cdh

Would love to see more photos of things growing. Your herb garden is prodigious. Do you dry or otherwise preserve any of your herbal crops? Also, are some of your herbs' leaves really yellow, or is that a result of lighting and camera effects? Your sweet woodruff looks much happier and healthier than mine... what do you do with it? It has a wonderful aroma almost like baked goods-- sweet and spicy... but I've not figured much to do with it besides incorporating into wheat beers I brew. I'd love suggestions.

Neat to see somebody trying to fight the meme about canned beer being bad beer. In PA, Yuengling does cans and they're indistinguishable from the bottled product (though less expensive). Cans have some things going for them: durability, chillability, light blocking... I hope more breweries follow this lead. Much easier to bring a 6pack of cans along than a 6pack of bottles. Canning beer certainly got a lift when Guinness started with their pub draught cans a long while ago. Guinness pub draft is a fine product. That said, the beers I drink most are my own homebrew, which only comes in bottles because that is all I put it into.

Wow! If Capogiro is really a pale shadow of Canadian and Bostonian top-end ice cream, I really need to go and visit those spots. I've not found any lack of vividness of flavor in anything I've had at Capo. If there are ice creams that make their stuff taste washed out, I MUST find and try them. Or maybe not... I'd be spoiling myself for what is readily available.

Hendricks Farm is right in my neighborhood... I'd say much less than an hour from downtown. Depends on traffic, of course, but in the evening when the Schuylkill and Blue Route are clear I can get from parked in CC to home in 45 minutes, and Hendricks farm is 10 minutes closer to town than I am.

Welcome indeed! Would love to read about your adventures in entrepreneurship!

Well, my wit is done (or at least retired to its bottles)... though I tossed a bit of the Roeselare culture in after the main fermentation subsided, so this will be a slightly different wit... I think the Rodenbach flavor profile might be fun with a witbier... we'll see. And I couldn't resist the call of all those empty bottles in my basement, so I did put together another beer to ferment off the sediment from tht wit... 3 lbs ultra light dry extract, 1 lb wheat dry extract, with 6oz each of 20L Crystal, 48L CaraMunich and 145L Special B steeped in. Sort of a light-bodied reddish beer is the thought... Maybe a witty red... maybe I should call this GB Shaw Ale... he was certainly a witty red... hmmmm.... Took a different tack with this brew, having read that malt extracts have already been boiled, so they don't need the really long boil that the hops do... Consequently, I did the steep as usual, the grain into a bag into cold water, onto the burner until the water boiled. This time I tossed the bittering hops (1 oz Magnum) into the cold water with the steeping bag, a feeble attempt at replicating the "first wort hopping" technique that I've also read about recently. Brought the kettle to a boil and let it boil for 35 minutes before I added any of the DME. Then let the malt boil for just 25 minutes in the hoppy steepy water... added 2.5 oz of finishing hops (1.25 Columbus, 1.25 Centennial) 5 minutes before I took it off the boil. Cooled this batch while bottling the wit, and then diluted it down to 5 gallons and poured it onto the yeast sediment left by the wit. A few hours in, it is bubbling away like mad. I'm considering tossing in the remaining ounce or so of Centennials and Columbus as dry hopping after the main fermentation settles down. I wonder if so light bodied a beer could handle a dry hopping.

Sounds like a fun winemaker, and a wonderful iconoclast. Anybody here tasted any of his wines? http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/25/dining/25pour.html?8hpib

Your question seems as though it deserves a thread of its own rather than getting buried in here... but to answer it so that Katie or Holly can move the answer along with the question, I'd say that it is all in the palate of the taster. Leaving a wine open for 24 hours will certainly change it. Whether you like the change is another thing. It won't be acetic battery acid... but it may lose some of the flavor elements you liked in it... but then again, it may have developed other elements you might like too. It won't be "bad" in the sense that it might kill you... but it might be bad in the sense you won't like it as much. Taste it and let us know.

Late in the season? My fish guys got their first of the season last week. Granted they said they held off on the initial purchase, as the first offer they got was at $57/doz wholesale. They'd obviously dropped significantly below that price, as they were going at $4/each retail, and were delicious dredged in seasoned flour and sauteed in butter.

Since this event is now semi-commercial in nature, how would that affect us homebrewers who were thinking of bringing beer to the shindig? Charging for tix generally crosses the line from friendly party into a regulated space, at least up here on the other side of the Mason Dixon line. Would I have to become licensed by the state of NC and pay excise tax to donate homemade beer to the cause? Will you need to acquire a site license to dispense any booze that is brought?

Reasonable analogy based on empirical observations... but my issue with it is that by definition Vodka should have no taste, while chicken, on the other hand, should. The fact that chicken is like vodka is more of a statement of manufacturing defect about the chicken than anything else. That fact that tasteless things accept the flavors they're mixed with is not all that profound. Tofu would be easily substitutable for either chicken or vodka in the proposition.

I've got a South American set as well... Baker's writing about drinks is wonderful... I had no idea the SAGC was rare... I picked mine up for a song as well. Getting a pair of the original in the slipcover rather than as the bound-into-one-volume reprint would be nice... but I've got all the relevant Baker texts available...

Keeping it flat sure helps with preventing sampling. I'm considering doing it entirely force carbonated rather than bottle conditioning... there is already a big layer of dropped yeast at the bottom of my secondaries, so I'll need to rack it again into something... That saison recipe sounds simple and likely to be quite tasty. The simple ones are often really good. A couple of years ago I decided to do a breakin-the-rules brew and steeped a whole pound of Special B in 6 lbs of light DME. So much for all those warnings about keeping the Special B at 1/4 lb per 5 gallons... this beer was good! Need to do more experimental brews. Maybe I'll need to concoct a recipe to toss onto the yeast cake at the bottom of the wit that's fermenting now... hmmmmm.... maybe I'll just take yours... though the hops I've got lying around are Magnums, Columbus and Centennials...

That strikes me as the key distinction here. We must accept vineyards as farms because part of vineyard-ness is actually raising the grapes that are turned into wines. Wineries, on the other hand, may purchase all the grapes they turn into wine from other growers elsewhere. So, a vineyard is a farm that grows grapes and may (but need not) produce wine. A winery is a place that makes wine but does not necessarily grow any grapes. A vineyard that is also a winery must be a farm. A winery without a vineyard cannot be a farm (unless they grow things that are not grapes). Woo hoo! Fun with logic. Extra credit to anybody who can translate that into symbolic logic and generate the truth table.

Recently got my Oud Bruin out of my primary fermentor and divided it into thirds... two of them are sitting sealed (but unprimed) for a long rest, and one I decided to dump a kilo of sour cherries into, so it bubbling away under an airlock. Must say that the ounce of oak chips was potent... oak is the predominant flavor in the samples I tasted while moving the beer around... How do others use oak in their brewing? An ounce of chips spending 2 weeks in 5 gallons sure seemed to do a potent magic on the beer... do people leave the oak in for longer periods of time, use more or less, etc? How long does an oaked beer have to age to mellow and integrate the oak flavors? I'm counting on this beer resting for a good long time, since the souring bugs in the Roeselare culture are supposed to take upwards of 6 months to ramp up the tartness after the yeast are done converting the sugars to alcohols... or so I've read elsewhere... and the reported technique of the Rodenbach brewery seems to back up this plan. Their beers are either blends of fresh beers and beers aged in oak for at least a year, or just the oak aged older beers... so I'm comfortable with the lack of palatability in the young beer I've got now. Now I just hope that it does as expected and improves with age. Once I freed up my fermentor I put a batch of my tea infused witbier in to ferment, and as usual it is going crazy bubbling away. That will be the summer consumption beer...

Were price no object, Rodenbach would be the only beer I drank all summer. Given that it is, homebrewed witbiers are my regular summer beers of choice. I picked up a case of summer beers from Saranac, and found a couple of winners in the mix-- their Hefeweizen is quite passable and pleasant on a warm summer afternoon, their Witbier is in the same sort of vein as Blue Moon... not a Celis White, but an alright interpretation of the style. My favorite in the case is the Mountain Ale, which is a coppery colored beer brewed with bunches of berries, so it looks like your average pale ale, but packs a fruity sour kick that is quite nice indeed. The Pilsener and Kolsch are so-so, and not really to my tastes... and the Summer Ale was so lacking in distinctiveness or memorability I just had to go down to the case to remind myself what the sixth type of beer in there was.

Anybody have an URL for the ruling? I'd like to read it rather than read about it. Nothing up yet on Freethegrapes, wineinstitute or law.com yet...

Last night i had the cherimoya and the apple and calvados... a fantasitc combination. The apple was wonderfully tart and a great complement to the creamy fruity cherimoya. Yummy!

Did you put in a later appearance? Saw Gary there briefly, who reported that Bryson had come and gone by the time I'd arrived... and there were no signs of you. Not many familiar faces in the crowd, actually, which is a really good thing-- more and more people proving that they care about good beer by turning up for events like this.

A packed house, as usual at these events. I sadly arrived far too late to get much of the good stuff. By the time I got there at 7:45 or so there were already 7 or 8 kicked kegs in the RIP column... and the crush at the bar was more insane than usual. I tried the Iron Hill Oud Bruin, which was an improvement on the last batch of it that they sent to the previous firkinteenth, but still somewhat muted. It's mouthfeel was too thin and its sourness was not pronounced enough. I commend them for continuing to try this unusual style, and hope they keep on improving it in the future. Since the crush at the bar was as it was, I'd decided that two-fisted ordering was the only way to go, so I also picked up a Yards IPA (with special secret dry hopping)... which was a very nice IPA with the sort of burnt caramelly flavors that made it seem to be approaching on the tripel style. I generally like more grapefruit and less burnt caramel, so this wasn't quite to my tastes, but was clearly a well made beer. Braving the throngs a second time, I managed to get a Brewers Art Proletary Ale and an oak-aged Legacy Hedonism. The Proletary was the most interesting beer of the evening, since it tasted like it had been bittered with coffee instead of hops. This was an interesting beer in that it was like coffee sweetened with malt syrup and then fermented. It actually worked quite well. The Legacy Hedonism was less distinctive next to the Proletary. It's oakiness was minimal, and its flavor was underhopped and not particularly distinctive. It was a pleasant session type beer, but not a showcase beer like many of the FtheF beers tend to be. I went upstairs and availed myself of the fine cooking of the Grey Lodge's new kitchen, enjoying the duck spring rolls and a plate of cheese fries. When I headed back down, the place was more packed than it had been... I fought my way to the bar and stood there for 20 minutes, intermittantly doing semaphor in the general direction of the bartenders. It appered that there were only about 3 live firkins left with any significant amount of beer in them, and everybody all around the bar was clamoring for whatever it was. After a long enough wait for my tastes, I decided it was not worth it to stick around... so I left. And headed into Center City for a bit of Capogiro's fine gelato to finish up the evening. The cherimoya and apples with calvados were a fine pairing and did a marvelous job as end-of evening palate cleansers.

Prompted by this topic, I stopped by Hendricks Farms this afternoon and got the chance to taste a bunch of the new cheese projects Trent has been working on since I last went tasting there six months ago. There are new soft ripened cheeses he's working on that are quite interesting indeed. I came away with small discs of Baby Blue (cow's milk) and Bluebell (goat's milk), both of which were quite tasty and very different from what they were working on in the fall. Both cheeses are examples of Trent Hendricks' technique of using blue mold only on the rind of a cheese, giving it a tinge of blue flavor (and a really impressive visual appeal) without overpowering the inherent flavor of the cheese underneath it. He'd been experimenting with it in the fall, but has really mastered the technique now. This technique is really well suited to cheeses in this small size. The blue flavor stands out and is clearly present, but the flavor of the cheese itself predominates. I also got to taste a few samples of other cheeses that were ready to go, of particular interest was the ten-month aged Telford Tomme, which gained a distinctive intense nuttiness over time and showed signs of getting to a delicious crumbly aged-cheese texture with a bit more aging. This was in sharp contrast to the meltingly tender two-month-old tomme. There was a blue-rind cheddar experiment, which was done on a larger wheel so the blue-ness was quite muted. In a smaller format that could be a real winner for a lover of both blues and cheddars. As it is, the blue gets lost in the cheddar. Coming in the next couple months will be an interesting experiment in dessert cheese-- a coffee-infused triple cream which sounds like it could prove delicious once it has done its 60 days of raw-milk required aging. I wish I'd had my camera along on the visit, since I got a look inside their aging room where thirty-some different varities of cheeses are maturing now. A sight to behold. And testimony to the inquisitive and experimental cheesemaking that is going on there now. So, Andrew, if you do get the urge to take a drive out into the country to visit Hendricks, drop me a note... they're right in my neighborhood... come and picnic on my lawn after you stock up with cheese. And Sandy, since you're automotively deprived, you should know that they do ship. Just ask.

From that tasting.com article referenced above: This strikes me as highly improbable. Juniper berries I've met haven't had any sugar content to ferment... nor much in the way of liquid content at all. Anybody here knowledgable enough to provide an assessment in the way of fact checking this? Any opinions on the veracity of the rest of the article? Strikes me as fishy.

Poached? Ack! The beauty of shad roe is the crispy outside contrasting with the firm inside. Best preparation involves a frypan and a couple of slices of good bacon. Cook bacon in the pan, remove bacon from the pan, leave the fat in the pan. Dust the roe with a little flour and add to the pan. Cook 'til crispy on the outside. Eat garnished with bacon, and maybe a squeeze of lemon juice. I can't imagine a soft inside and out preparation of the stuff being at all appealing. Also, the quality of the roes is quite variable... if it gets too late in the season, they sometimes pick up a muddy flavor that isn't so nice. Don't judge all roes by a muddy example.

drool.... this is what I miss out on because I don't bother to check out the ISO dining friends more than weekly.

As to containers, it sounds like you would like something fancy to tote the salt around in... you might look into antique snuffboxes. They were the height of fashion in their day... and were designed accordingly.