cdh

Another rumination on chinese fermentation and distillation: There are fine chinese beers out there, e.g tsing tao, that have no funk. So the technique of stank-free fermentation is well established over there. Anybody know of any distilled malt beverages in the whisky family being made in China? Do stank-free western beverages sell well over there?? Do they even compete? Chinese consumer nationalism is an old habit... it figured well into the tea trade and the opium wars back in the day...

A ha! You're looking to make sweet drinks with gin. You should have said so. Your references to the curacao and grenadine and cream have let us know what sort of drinks you're trying to mix. Gin and sweet don't really play well together, I don't think. Gin works very well with sour, and with herbal. Sweetness is always a sidenote, not a main theme in good gin drinks. Not everybody thinks so, however, as you will see Alexander recipes with gin. I've never tried one. So for the purpose of mixing sweet drinks, I'd say you're right on. Gin is hard to do sweet.

Is this foulness an inherent characteristic of these drinks, or is it evidence that only the cruddy products get exported over to us? Imagine if your impression of Western booze was formed solely on the basis of spirits too cruddy to serve in well drinks here... Are there better versions of this stuff, or is the stank an essential element in the appreciation of Chinese booze?

Last time I went to Gari and let them bring it on, it ended up costing me $200 +. Just so you know and aren't quite as shocked as I was.

Neat thought, Bob. I'll have to try to find some of those Jack Daniels chips next time I brew a stout. Yummy!

I'll chime in as well, and agree with Sam and Janet and Robert. I don't see gin as having an inherently obnoxious flavor that must be hidden, but rather having a nice complexity that marries well with lots of other cocktail ingredients. That said, there are many different formulations that all get a gin label stuck on them. The differences between Bombay Sapphire (light and inoffensive) and Beefeater (strongly herbal) and Tanqueray Malacca (slightly sweet and herbal) are greater than the differences between bourbon, scotch and canadian, I'd argue. I love gin, and find vodka extremely uninteresting. It takes something like Audrey's Smoking Martini (vodka flavored with laphroaig and such) to make a vodka drink at all appealing to me. Vodka + fruit juice has no appeal. All vodkas have a certain inherent bittersweetness that just clashes with fruit flavors on my palate. Vodka on the rocks with a twist is about as close as I'd like fruit to my vodka. Vodka does have its place... at the Russian dinner table, frozen. Goes remarkably well with all the savory and oily foods that get served. But beyond that, vodka is not a go-to spirit for any drink I'd make.

Don't know how a homebrewer could mimic this effect, but I recently tried Weyerbacher's Heresy stout, which is aged in charred-oak bourbon barrels. Gives the stout a bourbon-y vanilla-ish flavor, which is great.

Had a pint of O'Hara's Irish Stout the other night. Very unimpressive. Body too thin, a slight rusty metalic taste, and enough diacetyl to make it taste like movie theater popcorn. Maybe just a bad keg, but very unimpressive.

Well, Susan, are you going to make the pilgrimage to put in an appearance at the Grey Lodge on May 13th? I could bring along a sample or two for you. After having a glass of german wine last night, I've rethought the flavor profile of the mead... less champagne, and more riesling-y, actually. The acid is not nearly as biting as champagne acid, and the sweetness is more like a german halbtrocken. The flavor is more rounded and less sharply pointed.

While I'm updating eG on my current brewing project in other threads, I thought to revisit this thread to report on how my mead experiment has been doing. I racked it again about a month ago, and hit it with a little gelatin dissolved in water to help it clarify. I looked at it today and have decided that it looked good enough to taste. So I did. The Witbier yeast pretty clearly produced a whole lot of acidity in this mead, so much so that it has a dry champagne sort of flavor. A bit of residual sweetness, but a bracing acid structure underneath it. Tasted so champagne-like that I decided to throw some CO2 into it and make it properly fizzy. Will report back once my two chargers of fizz are dissolved into the mead.

Go to Trader Joe's. 1. Buy their creme brulees. (about $3 for four of them) 2. Save the glazed terra cotta ramekins it comes in. 3. Profit!

Well... mine already counts as off the charts, I think. Maybe a simple but good Ordinary Bitter would make a nice counterpoint in this thread? My next brew will be a Witbier, which I hope to get started as soon as the Oud Bruin experiment gets out of my fermenter. I know the Roeselare takes a bit of aging, while good old fashioned Witbiers are ready to drink within a few weeks of being brewed. Maybe I'll save a bit of the Roeselare yeast sediment and toss that into the witbier after it has had a bit of time to get going with the ordinary witbier yeast. Might be an interesting experiment...

I'm at it again... it is that time of year to get out the brewing equipment and set myself up with a summer's worth of fine fermented grain products. Since there appears to be at least a passing interest in the homebrew thing here, I thought I'd write a bit of a commentary for the amusement of whoever happens to be amused by it. Since I brewed over the weekend and took no pictures, there will be no visual aids... Maybe next time, if there's demand for it. As a bit of background, I've been brewing a few batches a year for at least a decade. I started out like most newbie brewers with pre-hopped extracts that were very much an exercise in dumping and stirring... the essential brewings skills I picked up back then were sanitation and not reading the directions on canned pre-hopped kits. I moved on into choosing my own hops, though using mostly extract for my base, and then picked up the technique of steeping flavorful grains in a base of extract-derived wort to freshen it up and customize it a bit (thanks to the fine folks at my local homebrew shop, who took the time to explain these processes). I've since begun to do partial mash brewing, which means that some of the sugar I'm converting into alcohol actually comes out of grain that has been warmed to the right temperature to let enzymes itside it convert its starches into sugars. My equipment only allows me about a five-pound mash, which means that I can play with about 5 pounds of grain, and have to supplement the remainder with extracts... and I'm happy at the moment with this technique. I still mainly buy kits to brew from, though I sometimes customize them with things that make me happy. While shopping for kits recently, I happened to be browsing over at Beer beer and more beer and spotted two thing juxtaposed which got all kinds of gears in my head turning. First was their Fire in the Hole partial mash kit, and juxtaposed with it was Wyeast's Roeselare yeast blend. Since I have really unusual tastes in beer and happen to like the quite sour Belgian styles, I knew right off that Roeselare is where Rodenbach beers are brewed, and I got excited at the thought of being able to try my hand at making an Oud Bruin of my own. Flemish sour beers are fermented in a manner that would count as irretreivably contaminated in a brewery anywhere else. There are a cocktail of yeast strains and bacteria in there that produce a very distinctive sourness. I hope Wyeast got the mix down, so that homebrewers can play with these styles. That is part of what my experiment is all about finding out. The kit claimed to have been based on an irish red with some ad libbing by the kitmakers. Their decision to throw in some oak chips jived exactly with the Rodenbach brewing process, which involves aging their beers in oak. So, I ordered the kit and the yeast, and went at it this weekend. We'll see how it turns out. Doing the mash is sort of like making a vat of instant oatmeal... warm but not boiling water (170F) with lots of grain stirred into it. Since somewhere online I'd seen somebody call for plain wheat flour in a mash for an Oud Bruin, I decided to augment the recipe with a cup of it to see what would happen. It sort of gelatinized on top of the grains since I didn't mix the flour and grain together before hitting them with the water. But after letting it go for 45 minutes at about 155 degrees (hooray for large quantities of wet stuff having a lot of thermal inertia!) the flour did appear to have been chewed on by the enzymes. A taste of the final wort was a bit astringent, as though the process may have gone on a bit long and taken some of the tannins out of the grain husks. Fortunately, Belgian sours benefit from a bit of astringency, and like with a wine, they should age out. At the boiling stage, I'd decided that the kit's hop schedule would totally not jive with the style I'm trying for... it would be way too bitter if I threw in all of the high powered hops that were called for. So I dug around in my beer boxes in the basement and brought out a year old half ounce of Hallertauer, and a half ounce of Saaz. Tossed them into the boil and did a little figuring with an online hops utilization calculator to figure out if I'd need more. It turned out that I'd be at the bottom end of the style with my little ounce boiled for an hour, so a bit more might be called for. Since the kit came with some Centennials which are famously grapefruity in their aroma, I figured that a flemish sour beer might play well with that sort of flavor... so a half ounce of centennials and the remaining half ounce of Saaz went into the boil for the last eight minutes. Enough time to extract a bit of the bittering agents from the hops to up the bitterness by a couple of points, and sufficiently little time that the grapefruity aroma should not be boiled off. Now a few days later, the yeast and beasts have been doing their thing, and my airlock has been bubbling with hoppy aromas escaping. I'm a bit concerned that even the two ounces of hops may be a bit much for this beer style... but we'll see. In a week or so, I'll toss in some of the the oak chips and let them do their thing. I'm excited to see the results...

I miss the place too... their cocktails based on white armagnac were great! As were all the wonderfully ducky dishes! And they had great tableware too.

Mr. Chairman: I want to take this opportunity to second all of the complements that others here have lavished upon you. The PLCB stores are really turning around, and the Chairman's Selections are a wonderful addition. My question/comment is about the ability of the LCB to stock some of the more unusual and interesting products from around the world. I think it is great that I randomly discovered the southern French aperitif Byrrh because it was on the shelves at the Norristown super store. I've also picked up a bottle of Beirao, a Portuguese herbal/honey tasting liqueur that caught my eye and is quite nice in a Benedictine kind of way. Do these obscure things appear on the shelves as the result of some program in the LCB, or because some wily buyer knows the good stuff that the big liquor interests are not pushing at the moment? I applaud the LCB for delving off the beaten track, and hope you continue to do so. There is a huge array of interesting drinks out there that are not controlled by the luxury marketing houses. I hope that Pennsylvania continues to seek out the opportunities to buy interesting stuff at good prices and pass the benefits along to PA consumers. What would be even better is if some of these things got descriptions so we knew what we were getting into when we pick up the bottle. Thanks for doing a great job!

Fee's Peach Bitters make a wonderful champagne cocktail. A tsp of sugar, a couple of shakes of fees and a flute of inexpensive fizzy wine turn into a wonderfully floral and complex cocktail.

I'll second the IKEA idea. And remember that there's one in Paramus as well as the one in Elizabeth... may be less of a zoo. Last New Years we picked up 100 Ikea champagne flutes, and at the 4:30 AM end of the evening there were at least 90 of them still standing. They feel good in the hand, and the price is right. And if you don't have someplace to store them, then donate them to the guests. Maybe find a glass etching kit and design a logo for the event, etc. Every guest could end up with a nice souvenier of the event at a very inexpensive cost. Either that or rent... and use the Ikea pricepoint to negotiate the rental cost down.

Tremendous fun indeed. Ran into a few eG folks, apparently missed a few others. Was particularly impressed by the match of the Appalachian Scotch Ale with the Down Home Diner's pulled pork. That one really worked. The London Grill's octopus salad on top of a bean puree was excellent... soft and delicate, herbed with tarragon or something similarly licorice-y. Delicious with the Victory Prima Pils. The Triumph Jewish Rye beer was awesome! Their rauchbier was also good, particularly paired with Rx's mushroom tarts. I also luckily got the final piece of Rx's gingerbread as well, and was well impressed with that when paired with Lancaster's Milk Stout. (I'd already tried the Independence Imperial Stout it was supposed to go with, so I picked a similar beer I'd not yet tried.) The Nodding Head BPA was a wonderfully fruity and aromatic, showing how hops can produce plenty of good flavor beyond just the bitter.

Not necessarily. Where trade secrets are jealously guarded by tradition, keeping a secret to your dying day could be an honorable thing to do. The rest of the world be damned, you've done your duty to keep the secret. This is where reverse engineering comes into play.

My attention has been drawn to kettles with thermostats that bring water to ideal temperatures for brewing Darjeelings and non-black teas. I'm wondering if anybody here has had any experience with the performance of these gadgets. One is available from Ten Ren for a lot of money. And another is available from Adagio Tea for a bit less money. Does anybody have any options about their value and utility? To me they sound like the greatest thing since the toaster... but I'm reticent to put my money where my fancies direct without somebody vouching for the quality of these toys.

On the olive oil, I'd say it was more than just oily. The oil was textural. The flavor was cooked sugar. Very tasty. Not an ideal pairing with the fruit options I'd selected to accompany it... but tasty.

Do report back and let us know if it works. Aromatized sugars could provide for all kinds of interesting experiemnts with unusual flavors in baking.

Interesting principle. Where does it stop?[...] [...] I dont know if you are making that statement or if you misunderstood what I said. I never suggested that 'its fine and democratic to ban foie gras'. Although, if it is of any comfort to anyone, it is quite difficult to to ban consumption of foie gras. There are four federal agencies that can regulate food consumption, iirc. USDA, FDA, EPA and NMFS...There is very little wiggle room to squeeze in a ban on foie gras consumption. I think. It can also be argued that is unconstitutional. ← Sorry for the misinterpretation of what you said. I read your "it's undemocratic" sentence as dripping with ironic sarcasm and intended to imply the opposite of what it said. That is consistent with the tone that has been emanating from a number of your posts in this thread. Sorry if I'm seeing something that is not intended. My apologies.

I imagine that you could aromatize things with the jasmine oil without actually mixing them together. If a vanilla bean in a pound of sugar aromatizes it, maybe leaving a dish of sugar in a closed container with your bottle of jasmine oil (opened) for a while might end up producing jasmine sugar for you. Just be careful about knocking the container.

Had a marvellous meal there at the end of January. Fantastic twenty-some-odd-course tasting menu that was stellar all the way through. Previous reports have done the play by play of the meal I had, so I'll spare you the details... but go for the full tasting menu when you're there. You'll not regret it! And do report back if there are any remarkable new dishes that haven been covered upthread.