Beers by HTNL: part 5 Fresh hop ales.

For as much as craft brewers drone on and on about the quality of their products in relation to the gruesome twosome (Bud/Inbev and Miller) their products largely draw from the same ingredients and utilize relatively the same methods. Same hops, same grains with some exceptions, and the same methods. Craft brewers brew smaller lots though with more attention and more concentrated ingredients.

One rare exception to this generality is the fresh hop ale/wet hope ale/harvest hop ale. The fresh hop ale takes the hops directly from the fields and goes into tank immediately. Normally, hops are mechanically pelletized which greatly compromises their taste and their dignity, like pantsing a portly slow kid and running his drawers up the flag pole outside Mrs. Baker's math class. It just isn't right. But fresh hop ales are beer the way beer should be done, old school. No machines and dies, no fraud.

Last year out in the People's Republic of Oregon, I experienced the full fury of the fresh hop ale season. My favorite was Bridgeport's fresh hop ale. Sold in a larger 2 pint bottle with a golden and green foil colsure, this beer is the shining jewel of the year, in my view. Typically fresh hop ales are strictly a season ale because they do not keep for as long as other beers (which I do not fully understand and am skeptical about). Sierra Nevada (of California) though, brews a southern hemisphere fresh hop ale after the harvest in New Zealand in what is our spring. Rogue also does an excellent fresh hop ale.

I wish breweries in the midwest would get serious about growing their own hop plots like many of the best quality beers in the West. And I wish breweries in the midwest would get serious about brewing in general, like those in the West. But that is for another day.

Today, I got a gilmpse of how this might happen. The "Fresh hop harvest ale" from Founders brewery in Grand Rapids, MI (Grand Crapids). This reminded me, in a way, of the glory of Oregon and Washington hop season. 70 IBUs leaks out of the top of the bottle upon opening. After pouring, you might as well have cut a grapefruit in half, because they will smell about the same. Bitter, sharp and crisp, the foretaste on the pallate is a sharp lemon flopping down like a shirtless portly man into a flannel lazyboy stained with cheeto dust into an orangy caramel flavour. I'm not sure where they got their hops from or how they were able to do a fresh hop ale. So I can only hope it was genuine and not pelletized rabbit turd hops. But the resins were powerful and the pallate satisfied.


HTNL rating of 8.3/10

Cheers.

Craftsman automatic hammer.

Possible catch phrases for this new invention:

"The Autohammer. Just in time, I've lost the ability to use my arms due to laziness."

"The Autohammer. Might work for longer than a day."

"The Autohammer. The best China made product for automatically driving nails. Until it breaks."

"The Autohammer. You might get about a half hour out of it."

"The Autohammer. You'll be surprised how efficient 34,000 light taps can partially drive in a nail."

"The Autohammer. Hope you kept your real hammer because this piece probably won't work at all. Sorry."

"The Autohammer. Why aren't I just using a screw gun?"

The future of ambulance chasers in America

I first heard this point made by Dr. Janet Smith in a lecture she gave about 10 years ago. The argument can be summed up like this: birth control is the new tobacco. In the same way tobacco companies have been sued countless times due to the harmful effects of their products, we are now beginning to see this trend with the birth control industry.

This afternoon I saw a commercial, a lawyer commercial like you see with asbestos or water pollution. It was advertising the bevy of law suits being brought against Yaz due to the rapid increase of damages caused by Yaz being brought to the public attention. Yaz is the most popular and widely used form of contraceptive birth control. Yaz is a product of Bayer, the German pharmaceutical company. Bayer innovated Aspirin as it now exists today. You may also remember them from such atrocities as being a financial core of the Nazi drive to power, or as the producer of the gas that killed the Jews at Auschwitz, or as the perpetrator of a variety of other crimes against humanity, including killing of the unborn. I suppose patterns of killing the innocent are hard to shake off for this company. Unfortunately there are no Allies coming to military aide for the innocent unborn. What a difference half a century makes. But, back to the point at hand.

Recently, it has come to wide public attention that Yaz, used by millions of women across the U.S., causes among other things; blood clots, pulmonary embolism, heart attacks, kidney issues, stroke, and death. During my time of unemployment, I got a chance to watch a lot of daytime T.V. TBS, TNT, and other stations would run Yaz advertisements 2-3 times every hour. It's no wonder Yaz stirred up over half a billion dollars for Bayer last year. Much like the "industry" the company engaged in during World War two, they have managed to make money in the most atrocious ways imaginable.

This should really not come as a surprise to anyone familiar to the history of the oral contraceptive. All of these side effects, now surprisingly sprung upon our society, have been side effects of the oral contraceptive since its creation. In fact, during the development of the pill, several women died, and many others suffered side effects such as these. But, undeterred companies like Bayer have continued to pioneer in the killing of the innocent while manipulating and poisoning our mothers.

This is my point: the pill, the oral contraceptive, is poison. It does freakishly unnatural things to a woman's body, wreaks havoc on marriages, contributes to the attitude that propagates abortion, leads to abuse of women including objectification of women, and contributes to general societal chaos. I find it increasingly ironic and tragic that in an age that is so concerned with going green, organic this and Prius that, we continue to ignore the unnatural chemical abuse of women's bodies as a result of taking birth control.

And, what's more ironic, the greatest argument I hear from feminists is that birth control is liberating for women, giving them freedoms do do as they please as they have never seen before. But at what cost? Is the goal of this freedom to be more respected, more valued, have safer and stabler families or be treated as a fully dignified human person. Because, if you look at the general moral trend of our country and dominant culture, women are markedly less respected and less valued as is evident by many movies, popular music (particularly rap, but also rock), style and fashion, etc. For true freedom is not to do simply as you please, but to be free is to live in a natural order or for the Christian, in the order as ordained by Christ, to be in the light of Christ.

I would bet a shiny new dime that this trend is only just beginning. Because physically, psychologically, and especially spiritually, the pill is bad for women. And, we've known that for a very long time.

V for Victory, great post to check out.

Great post on V for Victory blog today. Made me laugh in a very very sad kind of way.

Check it out: here

Witty name about my trip to Wisconsin

At the request of my rebel friend, I must admit that I have been remiss in my blog writing and now need to update ya'll.

Last weekend, I traveled up to the north land of Wisconsin to attend a hop growing convention. There is a group there trying to bring hop growing back to the Midwest. Currently 95 % of the hops grown in this country for beer making are grown in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. With 77% of the total hops grown in the Yakima valley, WA. But, currently about .0001% of this country's hops are grown in Wisconsin. Why so little you ask? Well, in the late 1800s, most of the hops in this country were grown in Wisconsin and New York. In fact Saulk county, where modern day Wisconsin Dells is, used to be corner to corner hops. Every year, 30,000 workers from Rockford, Chicago, and even into Indiana would flock to Wisconsin for the hop harvest earning 1-2 dollars a day, a month's wages in some places. But, around 1890, much like the potato famine in Ireland, the single variety was wiped out by a mold strain. So, the hops moved to the northwest, with their arid climates and consistent products.

I've been tossing around the idea of farming hops in Illinois on a smaller farm scale and in conjunction with other niche crops. This conference gave me a good idea of exactly what would go in to this endeavor. Approximately 15,000 dollars to start... per acre. So, it isn't exactly a cheap hobby... nor is it a short term investment. But it was a fruitful weekend in that I learned a lot about soil and hop variety. Plus the brew master of Capital brewery in Madison WI, Kirby Nelson, had us to the brewery for a private tour and lecture on hop quality's effect on beer quality. He also let us taste several beers off the tank. The tanks themselves are actually old dairy tanks, which was pretty neat. His signature beer now is an ice bock which is like a double bock but 25% of the water gets frozen off, producing a beer with a very high Alcohol by volume (ABV). And it was quite tasty, complex, almost syrupy.

On a side note, did you know that people from Wisconsin hate people from Illinois. I think it has to do with the Chicago folks who buy up all the lakefront property in Wisconsin so the locals can't buy property on their own lakes. Or, maybe it has something to do with the ultra-liberalized, snobby jerks from Chicago and the northern suburbs who mostly act as our ambassadors to the cheese land. Either way, I always catch a lot of flack from Wisconsinites who are ... less than charitable to Illinoisans. They even ave a term for us, "FIBS"... the I stands for Illinois. To combat this, I usually tell people I'm from Kentucky ... which is true in a manner of speaking.

The ironic thing is that few people in Illinois even know about this hatred. Kind of like a rivalry that only one side cares (or knows) about. I'm not saying it's unwarranted hatred. Most of the people in downstate Illinois hate Chicagoans as well, for many of the same reasons. But, to have such a widespread hatred that 90 percent of Illinoisans don't even know about... it's a little funny...

Cheers

From Wall St. Journal

What happened here, and is happening elsewhere in American life, is that Mr. Limbaugh's outspoken political conservatism is being deemed sufficient reason to ostracize him from polite society. By contrast, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, who fires off his own brand of high-velocity, left-wing political commentary but lacks Mr. Limbaugh's sense of humor, appears weekly as co-host of NBC's "Football Night in America." We haven't heard anyone on the right say Mr. Olbermann's nightly ad-hominem rants should disqualify him from hanging around the NFL. Al Franken made it all the way to the U.S. Senate on a river of political vitriol.

click here to read in full

Images from the Farm: Harvest 2009

For those of you not fortunate enough to be on a farm, here are some images of the beauty of the Fall.