cdh

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.

Hmmm... these negotiations will go on forever, I think. Making bottle shapes proprietary and controlled would be a boon to creative glassblowers around world, though a huge headache to wine shops and consumers. A great way to drive up prices, though. And it would be kind of nice to see some more variety in bottle shapes than just the Bordeaux and Alsace/Germanic shapes that have become the generic containers of still wine the world over. Get to work quick- geometry only allows a finite set of stable bottle configurations... snap them up and get them trademarked so that nobody else can use them!

No, dammit, it is almost a week late... but so are the printer parts I ordered that were supposed to be here last Friday too... I'm suffering from bad shipping mojo recently, it seems.

I just read that whole thread. The only disdain I saw was when talking about the Food Network's management decisions to dumb down some of their more "advanced" content, and their justification for doing so. Doesn't sound like snobbishness to me at all. Sounds like the market segment that demands more advanced food shows demanding more advanced food shows and being disappointed when TVFN decides to scale back that very product line. The occasional comment on RR's perpetual perkiness sounded entirely reasonable to me, and not high-horse driven... people are allowed to honestly disagree about what they like and not be horrible snobs, right? Unless you're saying that asking for more advanced content in a food show is itself disdainful and snobbish... then we just have an honest disagreement about terms.

Make milkshakes with it! Sounds better than porter milkshakes... and they're damn tasty!

Hmmm... really trying to hallmark-ify the holiday, it seems. St. Pats always had a certain ersatz flavor to it (being a holiday of gluttony in the middle of lent), but this has MARKETING HYPE written all over it. Not that I begrudge Guinness anything at all... good and tasty stuff (when well treated) that more people should drink more regularly and with more discriminating palate... places shouldn't be allowed to get away with letting their Guinness lines go sour and keep on pulling pints.

Does anybody have any useful links for more information on exotic citrus varieties and their commercial proponents? I'm facinated by the huge variety beyond the generic lime, lemon and orange every store carries... its is already Seville orange season, so I must go on my usually fruitless hunt for them this year... What other exotic citrus have people here run across that is worth mention? How much of the bland generic citrus situation in the markets is a result of import restrictions? If there was one citrus you'd love to see imported into the US, what would it be?

When I think of olives, no brands come to mind. Nobody has successfully stuck a brand on an olive and made it stick in my mind. Olves have always come from anonymous vats, often not even labelled as to type, much less brand. And there are so many types of olives out there-- recently I've been quite hooked on these amazingly vivid green olives that Fairway in NYC carries most of the time. They're packed in oil that has been infused with bay leaves (or something similar), and they're buttery and delicious. Don't think they'll go well in a martini, though... too much oiliness. So, my advice is to stop hunting brands, and find an Italian/Greek market that has vast vats of olives and sample all they've got until you've found your ideal martini olive. Apropos olives stuffed with wacky stuff, Fairway had some delicious olives pitted and stuffed with habanero peppers. Zingy... but delicious.

Tablets easier than powdered sugar? Hmm... Are you individually dosing each bottle? My method is to put the desired amount of finely powdered corn sugar into the bottom of my bottling bucket, and then to siphon the beer into the bucket, give it a good stir, and then bottle. Evenly disperses the priming sugar without having to worry about putting anything into each individual bottle other than the beer. As to an EGCI course, I like the thought. And getting some first timers involved would be a very good thing too.

Actually all of this talk of when the beer is done got me to thinking about another decision point that is encroaching upon us-- Carbonation. How much? Since this is an english style, I'm not planning on trying to get it really fizzy like I would for a Belgian. I'll probably use about half of the standard size priming pack of corn sugar, and hopefully end up with a very lightly carbonated end product. Since I'm playing catch-up since my yeast still isn't here, I may cheat and put some into my tap-a-draft wotzit (picture earlier in the thread) and force carbonate it after the primary fermentation and settling. The 15PSI that the wotzit's valves maintains works quite well for lightly carbonated drinks.

Indeed. I'd love to try all grain. I just don't have the equipment to do a five-gallon batch of it, I don't think. I've got a 5 gallon brew pot, which could probably do a half batch reasonably well... and if we're brewing again next month, then I'll only have bottles for a half batch available by then... so I'm all for giving an all-grain half-sized batch a try next brew.

When you're brewing an ale, like we are here, once the yeast goes into the sugar laden wort, it usually takes between a week and two for it to finish munching through all the sugar it wants to eat in the solution. Then a couple of days to settle and clarify are best before you bottle it. It then requires another two weeks for the bottle carbonation process to happen. So, we're looking at about a month from now before the tastings happen. Three weeks if people are using really quick yeasts. OR two, if anybody here is kegging and force carbonating rather than bottlling.