Why bother?

Plenty of reasons. Maybe you’re knocked up, or trying to cut down on the liver damage, or taking a medicine what ain’t booze compatible, or what-have-you. The fact is sometimes you want to hang out and have the taste of an oat soda from a longneck like everybody else. We can respect that. The truth of the matter is nobody will know you’re drinking a diet oat soda unless they study the label. The labels, suspiciously, look like regular beer labels. So they’ll have to study hard, which will be a problem unless they’re suckin’ back one of these.

So, wanna try one? PRO-TIP: go continental.

Forget anything domestic, it’ll taste even more like fizzy water than the regular stuff. The best two I’ve had were Clausthaler & Kaliber.

Clausthaler has a nice afterbite of hops, much like a continental ale. Not much body, but you shouldn’t expect any. NA beer is about sacrifices, like sacrificing your future to the city council of Bethesda, Maryland. Oh, sorry… got a lot on my mind lately.

The other brand worth trying is Kaliber. This is more like a lager style. It is far maltier with a sweet taste. No real bite of hops to speak of.

Neither could every be mistaken for regular beer, but they’re worth a shot if you’re on the wagon. Sometimes you can’t/shan’t drink alcohol and we understand. We just want you to have a good time while doing it, and sometimes one of these faux brews will help you feel better about the tough decisions one must make in life. And hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy a regular brew at some time in the future.

But if you’re not drinking actual beer, do the rest of us a favor and be the designated driver or the you-fly-I-buy pilot for a liquor run, OK?

Ireland is, first, a blur of ancient stone walls flashing out of the night as we blast down back country lanes, fifty kilometers per hour on the black left side of the road. Sarah has only been driving for a month. She and her sister Emma collected us after we touched down at Shannon, we weary and bleary and them bearing broad smiles and accents. They were, immediately, the most fun people I had ever met, but it was now obvious that in this Rover was where we were going to die, grinning, sung off to heaven by broadcast American blues music.

No one dies in Ireland before they’ve had a pint.

First stop, before lodging, before food, before breathing, is the pub. There is no real choice to be made regarding beverage. Oh, our first proper Irish Guinness, ever after supplying credit for haughty complaints about bad pours the world over. While we’re endeavoring to instruct a bartender how to make a white russian the natives reckon our stomachs settled and pack us off to their manse in Quinville, wherein we arrange ourselves around the rough-hewn kitchen table to discuss the seriousness of fairy rings, to eat thick cheddar on dense bread, and to wash down our day with appley hash smoke and a tart can of Irish cider.

We wake to the rain on County Clare, in a giant manor house sprouting from a landscape painting of green down, in which the pipes leak hospitality and there’s more and better food than you’ll find anywhere and the fog in our brains lifts enough to begin the day. We walk wet lanes to the ruin of a fourteenth century Franciscan abbey, climb the walls, perch like gargoyles and wonder idly if the monks here brewed beer. It feels likely.

Our hosts continue the theme of antique architecture by bringing us to a “medieval” banquet at Bunratty Castle; once a stage for war between Ireland and England and Ireland and Ireland, it was now a theme restaurant staffed by actors of lesser stature. Aside from costumes, pewter tableware and pseudo-ribald entertainment the real meaning of a medieval banquet is, naturally, mead. Sticky sweet, imbibed with assurances to our companions that, yes, we can taste the clover. Serious drinking waits a few hours until our first proper night out at a pub. Guinness and cider alternate, each cleansing the palate for the other, and I challenge one of the Brothers Houlihan to a round of billiards for the honor of the United States. We pocket balls to a draw, which satisfies everyone.

An old local drunkard slopped on the bench outside the pub croons slurrily through the highlights of Van Morrison’s back catalogue. I join him by compulsion, and he demands that Emma and Sarah dance for him, for us and for Ireland. They hold hands under the stars and streetlight moon, lazily spinning, reminding us how fairy rings are made.

The next night we’re riding the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, the papery light of the full moon preventing us from accidentally soaring to our demise. If you stick your head over the edge and throw your arms out it feels like you’re flying. This is one of the most amazing places I’ve ever been; cascades of limestone stretch down to the sea crazed and cracked and just begging for you to stand up a shard and feel a little Celtic for a while. Wind screams straight up the cliff face from the sea, threatening to snatch our cans of cider from our hands. Sitting with my feet dangling over the dark limestone, large, fresh chunks of which litter the “beach” below. James finds some largish slabs of rock to throw over the edge. We watch as they fall for nearly thirty seconds before hitting the water. We whoop lustily, wet-throated, at the threat of death. We hatch a plot to spend our last night in-country at something called a “pub”.

“How do you pronounce that?” I asked, pointing to the carved wooden sign hung over the mirror behind the bar. It read FÁILTE in that gaelic-looking typeface which, don’t be fooled, is just as clichéd in Ireland as it is in the U.S.

The question I’d posed was the first thing of any kind I’d actually said to Liz since we’d met a day or so before. It took more courage than anyone reasonable would expect; immediately after the obligatory introductions had been made we’d sat in discrete chairs across the room from one another and pretended not to be staring at each other peripherally. It was some of the loudest non-conversation I’d ever engaged in, but when I finally spoke to her my voice almost broke like an adolescent’s. Almost.

Liz was just the cascade in the stout, as far as my visit to Ireland was concerned. As you’d expect, she was red-haired and had skin like cream. Her trilling lilt of a voice found me just another American sucker for a Colleen, but it was her eyes that did me in. Lightning shards of green-gray-blue stone that knocked me in the forebrain like a camán and I was lost. She turned them on me.

“FOIL-cha,” she said. “It means ‘welcome’.”

A day later we’d be shifting in the back of a crowded, tiny car rocketing through the night while our companions shouted along to a recorded American girl singing Swedish pop, snuggling into each other under a blanket while the hash apple was passed around, sneaking up to my borrowed bedroom shielded by entirely transparent excuses, not sleeping until the sun cracked the horizon. A day later than that and I was carried away by a plane and a train and vanished back into the patchwork of Europe.

To that end but somewhat closer to home, we heartily recommend the musings of Mr. Kevin Weedon, friend of a fine brew and to many of us truly, on his “Real Beer Blog“. Despite his handicap of using the B-word, you should fear not and peruse his findings.

I am currently working on syndicating him here (because I know how truly drunk and lazy most of you are – and us, for that matter) & hope to have these tubes connected soon. Shit be workin, Holmes! Peep that sidebar with the latest 5 of his musings in it. Still working on having them show up here as proper entries. Until then, I’ll enjoy Now enjoying another of the fine beers in my Two Brothers Brewing sampler case from Costco – their Cane & Ebel really grabbed me, and their Bitter End IPA is damn fine as well.

• 750mL white rum
• 1 medium-size navel orange
• 44 coffee beans

Grab a paring knife and a nice wide-mouth 1L jar. ProTip: make sure the orange will fit into the jar before you start this process or you’re gonna be pissing and shouting in a little bit.

Cut 44 holes in the skin of the orange and cram a coffee bean in each hole. You might want to cut little X’s rather than slits, since the orange skin can be a bit tough and the coffee beans can be slippery little bastards.

Once the orange is fully loaded, stuff it into the jar. (Good thing you checked to make sure the orange would fit earlier, or all that work would have gone to waste.) Pour the bottle of rum into the jar – If you’re using a 1L jar and a large orange you might not be able to get the whole 750mL in there but fill it as best you can.

If you use a larger jar, you can also add the traditional 44  teaspoons of sugar at this point. Me, all I have is 1L jars so I skipped this step in favor of having more room for rum.

Now the hard part – patience. Let it sit 44 days. Every day or two, give the jar a little shake or a turn to let the orange float to the other side and back. Admire the slowly darkening color of the rum. Keep waiting.

Once 44 days have passed, it’s ready to filter. Wide-mouth jars are hard to pour from (especially when they’re brimming with delicious rum) so you might want to dump the contents into a large mixing bowl – something wide enough to catch all the dripping rum, with a spout to allow you to pour it into a funnel.

Grab your funnel and filters (see the previous post about equipment) and filter the orange liquid into a 750mL bottle. A paper coffee filter works just fine.

At this point I say “sweeten to taste” but here’s a tip: I ended up with a little over 550mL of liquid. 44tsp of sugar turns out to be just under 200 grams, so I just filled the bottle the rest of the way with simple syrup and called it good. And damn is it ever good.

The aroma is mostly orange, with a whiff of coffee. The flavor starts out as sweet, mild coffee and then turns into a pleasing orange warmth, which fades into a combo of the two aftertastes. It’s pretty friggin’ great. If you have the patience I definitely recommend it.

Diamond Bear Brewing Company have created a nice ale with their Presidential IPA. A very opaque beer, the Presidential makes a point of tasting big and hoppy, full of that distinctive flavor that proves that this beer is not your typical reggaeton-blasting deli purchase. That’s just it, though—this tastes like an IPA defined, without any of the distinctions that make other IPAs so desirable. A tasty beverage, to be sure, but nothing to write home about.

The Alley Kat Amber is a good mix of light frothiness and nutty, coffee-like flavor, making it both an easy drink and a distinct flavor. While it in no way changes this brown ale’s robust flavor, the lightness of the beer itself is a little off-putting; I like an Amber to be nice and heavy with a decent thickness on the tongue, and this beer seems to move too fast, if that makes any sense. Strange, but nice.

The Licher Pilsner is, simply, fantastic. All too often are Pilsners created as vodka-beers: tasteless, easily chugged, devoid of character (the obvious example being the King itself). Licher, however, has created a Pilsner that is not only light and golden, but also complex and flavorful. Each refreshing mouthful leaves the drinker wanting another taste, and even as the beer sits and gets warmer, it doesn’t become gross or flavorless the way more common Pilsners do. Impressive and delightful.

Florida Beer Company wins this month’s batch with their Hurricane Reef Pale Ale. Lacking the over-the-top hoppiness of the Presidential IPA but retaining a traditional pale ale color and tastiness, this beer is the best of both worlds, a distinct ale without the knock-down-drag-out taste of a beer that has something to probe. There’s a metallic taste upon the first sip, but it seems to blend in well as the drinker continues enjoying the beverage. Truly a wonderful beer.

For information on how you can have tasty, life-giving beer delivered right to your motherfucking door once a month, check out http://www.beermonthclub.com/.

As much as I want to call that “fascist” or “freedom-hating” or “unamerican” or “socialist” and make a stink at town-hall meetings and whatnot, my desire for invective does not outweigh my commitment to factual accuracy. Alcohol control states are not inherently freedom-hating: Oregon is another of the nine, and yet our own Ouroboros seems to be just fuckingly tripping over bottles of Maraska Maraschino and delightful locally-produced artisan spirits. It’s just that my fellow North Carolinians don’t produce sufficient demand for the good shit and I ain’t got the ducats to order a case of bottles.

So, OK, fine. If you can’t drink globally, produce locally. Thus I decided to start making my own liqueurs and/or cordials. There’s two good reasons to do this. One: you can make delicious new things that you’ve never tried before – stuff they don’t sell in stores. And two: if done right it’s dirt-ass cheap. So let’s start with some basics.

First off: the basic process is dead simple. Take something delicious and let it soak in booze for a while. Filter out the chunky parts and drink the rest – perhaps diluted or sweetened. I’ll present some of the recipes I’ve tried soon, but first let’s talk equipment.

The small robot shows off a selection of containers

Obviously, you’re gonna need containers to put the booze in – first to let it age, and then something else to filter it into. Obviously you can use empty bottles from stuff you drank earlier – as on the right of the photo. Yeah, I’m sure you’ve got a few of them around. But most cordials (ProTip: a “cordial” is usually an infusion with fruit or berries; “liqueur” is usually reserved for things made from herbs, spices, and nuts) involve a significant volume of fruit – how the hell are you gonna stuff a cup of blueberries or a whole orange into that vodka bottle?

Enter the Mason Jar – center stage of the above photo. Around here you can get a dozen of them (that’s a 1-quart wide-mouth jar) for about $10. They’ll hold a medium-sized orange or a bag of frozen blueberries plus 750mL of alcohol quite nicely.

Finally, if you want some slightly fancier bottles (like the one on the left) you can get this Lorina lemonade junk in a lot of mediocre supermarkets. It pretends it’s made by monks in France or some shit but it’s basically just fizzy sugar-water. They come in nice reusable 750mL and 1L swing-top bottles and cost like $5. You could probably try real hard and find big swing-top bottles for cheaper but I’m lazy and the wife likes the fizzy lemonade so there you go.

You might also try to find smaller swing-top bottles, which you could decorate with festive ribbons and whimsical labels, and present to your friends as gifts at holidays and such. You can also fuck right off, because we’re trying to make drinks here, not fucking decorative gift baskets or some shit.

A funnel and some filters. Yeah it ain't that hard.

Anyway. Once you decide that your infusion is ready to be bottled, you’re gonna need to filter it. Coffee filters work great for this. Get a funnel that coffee filters will fit in. You can get that OXO funnel set for $8 on amazon.com, and #2 cone coffee filters will fit right in it. That little 4-cup metal coffee filter will set you back another $8, but it’s awesome as a first-stage filter to keep the paper filter from clogging up too quickly.

Honestly though, the funnel is the only thing you really need. You can age your infusions in old jars of spaghetti sauce and filter through paper towels and your stuff will probably turn out mostly OK. Just don’t blame me if your limoncello ends up tasting like Brawny and Chunkstyle Ragu.

To start you off, here’s the very simplest infusion I can think of. You basically cannot go wrong with this.

Vanilla Vodka

• 750mL 100-proof vodka
• 1 vanilla bean/pod

Split the vanilla bean open lengthwise and stick it in the vodka bottle. Infuse for 7 days, then filter.

As chief engineer I set forth to figure out what was doing and I think I managed to reverse engineer a passable fauximile. Mix up a big batch for your next party and you’ll be glad you did the next morning.

You’ll note this recipe is in metric. That’s because the imperial system is dumb. DUMB AS HELL. Be smart; go metric.

TAKE THIS:

• 150 grams sugar (a bit more than half a cup). I like turbinado/demerara/raw/what-have-you sugar.
• 2 grams table salt (about half a teaspoon). This is your source of sodium ions, from sodium chloride.
• 1 gram salt substitute (about a quarter teaspoon). This provides the other necessary ion, potassium.
• 1 packet store-brand ripoff of Kool-Aid mix. The real stuff tastes… well, like the real stuff. Store brands don’t taste like that and the finished product will taste more like the stuff you’re trying to copy.

MIX TOGETHER WITH:

• 2 liters of water. Tap, preferably.

Vary the sugar and table salt to taste.

Stay hydrated, my drunk friends.

I celebrated my 30th successful orbit about the sun by finishing all the open bourbon in the house. The Doctor and I also had a joint birthday party (observed) on the deck and y’all left a shitload of cheap beer at my house.

The Cheap Beer Challenge 2009 was met and bested. Reviews and recommendations to come tomorrow.