen out of the box when its owner made a turn too hard! I was moving too rapidly to get a good photo, but it was quite a satisfying sight. Don't get me wrong, I feel badly for whomever lost their newly purchased TV, but if you know anything about me, you'll understand why such a tragedy of consumer products gave me an unbelieving, mouth-agape smile.
What I still have left on my list includes Jethro's BBQ near Drake University campus, the Chicago Speakeasy restaurant (what I've been told is an uncompromising supper club equidistant from its namesake & the grilled midwest steer it's reputed to serve so finely), and a perpetually expanding selection of craft eateries that pour an ever expanding selection of Iowa-brewed beers.
Des Moines has become a small pill version of Chicago - another city I never get to fully take in (for many more geographical & financial reasons). Though I have to give it to the Iowans that never seem to stop sprawling out from their city's core; they still manage to give plenty of time to the core of their capitol city, never treating it like a remote destination filled with urban dangers. The later is likely because for a city of over 100K people, Des Moines' social concerns still seem very trailer park-eque when I watch their local news channels from my hotel rooms.
El Bait Shop
After three prior visits with this airy downtown Des Moines pub on my list, I finally penciled it into my itinerary as my Tuesday morning, beer & breakfast destination. El Bait Shop should be in Chicago, Philadelphia, or even Tampa, just somewhere you'd expect a more than worthwhile selection of breweries from all corners of the US & the world. Hundreds of beers, fine offerings that form a list that seems to prove Iowa liquor distributors have the advantage of being central to the major transportation pathways between the biggest populated metroplexes.
El Bait shop had Rogue, Lakefront, Stone, Summit, Bells, New Belgium, Left Hand, Shipyard, Lost Coast, and on & on & on through a list of premier craft brands. Their selection of Iowa brews could teach a course on the state's breweries. What I love about Iowa's microbrewers is the purity & clean finish of their product they get into the kegs & bottles of damn near every brew in any season. Take Peace Tree Brewing from Knoxville... Their Hop Wrangler IPA isn't some overhopped caramel malt bomb that's rushed to market, it's a malt-developed ale with excellent citrus notes that wouldn't overpower a lager drinker. The well-read bartender mentioned Hop Wrangler is fermented with Belgian yeast & its malt character lightened in the kettle with candy sugar. A pour from the tap (its handle gaudily wrapped with a belt buckle) complimented the Mexican-spiced chicken wings that the kitchen served up without haste.
El Bait Shop's menu has plenty of American pub grub, representing border-to-border styles to compliment their well traveled drink selection. Fine wines & whiskeys are also on site, and Thursday's happy hour features free samples from Des Moines area homebrewers... A loaded deck of glad-handed offering that ranks El Bait Shop & IA liquor distributors as good sports in my book. Also, come for the scavenger hunt decor, the mural to Where the Wild Things Are, and the library of beer-related stickers adorning the bar.
Also drunk: Madhouse Coffee Stout (Davenport, IA), Summit Honeymoon Saison (St. Paul, MN).
The Yankee ClipperThe Ankeny bar that a respectable amount of my childhood found me in was a no-brainer stop on my way out of town, for little more than the actuality that it was a Tuesday. Taco Tuesdays are no rarity among the townie bars I frequent, but for more than 15 years I have known how uniquely special, nay important the Tuesday tacos are at the Clipper.
Take a deep-fried flour tortilla, stuff it with Iowa beef, season it with Iowa butchers' spices (or whatever makes the Clipper's grill taste so uniquely Iowan), add Cheddar, lettuce, tomatoes, sour cream, & line the top of that mother with some deep red sweetly hot sauce... That's a Clipper taco. I was only there for an hour, but in the time it took me to polish off two PBRs & a pint of Boulevard Wheat the staff of four running the lunch rush made & moved more than thirty tacos both inside the pub & out the door for locals on their lunch breaks. At one point, ten tacos sat brown bagged & tagged, awaiting their hungry recipients whom I'm told come from four counties surrounding Des Moines, every Tuesday for this lucky feast.The tacos haven't changed since I was a kid, either; that's the magic part of the experience. No downsizing has occurred for this perfect meal. It still fills the belly, never seeming any smaller in the hand than it did when I was nine years old. The Clipper is a friendly local tavern with a library of 70s-era backlit Lite beer fodor, Iowa State University effects, and various other scraps from the locals that keep it a nightlife destination even though it's in the old downtown Ankeny, far from the big box retail encampments that line what once was farmland & villages surrounding this exurb turned suburb.
Also noted: the cozy, but well-equipped men's room.
Finally, one for the 'Yeah, I Really Saw It!' file. While en route to the Clipper, on the edge of the village of Marquisville traveling north on US highway 69 near it's interchange with I-35/80, I noticed a discarded plasma TV box in the median near a turn lane. As I approached it, I was stunned with neo-luddite happiness: not only was it a box for a plasma TV, a brand new flat panel TV laid scuffed & weather-beaten, still wrapped in its shrink wrap, having apparently fallen out of the box when its owner made a turn too hard! I was moving too rapidly to get a good photo, but it was quite a satisfying sight. Don't get me wrong, I feel badly for whomever lost their newly purchased TV, but if you know anything about me, you'll understand why such a tragedy of consumer products gave me an unbelieving, mouth-agape smile.
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