Silflay Hraka

One of a member of my favorite style, the Belgian Red.

Vichtenaar Flemish Ale
It is a style known as a Flemish, or Flanders, red ale, originating in the northern Belgium region that is primarily Dutch speaking. The style is very different from lambic, with none of the earthiness or mustiness that can be part of that style.

Vichtenaar is sweet, sour, winey, oakey and fruity all at once, with the flavors battling for supremacy, but no clear winner emerging.

Vichtenaar has medium carbonation and a good mouthfeel — not thin at all. Amazingly, this is not even Verhaeghe’s best beer — Duchesse De Bourgogne is aged 18 months in oak casks before being mixed with eight-month-old beer. It’s darker and even more smooth than Vichtenaar, with more toffee-chocolate tones.

And one of a Brewery, Peak Organic Brewing Co.

Cadoux did not have to worry — the beer was good. His pale ale, the first release, is a solid American pale ale, very malty with a nice fruity taste.

Despite its bitterness, the nut brown ale was still a smooth beer to drink. After having a sample of the beer with Cadoux, I went out and picked up a six pack of my own, because it is one of the best nut browns I’ve ever had.

It’s not quite as good as an acutal study, but here’s anecdotal evidence that the mortality rate for released red drum is under 5%.

Berliner Kindl Weisse

The Berliner Kindl Weisse is a schizophrenic beer, offering two distinct experiences to those lucky enough to run across it. In its basic form, the Kindl Weisse is a tart, low-alcohol (2.5 abv) wheat beer, similar to a Cantillon, though not nearly as sharp or sour, a style known as a Berliner Weissbier.

Berliner Weisse is a top-fermented, bottle conditioned wheat beer made with both traditional warm-fermenting yeasts and lactobacillus culture. They have a rapidly vanishing head and a clear, pale golden straw-coloured appearance. The taste is refreshing, tart, sour and acidic, with a lemony-citric fruit sharpness and almost no hop bitterness.

In the form it is most oftern seen by tourists, it is tinged either red or green by a syrup added to it by the bartender, as the Reinheitsgebot laws prevent anything other than hops, barley and water from being used in the production of beer. The red syrup is raspberry, whereas the green is made from a herb known as Woodruff.

The homebrewer and I had two each of the Kindls tonight, the first unadulterated, and the second with the Woodruff syrup. The raspberry was available at Sams, but given a choice between known and unknown in beer, I’ll go for the unknown almost ever single time.

The first glass was as advertised, sour, refreshing, and with an end note vaguely reminiscent of the orange circus peanuts candy I devoured entirely too many of as a youth. The taste is quite at odds with the light, lager color–it would be an ideal beer to foist upon an unsuspecting friend, were it not a sin to waste good beer just to see a spit-take.

I had a momentary spot of trouble with the second brew, as the label writing on the woodruff syrup bottle was entirely in German, and I was at a bit of a loss as to exactly how much syrup to add to the glass in order to achieve the glowing green tinge you see above. Eventually I decided on two teaspoons worth, and while the end result was more like fungal pool water than radioactive martion pee, the addition of the syrup made from a much smoother brew. The first example we could drink a lot of. The second, a lot of, quickly. Note that this could be considered heresy.

Not that we’d have been that affected, given the low abv. Perhaps if we alternated with shots of the cask-strength MacAllen.

My father is possibly the worst housekeeper ever. If my father were a superhero, bad housekeeping woud be his super power. He seems to generate a chaos field that slowly shifts everything around him into disorder. He can take a brand new automobile and have it filled with old papers, decayed baseballs, broken umbrellas and other detritus inside of three days. Within a week, the cupholders and dash will be covered with a sticky residue that might’ve been either coffee, soda or jelly at one point in time.

My father’s bedroom has been off-limits to everyone for the whole of my 36 years. Mother insists the door to that room stay closed at all times. It’s like the mysterious locked door in the mysterious castle with the mysterious old man. “You may go everywhere in the castle, but you must never venture into this one room, on peril of your life!” Apparently, father’s chaos field has permanently warped the space-time continuum behind the dread portal. The old papers that seem to follow in my father’s wake whirl in the whipping winds of extra-dimensional vortices. Ancient tomes like harpies flap wildly around the room, diving to tear the flesh of unwelcome trespassers. Tortured, unpaired socks weap and gnash their gaping holes like the damned in Dante’s hell, warning those that walk the straight and narrow path between the door and the bed, “Stray not, lest ye fall!”

My father’s personal field of resonance also grants selective invisibility to dirt and disorder around him. Rather than entering his personal space, light reflecting off dust or grime in his path bends itself around him, disobeying the laws of physics rather than enlightening him to the existence of clutter. The things my father does see, he sees with a kind of super vision, the kind of super vision that sees “Potential Future Usefulness” in an item that is clearly trash to the rest of humanity. My family has a whole outbuilding devoted to these kinds of items. We tried to clean it out several times in the days of my relative youth. We’d cart piles of what we perceived to be useless junk to the roadside only to have my father cart half of it back citing its PFU. As far as I know, most of it is there still, lying in wait against the day when its potential value is revealed to the world.

Unfortunately, I am the son of my father. Fight my genetics as I may, I have inherited my father’s ability to create chaos out of even the most rigid order. I clean and organize and order, all to no avail. Stacks of letters, bills and other assorted papers slowly slip and slide into a jumbled mess and neatly folded clothes slowly unfold and crumple themselves into small piles on my floor and furniture. Shoes gradually migrate from the closet to the hallway and from the hallway to the den. Books find their way from the shelves to almost every flat surface that will have them. Dishes magically soil themselves and settle comfortably into the sink. Previously clean surfaces send out a siren call to dirt and grime and stickiness of all stripes. In my home, the Lords of Chaos rule.

Also unfortunately, cleaning seems to be a little far down on my list of priorities most days. Even when I have absolutely nothing else to do, I seem to come up with something more important than cleaning. Typically, this means going to Target to buy cleaning supplies.

Where I do not enjoy cleaning a great deal, I do enjoy buying cleaning supplies. Shopping for supplies is a wonderful delay tactic and it makes me feel that I’ve at least made some progress. It’s like stockpiling weapons for my fight against the Lords of Chaos. I tend to forget what supplies I already own, so I end up with multiples of any type of cleaner. I have three nearly full bottles of surface cleaner. I have two-and-a-half bottles of laundry detergent. I have several different kinds of glass cleaner, several bathroom cleaners, gobs of unused sponges, dusting wipes, disinfectant wipes, cleaning wipes, rust and lime remover, mildew and mold killer, bleaches, carpet cleaners, spot removers, stain removers and just about every other kind of cleaning product you might ever need. I figure if I have enough of the right weapons in my cleaning arsenal, I’ll eventually be able to overcome my own genetics. Most of it has been used once. So far it’s Genetics 1, Arsenal of Cleaners 0.

But I might’ve finally found an effective weapon in the fight against my own nature. The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

The Mr. Clean Magic Eraser is amazing. You just wet it and go to town on soiled surfaces. Wipe out soap scum from the tub, obliterate scuff marks on the wall, destroy stains on the floor and annihilate unidentified ick on the counter. The Magic Eraser is all powerful. I loved using it so much that I scrubbed my bathroom from top to bottom and then went back to Target to buy more. I plan on scrubbing the kitchen next. After that I may search my home for other possible uses. It was that impressive.

In the end, it probably won’t make me any better of a housekeeper than I was previously. As far as I can tell, the Magic Eraser doesn’t fold laundry, much less put it where it belongs. But it does give me one more weapon in the war against my poor housekeeping heritage.

Spectacularly ineffectual bonehead Kofi Annan is shlepping around the Middle East, pulling “demands” out of his rectal region. Among his sternly-worded orders:

Kofi wants Palestinians to stop firing rockets into Israel.
Kofi wants Israel to stop its offensive into Gaza.
Kofi wants Hezbollah to return its kidnapped Israelis.
Kofi wants Palestinians to return their kidnapped Israelis.
Kofi wants Israel to cease its blockade of Lebanon.

In the spirit of these demands, and wielding no less authority than Annan himself, I issue the following fatwas:

I demand that the state of Nebraska secede from the union and rename itself The Midwestern Republic of Custard Pies.

I demand that all Hilary Clinton photographs be airbrushed by the same technician who lopped 20 pounds off of Katie Couric. Special attention should be paid to the face and jowls.

I demand an immediate cessation of Terrell Owens stories, lasting indefinitely, or until he actually plays a football game.

I demand that President Bush reveal his plan for controlling the weather. The slew of hurricanes he caused last year were clearly part of his insidious plan to disenfranchise blacks, but why has he ceased causing hurricanes? Is he sucking up the the special interests in coastal resort areas?

I expect my success rate to equal or exceed Annan’s.

A logical explanation behind the recent American casualties in Iraq.

No idea of the original source, yet.

Ever.

A forgetful Sumerian baker—probably the lady of the house or her maid—might have left her dough out during one of Sumeria’s infrequent rainstorms. When the rays of the returning sun warmed the earthenware mixing bowl, in which the dough was now immersed in water, it became a combination of mash tun and open fermenter (as we would say today), in which the grain’s enzymes converted the dough’s starches into sugars. Or, perhaps, a Sumerian family sat down for a bowl of bread dunked in water, perhaps flavored with honey, dates, or date syrup. For some reason, however, the meal was not finished. When the household re-assembled, perhaps a few days later, the bowls of gruel were still on the table. In either scenario, airborne yeasts might have converted the sugars in the gruel to alcohol. Perhaps out of innate curiosity, the careless baker or the returning family might have tasted the ale that was so inadvertently concocted and appreciated the sour, refreshing taste—and, perhaps, the heady after-effect as well. This is all speculation, perhaps an apocryphal legend, but it offers a fair generic description of how beer is made, and, because of the records we have found and because of the bio-chemistry involved in beer-making, which we now understand, these scenarios are quite plausible.

Making her special day one she’ll remember forever.

A West Brookfield groom was arrested at his own wedding reception Sunday on five charges, including assaulting a police officer.

After posting bail, Gendron was arrested again later that night after violating a restraining order filed by his new wife.

Passed out in the street.

A Cambodian Buddhist monk who stripped naked and raced through suburban streets after a heavy night of drinking rice wine laced with toads has been asked to leave the monkhood, a religious official said Saturday.

Wine laced with toads. I bet that’s got a kick.

Found at the Philadelphia Inquirer.

In addition to helping Dick Cheney refrain from biting all the Democrats in Congress, it represents the most direct and concise English term for sexual intercourse.