NYC and Vermont Beer Fest 2018

Seriously, moment for moment, one of the best trips I’ve ever taken.  I got to eat at not one but two iconic NYC eateries; Katz’s Deli and Peter Luger’s.  And I got to bask in the beauty of Vermont while drinking some of the best beer the world has to offer.

Walkabout 2016 Day 3: Even More Brussels

More beer fest and a side trip to the Atomium.

Walkabout 2016 Day 2 : Brussels

Have I mentioned how the Belgian Beer Fest is the best beer fest ever in the history of ever?  We got there early enough this year to see the “opening ceremonies”, which is depicted in those crazy picture at the old cathedral.

Recently In My Face: Grapevine Brewery Beer Dinner at Cook Hall

This was my second beer dinner at Cook Hall in The W near the AAC.  Both times the food has been phenomenomnomnomal!

Tres Vaso’s Ceviche – Shrimp, Tuna, Scallop

Pairing:  Monarch Filtered Wheat

Corn Goat Cheese Soup

Pairing: Belgian Saison Spring Seasonal

This was the winner of the evening.  Both soup and beer.

Spice Rub New York Strip

Pairing: Night Watch Oatmeal Stout

Churros

Pairing: Sir Williams English Brown Ale

 

These pictures were amazingly captured without a flash on my new Galaxy S6 Edge with just a tiny bit of adjustment from Adobe Lightroom.

TWIB Notes

Well it wouldn’t be a Summer of Steve weekly feature without it first missing several weeks in a row.  I’ve finally taken a break from drinking to sit down and update my progress in destroying most hepatic function.

Obviously much booze was consumed in Seattle.  I had my fill of Manny’s Pale Ale and several nice beers from Maritime Brewery.  Their Pilsner was particularly good.  Cocktails were also on the menu.  The highlights included a Dark and Stormy at Pie Bar* and The Southpaw at Zig Zag Café.  And if you’re looking for the dive-iest of dive bars,  we’ll there’s Bernard’s. You can have a cheap, inexpensive $2.50 well and wash that down with an Irish Car Bomb.

 

Wine School Update

You are now reading the blog of someone who has passed Wine FUNdamentals Level I.  I only scored 98.3 our of 100.  I guess that’s ok.  It’s one to Level II.  Sadly, while in Vermont this weekend, I’ll be missing the best class of the whole course, the one that goes over both Burgundy and Bordeaux.

Wine of the Week:  2013 The Dreaming Tree Chardonnay

This is what wine school has done to me.  I’m drinking Chardonnay.  Actually on a recent trip to Total Wine, I picked a bunch of varieties I would not normally purchase.  This was one of them.  I promise next week I’ll go back to Two Buck Chuck.

Appearance: Clear medium intensity yellow** with a clear rim.

Nose: Clean, with lots of sour apple and pear with a hint of vanilla from the oak bleeding through.  Pure aroma.

Palate: Dry with a medium high amount of acidity.  Medium alcohol and body with a similarly medium finish.  The sour apple is still there on the tongue, but the pear has been replaced with a bit of oak.  There’s also a strange soapy flavor.

I liked their Pinot Noir and thought I would give their Chardonnay a try.  It’s not terrible and probably does a good job representing a midlevel lightly oaked California Chardonnay, but that’s just not something I’m going to go out of my way for.  And at the mid $20s there are bound to be better options, I’m sure.  I’ll keep looking.

 

 

* Pie Bar may be my favorite place on earth now.

** I would call it vitamin piss yellow

Walkabout 2014 Days 5 & 6

One final beer at the beer fest and then it was back to the dorf for laundry and schnitzel.

Walkabout 2014 Day 4: Belgian Beer Fest Part Deux

It’s not just all beer guzzling at the Belgian Beer fest.  Brussels is a city of many museums, so we headed to the Museum of the Old Masters and played around of Spot the Bottom.  Those masters sure did love them some bottoms.

Afterwards it was a quick lunch at Mer du Nord, more beer at the fest, a great dinner featuring the best fries I’ve ever had and then a small pub crawl ending at a bar whose name I wish I remembered.  It was a tiny little bar run by a friendly family.

Walkabout 2014 Day 3: Belgian Beer fest Part Un

Brussels, the New Orleans of Europe – a little bit French and a lotta bit stanky.  This is truly the greatest beer fest in the world.  Not only is there a wide variety of the best beers in the world, but it’s in a picturesque setting.  Hopefully my pictures convey the esqueness.

After the fest, we were off for some hand pulled Chinese noodles.  The first time I had them three years ago, I hadn’t eaten in over a day.  I feared that my perceived awesomeness of the noodles was an artifact of my hunger.  For purely scientific purposes, I subjected myself to the same noodles with duck.  My findings were that they are truly awesome.

After dinner, more beer of course.

Brewery Map

Someone has finally found a way to use the internet for good. Brewerymap shows you where breweries are.

Try it here.

Thanks Wired!

Eating Prague: U Fleků

Walkabout 2013: U Fleku VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Oh, U Fleků, what’s happened to you?  Or maybe it’s what’s happened to me.  Four years after my first visit you seem so touristy and brightly lit.  And please believe us when we say we don’t want any shots.  And what are those other shots?  In the good old days four years ago there was just one shot, Becherovka.  Oh well,  the pork knuckle was still great and the beer flowing.

Walkabout 2013 Day 17: Prague Beer Fest Part Dva

Day 17 was so epic it’s going to take at least three blog postings.  So stay tuned.

The first posting will consist of more beer fest hijinks followed by a tram ride back to the hotel where we encountered a band of locals heading to a football game and who led us in cheer.  “Let’s go Praha” or some such.  Many liters of beer had been poured down my face at this point.  So specifics are cloudy to mostly cloudy.

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Walkabout 2013 Day 16: Plzen and Castle Karlštejn

We take a break from the beer fest for a road trip to the birthplace of Pilsner beer, Plzen, and then on to a castle.  On a sadder note, both meals today were very unspectacular and thus not worth blogging about. 

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Walkabout 2013 Day 15: Prague and the Czech Beer Fest

This was the first of many rainy days in the Czech Republic.  On our way to the fest, we stopped off at Bavarian Bagels for a ridiculous bacon, egg and cheese bagel sandwich.

I’m not sure how much beer I drink this day, but it has to have been around five liters, maybe more.

And that thing that looks like a cinnamon roll is really a smoked cheese spiral.

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Walkabout 2013 Day 12: Finally a Sunny Day in Düsseldorf

It’s mostly been rainy, cloudy and cold here in the ‘dorf.  But finally the sun broke through and I got to walk around the city a bit.  And could there be a better way to end a day than with copious amounts of altbier, schweine haxe, some blutwurst and then more altbier?

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Belgians Strive to be More American by Drinking Shitty Beer

I doubt I’ll be drinking either of these beer on my upcoming Euro-Walkabout 2013.

I’m also very excited the the double-fake Swedish Gordon Keith has found employment.

Shit I Don’t Get: Drinking Beer at Whole Foods

There is a new phenomenon that has been troubling me since the jumbo Whole Foods on Park opened up last year, and that is that people go there and drink beer and wine at the beer and wine bar inside the Whole Foods.  A similar bar was later installed in the cheese section of my beloved neighborhood Lakewood Whole Foods.

Now, I fully admit that maybe I’m not “the hippest dude on the ranch”.  And that maybe I’m not the “coolest cat at the cat college”.  And maybe sometimes I can’t “control my bowels and often crap my pants.”  Now that last one was hurtful and I am now wondering why you brought that up and if we could even still be friends.  Maybe we should spend some time apart until I can figure out where this thing is going.

But one place I won’t be figuring out the future of our relationship is the Beer and Wine Bar at Whole Foods.

I’ve found myself in the Lakewood Whole Foods on a Friday evening a time or two the last few months.  And each and every time I am dumbfounded at the number of people drinking at the beer/wine bar in the middle of the store.  It’s Friday night, people, go to a real bar

I first became acquainted with the Whole Foods beer/wine bar while I was working in Irvine, CA for a couple of weeks in late 2009.  Twelve hour days were the norm during that trip and I would often swing by the Whole Foods in Tustin for dinner.  It was the first time I had seen a bar in a grocery store.  But even in Tustin, where there’s nothing to do but admire the gigantic concrete blimp hangers,  there would only be a couple of people drinking.

But the Lakewood Whole Foods is always hopping. The thing that baffles me is that there are beers on tap that you can get anywhere else.  The beers offered are usually not as good or diverse as the beers offered just a mile or two away at The Bottle Shop or The Goodfriend.  Is it because they are cheaper??  I know the beers at Whole Foods will run around $4 while the same beer might be $6.  But here’s the thing.  I would gladly pay $2 extra on a beer in order to not be exposed to harsh grocery store lighting and to not be wedged in between the petchuli based fragrances and the stinky cheeses.

So someone is going to have to clue me in.  What’s the allure?  What’s the draw?  Why would anyone treat a grocery store as a neighborhood bar in neighborhood that has several neighborhood bars?

Please discuss and get back to me.

Finally Available for Drinking with Your Face

And coming soon…

 

February iPhone Picture of the Day

Freedom of Speech Infiltrates Texas

Congratulations to the Jester King Brewery for beating back the Jackbooted Thugs known as TABC by now being abled to call their beers “beer” and their ales “ale”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

As of result of yesterday’s ruling, beer in Texas may now be labeled as “beer” and ale may now be labeled as “ale”, regardless of alcohol content. Breweries and distributors are also no longer prohibited from independently telling consumers where their products may be purchased, or from communicating truthful and accurate information about their alcohol content. That means Jester King will now be able to add a “Where to Buy” section to our website, as will all other breweries selling beer in Texas.

“In a remarkable (though logically dubious) demonstration of circular reasoning” Judge Sparks writes in his ruling, “TABC attempts to defend the constitutional legitimacy of the Code through an appeal to the statutory authority of the Code itself.” Referring to the required use of the terms “beer”, “ale”, and “malt liquor”, he writes “TABC’s argument, combined with artful legislative drafting, could be used to justify any restrictions on commercial speech. For instance, Texas would likely face no (legal) obstacle if it wished to pass a law defining the word ‘milk’ to mean ‘a nocturnal flying mammal that eats insects and employs echolocation.’ Under TABC’s logic, Texas would then be authorized to prohibit use of the word ‘milk’ by producers of a certain liquid dairy product, but also to require Austin promoters to advertise the famous annual ‘Milk Festival’ on the Congress Avenue Bridge.’”

I still can’t get an Oregon winery to ship to me and breweries still can’t sell their wares at their breweries (unlike Texas wineries and every other state’s breweries).  So more work needs to be done to rid ourselves of these tea-totalling despots.

Read the whole article here.

Walkabout 2011: Day 6—A Day in the ‘Dorf

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This was pretty much a rest day. I just walk around the 'Dorf and got lost a few times. Luckily I found my way back to JT's where we were off for more Alt Bier and Italian food.