cdh

Well, if the Times is going to drop the ball like this, they're leaving themselves wide open to serious competition. That review is useless. What other NYC publications might be able to snatch the crown away from the NYT and become the premier source of serious food reviews in NYC?

St. Agur

Check out NYCBeer.org and have a look at their homebrew resources. Nothing in Manhattan but lots of options in the near suburbs. No idea how accessable by transit they are, but maybe they might deliver.

Had a taste of mine in its flat state. It is very nearly there, but I think I'll await the weekend to bottle.

No real trick to the candied limequats, I don't think. My procedure was: Put 2 cups sugar and and 1 cup water in pan, and heat until the sugar dissolves into the water. Wash the limequats, halve them, and throw them into the syrup. Bring the syrup up to boiling. Remove the limequats and heat the syrup to 240F. Add a little tiny bit of cream of tartar. Throw the limequats in and turn the heat off after about 5 minutes. Fish the limequats out and spread out on parchment paper. Sprinkle lots of sugar all over them and toss them around so that they're evenly coated. Voila! I then candied some ginger in syrup, and now have candied limequats, candied ginger, and syrup that makes a mighty nice ginger ale when you mix it up with some seltzer and a squeeze of lemon juice.

Lucky you indeed. Beautiful pictures. Any chance of getting a handful of seeds from you? If the things are calamondins, then they're cold hardy up to and including the DC area... was surprised to see a citrus growing in the Dumbarton Oaks gardens, and looked it up, and it was some variety of calamondin. Spikey, though. Is your tree full of thorns? All this means that I can at least get one going quite well in a large pot and only bring it indoors for December through February. And here is a snapshot of a handful of my candied limequats. Tiny little things, but soooooooo yummy.

Limequats are little tiny lime shaped things that you could, if you wanted to, eat whole like a kumquat. They're pretty tart, with just a hint of bitterness. I love candied citrus, and these things seemed like an ideal candidate for the process. As to where they're from, I got them in the exotic fruit aisle of the Wegmans in Allentown, PA. Central Market has expanded to Houston, no? They'd be your best shot at getting some that I can think of.

In recent citrus hunting, I found myself in possession of a handful of Limequats (xbreed of lime and kumquat, apparently)... and the thought of making candied citrus came to mind... yummy. Make sugar syrup, cook it to about 240F, drop in halved limequats, and allow to boil for a little while and cool.

The brew was going like mad all week, and has now settled down and the frothy head has all but dissipated. I think I'll give it another blast with the hand blender to rouse and stir things up, and aim to bottle next weekend. As to McGee, nothing definitive, however, in his section on malt, he does say that ater malt is kilned, it can be stored for "several months" indicating that even whole malts are perishable. no reason why is given, however.

Really? I was wondering about this and don't really have a clue. My issue with the coffee analogy is that coffee is all about the volatile oils and such that can either go rancid or dissipate. Since sugar lasts forever, and malt extract lasts forever, why wouldn't cracked malt also last forever. How much of the stuuff extracted from malt is not sugar, and of that stuff, how much of it is vulnerable to oxidization, rancidity, etc. I wonder if Harold McGee's encyclopaedic book has a chapter on malted grains and such. Will have to pull it out and check.

Mission accomplished. About a year ago a friend reported to me on his meal at Veyrat's Ferme de Mon Pere. Dishes served were as follows, with my friend's personal reactions noted.

A friend ate there a year or two back and emailed me a complete review of the place and the 15 or so course meal he had. I'll see if I can find the email and edit it to a postable format.

Hmmmmm... wouldn't a very light roast made in espresso style be quite sour? That has been my finding in experimenting with various roasts and my espresso machine. Until you get to the beginning of the second crack, the beans have too much acid in them for my tastes.

Not changing the subject at all... I wanted this to be a broad discussion of wacky aperitifs, not just the Byrrh. As to Suze, I've never had the chance to try it. I gather it is primarily gentian flavored, though have no clue what gentian tastes like.

is it still on the list? I checked a few months back and it didn't come up on the computer database. Just checked again, and it's there now, but with a minimum order of 6 bottles, and at 18 bucks per. If I'm really jonesing for it, I'll stop in at Astor when I'm in NYC.

I've seen something Byrrh branded for sale at Astor Wines and spirits in NYC... about $20 (twenty... hope the numerals don't turn into thai letters like they seem to 'round here when following a $), which is about twice what PA was asking or it when I picked up my last bottles of it. The bottle at Astor looks sharp and newly redesigned. Not sure if it the same stuff or not, as I've not looked for the stuff until I noticed how low my present bottle is. Problem finding it may be one of categorization. How in the world do you categorize this stuff? I'd bet that Cinzano and Martini&Rossi would throw a fit if wacky stuff like this were filed as vermouths... it is an orphan product in a category all its own. Tough to search for in category driven search systems.

Since vermouth and Lillet have gotten their own threads, I thought it time to branch out in an even more obscure direction. Anybody else here have a taste for Byrrh? This is a french aperitif, probably a separate species in the vermouth genus, that has quite turned me on recently. The flavor is a lot like a port that has been dosed with a bit of quinine for a mild bitterness. There is definitely some wood in there, a nice acid structure, albeit a little sweet, and it is quite a pleasant combination. I'm on my last bottle of it at the moment, as the PA liquor monopoly stopped stocking it a year or two ago... Will miss it when it is gone.

Well... I'd wait until it is done brewing. If the Ringwood is true to form and leaves a little diacetyl character I might be tempted to do something punny like calling it Butternut Squash Ale... We'll see if that happens or not.

That's very odd. The FDA says that "carefully controlled clinical studies show that aspartame is not an allergen." I wonder if it's something else. Do you get the same reaction from just raw aspartame by itself? I wonder if if would happen if you drank a diet coke that had been spiked with enough high fructose corn syrup that you were unable to taste the difference. I am not suggesting, of course, that you don't react the way you say you react. I just wonder a bit about what might be causing it. Upon reading through this thread, the thought of checking out what Harold McGee had to say about aspartame in 1984 came to mind. He's somewhat enlightening, I think: Maybe those who react adversely are sufferers of this metabolic problem, rather than victims of some great conspiracy to market poison to the masses? Regardless of what the FDA says or does, companies pushing Aspartame could get bankrupted by a well placed lawsuit if proof of the poison conspiracy to a jury were possible. Since that hasn't happened... well... I'll continue my practice of avoiding diet stuff anyway.

Am glad my wort chiller is providing amusement. Making do with what's available is a key skill in homebrewing. Now that the yeasties have had about 40 hours in the wort to munch away, here's a snapshot of their progress:

So everybody here does the racking and secondary fermentation? In all my time brewing, I've never taken that step, and have been quite pleased with the beers that I've brewed. What is the reason to rack a beer that is not going to sit around for a long time before bottling?? I always understood racking to be a lager-brewing thing, b/c the lager beer sits around for months on end, and if it did so on its yeast, there was the danger of autolysis and the attendant funk that came along with it. I may have gotten close to that problem once, when I let the beer sit in the primary fermentor for a few extra weeks during a warm summer, but generally I've noticed no problems of that nature when the beer gets bottled within a month. Any comments?

OK... with inflated yeast smack pack in hand, I brewed today. My variations from the recipe were: In addition to the liquid malt extract and the crushed grain, I also tossed in a half pound of Laaglander dry dark malt extract (mostly because it was sitting around and not getting any better with age.) My hops were: bittering: 1 oz Kent Goldings, .5 oz Willamette finishing: .5 oz Willamette, .5 oz Hallertauer My yeast was the long awaited Ringwood, which I smacked yesterday at 2:30 in the afternoon and found fully inflated this morning. Upon finding yeast so active, I couldn't help making a starter to give it a head start. So I boiled up some of my dry malt extract in about a pint of water, tossed it into a sterilized PET liter bottle, and then put the yeast in. The yeast had a 7 hour headstart, as it went into the starter at 9:00 this morning and then got pitched at 4:00 this afternoon. On to the illustrated description of the process: About 2.5 or so gallons of cold water went into the 5 gallon pot. In went the cracked grain, divided into two nylon steeping bags. It took a good while to get the grains up to near the boiling point... maybe an hour and a half with the pot straddling two burners, each set at a relatively slow temperature. This procedure is more for the health of the stove than for any brewing necessity. After it got close to boiling, I turned the heat off and removed the grain steeping bags. In went two 1.5 Kg cans of Amber malt extract that had been warmed under the hot water tap of my sink for a little while before opening, and a half pound of dry malt extract as measured by my scale. Wazzed the stuff with a hand blender for a while to ensure that the malt extracts were fully incorporated and dissolved, and then turned the heat back on and got it up to boiling. In went the Goldings and Willamette hop flowers, in muslin hop socks, and they boiled there for an hour or so. The finishing hops went in for a minute and a half at the end. A frozen over ornamental fish pond makes an excellent wort chiller. The lidded kettle melted through the ice and chilled in the pond for about 20 minutes. In the meantime I mixed up a gallon of activated oxygen sanitizer and gave my fermenter bucket a going over. And then the chilled wort went into the bucket and got topped up with tap water, then wazzed with the hand blender again to oxygenate and incorporate, and then the yeast starter got pitched in. The bucket is now sitting in a 68F room with a doubled over dish towel rubber banded across the top. Wish my yeast bon appetit!

My yeast has arrived! I've smacked it this afternoon, and will aim to brew tomorrow. Pictures of the process will follow.

I try.

Have had caucasian brandy while living in Russia, but never had the chance to try the wine it comes from. The brandy was actually quite nice. I wonder if the ubiquitous "sovyetskoye shampanskoye" was a Georgian product... I seem to recall it being Ukranian, but maybe that is just my memory being flaky.