Three Small, Unrelated Things
1.
Our newly-upgraded professional soccer team (that's football club to you Europeans), the Portland Timbers, play in their first home game tonight. I will be one of the 18,000 in attendance. They are starting out a rocky 0-2-1, but as a Red Sox fan, I know it gets a whole lot worse. A few of the local breweries are offering celebratory batches, but I think Lompoc's
Kick Axe is the best: a green, vivid, dry-hopped pale. If you're brewing a beer to honor a green-and-yellow-jerseyed Portland team, it's gotta have hops.
2.
A couple weeks back, I attempted a modified turbid mash for a lambic. It was a long and strange procedure, the results of which will only be known years from now. Unsatisfying! However, I transferred it off the alarming trub pile in the primary fermenter and had a zwickel on the way. It was wheaty and fresh and while you could go so far as to call it zesty, funk was nowhere to be found. It was, I expect, roughly what medieval mild ale tasted like. Interesting.
3.
Doing a bit of research for the book and I found a source that identified three styles of beer brewed by the ancient--and first--brewers, the Sumerians. Dark, white, and red. It didn't get much into the distinctions, but did go to show that even at the outset, styles proliferated. I have no word on whether late-era Sumerians debated the evolution or critiqued later iterations as "not to style." Probably.
Go Timbers!
Our newly-upgraded professional soccer team (that's football club to you Europeans), the Portland Timbers, play in their first home game tonight. I will be one of the 18,000 in attendance. They are starting out a rocky 0-2-1, but as a Red Sox fan, I know it gets a whole lot worse. A few of the local breweries are offering celebratory batches, but I think Lompoc's
Kick Axe is the best: a green, vivid, dry-hopped pale. If you're brewing a beer to honor a green-and-yellow-jerseyed Portland team, it's gotta have hops.2.
A couple weeks back, I attempted a modified turbid mash for a lambic. It was a long and strange procedure, the results of which will only be known years from now. Unsatisfying! However, I transferred it off the alarming trub pile in the primary fermenter and had a zwickel on the way. It was wheaty and fresh and while you could go so far as to call it zesty, funk was nowhere to be found. It was, I expect, roughly what medieval mild ale tasted like. Interesting.
3.
Doing a bit of research for the book and I found a source that identified three styles of beer brewed by the ancient--and first--brewers, the Sumerians. Dark, white, and red. It didn't get much into the distinctions, but did go to show that even at the outset, styles proliferated. I have no word on whether late-era Sumerians debated the evolution or critiqued later iterations as "not to style." Probably.
Go Timbers!