cdh

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.

Have just done an experiment of sorts on the glassware issue and can report that Cognac does certainly taste different in tall glasses as opposed to balloon glasses. I called into service a traditional balloon glass and one of my Amazon bargain Riedel Overture spirits glasses (from which I'd never thought to drink Cognac before this evening.) I splashed a bit of cognac at room temperature into the Riedel (granted room temp in that part of the house at this time of evening is 61F), and gave it a try. The vanilla tones from the oak came out very very clearly in the first whiff. The fruity tones were quite muted in the nose, and didn't come out until the cognac hit my tongue. The flavor was a bit muted, but that may be temperature. I then poured the booze into the balloon, and inhaled. I see how that could bother some people's olfactory senses... When I inhaled too deeply the aromatic vapor came followed by harsh alcohol that had a burn. So a less deep inhalation over the balloon presented what seemed to me to be a more rounded nose, with the vanilla and woody tones met by fruity tones as well. As it warmed more (room temp in this part of the house is about 68F, and I did hold the balloon in my palm) thie effect increased. In pouring back and forth between the glasses, I find that I still prefer the balloon over the Riedel spirits glass. The flavor is more rounded and less sharp from the balloon glass than from the riedel. I'm really curious about the Riedel Cognac specific tulips, since my Riedel spirits glass had no tulip flare at the top and that might make a big difference. So, for a beginning cognac drinker, I'd recommend a balloon over any random tall glass. They're dirt cheap at Ikea, and they play well enough with cognac to keep me happy right now.

I wonder if the Cognac rules apply to other brandies too. If the Riedel glasses' new and different aerodynamics get more vapor to your nose with less surface are exposed and at lower temperatures, then they should work for any brandy, not just Cognac.

As a follow up to my musings above, I just made a bloody mary-like beverage out of the corn liquor... had to dig around in the box of party leftovers that I'd figured wouldn't get touched until the next big bash... Anyway, it does sort of work in that context. The very grainy undertones work well with V8 and worcestershire and my bloody mary oil. Doesn't taste like a bloody mary (that could be the for lack of horseradish in my house), but it is not at all disgusting even without horseradish. If you find yourself with a mason jar of the stuff, don't lose all hope.

Like it a lot. Generally prefer it to Cognac, actually. Distilled with a different type of still than they use in Cognac.

Hmmm.... are the tall tulip glasses really an old-fashioned Cognac tradition, or are they the fruits of the Riedels' engineering and marketing? Riedel makes all sorts of interestingly shaped glasses for specific stuff... does anybody else make Cognac glasses of the same shape? Or has Riedel gotten itself a 100% market share of die-hard cognac consumers? Interesting... I'll have to try my next Cognac from a tall glass at room temperature and see if it tastes any better. Silly me thinking that the same rules applied to brandy and Cognac... being the same thing and all...

Cognac is a type of brandy. It's nothing at all like wine, except for the fact that it is made from wine. As to how to taste it, you want it served warm. Body temperature or a little above. The huge-bowled glasses they serve it in are designed so that you can cup the bottom in your palm and transfer body heat into the contents of the glass. A wide bodied glass with a narrow opening at the top is the best glassware option. Wider is better, as you expose more surface area, and get more vapors evaporating from your drink, which is a good thing. As a spirit, a whole lot of the process of "tasting" Cognac actually goes on in your nose and sinuses. Before you put your lips to the glass you want to inhale deeply and get a noseful of the vapors coming from your drink. You also want to make sure that you exhale slightly through your nose just after you've taken a sip... that will move the vapors in your mouth up into your olfactory system and more of the flavor experience will hit you. Cognac is quite variable from brand to brand and from one level of quality to the next... it is also a heavily hyped luxury product... You'll have to taste a bunch of them to find one you particularly like more than the rest, and people's tastes really do vary. As to the confusing jabber of letters on the bottles: VS= youngest and roughest VSOP= somewhat less young and rough XO= Mellow and expensive

Its not an either/or kind of situation... A bucket w/ airlock has slightly more air exposure than a carboy with an airlock. A carboy without an airlock is still pretty damn closed, given its narrow neck and the propensity of CO2 to form a blanket over the beer unless disturbed by air currents... the propensity to diffuse into equilibrium with the air would be inhibited by the narrow neck too. Considering the advice I've been given on the Ringwood yeast, I intend to go a step closer to fully open than my usual bucket w/ airlock, and just do a bucket with a dishtowel rubber banded around the top. The towel will keep most airborne beasties away, and there will still be decent access to oxygen since the diffusion won't be affected too much by the towel.

Will do. Have yet to hear from my guys... I should have controlled my wacky yeast compulsion and taken something they had in stock... but I just couldn't brew with Whitbread yeast... Will take lots of pictures once I'm able to brew.

I'll second the suggestion of Angel's Share. Japanese precision applied to the fine art of mixology. Their menu is all classics, so don't go there looking for a particular house specialty cocktail. Go there for the best examples you'll find of the old classics. Don't go with more than three friends, as they won't allow groups larger than four. No dress code. There is a particular eGullet cocktail concocted for us by master mixologist Dale DeGroff... I believe the Beacon is the venue that serves it... but do a search for the "Flaming Orange Gully" thread for the correct details. There are nice, but very pricey, drinks to be had at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis, but then again, they're classicists... and expensive... the number 18 comes to mind for the last Manhattan I drank there, but I don't recall if that was before or after tip. No formal dress code. On the general topic of making pilgrimmages to bars well known for their cocktails, I wonder if anywhere that has gotten itself famous enough to be "well known" still bothers to make good drinks... or if the drinks that made them famous are any good. I went out of my way to stop in at the Raffles in Singapore for a Singapore Sling, despite the warnings of a Singaporean epicure friend of mine... and he was right... not a great drink. Let us know more of what you had in mind? Are you looking for modern creative mixology, or masters of the classics?

Well, the Wyeast shipment didn't arrive at my brew shop yet... they say it will probably appear on Monday, so I'll brew during the week. Best of luck to those infusing grains and boiling hops as I type. Post any questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.

And that's a bad thing? Too much of a bite to drink straight, too corny to mix with juice. Tomato juice seems its only hope. Imagine unsalted Fritos... dipped in jam... that wrong. Needs salt.

Was brought to a party I attended as a joke. Tastes like alcoholic Fritos. Might be nice in savory drinks like bloody maries, but not good either straight or with fruit.

indeed. dry vermouth + orange bitters does approximate blonde Lillet... but without the caramelized notes in the Lillet. I do use orange bitters in martinis (when I infrequently make them), but don't use either of your gins.

Here you are: http://www.keystonehomebrew.com/beerkits/nutbrown.cfm