Remembering the Gold Dust Lounge

Too many years ago, I moved to California with six friends. We had met working in restaurants and a German class at the University of Minnesota; some of us had other friends out here already, and as all our circles of acquaintances rippled outward and overlapped, we enjoyed getting to know our new home. The whole world may not have been our oyster, but San Francisco was quite enough.

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The pack rat mentality suffers a crash

<Drafted Nov. 9, ’11.>  Combining homebrewing with a packrat mentality can be a study in cross-purposes. Beer does not have the shelf-life of wine. While I think vintners have shown great marketing genius in the valuation of their product (given the public’s perception of aged wine), fermented grape juice generally adds value far better than beer does. As far as playing to a packrat’s strength, oenophiles have a clear advantage.

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Brewmaster Makes Good

Hey! I got a nice follow-up on my letter to Brewmaster. 

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Minneapolis, Here I Come, or:

If time is nature’s way of keeping everything from happening all at once, where can I get some more if it? 

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Brouhaha with Brewmaster Manager

On Wednesday I had a manager at Brewmaster, where I buy my beer supplies, tell me it’s my fault the pale malt I bought at his store wasn’t milled properly. I was supposed to rip open the packaging at the store and check it before I left.

 Really?

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Vernality

I recently learned that the Roman festivals for the vernal equinox were called Hilaria.

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Ales for What Ails You: The Winter Brews Festival

People are doing strange things to beer. And I’m not just talking about Dogfish Brewery in Delaware, adding juniper berries and “cardamom, coriander, ginger, allspice, rampe leaves, lemongrass, curry powder, and black tea, custom blended …  in India” then fermenting their beer in ironwood barrel staves, for the pungent flavor of the oils imparted.

Across the continent, on the comparatively brewing traditional left coast, I went to a Winter Brews Festival yesterday, and early on I stood in line and enjoyed watching a guy try to order Russian River Brewery’s Rejection  Ale. “When they ask if they can have Rejection,” one of the bartenders informed another, “tell them no.”

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A Frothy Experiment Works

 Among my recurring expenses when I brew is buying yeast. Yeast is alive, and brewing beer is a controlled population explosion and collapse—the little single-celled organisms giving their lives that we might also live, and live more happily, too.

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To Longer Days

and shorter nights.

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Finding out my adrenal gland still works

I was bottling some India pale ale on our back deck this weekend, busy filling the bottles before I cap them, when I found out that my adrenal gland still works.

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