All you food bloggers

Bourdain's "Obsession" episode last night: I thought the bit on food bloggers was spot on. Equal parts sardonic bemusement, ironic distance and feigned-reluctant attachment. In other words, classic Bourdain. I know it was one of those cheap compilation episodes but I enjoyed it.

I feel like I oughta be tweeting this. Isn't that what all the kids are doing these days?

What We're Reading: The Big Machine

This post from Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic is only tangentially related to food (specifically food systems and obesity), but like most of his writing, it's well worth reading.

Catching up

Autumnal hiatus turned into winter break. It's snowed a bunch of times since we posted anything here.

We've been thinking that the tag line above --on the brewing, drinking and culture of beer-- is too limiting for the things we want to talk about. Not just beer, but food, wine, pop culture, music and so on. So we're working on some changes that will hopefully open things up a bit creatively, and get us posting more than once a quarter. More to come on that soon. We've also added comment moderation because we've been getting some spam.

That said, we've been brewing some pretty great beer recently. We brewed a Belgian dubbel in October that was ready for Christmas, but tasted pretty rough -- lots of alcohol heat without much body. It's smoothed out nicely in the last few weeks as the malt has come forward. It should taste even better in another month or two.

Our last beer was a rye IPA, pictured above. We clogged up our plate chiller on brew day and I was afraid the resulting emergency measures would compromise the beer. But it turned out great, with a huge nose from being dry-hopped with several ounces of Amarillo.

My one problem with both of these beers is lack of body, which I think is due to not hitting the right mash temperatures. I'd been using a cheap remote thermometer, and it's probably just not accurate enough for brewing. So that should be an easy fix.

We'll be drinking the dubbel and rye on Sunday, as we get together with friends to play music in the afternoon before cooking up some great food and retiring to watch the Superbowl. This has become a bit of a tradition the last few years and we'll document the proceedings here.

Here's to a new year of brewing, drinking and eating well.

Sláinte!

Blog Watch: The Atlantic Food Channel

The Atlantic magazine has launched a new Food Channel (to accompany its Politics and Business Channels).  Curated by senior editor and food critic Corby Kummer, it's packed full of excellent writing from the magazine's own staff as well as contributions from such luminaries as Alinea chef/owner Grant Achatz, health policy expert Ezekiel Emanuel (brother of Rahm) and rancher Bill Niman.  The Atlantic's food writing, like its politcal and cultural commentary, will be thought-provoking for sure.

drawnk: Session Beer Project Logo

Beer scribe Lew Bryson has a blog dedicated to session beers:

"SBP was started in January of 2007 by beer writer Lew Bryson for two reasons. First, to spread the word about session beers so more people could enjoy them. Second, to better Lew's chances of finding good session beers to drink."

What makes a session beer?

• under 4.5% alcohol by volume
• flavorful enough to be interesting -- no light beers, please
• balanced enough for multiple pints
• conducive to conversation
• reasonably priced

A couple weeks ago he sent out an open call for a logo design for the movement. Now, I love me some session beers (Sly Fox O'Reilly's Stout, Yards Brawler, Kenzinger, Philly Pale, etc) so I decided to give it a go and these are the results:

Preliminary sketches:

These were my original ideas. I submitted the second one and Lew got back to me and gave me some feedback; which resulted in the final version below:


Lew still hasn't chosen a logo yet (I think he's still receiving submissions). I had fun working on this and I'm happy with the final result. Now it's up to the fates (i.e. Lew himself) to decide.
Check out his facebook group for SBP...if that's what you're into.