Hip Hops – Hot Knives

Real Beer Buzz

Hot Knives — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 15:05:42 +0000

Caffeine + alcohol + teenage hormones = 911

If that sounds like the bull-shittery of a D.A.R.E. lesson, uh-uh, watch the news headlines that the “blackout in a can,” beverage Four Loko, which we’ve never tried, has college kids passing out naked together mid-grope at parties in their front lawns, unconscious in cars, getting found by cops in these various states of compromised fuck-up-edness, and ultimately sent tripping to the emergency room with their hearts beating out of their chests. The timeless tradition of uppers plus downers made more convenient. Speedy coma. Sleepy foam party. Forget the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ maxim. It’s all, ‘rock-out, throw up, pass-out.’

If there’s one bit of advice we would give today’s youth about this nasty shit, it’d be this: Ditch the cranberry-lemonade flavor, kids! We say either go hard – snort an 8-ball with a smack chaser – or go classy – take your booze with coffee!

Whereas Europeans have been mixing their drugs for centuries to great effect (wine + cognac + espresso = dinner), we Americans have trouble getting the equation just right. So we can sympathize. It took us a while to figure out how to combine uppers and downers too. And most of our own experiments were also in dorm rooms. Lab trials like replacing water in a hooka pipe with peppermint shnapps (side effects: light headedness and coughing fits), or bringing tallboys of peach corn syrup-flavored Arizona Ice Tea spiked with vodka to classes (headaches, dizziness, ill-advised hand-raising to professors’ questions).

But currently, there’s nothing we’d rather pass out with our pants off to than the beer aptly called Stimulus, a coffee-infused Belgian-pale-pretty crafted by our local Eagle Rock Brewery. Bucking the trend that says coffee-tinged malt must be a stout, porter or other cocoa-colored “dark” beer, this is less predictable and far more cerebrally exciting.

The amber wavvy brew is all Tuscan-sun gold with a crisp cumulous-white lacing. Served in a real pint, it’s a beautiful thing – a venti latte of malted grain booze head-rush cool-down. Stimulus tastes on your tongue the way it feels to snake a coveted sidewalk spot at your busy coffee shop, with a tasty, white-ceramic and lemon-garnished shot of foamy espresso in your hands, on a sunny 75-degree Saturday. It starts off numby on your gums and smells more like fresh milk than coffee. Wafts of sweet grassy hops help mask the bitter brown bean-cream, in this case the roast comes from a certain Chicago mob of barista-nistas, not our favorite, but a strong, oily and soily bean to be sure. Halfway through though, all we taste is the sweet sweet caffeine.

Have two, have three. Take your pants off. Turn the lights out, you’ll be fine.

Dairy Pairy: Petit Mothais, a musty Loire Valley hockey puck
Soundtrack: Nirvana, “Smells Like Teen Spirit”

Morning Beer for Beer Week

Hot Knives — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

The closest thing to a “beer festival” in L.A. just a few years ago was the annual German sausage-fest and lederhosen horror-show that occupies a Torrance parking lot off the Long Beach Freeway. Oh how the times have changed.
In honor of this year’s L.A. Beer Week – not one, but dozens of events will be un-corked throughout the city’s beer bars, breweries, homebrew clubs, restaurants and beer sommeliers that range from the mainstream accessible to the psychotic. For our part, Hot Knives is hosting a “Cheese Pairing Symposium” next week at Verdugo Bar along with much-acclaimed local beereos (beer heroes) the Bruery – or how we like to call them, “the only fucking reason to go to Orange County.” (If you’re a blogger, you can still enter the contest to get a free ticket to the pairing.) For the rest of you who might wanna celebrate L.A. Beer Week quietly at home with loved ones or alone with your spiritual leaders, we’ve thought of that too!

Over the last month, we embarked on a crazy scientific experiment that involved cracking open a beer every morning. No, not for drinking… We made Franziskaner Pancakes, Russian Imperial Stout Bran Muffins, and “hop-berry syrup.” There were Coconut Porter Cupcakes, Belgian Candi-topped Muffins and even fresh Hop Butter for Guinness Flapjacks. Thankfully, there was also plenty of water and laps around the park.
In the end, we believe we found our favorite baking recipes combining both raw brewing ingredients (malt extract, malt sugar, and hops) and beer (just substitute any beer of your choice for the milk or water in a recipe). We love Heffeweissen Banana Bread and Hop-Berry Muffins. Stock up on malts and grains and give ’em a try. The best part? Now, you don’t even need a homebrew kit to shop at your local homebrew shop! Think of it like your neighborhood Trader Joe’s aisle. Except without the little complimentary cups for coffee, and fewer chances for casual sex. And let us know what morning beer you love most, here.

Hefeweissen Banana Bread
(Makes a loaf)

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
3 ripe bananas
1/2 cup Earth Balance margarine (melted)
1/2 cup barley malt syrup (or white sugar)
1 1/2 cup Heffeweissen (room temp)
1 Tbs. whole cloves
1 tsp. whole coriander
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
zest of one orange
zest of one lemon
1 Tbs. Belgian Candi Sugar (or more barley malt syrup)
1. Measure out your flour and baking powder and stir in a large mixing bowl. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.
2. In a second large mixing bowl, combine wet ingredients and spices: Peel and mash your ripe ‘naners and combine with melted margarine. Add malt syrup, or sugar, and the beer while stirring with a spatula.
3. Grind coriander and clove in a mortar and pestle or coffee grinder (or simply with a knife) and add to the wet ingredients along with cinnamon and nutmeg. Finally, zest an orange and a lemon over your cutting board. Add half of each to the bowl, and reserve half for garnish.
4. Combine wet and dry ingredients and combine well, stirring until lumps disappear. Pour batter into a canola or margarine-greased bread pan. Bake at 350 degrees for 40-50 minutes. Test the middle, should be slightly gooey but not wet. Remove and immediately cool on a cooling rack to prevent burnt bottom. Rub the Belgian candi sugar or barley malt syrup on top, and sprinkle with zest for garnish.

Hop Berry Muffins
(Makes 12 small muffins)

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 cup Grape Nuts cereal
1/4 cup shredded coconut
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 cup fresh strawberries
12 oz. hoppy red ale of choice
3/4 cup sugar
2 large organic eggs
3/4 cup melted butter (unsalted)
1. Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Combine dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl, including flour, baking powder, Grape nuts, salt and coconut. And stir to mix.
2. Wash and slice strawberries into thin pieces. Place a small saucepan on high heat with your red ale and sliced strawberries. Let reach a rolling boil and add sugar, stirring well and reducing to a simmer. Let continue to cook for 2-3 minutes. Then remove from heat and cool for at least 10 minutes.
3. Combine sweetend-beer and dry ingredients. Crack eggs and whisk and add to mixture along with melted butter. Stir well with a spatula until all lumps (except Grape Nuts clusters) disappear.
4. Grease muffin tray and pour batter into each, about ¾ to the top, leaving a centimeter or so to rise. Bake for 12-15 minutes at 350 degrees. Let cool in muffin tray before serving. Glaze with topping of choice.

‘Fuck the FDA’ Porter

Hot Knives — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:53:28 +0000

We may not be our own best critics. That becomes crystal-hops-pale-ale clear when Alex Macy pours the first tiny pintlet of our homebrewed beer and we tip the red-brown tonic toward our lips. Wow, that smell? Kazowwwww! We made this?!
It’s been 6 weeks and 10 days since we sterilized the fermenter and went to work creating what we believe to be the world’s first-ever Tonka Bean Porter. Powerful stuff, this hobby: Revisiting homebrew felt a little like winning back our independence. Remember, homebrew was verboten contraband until 1979 when Jimmy Carter courted the garage-bound beer-bellied caveman vote by legalizing the intoxicating art of brewing your own dumb stupor in glass and stainless steel contraptions sitting right next to your car, or bicycle, or cat litter.
Oh, but how easy it is to fall pray to loving the shit out of your own beer. It’s less like reviewing your own novel in a major magazine. And more like describing your precious first-grade child to a stranger sitting next to you on the flight home from a business trip. Our beer is better than your beer. Our beer is good in its heart. Our fucking beer is going to be president of the United States of America someday. What’s our beer like?!
(…fishing out a thick wad of baby pictures from our wallet.)
Sweet, sticky, paint-thinner-thin. But rich, round, warm and festive tasting. Raw sugarcane and cinnamon, something nutty, whole wheaty. A vision of raison bagels — freshly, boiled and baked — the ones with deep swirling smears of cinnamon running through their whole wheat flesh, but maybe closer to a raison bagel that’s been left sitting in a cereal bowl filled with vodka. Tongue goes fuzzy with the taste of almonds, marzipan-squirting candies, so potent they taste like what the first whiff of cyanide gas might be like. Arm cramp… It feels hotter in the belly than other beers, doesn’t it? It does right? The whole room feels a little hot now. Cotton mouth. Slightly pulsing brow. That’s the paranoia, not the beer.
It’s a new sensation for us to know what we’re tasting because we know how it was made: Brewed on a shaded front patio in Echo Park, with a couple old dogs looking on, hitting a rolling boil in a steel drum usually used for deep-frying turkeys — our tonka beer is a slight departure from a basic vanilla bean porter. We got our hands on more than a dozen tonka beans, shaved ’em, crushed ’em and sunk them in a tincture of vodka to bloom into a brown liquor. Two weeks into the fermenting process, we poured the tincture in. A month later, there’s the tonka. Is it strong enough? Can you really taste the tonka? We added a second tincture. Now, you can’t miss it. There is only tonka — no pain or death, sorry FDA, not like the factory tomatoes, shitty spinach, peanut butter, crappy eggs you can’t seem to keep clean. And it’s delicious.
But we’re biased and you don’t have to take our word for it.
Dairy Pairy: Tomme de Chevre
Soundtrack: Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer to God”

Lockness Monster: ‘Green Dragon, Grown Up

Hot Knives — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 08:37:01 +0000

Being into drugs often breeds innovation.
Wait, we’re not junkies — but psychedelic experience has been a fairly consistent encounter throughout our now over-a-quarter-century hill lives. Lets not mince ideas: This is a blog partly dedicated to an ancient fermented grain juice that gives you the happies, gimmies, and giggles.
(After all there’s an illicit activity behind our blog name: Google it already and look at what other Web pages come up (yes, there have been people who didn’t get the double entendre.).)
One such innovation was met and mastered by a younger Alex Brown and his cadre of hoods in high school (i.e. five bowl-cut tweens wearing trench coats before it was cool, and then uncool) when two common and sub-par chemicals (shitty brick weed and cheap gin) were married and aged in the bowels of the young Knife’s closet.
Before brownies and THC ghee there was “Green Dragon;” a lesson in chemistry where chemical extraction via alcohol was streamlined into ecstatic, albeit disgusting, perfection.
The brutish elation of a gin drunk,
augmented with a concentrated log jam
of THC: Teenage Power // Teenage Prowess.
The seemingly endless stash of single serving Tanqueray that used to be complimentary on airplanes, was silently expropriated from its dusty shelf in a virtually unused wet bar, relieved of two small sips of gin, and then stuffed to the brim with the finest “orange-hair step-down” that 20 dollars could buy. Thirty to 65 days later, the bottles were drained, the liquid purified via coffee filters and toilet paper tubes, and the remaining marijuana left to dry (only to be smoked in what were essentially useless and extremely painful joints). The tincture was then returned to its original bottle and reserved for social events, used mainly for impressing older girls into hopefully fruitful rendezvous and/or disgusting/generating respect from the older guys who thought we were rad/insane. That was then, this is now…
A few weeks back, a shady deal landed us two $20 bottles of brewed homebeer with no labels. The ingredients, however were clear from the onset: These were weed IPAs…
So the following is an account of a self-admitted ‘Green Dragon O.G.’ named Alex Brown meeting his match: a sophisticated concoction of THC extracted and imbued in a piney IPA. Early accounts of this concoction by an official Medical Grade Connoisseur were: “Shit man, fucked all day.” (Note: in this instance, ‘fucked,’ refers not to the widely used idiom for coitus, but the situation of ‘fucked-upped-ness,’ often associated with drugs and/or drink).
Time: 3.45.
Place: Darchuck Residence, Glendale.
Situation: The Party Joke Gets the Better of Our Man
Details on imbibing:
Upon entry to a celebration of birth for one Peter “Sam I Am” Darchuck, and after gifts were presented, my 16 oz. of beer was offered to just shy of everyone at the event (I spared the birthday boys’ Pops and Ladyfriend), which may result in a lower dose…(in retrospect, this is a silly concern).
The brew, cloudy with either beer sediments or Sativa globules, tasted exactly as it was expected to. Thankfully, there was a total lack of the cloying flavor of weed infusion usually present in lipid based suspensions.
Disadvantages:
When you tell everyone that you’re imbibing some goofy novel weed-thing, they all seem to watch you like a baby pending some kind of adorable and potentially fragrant accident.
Time: 4.47
Place: My Girlfirend’s Echo
Situation: Things Get Pretty
Remarks:
A sunny day on Sunday is a great time to exit Glendale (not a dig).
The vines underneath the 5 are like giant plant dreadlocks (ouch).
The sounds of a Police firing range waft over the hill to my house (eep).
Lessons Learned:
Driving at the onset is swell, but slightly intimidating.
Time: 5.26.

Place: Poolside
Situation: Typical.
A trip downstairs for refreshment has resulted in a conundrum: upon return my cellular phone appears to be missing. This is not good. A friend may or may not be arriving, she may or may not be a she, I may or may not be wearing any clothes…its downstairs.
“It’s not downstairs. It must be back at the pool.”
(It’s not at the pool. This routine repeats itself three times.)
“Where the shit is the goddamn phone?”
(Enter Cocoa the dog.)
(Rumination on the dog being covered with dead grass, dirt, and wearing a more than usually goofy grin.)
“You’ve done something with it haven’t you”
(…) (She had.) (…)

(I’m suddenly very hungry.)
Conclusion:
After hours of Young Money music videos, an unnatural concoction of tortilla chips, peanut butter, fish sauce and sriracha, and yes, digging my phone from its shallow grave, I took a nap.
Drinking a bottle of THC infused IPA inspired many symptoms commonly associated with smoking weed all day: sloth, paranoia, ecstasy, strange desire for shameful snacks and basic social alienation.
Drinking pot beer will prevent you from taking photos for your blog, and force you to fill memory cards with pictures of bugs.
Was imbibing 12 oz. of untold chronic power dissimilar from cereal-smoking some kind of pot named “Truth” or “Kilimanjaro?”
Not Really.
Does that really matter?
Nope.
Beverage: (after the weed beer) Eagle Rock Brewery’s Equinox.
Soundtrack: Punky Reggae Party, “Halloween”

Wood: The New Hops

Hot Knives — Tue, 11 May 2010 07:53:56 +0000

We are lovers of barrels, that which resides within their steel banded darkness is heaven.
The aging of beer at our own hands is still just a fumbling hobby; but when done by brewers, it becomes a kind of sorcery. That synergy of time, bacteria, and wood coalesces into flavors and sensations that Hot Knives and other beer freaks now hunt down with the same voracity that we used to for heavy-handed hop brews.
Let these bottles cost way too much. Let them stay out of the fridge a little too long, and let them lose 20% of their fizz before you swill and contemplate the vastness of fruit-inflected, ale infections.
This Red Poppy was the one time we wanted, nay, needed the flaccid security of a rubber cork and one of those cheap air pumps the weak use when they can’t finish their fancy grape juice. A strange compulsion to be sure: Why did we not want to saber more bottles, dumping the ruddy, red suds into our gaping mouths like blood crazed cannibals? What preservation, what need would stretching this 375 ml. continuum fulfill that another tall glass would not? This was different; this was like some forced sensation of the Sacred. We wrapped the bottle in saran wrap and rubber bands, trying to tie off the gusher so that another tart-minded tongue could sip something this good.
Tartness that actually made the words “oh my god” come out of our mouths — a sensual knee jerk reaction like the kind you only have in the company of naked people.

Even keeled tartness with no bitterness? Amazing old ale flavor with no saccharin back side? Deep flavors of barely mashed grain? S. H. I. T. This is good. Brain zaps. Mind pops. This needs to be repeated. Where, and when, will we get back to the beer store — which is where by the way? Where did you get it? Where was I…
We’re not fucked up, we’re going crazy.
Maybe it was circumstantial. The sun had just peaked through the clouds. The chores were done before noon. All the knives had been sharpened, and news from the wilderness was that all our ladies were safe and elated and on their way home. A sense of calm.
Fumbling, we unwrapped our hermetically sealed leftovers, we lost control. It’s so perfect.
Dairy Pairy: Bavarian Limburger
Soundtrack: Fever Ray “If I Had a Heart”

Extreme Beer Tasting

Hot Knives — Tue, 04 May 2010 21:50:11 +0000

When we first caught wind of Brewdog’s Tactical Nuclear Penguin, a 32-percent alcohol stout that they froze in ice cream vats, we tried to order it online. No luck. The brewery had already sold out of the first batch.
So we kept trying. We wrote publicists. We tried to make friends with people who had squirreled away bottles of the stuff. Rebuffed.
A couple of months ago one of us convinced the Los Angeles Times to buy an article we’d write about Brewdog’s high-octane brewing experiments and what it says about the beer market’s growing, if still niche, obsession with beers as strong as liquor. The piece ran today. In it we survey brewery and bar experts like Stone’s Greg Koch on why extreme beer is an important, and increasingly sexy, part of the beer industry.
Being the magna cum laude graduates of the Gonzo School of Reporting that we are, we would never ever ever think of publishing a work of beer journalism about beers we hadn’t actually imbibed! So we dutifully cleared our calendar one Saturday in March when Brewdog’s CEO James Watt was making an appearance in West Hollywood for a rare tasting of the strongest beer in the world – Brewdog’s Sink the Bismark and Tactical Nuclear Penguin.
Hot Knives showed up at the Surly Goat early and tried a couple of the “weaker” Brewdog beers. The 5AM Saint was our favorite: a kilt-lifting, red-bearded nectar that could easily be consumed at 5AM after a night of heavier drinking. The Punk IPA was alright, but the 18-percent Tokio was totally evil. A good taste of things to come.
An hour later, the Scottish brewers showed up to a bar packed with geeks waiting for them. Watt gave a 10-minute spiel about the beers and then had everyone squeeze into two single file lines to gulp a couple sips of the killer Kool-Aid. What did it taste like, you ask?
Click the video above for our “tasting notes.”

The Real Sierra Nevada

Hot Knives — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 08:14:00 +0000

When we moved west as young men, our idea of a ‘day trip’ was popping LSD in the afternoon and wandering around campus.
That changed once we realized the psychedelic grandeur that is the Angeles National Forest, the high woods north of Ojai, the zen cabins on Mt. Wilson, and a dozen other pine and ponderosa-kissed summits from Southern California to the Eastern Sierras. Contrary to that silly notion that L.A. lacks seasons, we found otherwise. We made a special commune with nature here in the foothills north of Los Angeles, walking the trails with our eyes closed, breathing deep the desert sage, fox scat, juniper berries, and those Goliath pinecones.
The blotter acid still helped of course.
But we weren’t high at all when we poured our first pint of Mammoth Brewing Company’s IPA 395, and yet we felt transported to a late August, sunset hike in King’s Canyon. Other writers more schooled in the ways of the Sierra Nevada backcountry have described the terrain along historic Route 395 this way: “It is a land of 10,000-foot tall peaks and 6,000-foot deep valleys where the wild rivers run. And it is a land few people ever see.”
If you haven’t seen it, you can still taste it. Breathe in this IPA and you’ll see what we mean. The nose is a heady mix of spring flowers, dusty trail scents, townies-selling-dried-sage-at-the-farmers-market. There’s a faint note of something more sinister too, like a waft of a carcass retreating back into the soil. It’s a confusing smell to be sure, because it’s coming from a pint glass. But this is undeniably the California foothills, all red rock and clay with a sandy head. A gravestone under a ponderosa pine for a local church lady who loved the scenic views.
Mammoth defines this beer as “desert sage, juniper, and local hops.” We have never known a truer beer label. If not for the iconic, fizzy head you would be forgiven for mistaking this for an herbal tea mixed with smooth bathtub gin. They chalk up its purity to the water — besides local hops, their beers are crafted with water from those local creeks. We chalk it up instead to that image that our minds keep melting to when we sip this: us kicking off our hiking boots, dipping our toes into a crispy, cold creek and fishing out a bottle of 395 nestled between the stones and popping the top with an otherwise unused hunting knife.
Dairy Pairy: Cantal Vieux St. Mamet (Cheddar’s French Grandad).
Soundtrack: Violent Femmes’ “Good Feeing”

The OG Beer Cocktail

Hot Knives — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:30:00 +0000

The Black & Tan is a peculiar thing, if you stop (pounding draught Guinness long enough) to think about it. For one thing, it’s the rare beer cocktail — a booze genre we’ve been pondering a lot lately. But is pouring a stout on top of an ale really so different from the sloppy, midnight mistake of refilling your pint glass with the wrong beer?
No. No, it’s not. It just has a name. So why not mix other beers? What’s stopping us from playing with the endless yin-yang possibilities of dark and light beers? Porters and Pils? Imperial Stouts and IPAs?
That’s what we asked ourselves this week when our good buds at KCRW’s “Good Food” asked us to demonstrate how to pour a Black & Tan to for their pre-Patty’s Day episode. Over the years we’ve celebrated this depraved K-hole of an excuse for a cultural holiday by making Irish-Mexican casseroles, reviewing Irish ales, and fixing an Irish Breakfast. This year we decided to get technical and perfect our pouring technique since we’ve mastered our barfing methods.

The Perfect Black & Tan

1. Tip the Tan: This insures a lack of head on the first level of beer.
2. Sip the Guinness: This helps prevent aggressive spill-over.
3. Use a spoon: Choose the biggest you got, turn it over, and gently raise it as you pour.

After mastering the basics, we moved on to a more advanced pursuit: the variation. We wanted to make a West Coast-style Black & Tan to prove once and for all that mixing your beers doesn’t just work for the Irish tried-and-trues.
After collecting aged bottles of Cali stouts (Stone Imperial Russian Stout, Firestone Robust Porter) and fresh hop buys (Green Flash West Coast IPA, Port’s High Tide, Dogfish Head) we started playing to sublimely delicious results, only to stumble upon a fourth and final tip — OK call it an eternal Irish truth.
4. Always use Guinness.
It’s not about taste or tradition. For the home drinker’s it’s just about carbonation. You might have the freshest, creamiest California made stout, but if it doesn’t have a widget in the can to help carbonate it, it’s all a lost cause.
Cheers!

Brain Dead Guy Ale

Hot Knives — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 07:45:00 +0000

Driving shotgun this summer on the sleek roads around the Isle of Mann, we took note of the beautiful, deep-purple gobs of what looked like heather that infiltrate that island. From the roads, the mossy underbrush looked like the lovely lavender buds of wild heather that are Scotland’s second most famous grass. (After peet moss, of course, in all its smoky glory.)
Fraoch anniversary ale by Williams Bros Brewing Co. combines these two most sacred weeds to mind-scrambling results: an 11-percent ABV ale brewed with heather tips and matured in sherry casks used to age single-malt Speyside Scotch. This is the 20th anniversary version of their normal Fraoch brew, which reportedly is based on a beer that drove a Gaelic king to throw himself off a cliff after an English lord tortured his son looking for the recipe. Since we didn’t make it north to Scotland, this rare, revered and suicide inducing Gruit-style beer would suffice. It was a gift from a chef friend who took a recent business trip to New York. We’d never heard of it before. Famous last words.
This bottle was curious. For on thing, it’s green glass, which you don’t see in serious beers. And with the recent American fixation with aging our strong ales in bourbon barrels, this seemed so in tune with our modern American desires.
When we slashed its gold-foil cap sleeve with a fish knife we were greeted by a cheap-o plastic cork. As we “uhhhhh’ed” at these incongruent signals of sheer luxury and cost-cutting dereliction, we forgot to let the beer sit to help settle the fairy dust sediment.
We slam-toasted our goblets. “Fraoch (pronounced “frucccccccck” in our slo-mo skulls). Tastes. Gooooood.”

Booze up front and lingering behind, the Scotch peetiness was subdued. The cereal malt flavors were crisp and sticky. Stinging nettle, honey, and malted barley clusters. The heather bobbed in our cereal bowls like museli dust. (Is there heather in my teeth?) We were drinking faster now, with places to go later. The crystalized lemon notes quickly melted into a caramel swirl.
Two hours later, in a well-lit art gallery, our brains were throbbing in slow bursts. Gabbing around warm apple cider before taking part in a free-form jazzercise, we felt sluggish. The pain was muted but distinct. Talking became hard. A squishy, wet mushroom seemed to bloom behind our left eyelobes. Time stood still with a snickerdoodle in our hand. Then the exercises started. Yoga mats and a wood floor felt hard and unfriendly. Motown boogies had the group of dancers leading us in sock-hop style movements that tugged on our floppy heads. The lights were shrieking. We could taste herbal bitterness on our breath.
Finally, in a measure of God’s love, the moving stopped and the dancers let us stoop to a shavasana floor rest. Lights turned off. We closed our eyes and saw a deep deep purple in the back of our brains, spinning like flowers on the side of the road.
Dairy Pairy: Valentina by La Estrella Creamery: An altitude defying faux-Gruyere.
Soundtrack: Sonic Youth, “Bull in the Heather”

Double Barrel Action

Hot Knives — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 08:55:00 +0000

Before a 63-year-old schoolteacher named Annie Taylor went over Niagara Falls in a barrel, nobody believed it could be done. But the hard-ass opportunist outfitted a barrel with a mattress, reinforced it with some steel and had some friends (can they be called friends if they’re pushing her down Niagara?) pressurize her coffin once she climbed inside, using a bicycle pump. She lived.
We only bring it up because it sounds remarkably like what Marble Brewing‘s Reserve Ale tastes like. Hell, Daniel and Ted, head brewers of the Albuquerque brewery might as well have climbed into a wooden death trap themselves, the way this beer tastes. It is strong and sweet and destructive. Even the beer snobs who usually go all goo-goo-eyed over “American strong ales” (Arrtogrant Bastard, Angel’s Share etc.) thought it tasted too much like bourbon. It’s a 9-percent ale aged in bourbon barrels for the purpose of cellaring. Too much like bourbon? Are you fucking kidding us?
Popped and poured, the beer is placid like a lake of Maker’s Mark. Its slightly see-through and tinted deep red with the faintest white clinging to its surface. Swirl it hard and you’ll inspire the most meager of foams, more like a white patch on the nose of an angry red mare than the head of any beer we’ve seen. The nose can only be described as an evil version of that ABV-perfume that wafts off of fragrant ice wines and ruby ports. Cane sugar and danger. Smell it long enough and you detect a Jack Daniel’s brand breath spray. Or an Old Overholt deoderant.
Now, it’s worth noting that we have flirted with bourbon barrel-aged beers for years but were unaware that the technique could bring us this close to actually drinking bourbon-flavored beer.
Putting your lips to a glass of Marble Reserve tastes like everything that is good about America. Specifically, chopped lumber, bent with fire and scorched for flavor, steeped with bourbon for years, and then used to discolor and flavor a strong beer. Why wouldn’t we want to taste this all the time? Sweet and nearly hot with alcohol burn, we imaged putting our faces directly into spitting whiskey mash pots. Or letting a cowboy soak their boots in Old Rip Van Winkle and proceed to grind us in the face.
Do we like that? We’re buying more and aging it for our birthdays. What do you think?
Dairy Pairy: Trappe Echourgnac, aged cow’s milk washed in walnut liquor
Soundtrack: Las Vegas Club’s “Whiskey Flats”