A relaxing weekend with H in the picturesque environs of Healdsburg (Alexander, Dry Creek, and Russian River Valleys), about an hour North of San Francisco. Sometimes this blog is a place to jot down quick food/drink notes to look up later / in case I lose the paper notebook, and this is one of those times: Favorite wines of the 35ish tasted, all brought back for further “investigation” with friends and food: ...
A week and a half ago, I was here. Walk into a flower shop: Head through the back door and down metal stairs: Have a drink: Just one page of the loosely themed menu: One of the best cocktail bars I’ve been to in my life, by far. Every single cocktail was remarkably good, and distinctive– glass jars of eucalyptus, cocktails infused with smoke from the grill, beer and amaro, a cocktail in pieces you combine as you drink… but none of it felt ‘conceptual-cute’ or forced. Really well executed cocktails that happened to have some structure to the presentation. I’m in awe. ...
A one-of-a-kind evening of strong, dark, and old beers with friends. Some of us had been hanging on to some beers for years without quite the right excuse to crack them open… problem solved. Not a wedding, new year, baby shower, or birthday, just a casual evening hanging out with lentil soup and bread. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout *2007*, Westvleteren 12 and 8 eBayed from Belgium years ago, Half Acre’s special Sanguis beer brewed with oranges and beets for one specific dinner at Next, an excellent imperial porter from High Water, a 10.5% imperial stout in a can, homebrew, and more. ...
I found myself in Bavaria recently. Unfortunately, I’m not really a fan of German food and the continuous stream of meat-and-white-starch (and to my disappointment, so many of the sausages and pork chops just weren’t very good), but a handful of meals or beers were memorable. Bamberg was a cute city and great place for beer. Schlenkerla is one of the few old breweries still making a rauchbier (smoked beer). Their Marzen tapped straight from a wooden keg was intoxicatingly campfire-smoky in smell, but not bitter or harsh in taste, with a modestly roasted malt and creamy body (and all this for about $3). Delicious and definitely worth a visit. ...
Quick summary: If you’re in Tokyo and you like coffee, you should really go to Be A Good Neighbor in Sendagaya near Harajuku. A cozy little kiosk with just a window counter, several different varieties of beans you can smell, moderately lightly roasted, and very friendly people. He asked what kind of flavors I like in my coffee and I said “citrus”, and he made me a great drip. I noted the Dandelion Chocolate from San Francisco and then we talked about Four Barrel, they gave me a free pin, and suggested which other coffeehouses (third-wave and traditional Japanese) to visit. ...
While visiting Chicago, I was usually getting dinner with other people who are into craft beer, making it easy to try a wide variety. It was a busy few evenings so I don’t remember all the details, but I jotted down a few notes of my favorites that I’m going to keep an eye out for in the future: Vichtenaar, a slightly sour Flemish Red Avery Maharajah, a very distinctively-flavored IPA (and one of a small number of IPAs I’m excited about these days– I’d had it before) Half Acre Over Ale (a brown ale, a bit nutty, a bit like toast, quite good – sadly I don’t think they distribute outside of Chicago) Half Acre Sanguis brewed with oranges and beets, and really excellent with strong food (smoked eel) Brooklyn Sorachi Ace (Sorachi Ace is a particular unusual hop that I think smells a bit like dill– I only knew it from the Mikkeller Single Hop series tasting I did with some friends last year) Revolution Coup d’Etat (from a local brewery, in the slightly funky belgian farmhouse/blonde/yeasty style) As a side note– I liked the design of the Half Acre Sanguis label quite a bit– my photo of it is a bit blurry but I found a blog post from the designer with the image: ...
I was tired of the bland-coffee-plus-lots-of-sweetened-condensed-milk I’d had in Asia so far, so I looked up a more interesting cafe when in Hong Kong. Via a google search to this coffeegeek.com thread, I heard about Rabbithole Coffee & Roasters… and what a successful morning that was. It’s part coffee equipment showroom, part roastery, part place to drink a coffee (with just a few seats along a shared table and a few more on a back patio). ...
I didn’t know Parabola was available outside of a few Firestone Walker tastings (they mainly use it as an intermediate beer they blend into their anniversary ale each year) , but City Beer managed to get a few bottles of it (for in-store consumption only, to prevent them from being scooped up and resold on ebay). A good surprise on a beerophile friend’s birthday. I don’t want to be that person who describes a taste as “dutch cocoa, with raisins and the tart fruitiness of a lightly-roasted espresso”, but apparently I am. ...
I had a 2008 Goose Island Bourbon County Stout at City Beer recently. Wow. I loved it. I won’t come up with suitable adjectives (volatile?)– it’s more like drinking whiskey than any other beer I’ve had. And at 13% alcohol and a powerful smoky-sweet taste, I could have easily split the single 12oz bottle with one or two other people.
Mikkeller, the one-man ‘roving brewery’, makes a series of many (19, over the years?) beers from the exact same IPA recipe*, except each uses a single, different variety of hop. Beer + Science? How could I say no? And two different friends thought the same way– so twice in the past month+, I’ve had a chance to do a side-by-side tasting of 16 of them with a group of friends. Fascinating. ...
This is the final writeup from a weekend trip to Portland, focusing on our favorite beer places (Part 1: Portland Food, Part 2: Oregeon Brewers Festival). I half-wrote this right after the trip but hadn’t got around to posting it. Bailey’s Taproom(SW Broadway and Pine, downtown) A great place to taste beer– an informal space with plenty of seating and a rotating selection of about twenty beers on tap, including a lot of Oregon beer. For just $7.50 you can get a sampler of any five of your choice. I liked the Avatar Jasmine IPA (very faint hints of jasmine), but can’t remember what else we had (a scotch ale and one of the Upright beers, but I don’t seem to have notes). ...
[the original motivation for creating this blog– I had pages of notes from a trip and wanted to share them with a few friends] I recently spent a week in Belgium with three friends, visiting breweries and tasting beers. Without further fanfare or detail, here’s a list of everything I tasted and my favorites (somewhat subjective, I’m sure, depending what I was eating with them and so on): My very favorites: ...