Shapes and Sizes

i am related to one of them...

First batch of homemade pasta!

Dogfish Head Brewery Pilgimage

A little while back we headed out to Delaware to visit one of our favorite breweries, Dogfish Head. They were recently profiled in an excellent article about the founder Sam Calagione in New Yorker Magazine.

Their slogan is "Off Centered Beers for Off Centered People. As you can imagine, the Dogfish beers are odd, potent, unique and often delicious. They use more hops per barrel than any other brewery in the world. And they often use unorthodox ingredients in their beers such as saffron, cocoa nibs, a variety of grapes, annatto (fragrant tree seeds), chrysanthemum flowers, figs...

One of Beth's favorites DFH concoction is Heaven & Hell. It's an insane black & tan you make yourself with 18+% World Wide Stout and 20% 120 Minute IPA. It packs a punch in many different ways...yum....





A piece of brewing history!

Sir Hops Alot is the quirky brainchild of Sam Calagione.

"Typically, brewers only add hops during two points of the brewing process - once in the beginning to impart flavor and bitterness and then again at the end for aroma. Once upon a time, Sam was watching a cooking show and the chef was preparing soup. The chef on the show emphasized the importance of slowly and continuously adding the pepper throughout the cooking process. He said that continuously peppering the soup would yield better flavor than just adding it all at once.

And then a light bulb went off in Sam’s head … instead of adding the hops all at once, why not try to continuously hop the beer over a set period of time? This is how the 60 minute ale was born. The first time Sam brewed 60 Minute IPA he used an old vibrating tabletop football game that he found at a garage sale. He put the game over the brew kettle and covered the surface with hops. The little plastic football players shook and spun their way down the field, continuously distributing hops into the kettle over a 60 minute time period.

The old plastic game from the 80’s didn't last very long for the continuous hopping process. So Sam decided to build his own apparatus to do the job. The first model was SIR HOPS A LOT."

When they moved from a 50-bbl brewhouse to a 100-bbl brewhouse, Sir Hops Alot was retired and was replaced by the bigger and badder Sofa King Hoppy.

Dem nutty DogFish peeps built a monster wood tank from a crazy bullet proof Panamanian wood.

"Now nestled in the High-Gravity Cellars at our Milton, Delaware brewery are three great, big wooden tanks. Two of the 300-bbl tanks are made with White American Oak, the third is made from Palo Santo wood (that's the one in the foreground of the photo).

All three of the tanks were build on-site by our friends at Arrow Tank in Buffalo, NY. Each one holds 300-barrels of beer (that's 600 kegs or 9300 gallons). The Palo tank is for conditioning Palo Santo Marron. The oak tanks will be conditioning Immort Ale, Burton Baton, Red & White, 120 Minute IPA, World Wide Stout, Fort, and Olde School Barleywine.

Sound cool? We put together a short movie about the Palo wood tank project, click here to watch."

thirsty yet?

Impermanence

Happy New Year!

Odetta 1930-2008

"Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music. Odetta's stage presence was regal enough: planted onstage like an oak tree no one would dare cut down, wearing a guitar high on her chest, she could envelop Carnegie Hall with her powerful contralto as other vocalists might fill a phone booth. This was not some pruny European monarch but a stout, imperious queen of African-American music. She used that amazing instrument to bear witness to the pain and perseverance of her ancestors. Some folks sing songs. Odetta testified." (full Time article)

"Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, and she became one of the most widely known and influential folk music artists of the 1950s and '60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin. Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in quest of an end to racial discrimination."(IHT obit)

Here is her searing live rendition of House of the Rising Sun
on A Prairie Home Companion (12/8/07):
Special thanks to Doc Bogz for this priceless rare gem.

Moroccan Treats

more food!

Straight from Al Bled, courtesy of Ahmed:
chebbakia, cornes de gazelles, palmiers,
and some fantastic foliated pancakes "mssm'n"

Fresh Fun With Grains

The Rise of the Breads

30 minutes later... Fresh, Warm and Delicious

We made a spectacular bread last night. Using the spent grains from brewing and some whole wheat flour and local honey. YUM!

The beer we brewed this weekend is happily fermenting. It's a "Home for the Holidays Ale" with a little ginger and allspice, masterfully formulated by our zymurgy sensei Wendell.

The Skies Are Smiling

Click on the image for the full effect

"At sunset, [the] western sky showed off stunning colors and dramatic clouds reflected in Brisbane Water on the Central Coast of New South Wales, Australia. It also featured the remarkable conjunction of the crescent Moon, Venus, and Jupiter forming a twilight smiley face."



From the Great NASA Astronomy Pix of the Day Site.

Rockville December Sky

Shop Till You Drop

Doing our part to keep the economy a'rollin' and getting ready for some turkey madness!

Spanakopita!

It is time for me to give many thanks when I get back from band practice and there's some fresh warm homemade spanakopita waiting in the kitchen for me.
YUM!

"Obama, Yey, Yey, Yey"

"Your victory has demonstrated that no person... should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place"
- Nelson Mandela

Kenya has declared a national holiday of celebration.

I went to 4 different stores today to try to buy extra commemorative copies of the Washington Post and the New York Times. All stores were completely sold-out.

Here's a sweet sweet track from Extra Golden, a Kenya/US band collaborative. I've been blasting this song all day! It was written to thank some Illinois Senator help them clear their final tourist visa hurdles so they could come perform and record in the US in 2006.

Lyons Classic Pinball, Colorado

Seeing four pinball machines at Oskar Blues was already a treat. Well, just around the corner was this little piece of heaven called Lyons Classic Pinball.

I walked around in a gleeful daze.
36 games of pinball.
3 rooms chock full.
In the last few years, I have hopelessly watched as pinball has been quietly disappearing from establishments all over.
So this chance find was momentous.

We ended up chatting up the knowledgeable and hospitable owner for a while even though he politely passed over my offer to effusively hug him in gratitude for having such a place. There is no doubt this is a labor of love. I wish him all the best and I can't wait for our next trip out to friendly Colorado.

A quiet moment of prayer and giving thanks

"The Audacity of Hops"

One of my favorite bars is now The Oskar Blues Restaurant and Brewery in Lyons, Colorado. They call themselves "The Little Brewery That Cans." These fun folks were the first microbrewery to can their beers since 2002. Besides being very practical to take along outdoors, cans are actually better for beer than bottles since they block out all harmful sunlight. Cans are also easier and more efficient to recycle and to ship that bottles. And you can crush them on your forehead if you choose to do so.

Their colorful brewpub is a treasure of a place, full of character and liveliness. When we visited there was a top notch Honky-Tonk band downstairs tearing it up with upright bass, pedal steel guitar and harmonica. The food was outstanding. I had the superb Blackened Redfish Washday on a bed of rice and beans.

But most importantly they had a full arcade room, with not 1, 2, 3 but FOUR pinball machines. When I profusely thanked the hostess for the uncanny perfectness of the place she told me all their pinball machines were actually supplied from a shop right next door....

Modular Star

While most of us were at work, someone stayed home sick and made this impressive origami out of 30 different pieces. It took more than 3 hours apparently!

Permanent Vacation

I'm back from vacation and still trying to catch up with everything.
My glasses however are still enjoying the Basque beaches of Southern France.

A complicit sneaky wave allowed them to escape and off they were,
never to be found again. I guess I cannot really blame them, Cap Breton does offers some of the best surfing in Europe.
I can't very well, but see for yourself.

Mac Pro Delight

It's christmas in August for me at work. To supplement my dual 20' PC, I just received a 30' loaded! Mac Pro. It is a beast. Processing is blazingly fast and it's just so smuv and slick.

Zina hits 200,000

My trusty 1992 Acura Integra GS-R just hit 200K and she's still doing great. 300K here we come.

The Dale's Way

Beth and her dad hiked the Dale's Way in England for a week.
Pints of bitter, rolling hills, rustic farms, charging bulls, B&Bs, friendly publicans, ancient stone bridges, big blisters, rain, and then more rain, hearty ales, all spell good times.

Dead Trees, Grand Sable Dunes, Michigan

We're on a pretty pix rampage.
Here's the National Geographic Picture of the Day


Photograph by Phil Schermeister, 1991

"Long-deceased trees cling stubbornly to the steep flanks of Grand Sable Dunes in Michigan's Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The precipitous dunes, left behind by ancient glaciers, rise some 300 feet (90 meters) above Lake Superior and spread over 5 square miles (13 square kilometers)."

(Photo shot on assignment for, but not published in, "Big Lost Country," March/April 1991, National Geographic Traveler magazine)