Athenian Ale

It’s been hot in Athens, much hotter than in Istanbul. Accordingly, after walking around yesterday trying to find a reasonably priced hat that could shield against the sun’s glaring rays, we decided it was time to stop for refreshment. Fortunately, Athens is loaded with streetside pubs and restaurants, and we stopped at a random place to cool down.

I realized quickly that a beer was in order. My throat felt dry and dusty, and it needed a good washing. The circumstances therefore called for a cold adult beverage brewed from grains and hops. Our friendly water strongly recommended a beer called Mythos. Who could resist ordering a bear that conjured memories of Zeus, Hera, Apollo, Aphrodite, and of course Athena, for whom Athens is named? So, I ordered the Mythos, and found it to be an entirely potable lager, happily served very cold. And even though it was warm in Athens, I quaffed the entire glass before the beer reached room temperature.

As an veteran reader of this blog knows, I like trying different, local beers. Mythos was pretty good. It didn’t make me think Olympian thoughts, but it definitely wet my whistle on a warm, desiccated day in Athens.

Pide, Beer, And Bubbling Grub

One of the things I like most about traveling to a different part of the world is trying the local food. Istanbul is blessed with plenty of outdoor cafes where you can sit outside on a sunny day and try some of the different culinary options.

We’ve tried several restaurants and some different foods–all of which have been very good. Consider the pide, shown above. It looks like a pizza with a crunchy crust in a canoe shape, but there are some subtle differences. Although the sauce is tomato-based, it doesn’t have the hard-hitting tomato flavor you get with many American pizzas. Instead, the seasoning gives the pide a very delicate, mild taste. I got the pide with minced meat, which was excellent and just the right amount of food for lunch. The pide also is inexpensive, which is nice if you are watching your budget.

Of course, you also want to try the local beer when you go to a different country. We sampled some Efes, which was very good, indeed–a full-bodied, refreshing lager. Another interesting feature of the Turkish cafes is a stone container they use for casserole-type dishes. It has an amazing heat storage capability that keeps the dishes hot and bubbling long after a western casserole dish would have cooled off. I like food that is served hot, so I really appreciated this nifty bit of stonework. Be careful not to touch it when it is fresh from the oven, however!

Useful Information

Today, on a bright and warm spring day in Austin, we decided to stop at the Armadillo Den brewpub and outdoor venue, drink a beer, sit outside under the trees in the sunshine, and enjoy the fruits of a fresh crawfish boil.

The Armadillo, like many brewpubs, not only lists the kinds of beer they have on tap, but also provides alcoholic content information for each option. I’m grateful for this information, and I think the publication of beer and ale alcohol content, on signs and menus, is one of the best developments in bar and tavern management in my lifetime. Not only can you avoid dreaded IPAs and beers that might not otherwise suit your taste–like a strawberry blonde beer, for example–but you can also make conscious choices about your alcohol intake.

We’re going out to dinner tonight, so I went for a beer on the lower alcohol side of the ledger. If we want people to drink responsibly, as the ads inevitably urge, why not give them the information that allows them to make responsible decisions and, perhaps, steer away from the 9.1 percent ABV Lakewood Temptress Imperial Milk Stout? Bravo to the Armadillo and other bars that engage in this helpful practice.

Bier At New Braunfels

We’re in Austin for a quick weekend visit. Yesterday we drove to New Braunfels, Texas, a town located off I-35 between Austin and San Antonio. New Braunfels was settled by German immigrants and remains loud and proud about its German heritage. And when you think German, you think . . . beer. So it made sense that we stopped at Krause’s, a legendary Biergarten and restaurant just off the main drag.

Krause’s was, in a word, fantastic. If you’ve ever been to the original Hofbrau Haus in Munich, Krause’s will look very familiar to you. You can sit inside or outside, at long picnic tables, as shown in the photos above and below. Live zydeco music was playing from a stage at one end of the outdoor seating area, and the place was hopping. Because it was about 100 degrees outside (no exaggeration!) we sat inside, but right next to the door so we could enjoy the great music. It was a festive, colorful atmosphere that made for a fun lunch setting.

The Krause’s menu features a lot of German fare, which is right up my alley. I ordered chicken schnitzel, which came with a helping of beer cheese and fries. (It also came with colossal pieces of broccoli that were promptly deposited on Kish’s plate so as not to ruin the photo below.) The schnitzel was lightly breaded and fried just right, so that the chicken was juicy and quite tasty. The beer cheese was also good, and I did the scarpetta routine with my fries to enjoy every bite.

Oh, and I should mention the beer, shouldn’t I? Krauses’s offers an overwhelming beer menu, as reflected in the photo of the taps at the top of this post. I opted for a weissbier and was glad to see that it was served in a large, cool stein that wouldn’t have been out of place at the Hofbrau Haus. It had lots of flavor and went down easy in the scorching heat. so I decided to have another. As I lingered over a second cold beer, enjoying the company and the bouncy live music, and scarpettaing up the remnants of the bier cheese, I decided I liked New Braunfels just fine.

Birra

One of the fun things to do when traveling is sampling the local beer. On one sunny afternoon during our stay in Scopello, the Georgia BrewDog and I sat outside on the patio and quaffed some of the local birra while having a nice chat about beer, travel, and life in general. Called Messina, it is a smooth, medium-bodied lager that is served in 50 cl (for centileter) bottles, which is about a pint in volume. It has a nice flavor and goes down easy, and the heat is a helpful incentive to not linger over your beer, lest it warm up in the sunshine.

Before we knew it we had each downed two of the bottles. The beer was refreshing, but of course the good company and beautiful surroundings helped.

The Local Caribbean Beer

Every Caribbean island seems to have its own beer. On St. Lucia, the local brew is called Piton, named for the mountains that dominate the landscape on this rugged volcanic island.

Like most of the Caribbean beers I’ve sampled over the years, Piton is a basic lager. The islanders don’t seem to go much for IPAs, which is fine with me, because IPAs are just too bitter for my taste and really wouldn’t work on a vacation when your brain is on island time. Piton is smooth and light, with a nice flavor, and it goes down easy on a hot sunny day with a serving of conch fritters and a side of french fries. Piton is so drinkable, in fact, that it is hard to come away from the lunch table without having quaffed at least two of them.

To my knowledge, you can’t get Piton in Columbus or anywhere in the Midwest. Even if you could, I’m not sure I would want to, because Caribbean beers are very much a sensory experience of the time and place, to be enjoyed when you’re hot and smell faintly of suntan lotion and you’re wearing sandals and looking out over blue water with white boats and swimmers and snorkelers in the distance. I’m not sure how I would react to a Piton if the view out the window was of a gloomy winter scene. I’d rather reserve this fine beer for consumption in its native habitat.

Beer And Cheese

I enjoy a meal of beer and cheese every now and then. And in that regard, I’m part of a long line of human beer-and-cheese fanciers–a line that, as a recent discovery shows, dates back thousands of years.

A study published in Modern Biology focused on well-preserved human droppings found in salt mines near Hallstatt, Austria–salt mines that have been existed for thousands of years. People who worked deep in the salt mines over the millennia took their food to work, and they weren’t shy about answering the call of nature in the mines rather than journeying back to the surface. The dehydrating salt in the soil had the effect of turning the solid human waste deposits from days of yore into desiccated samples (non-smelly, the article linked above daintily points out) that have their biomolecules still intact. That means scientists can analyze the dried-out dung to see what the humans were eating over the years.

Ah, the romance of science!

The study of the fecal remains from the Iron Age, 2,700 years ago, showed traces of brewers’ yeast–the kind that produces traditional beers like pale ales. The paleofeces also showed lots of whole grains and fibers, as well as traces of blue cheese. And the study’s authors note that the ancient working man’s diet produced healthier, and more biodiverse, gut microbes for the ancient salt miners than are seen in most modern humans because none of the food was processed.

So there you have it: beer, bread, and cheese have a long history and are healthy, to boot. And those of us who still enjoy those long-term human dietary staples, 2,700 years later, get to use modern amenities like bathrooms, too.

Five Essential Inventions For A Tolerable Quarantine

We’ve been self-isolating for more than three weeks now, and while many people are complaining about being cooped up for so long, I think it’s important to recognize those things that have made our collective bout with quarantine more tolerable.  I’ve come up with a list of five things that I think have been essential, listed in reverse order of their first invention.  Two of them are about as old as civilization, interestingly.

1.  Alcohol — Where would we be without wine, beer, and other adult beverages?  At the end of a hard day of working at home, a glass of wine or a cold tumbler of suds sure make the graphs showing how curves can be flattened and the news about ventilator production go down a bit easier.  Liquor sales spiked after the shutdown was announced, and it quickly became clear that Americans put alcohol on the same exalted level as toilet paper when it comes to being absolutely certain of having a more than ample supply.  As somebody said, it’s not clear that people are drinking more during the work-at-home period, but they’re sure not drinking any less, either.  As for the invention of adult beverages, humans have made both wine and beer for so long that their dates of creation have been lost in the mists of time.  Scientists recently discovered earthenware jars containing wine residue that indicated humans were guzzling fermented grape juice more than 8,000 years ago, and beer is the subject of the oldest recorded recipe in the world — instructions that were found on ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls that date back to 5,000 B.C. 
2. Soap — You’ve got to give people something to do during a pandemic to make them feel like they are pitching in, and for Americans the instructions are clear:  wash your hands, thoroughly and repeatedly.   As soon as we get back from our allotted exercise walks we head dutifully to the sink for our required 20-second bout with lathering, scrubbing, and rinsing.  It may not sound like much, but those constant 20-second scrubbings add up and help to pass the slow-moving quarantine time, and they make us feel good about doing our part.  Soap also dates back thousands of years, with historians believing that the Babylonians invented the first soap, made from fats boiled with ashes, about 5,000 years ago.
3. Canned food and crock pots — It’s probably safe to say that people are cooking more at home than they’ve done in the last 50 years, and because there’s an interest in trying to minimize trips to the grocery store, people are trying to stretch their food stores and leftovers farther than ever before.  That’s where canned food and crock pots really strut their stuff.  In fact, I think it is safe to say that no single device is more adept at converting aging leftovers into tasty meals than the crock pot.  Whether it’s stews made of random items hauled from the cupboard, or last night’s chili made with leftover meat loaf, leftover sausage, a can of black beans, some chopped onions, and liberal doses of Texas Pete’s hot sauce and sriracha sauce, our crock pot has been a high-producing kitchen item during the last few weeks.  The smells coming from the crock pot also help to make the quarantine household a happy place, too.  Canned foods were first invented more than 200 years ago, and the first slow cookers — the precursors to the crock pot, which was first call the “bean pot” — were invented about 80 years ago. 
4. PCs — Where would we be without personal computers and laptops?  For many of us, they are the one, essential device that allows us to work from home, and without them the unemployment statistics in America would be much, much worse.  They also allow us to get the latest news with a few touches of keyboard buttons, and to catch up on our friends and check out the latest coronavirus memes and political rants on social media websites.  The laptop PC is the fulcrum that has moved the working world, and the COVID-19 quarantine is the singular event that will probably change our approach to how people work and do business, forever.  The first personal computer — the Altair 8800 — was invented in 1975, and the first laptop — which weighed more than 30 pounds, incidentally — was released in 1981.
5. Netflix and other streaming services — One very popular topic among friends on social media these days is swapping information about nightly viewing options.  Everybody’s got an opinion, because we’re all watching a lot of TV during this shut-in period, and we’re running through viewing options faster than ever before.  (The ten episodes of season three of Ozark, for example, flew by far too quickly.)  Netflix and other streaming services allow us to pick from an enormous array or TV shows and movies, old and new, and then advise our friends on whether options like Tiger King or Messiah are worth checking out.  What would we do without constant entertainment?  Netflix first started streaming content in 2007 — just in the nick of time, relatively speaking.

So there you have it — millennia of human invention and creativity, all combining to make the Great Coronavirus Crisis of 2020 a bit more tolerable for American shut-ins.  Thanks to the ancient winemakers, the Egyptians and Babylonians, and the techno-geeks and food canners.  We owe you a great debt of gratitude.

And now, it’s time to check out a few websites and think about what we’ll be making for dinner tonight.

Post-Apocalyptic Brewskis

Back in the 1950s, when American scientists and military advisors were regularly test-detonating new nuclear devices to see whether they should be added to America’s nuclear arsenal, scientists decided it made sense to conduct a special experiment — and “Operation Teapot” was born.  Its purpose was to determine the “civil effects” of an atomic blast on commercially packaged food items, including bottled and canned beer.

The Operation Teapot researchers reasoned that, if the United States and the Soviet Union started hurling nuclear bombs at each other, the American water supply would quickly become contaminated by fallout, and determining an alternative source for fluids therefore was important.  The report on Operation Teapot explained:  “Consideration of the problems of food supply show the needs of humans for water, especially under disaster conditions, could be immediate and urgent.”  The report added:  “At various times some consideration has been given to special packaging of potable water, but since packaged beverages, both beer and soft drinks, are so ubiquitous and already uniformly available in urban areas, it is obvious that they could serve as important sources of fluids.”  In short, since American households already had ample supplies of beer and Coke, why not see if the U.S. could rely on those to supply post-bomb blast refreshment?

So, in 1955, researchers at the Nevada Proving Grounds put bottled and canned beer and soda at three locations, ranging from 0.2 to 2 miles from ground zero, and then set off a bomb.  Some of the bottles and cans at the location closest to the blast were obliterated, but others survived and, after testing, were found to be largely unaffected in the taste department and “within the permissible limits for emergency use” from a radiation standpoint.  The canned and bottled beers that were positioned farther away from the blast site showed no signs of change whatsoever and even retained their carbonation and airtight seal.

Some of the two-fisted scientists working on Operation Teapot, no doubt thirsty after witnessing the blast, apparently cracked open some of the beers and soft drinks and downed a few swigs to conduct an “immediate taste test.”  The report on Operation Teapot noted:  “Immediate taste tests indicated that the beverages, both beer and soft drinks, were still of commercial quality, although there was evidence of a slight flavour change in some of the products exposed at 1270 ft from GZ [Ground Zero]. Those farther away showed no change.”  The remaining bottles and cans were sent to several commercial laboratories for further taste testing, and the consensus was that the beer could unquestionably be used as an emergency source of potable beverages.

So there you have it!  After following “duck and cover” techniques to weather the initial atomic blast, Americans of the ’50s would be able to crack open a cold bottle of suds and quaff a few without concern about their beer supply going flat or having a skunky taste.  It would make the post-apocalyptic landscape and the clumps of hair falling out of your scalp a little bit easier to take.

Drinking The Beer The Monks Drank

Important news from Belgium for beer lovers — the monks of Grimbergen Abbey have managed to piece together long-lost information about the ingredients and methods used to brew their different beers going back in the Middle Ages, and have started to brew beer again.  The rediscovery of the recipe is a kind of historical detective story where language plays a key role.

The story starts with the monks of the abbey, who like other monks of the Middle Ages, brewed, and enjoyed, beer.  (In fact, some monks fasted during Lent and drank only specially brewed beer that was a kind of liquid bread during that period — which probably made for an interesting Lenten season.)  The Grimbergen Abbey brews were known far and wide, and their ingredients and the methods used by the monks were set down in books first written in the 12th century.  The monks continued to brew their beer, changing their recipes periodically, until 1798, when French Revolutionaries, who were no friends to religion, burned the monastery to the ground.  The 1798 incident is one of three times that the monastery has burned down.

But the monks of Grimbergen Abbey are resolute.  Fortunately, some of the monks rescued the 12th-century books and stored them, but the recipes and methods were thought to be lost because no one could read the writing, which was in a mixture of old Latin and old Dutch.  Four years ago, the monks at the monastery decided to tackle the problem and invited volunteers from the community to help them in trying to decipher the writings.  Together they were able to identify ingredient lists, the types of hops and bottles and barrels that were used, and even the names of the different beers the monks brewed over the centuries.

Now the monks, in partnership with Carlsberg which offers a number of the Abbey’s previously known beers for sale, have built a new microbrewery on the site of the original brewery and have started to brew a beer based on some of the old recipes and methods.  It’s a heady brew — 10.8% alcohol, by volume — and will be sold by the glass in Belgium and France.

A toast to the indomitable beer-loving monks of Grimbergen Abbey, and the volunteers who helped them to recover a bit of liquid history!

Pretentious, Indeed

The Doc Next Door knows I like sour beers, so when he and Mrs. Doc came over for a visit last night, he brought along four assorted sours he picked up at the Pretentious Barrel House. The bottles are a bit pretentious, I suppose — they hold 8.45 ounces and are shaped like tiny champagne bottles — and with handles like Grandiloquent and Magnanimous the beer names are, too. But the beers really aren’t. The Grandiloquent, which I enjoyed last night, was a great, mouth-puckering, as sour as sour can be effort, and today’s Magnanimous is a bit fuller-bodied and less tooth-curdling . . . the perfect beer to sip and savor along with Tiger Woods’ improbable Masters triumph.

Pretentious? I’ve never thought of making tasty beer as pretentious, but who am I to argue with brewers who produce these kinds of results?

Debunking Drinking Wisdom

Shortly after I passed the legal drinking age and started drinking adult beverages, I first heard the aphorism “wine, then beer, and have no fear.”  Some years later, I heard the flip side:  “beer, then wine, and I feel fine.”  The idea behind each of the sayings — which are seemingly contradictory, in case you hadn’t noticed — was that if you sequenced what you drank, you could avoid a hangover.

Are either of the sayings true?

No, of course not . . . and now a study has confirmed it.  Researchers from the Witten/Herdecke University in Germany and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom — two countries, incidentally, that are very serious about their wine and beer — studied whether the sequence in which alcoholic beverages are consumed might affect how people who overindulge feel the next day.  One group drank beer, then wine, and another drank wine, then beer.  A third, control group drank only one or the other.

The study found that the drinking sequence made no difference in the hangover impact.  One of the researchers explained: “The truth is that drinking too much of any alcoholic drink is likely to result in a hangover. The only reliable way of predicting how miserable you’ll feel the next day is by how drunk you feel and whether you are sick. We should all pay attention to these red flags when drinking.”  (No kidding!)

And get this:  another of the researchers makes the dubious argument that hangovers actually can have positive effects.  He stated: “Unpleasant as hangovers are, we should remember that they do have one important benefit, at least: They are a protective warning sign that will certainly have aided humans over the ages to change their future behavior. In other words, they can help us learn from our mistakes.”  Boy, scientists are perverse, aren’t they?

I’d never argue that hangovers are a good thing, but I do know this — any perceived folk wisdom about drinking that rhymes and is capable of being remembered after a few drinks probably isn’t that wise after all.

All Beers Are Not Created Equal

Deutsche Bank has performed a useful service for travelers who enjoy a fermented beverage now and then:  its latest Mapping The World’s Prices report includes a pint of beer as one of the cost items being surveyed.  As a result, beer fans (like me) can get a sense of the comparative cost of a glass of suds in 50 different cities around the world.

According to this year’s report, the most expensive pint is in Dubai, in the Arab Emirates, where the average cost of a cold one is $12.  Oslo, Norway is the only other city to exceed the $10 barrier for a brewski.  The most expensive beers in the U.S. are found in New York City and San Francisco — no surprise there — where you’ll pay an average of $7.70 and $7.40, respectively, and Boston isn’t far behind at $6.70.  The cheapest pint can be found in Manila, in the Philippines, where beer afficionados can slake their thirst for only $1.50.  Columbus isn’t one of the 50 cities on the list, but in my experience the beer costs here are closer to the Manila end of the spectrum — which is one of the many nice things about living in Ohio’s capital city.

But while the Deutsche Bank report is useful for travelers who might want to factor in beer costs to their trip planning, it really doesn’t tell the whole story.  A beer isn’t always just a beer.  To me, at least, whether we’re talking about a lager, an ale, one of those infernal bitter IPAs that seem to dominate beer menus these days, or something else, would make a real difference.  Even $1.50 for an IPA would be more than I would pay.

And the setting is important, too.  I’m guessing that someone coming into a pub from the fiery heat of Dubai might consider $12 for a cold one to be a bargain.  And speaking as someone who particularly enjoys the dark, warm, woody ambiance of a real British pub like the Lamb and Flag in Covent Garden, I’ll gladly pay $7.20 that is the average cost of a beer in London.

North Haven Brewing Company

These days you find American craft breweries just about everywhere. So I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the North Haven Brewing Company tucked into the walkout area of Calderwood Hall in North Haven — even though it’s a town on an island off the Maine coast that is accessible only by boat.

We stopped by to sample the wares NHBC offers and found them to be excellent. I had a red ale, and Russell enjoyed the coffee stout, brewed with coffee from 44 North in Stonington. One of the proprietors said they started a home brewery and found they liked it so much they decided to start a company. All of their offerings are brewed on the premises at Calderwood Hall.

The American craft brewing movement is a great thing, and it’s pretty cool to see it represented in a community like North Haven.

Beer Serape

In Ohio, we have cheap foam beer coozies. They don’t look great, but they do keep your beer cold — which is important.

Out here in San Diego, they’ve got much more classy coozies. In fact, they’re not coozies at all, but rather beer serapes. It’s the Corona covering of choice for any fiesta.

The beer tasted very good and went down easy, so I’m not sure whether my serape kept my beer “coozie cold.” It sure looked good, though.