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One thing to pay very careful attention to is that your boiling vessels are neither rusty nor capable of rust. I've got a batch of Wit in the basement that tastes horribly metallic since the enameled pot I'd boiled it in had apparently gotten a chip in it and exposed the beer to the metal. Stainless is the way to go.

Well, if we're going to do a project like this, I think that the kits (at least the pre-hopped ones) won't give us enough of a learning experience. The pre-hopped kits only really allow for creativity in the choice of yeast and the extra fermentables that you throw into the mix. The rest of the task is boiling water and pouring malt syrup into it. I'd much rather pick a simple recipe that uses well-distributed ingredients. I'd like to experiment with a simple and malty amber ale like this Bass knock-off. Everybody doing the project should report the brand and provenance of each ingredient they used. It will be fun to see the differences.

Indeed! Congrats Katie!

Low water temp is very important in brewing teas like whites... all sorts of delicate flavors would get killed by water too warm. So, get yourself a stopwatch, a mug, some warm (but not above 160) water, toss your tea in, pour your water over it, start the stopwatch, and begin sipping at 2 minutes and keep going until you find a flavor profile that you like. You'll note that the mouthfeel will change with time too...

For bibliography, I'd point you to the writing of J. Norwood Pratt... the Tea Lover's Treasury came out a year or two ago in a new second edition (I've only got the first ed myself, and it was good... the 2nd is New & Improved, or so they say...) Available here... don't know if it is general distribution... Amazon doesn't seem to carry it. Good guide to tea and the stories and history behind it. Were they still doing it, I'd suggest subscribing to Adagio Teas Tea Horizons tea-of-the-month club... they used to send around a wonderful variety of really rare and unusual teas every month... they sent about 5 oz per month, one each of five different teas. They discontinued the club a year or so ago... don't know if they've restarted it. I'd certainly go in for something like that again if somebody out there were doing it. PS: I'm a coffee-home-roasting espresso fiend too... I see no fundamental clash in liking both tea and coffee... I just gravitiate to opposite extremes... I love light oolongs, pouchongs and white teas... the only coffee I drink regularly is espresso.

As another tea lover, I'd suggest your list of requirements only pertains to certain types of black teas. Assams and Ceylons really do require really hot water, and don't suffer from its effects. However... At least according to my palate, a lot of teas suffer from brewing in too-hot water. Darjeelings get horribly bitter and astringent if the water is above about 190F... and even at that temperature, DJs can only handle about 2 minutes of infusion before getting unpleasant. Dark oolongs can't handle much above 185, or the floral foresty notes get drowned in the astringent tanins. Light oolongs get bitter if the water is above 180... Greens and whites actually show their best flavor characteristics if brewed overnight in room temperature water (provided they're kept in an airtight environment to prevent oxidation) and then warmed to serving temp once the leaves have been strained out. So... demanding boiling water is a totally reasonable response to the variable requirements of your leaves... provided you've got a good feel for how long it takes for it to cool off to the temperature you need it to be.

Don't look back... homeroasting is much fun and an excellent way to get high quality coffee at a reasonable price. I generally only home-roast things I can't get at a reasonable price commercially, i.e. Papua New Guinea and some funky Ethiopian beans... My everyday espresso beans are actually commercial (sorta)... Zabar's Dark Espresso. Excellent, and very fairly priced. Another mail-order souce worth consideration is M. Rohr's House of Fine Teas and Coffees... their quality is top-notch as well.

Don't look back... homeroasting is much fun and an excellent way to get high quality coffee at a reasonable price. I generally only home-roast things I can't get at a reasonable price commercially, i.e. Papua New Guinea and some funky Ethiopian beans... My everyday espresso beans are actually commercial (sorta)... Zabar's Dark Espresso. Excellent, and very fairly priced. Another mail-order souce worth consideration is M. Rohr's House of Fine Teas and Coffees... their quality is top-notch as well.

I am much more comfortable with the 1337 H4X0r 5p33|< than I am with people who post here with all the instant messaging shortcuts. The phrase "Can u recommend a good wine 4w/ my burger ..." bugs me much more. The 'leet haxors are using geeky code speak in a geekily ironic sort of way... whereas "2 b w/ u 4ever" seems like lazy shorthand applied to an earnest thought... perfectly intelligible shorthand, but the connotations of expressing that thought in such a half-assed manner is jarring... similarly conversations here seem generally earnest and use of shorthand seems is similarly jarring...

Saku is a brewery located in Tallinn... they brew a number of germanically influenced beers... the Originaal is a pilsner-type lager with a very distinctive malt character... quite tasty. The Tume (TOO-may) is a dark lager... also malty, but roastier and less vegetal than the Originaal. All over the place in Tallinn, or at least it was when I spent a few months there back 10 years ago. Sorry for the failure to demand off-the-wall African beers... but I've never lived in Africa, never travelled to Africa, nor have I heard any appealing descriptions of African beers... mostly Evelyn Waugh-type snipes about millet beer which sound much less than appetizing. If I'm going to pay my beer's ticket to travel in the belly of a ship for a long period of time, I'm less likely to choose something that might be mediocre at best when it gets here. Is there good African beer? Where do they get their hops? Where do they get their barley? Neither seems suited to the climate there... What countries produce beers that are worth notice? Northern African wines are surprisingly good... but having been colonized by the Frinch had something to do with that. Did the Belgian colonization of the Congo leave an unrecognized legacy of funky brewing?

Yup... pugs are the ideal candidate for the name pork-dog. They've got the curly tail, they make the right noises, they go crazy for scraps and leftovers (and just about anything else edible). I could see issues with a young pug in a restaurant... mine (13 years old now) used to love to chase large moving things... dessert cart watch out! (she lost a front leg at 3 when she had delusions of grandeur and discovered that attacking a riding mower was a bad idea... also loved to stand in the middle of the road and challenge oncoming traffic... we always caught her before anything happened with that particular exuberance) Mine was also quite vocal when something interesting was beyond her reach... fine for outside in the country, but bad for inside. She develops convenient "itches" that occur (and require vocal yipping and yapping while scratching herself) when people around her have food and she doesn't... the show stops when food falls onto the floor near her. She was also quite pig-headed in the training context... would learn tricks, but only do them when the snacky reward was visible, no other time. And she would never, ever, reliably come when called. More often than not, she'd look at you, cock her head, and then run the other way. A lot of that has mellowed as she's gotten elderly, but now she's deaf and can't hear you call her name so the result is the same. Pugs are great dogs... they get along well with cats, they are cute attention getters in public, they are smart, but they are good at manipulating the people around them.

Ivory? Are you talking about the north atlantic salmon that don't have pink flesh? Have had, and is good... But you're unclear as to what you meant.

3) farm raised fish taste like shit I always thought they tasted like mud... same color and texture, I guess...

Well, if we're talking real wish lists: Fresh Saku from Estonia would be nice, particularly the Saku Tume, though the Originaal is also yummy when fresh. Casks of Gales(Southern England) HSB, to be sold to bars with hand pumps, who would then sell lots of pints of it to me. I'd also not mind seeing casks of Marston's Pedigree available over here too... but then I'm a weirdo who likes fruity English flat beers. If you've got the pull, I'd like to see Rodenbach back in the US, but there are issues with the brewery being unwilling to bottle in anything marketable in the US.

You are, I think, setting your sites too broadly. It is not a national US problem that can be solved. It is a state-by-state problem. Thanks to the 21st amendment, every state gets to enact its own cockamamie regulations about how, where, when, in what, with what labelings, and how boozy. There are beers that are legal in some states and not in others... Best for you to pick a particular state you want to serve, rather than trying to serve everybody.... then when you set your sites on a beer, you only have to negotiate with the foreign brewery to get it put into one's state's version of a proper bottle, with that state's favorite label, and (maybe) with reduced alcohol to make the beer legal to sell in the target state. You'd better spend your time and money campaigning for a new constitutional amendment that puts all of this BS into the historical dustbin where it belongs. Sadly there are still enough bible thumping temperance freaks out there that would love to make it more difficult rather than easier to get good and interesting beers... and they're on the same side as the oligopoly of mega-brewers who have spent all the legal fees on figuring out the present system, and have come to rely on the status quo as a barrier to entry so that their products get better distribution and less competition. Tough business space.

Balthazar still does a stellar raw seafood tower to sate any 1 AM oyster jones that might arise... You're less likely to find yourself next to Calvin Kline there now than 5 years ago, but the food is still hot.

Even really good coffee can be ruined after the money is spent. A $35 pound of coffee must be carefully looked after to keep it in good shape... airtight environent, proper temperature and such. It must be brewed right... right temp water, right infusion time, freshly ground to the right grind... and it must be served very shortly after brewing, or it loses some of what makes it worth the cost in the first place. It would be a significant investment in human capital to train staff on all of these points, and if the staff goes, then retraining must happen for the new staff... There ain't no such animal as a coffee/tea sommellier, who would be required to get proper coffee service done in a high-end restaurant. And the other solution, for the coffee geek set, would be to invest in showy brew-your-own equipment-- a bunch of pretty but breakable french presses, or vacuum pot systems. While there might be a showy presentation option with something like a vac pot, I'd bet the cost would be exorbitant due to hit the place takes when one breaks. A coffee-cart which follows the dessert trolley, stocked with grinders, press pots, vac pots, an espresso machine, a selection of fine coffees and manned by somebody who knows how all of the stuff works might impress coffee geeks, but I doubt it could be done cost effectively. A pity, though.

Chef- Your thinking is off here-- temperature of fermentation does not differentiate between ale and lager. Type of yeast does. The temperature issue is derivative from the yeast choice. Yeasts are little organic chemical reactors, which primarily eat simple sugars, and discharge the reaction products, i.e. ethanol and CO2. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. The yeasts, depending on the strain, will produce other organic compounds besides just the booze and the gas. There are, for example, diacetyls that come out of some yeasts (sometimes) and give a buttery flavor to the beer... Since this is all very complex organic chemistry, the temperature at which the yeast reactions take place has a bearing on which reactions will happen, how efficiently, and what the resultant compounds will be. Lager yeasts have a propensity to produce flavors that are considered erroneous in beer when they are allowed to do their reacting at temperatures much above 50F. On the other hand, some ale yeasts won't do much reacting at all unless the temperature is closer to 55 or 60. To demonstrate this, an experiment to be done is to make a batch of wort, get three separate fermentation vessels, divide it equally between them, and pitch the exact same yeast. Assuming you're doing an ale, take one of the fermentors and place it someplace where the temperature hovers around 55F, another somewhere the temperature is around 65F and the last in a 75F space. They will take different amounts of time to ferment out, and there will be notable differences in the flavors produced. A very very informative yeasty FAQ that does a much better job of explaining all this stuff than I have.

Chef-- Good luck in your homebrew endeavors! I'll second the wise counsel of Theakston that lagers are best left to those who have the dedicated fridge equipment to keep the beer b/t 34 and 40F for a few months. Given your profession, I'd bet you have a free corner in a walk-in that fits that bill, so you're far ahead of most homebrewers. That said, the market for advice on properly brewing lagers is likely to be much smaller than that for brewing ales. Your profession would also give you an advantage if you were to get into the all-grain brewing, if you desired to do so. Your kitchen will almost certainly have 15-20 gallon stockpots and heating elements that can bring the contents of said pots to a certain temperature and maintain it for a set period of time... That is the essence of all-grain brewing... getting the right amount of water (w/ grain in it) to the right temperature, for the right amount of time to extract maximal sugar from the grains and avoid the unpleasant tannins and other such things that might come along if it gets too warm too soon. There are pieces of software written that help in calculating the temperatures and times for various grains. I've been brewing 2 or 3 batches a year for 10 years and have never stepped away from extract and specialty grain adjunct based ale recipes. There is so much more variety in the world of ales that I've not gotten bored with them yet. Over the past few years I've developed a few staple brews that I repeat with minor modifications... In the summers I like to brew either a Witbier or a Belgian Black (which is a Wit with a bit of dark malt thrown into the mix with the coriander seed and orange peel). I've played with the variety of hops, with adding a few drops of citrus oils, and with the strength... I'm not done tweaking yet, but the product is always tasty. In the winters I like to have an abbey dubbel around, and my local brew shop puts together a great kit that includes such exotics as paradise seeds and sweet gale... to which I also add embelishments... like a pound of raisins, or a few ancho chiles, or other dried fruit. Yum. Good luck with the exotic sugar experiments. I've heard of maple vodka, but never of maple beers... wonder if it is for lack of experimentation, or for lack of palatable results of experiments. I'd say that given the variations of plain barley malts available on the market- location of origin, plant strain of origin, degree of roast, caramelization, etc, that there are many many experiments in combining canonical ingredients into something completely new and different. And that is before you get to the hops and other flavorings. Not to mention the water chemistry, which is reported to have a profound effect on the results (some beers better brewed with hard water, some with soft water, etc). You've got a huge number of variables to play with! Have fun with your experiments!

lunch today was a leftover crab cake from a batch I made for dinner the other night... Have found that a sprinkle of corn flake crumbs instead of any other bread-y produce makes for a lovely crab cake consistency.

Less the cinnamon than the raisins... raisin + brisket = ewwww... I have my own cinnamon issues that have nothing to do with its flavor that would keep me away from Herb's sandwich even w/o the raisins.

Agree w/ MatthewB about the Dutch gin, or jenever (pronounced jaNEEvur)... pity the only easily found variety in the US is the Bols... which is undistinguised... the more interesting varieties are remniscent of good whisky, though they are meant to be drunk cold. Yum... Why doesn't any of the good stuff get imported to the US... probably the wiley Netherlands Tourism Bureau making everybody who wants to keep the good stuff around come and visit to get it.

You're just eating the wrong apples... I've decided to go through the vast variety of apples available now and figure out if the modernmarketingmachine has generated anything that beats the old favorites (McIntosh and Winesap)... I'm rather liking Empires right now and they certainly fit within the tart and crunchy mold of the old favorites, actually, and the Galas just don't do much for me. There are a zillion varieties of apples out there, and finding the good ones is a fun hunt.

Taking advantage of my current spate of funemployment, after heading down to the county courthouse to sit on an arbitration panel that didn't actually arbitrate anything (plaintiffs failed to show, but I still get my arbitrator's fee (yee hah!)), I stopped by my favorite fish market and picked up a bounty of seafood... lunch was an experiment in what can be done with baby octopi. Marinated them in olive oil, lemon juice, herbs de provence and garlic, and threw them on the grill... took grilled beasties and threw them on some bagged salad leaves and called them lunch. Need to work on my octopus cookery skills, I think... the tentacles were done just fine, but the bodies left something to be desired... Any suggestions?

Hmmm... you're right that some of the bieres de garde are a lot like belgian saisons... but you're also right that they're from nowhere near Alsace... Alsace is far eastern france, not far northern.