Boozin’ Blog

First, they deep fried pickles but pickles aren’t a big part of my life so I let it pass.
Then, they deep fried candy bats but I don’t care for sweets so I wasn’t concerned.
Next, they deep fried butter but I decided only the passively suicidal would eat such a thing so I ignored it.
And, since I did nothing to stop them then, now they’ve deep fried beer and I realize it’s too late. All is lost.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit melodramatic but still, fried beer? Why? And, after letting that sink in for a moment, how?

How is easy to answer. It’s a secret. Mark Zable spent the last three years trying to find a way to fry beer and he’s not about to blab. His solution is a ravioli looking piece of dough with a bubble full of beer. Apparently, when you bit into it you find perfectly normal, albeit flat, liquid beer on the inside.

Mmm, hot, flat beer served one teaspoonful at a time in dough. Does it get any better?

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What’s the first thing you do when you get home from work? Kick off your shoes, make some dinner, check the mailbox… An important part of getting home for me is reaching in the fridge and grabbing a beer. It’s what most of us want after work regardless of what we do for a living.

Imagine if work for you meant months long deployments to foreign countries where people are shooting at you. And that getting home means 30+ hours of travel. How much would you want a beer at the end of THAT workday?

But, for one soldier, a beer wasn’t in the cards, at least not as long as he was in uniform.

See, Sapper Anthony Walls is part of an Engineer Regiment and spent the last four months building a road in Afghanistan. When he finally got a few days off he headed home to spend them with his family.

His first stop, once he arrived, was at a supermarket for a few beers. When he took them to the cash register to pay, the clerk refused to sell them to him. This had nothing to do with the law, it would have been perfectly legal for him to buy the beer, and it’s not the store’s policy. This was just about a clerk not wishing to sell beer to a man in uniform. Her manager was called over and he backed her up, telling Walls that there was nothing he could do.

I thought that we’d gotten past this kind of stupidity. The newspaper article doesn’t explain why the clerk didn’t want to sell beer to Walls so I can only assume it was one of two reasons. Either she is opposed to the war in Afghanistan or she has an irrational phobia of uniforms. If it’s the former, she needs to take her objections up with the politicians. If it’s the later, she probably needs to see a psychiatrist. Either way, leave the soldier alone and sell him his damn beer!

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Where’s your favorite place to drink? I like drinking at home either with a meal or in front of the TV well enough. But it’s definitely more fun to head out to the bars with friends. And it turns out that I live in the right part of the US for that preference, statistically speaking that is.

The good folks over at Floating Sheep decided to crunch some numbers and came up with some interesting facts. They simply compared the number of grocery stores to bars then overlaid their data on a map of the US. What they found was a significant number of bars per capita in a region that roughly stretches from the upper Midwest and into the Northern Plains states. Check out the map for yourself to see what I mean.

Like to go out for a drink? Then these are the states for you. The national average for bars per 10,000 people is about 1.52, according to Floating Sheep. But some of these states tip the scales with 5 and 6 bars per 10,000 in some cases. Nice!

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Has this ever happened to you? You walk in your favorite beer store and suddenly you freeze up. You know you want beer, you just have no idea what kind. Do you want a light lager? Do you want something dark and chewy? Maybe you want something in-between. But you just don’t know what!

As the cashiers and the kid restocking the shelves look at you questioningly, you find yourself breaking into a cold sweat. Just pick a damn beer and get out, you tell yourself. But, you just can’t decide.

Yeah, it’s never happened to me either.

However, if you have a friend or acquaintance so plagued with brewskie indecision - that’s the medical term for this problem - then the good folks at Beer Number have a solution. By simply buying their iPhone app, anyone can overcome brewskie indecision. Yes, after answering a few simple questions designed to hone in on their beer drinking needs, anyone can be told by this program what kind of beer to drink.

So is that it? Are we done with useless beer apps? I certainly hope so.

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In all honesty, this is just another meaningless beer competition. But, these are still fun to watch, aren’t they?

The Beer Madness competition is put on by The Washington Post. They ask they readers to apply to join the beer tasters panel. This means the judges are generally lay-people, not beer professionals. That’s certainly an interesting spin; after all beer is the democratic drink. Beer lovers don’t really need assholes like me telling them what they like. They can figure it out for themselves.

At this point in the game, the panel has assembled. Beers have been tasted, reviews written and judgment passed. The paper is publishing the results once a week with a bracket style rundown keeping track of the winners and losers.

Some interesting results came out of the first round:
Guinness got knocked out by Monteith’s Black Beer
Pilsner Urquell beat Heineken
Stella Artois won over Tsingtao

There are some odd competitions, though. Boston Brown Ale was put up against Xingu. One’s an ale and one’s a lager. How can these two compete? The judges aren’t really picking the superior beer here, they’re picking the beer style they prefer. The same could be said for Schneider Weisse Hefe-Weizen vs. Hitachino Nest White Ale and Chimay Red vs. Smithwick’s Irish Ale.

But, like I said, this contest really doesn’t matter; it’s just fun to watch.

Oh, and the paper is soliciting reader’s votes, too. If you want to weigh in on your favorites do it here.

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Okay, I admit that a few weeks ago I shat on breweries for getting wrapped up in the “world’s strongest beer” contest. But I can’t help but be fascinated by stuff like this. So, like a moth to a flame, I was drawn to this headline: Brewer brews bitterest beer ever.

Even though it was a British newspaper, I immediately assume that the brewer in question was from the west coast of the US. These are the nutjobs who usually get wrapped up in this sort of thing and they certainly like their hops out there.

But no, it’s a British brewer this time. Peter Fowler of Pitstop Brewery in southern England has put together a beer with 323 International Bittering Units (IBU). If that doesn’t mean anything to you, consider this: The typical IPA, generally considered a hoppy beer style, has between 40 and 60 IBU. In other words, The Hop, as Fowler calls his creation, is more than 5 times bitter than the average IPA.

Bitter beer face much?

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The big day is approaching. While you might feel obligated to grab a Guinness or one of those pints of green beer that started showing up a week or so ago, why not try some stout based beer cocktails this year?

Naturally, there’s the classic Black and Tan. Traditionally, the B&T is made with Guinness and Bass. The drink works because pale ale is heavier than stout. If you fill a glass halfway with pale ale then carefully pour stout on top, the stout will literally float on top. Not only does the drink look cool, it’s quite tasty, too. If you try this yourself, you probably want to use a spoon to slow the stout down so it won’t mix with the pale ale. Pouring it over the curved back of the spoon should do the trick. There are tools made for this very purpose which mount on the rim of the glass that make the pour a lot easier.

The Black and Red is like the B&T except in the beer styles used. The best option is a framboise lambic topped with a chocolate stout. This decadent drink tastes like chocolate covered berries in liquid form.

The Stout Sangria was originally designed to be a Christmas drink but it’s good anytime. Besides, this day when stout is the star seems like the perfect day to whip up the drink. To make it you’ll need:
One bottle of dry stout
1/2 ounce of simple syrup
1/2 ounce of ruby port
Cinnamon or nutmeg for garnish
Fill the glass about 3/4 full with the stout. Add the syrup and port then top it up with the rest of the beer. Sprinkle the spice of your choice on top. Drink. Enjoy. Repeat.

The final stout cocktail comes from our favorite guru of cocktails, Colleen Graham. She recently published this recipe for Apple Cider Shandy. It’s an easy drink to make - the best always are, aren’t they? Pour about half an oatmeal stout in a glass. Top it with an ounce of cider. Colleen recommends soft, nonalcoholic, sparkling cider. The flavor of hard cider is too harsh, she says, and will overwhelm the drink. I haven’t tried this one yet but I look forward to experimenting with it to find which cider is my favorite in it.

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Valentines Day is just a week away. So let’s talk a bit romantic booze.

Today we’ll begin with the most unlikely of adult beverages, beer. For those of you for whom beer means the cheapest case of cans filled with piss water - you know who you are - beer might not be the most romantic of drinks.

What is romantic? Is it elegance? Beer’s got elegance. Some of the top shelf craft and import beers are pure elegance. They range in intensity from delicate to bold with a whole palate of flavors from light and fruity to big roasty stouts to funky sour beers.

And the packaging; special release beers these days rival the finest champagnes with magnum bottles, wired down corks and striking labels. For a lot less money, one can pick up a fine bottle of beer that rivals the best wines in flavor, presentation and appearance.

Finally, does a romantic encounter always involve a box of chocolates for you? Chocolate and beer go great together. From the rich, coffee-like flavors of good stout to the tart, fruity flavors of lambic, there is plenty of fine beer that will go very nicely with the box of chocolates.

Or, just get chocolate beer! There is some great chocolate beer out there. Buy a bunch of individual bottles and see which one is you and your lover’s favorite.

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You know I like to drink. I’m fond of pretty much every form of alcohol from whisky to cider to red wine to mead – put it in front of me and chances are I’ll enjoy it. But my hands down favorite is beer. It is simultaneously simple and complex, unassuming and brash. No other drink is quite like it.

So, I tend to be a bit thin skinned about beer. The cheap clichés of beer being the drink of drunks drive me crazy. I get impatient when writers and journalists embrace them; I get absolutely pissed when lawmakers do.

The latest thing that has me crawling walls is the fact that Sam Adams high-alcohol beer, Utopia, is banned in 13 states here in the US. No doubt one can buy whisky, gin, vodka and many other forms of booze that far exceed Utopia’s 27% alcohol. But because Utopia is a beer, it must be stopped, according to these lawmakers.

When can we have some sort of equity? I’m not the biggest fan of Utopia. It’s $150 price tag is too great for what the beer is. But these stupid laws reinforce the idea that beer is evil and must be stopped.

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It’s hard not to sympathize with Lord Tebbit, even if he does go around introducing himself as “Lord Tebbit.” Apparently, he woke up to a collection of empty beer bottles outside of his home. I’ve got a neighbor who likes to flick his cigarette butts into my yard so I can understand his lordship’s frustration.

Tebbit understandably concluded that the bottles came from the Queen’s Head pub, 30 feet from his front door. So, the lordly one confronted Joel Shepherd, manager, of Queen’s Head. It was quickly established that the bottles couldn’t have come from the pub, rather they were likely sold at a nearby grocery store.

Joel gave the lord a pint and all was well. The lord graciously apologized to Joel and the staff. No word on whether the bottles are still sitting on the lord’s front stoop or not.

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