Filtering by Tag: Friday Froth,Peruvian

Friday Froth: Here and There

Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Holding my eyeball in my head at an altitude of 36,000 feet was a new experience. I was excited to get out to Utah during ski and Sundance season, yes, but the best part was having finally kicked the cold that had been holding me down like the Hand of the Man since before baby new year started crowning. I was enjoying the novel luxury of breathing through my nose when the plane ascended through 20,000 feet or so and the sea level air pressure trapped in the bone behind my eyebrow went all slumlord and attempted to evict my right eye for the next five hours. I didn't know an ex-cold could turn me into Popeye, but upon landing I did know this: I needed a drink. 

Red Rock Brewery in Salt Lake City is a sort of brewpub which is in many ways along the lines of Southport Brewing Company on our shores. I had never seen one of their beers in a bottle, much less a double IPA, so I ordered one straight away.


Friday Froth: Winter Update

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

"You shouldn't be scared of spiders," I remember my mother telling me. "You're much bigger than they are." At the time this line of reasoning seemed like neither a straight line, nor particularly reasonable, but I had no adequate retort at eight years old. Spiders were little, misshapen beasts from hell's own imagination then, and they remain so now. Doubly so, since now I know about things like the Brown Recluse, but that's not important. A spider I can hit with a magazine before turning on my heel and shrieking away. I am millions of times larger than a cold virus, and that hasn't stopped it from kicking my ass. So take that, 1987 Mom. All this is to say I haven't been drinking a lot of beer lately, but here are a few tidbits from the scattershot days in which I've been both awake and able to breathe over the past month.

Sixpoint in Brooklyn literally turns out (at least one) new beer every month. See their single-hopped Spice of Life series for just one example. In that vein, I finally had the Pacifica version which came out in November, and can still be found on tap here and there.

Friday Froth: What's New?

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Every day is like waking up in a new place when you're a beer fan. The craft beer scene continues to hit higher plateaus. Brewers and beer artisans no longer seem content to simply produce a great beer in a recognizable style, they're reaching out into the realms of winemaking, distillation and cooking just to see what they can offer, what they can contribute to zymurgy. I've mentioned the experimental barrel-aging going on with B. United's Zymatore Project, but every stumbling step seems to put me mouth to mouth with a pint of inspired brewing. It's like the Seattle music scene in 1990, or Parisian cafes in 1870: artists are communicating with artists, experiencing each others' product, and reconsidering what they can produce. 

Yesterday I had a Rogue Chipotle ale. Yes, yes, I know: chipotle has been done, done to death, buried, reanimated in a unholy ceremony using two parts voodoo and one part Guy Fieri's wrist band, and been put down and buried again, but there I was, having to recalibrate what I thought about beer.


Friday Froth: Outside and Inside

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

It can all seem so simple, these twenty two moving parts. Eleven on eleven, they violently mesh, or they fly apart. Some people look at this whole and perceive only a lumpen, tangled jumble. From orbit, the Amazon rainforest is reduced to a green carpet. A glance at the watch's face shows only two hands. A second's worth of recognition, then on to something else, the actual time already forgotten. On the watch's face is the hour. Behind that: gears, escapments, jewels. Under the green, jungle canopy: rivers, streams, lives, civilizations. Guttural cries, naked violence, and the necessary imbalance of the scoreboard are the most apparent facets of American football. Tribal, atavistic pleasures, occasionally waved off as simple things by and for simple minds. Motivating and informing it all, though, this. Twenty two individual goals made systemic by design; the moving parts of a machine imbued with a will and given a target. Put the parts together and see if the result is harmonic precision, or an expensive spray of ragged metal and oh dear, I seem to have a hairspring lodged in my cornea. That beer in your hand is more than just "a beer."

Friday Froth: Lesson Learned

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Your average lemur makes a terrible manservant. Don't ever waste a summer trying. It takes them forever to drag a beer from one room to the next, and you'd think they have dexterous little hands, but I found their laundry folding skills to be incredibly sub-par. Exotic animal friends can be both time consuming and delicious, but a Cornish game hen provides the latter with no need of training or a wee tuxedo. Unless well-dressed poultry is your thing, you monster. But let's put aside whatever predilections you have for Capon in chapeau and return to our subject, shall we? 

In the upper midwest (where the men are men and the women are frozen to something) sits Grand Rapids, Michigan. It has an area of 45.3 sq. mi., is home to the Frederick Meijer Gardens, the DeVos Place Convention Center and many other places you've read about both here and on Wikipedia if you've never been to the place and need something to write about it in your beer column. TRANSITION It is also home to Founders Brewing Company, one of the more significant craft breweries in the United States, at the northeast side of which you can spy Connecticut, where Founders beers can now be, um... found. 


Fiesta Atlantic: Authentic Peruvian Fare in Stamfor

Restaurant Delicious Dives Peruvian Stamford Lunch Kid Friendly

CTbites Team

I’ve enjoyed food from many different countries over the years but funny enough, never from Peru. So with three friends in tow, I decided to try Fiesta Atlantic, a Peruvian restaurant in Stamford. Having eaten Venezuelan and Mexican, I expected a fusion of both. It turns out Peruvian food is indeed a melting pot of different cultures but surprisingly, the food is notable for its Italian and Chinese influences. In the 18th century, Lima was the financial center of a vast Spanish Viceroyalty. Chinese laborers and Italian settlers washed up on its South Pacific shores bringing their own spices and cooking techniques.


Friday Froth: Get Some Sun

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Sorry for the delay, all, it took me two weeks to track down any of the new Sixpoint beers south of Fairfield, but they do seem to be propagating through liquor stores and brewpubs. Apollo was the first beer I picked up, since it is Sixpoint's summer seasonal this year, and I am an incurable geek about both space and Greek mythology. I was held helpless in this beer's sway even sitting on the shelf and, having run a few pints through my bloodstream, my slavish dedication hasn't lessened. 

Apollo gives off a brilliant aroma of yeasts and Bavarian wheat. Its color scores a 3.7 on the Standard Reference Method scale (or SRM; in this case straw colored, tending towards pale gold), a unit of measure especially useful when printed on the outside of opaque cans. Its unusual clarity (for a hefeweizen) is a result of the the beer being put through a centrifuge before canning, allowing it to keep the flavor and body, but with fewer solids.


Friday Froth: Some New Brews News

Friday Froth News Beer

James Gribbon

The American Brewers Association hit a milestone at the end of April when it registered its 2,000th member in the American craft beer family. This is an achievement, considering membership first hit 1,500 in '99 and then didn't touch so high a mark again until 2008. The American public has spoken, and we want fresh ingredients in all our foods, thankyouverymuch. I hope Gordon Knight is smiling from some other plane of existence right now, because craft beer is in the midst of a boom. Sunday beer sales aren't the only thing to smile about in the Constitution State, either: beers from Clown Shoes, Green Flash and Sixpoint breweries hit the shelves just last weekend.


Friday Froth: Spring Things

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

"The planet has needs for your deeds," read the bottle cap. I studied it as the beer's head made sizzling noises, bubbles popping in the glass. "Well," I thought, dropping the cap and producing a tinny rattle. "Obviously." I brought my eyes around to study the carbonation's wavering path as it rose through the brown fluid. A previous topper reading "It's later now than it has ever been before" stuck to my other hand as I put it down. I flicked the cap, and it skidded across the glass table, leaving a faint but traceable trail through the collected pollen. Weakening rays of early evening sun hit me on a slant as I closed my eyes and leaned back. Those beams wouldn't be much good for generating solar power, but they seemed to recharge my personal batteries just fine. Some sort of tiny insect crawled its way over the hills and valleys of my toes and back into the green grass. Ah, spring.


Friday Froth: Stop Making Sense

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Normally, this lede would be filled with some bit of esoteric ephemera wherein we'd compare the universe-building in the novels of Iain M. Banks to the lifestyle of the Hopi nation or some such, but we've been getting a little spacy lately, and I felt it was time to take it back to basics. If you want to talk katsina spirits and the socioeconomic theory of intangliation, come drinking with me some time, but for now, let's just talk beer.


Friday Froth: Winter Sky

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

We're going to look backwards and forwards this week. We're going to borrow something from November and give thanks for how good we have it, and boost our spirits as we look forward to spring. Our Yankee ancestors made it through bleak winters with barely any fresh food, and in an agrarian economy there wasn't even work to divert their cabin fever. Breaks from the desperate monotony came in the forms of weekly hymns or the occasional cholera outbreak. Well, that may not be strictly true, there was also smallpox, but in addition to smallpox, and considerably more preferable, there was beer. A little brewer ingenuity gave rise to bigger ales with deeper colors and increased potency to hold the cold and dark at bay and transform the winter months from merely bearable to enjoyable. That same tactic works to this day, and this can be found for the next month or so wherever you can find Smuttynose


Friday Froth: Bringin' A Mix

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

The Monday after Thanksgiving is one of the cruelest of the year. A country isn't really worthy of the name until it has a National Day Of Feasting, (and a beer and an airline, according to Frank Zappa) but I feel like a good feast, especially a winter-ish one, could really do with a National Week Of Hibernation subsequently. But we all have our roles to play in the national ant colony, and so we waddled back to our jobs, office chairs protesting perhaps more loudly than we ourselves did at the morning's alarm. My role at Thanksgiving, however, was considerably more enjoyable: Bringer Of The Beer. Here's how that went.

Craft brews have officially tipped in the Malcolm Gladwell sense. Most bars and restaurants now feature at least one tap dedicated to interesting beers, and brew-focused establishments seem to be springing up everywhere, to the delight of the hop head.


Friday Froth: Seasonal Brews

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

The following Froth column was originally scheduled to run last week but got sucked into a worm hole. Pardon any time related ambiguity.  

Congratulations to those of you who are now able to read this after having been gracefully ushered back into the 19th[strikethrough] 21st century by our benevolent dictators at CL&P. There's a scene in Gladiator where Djimon Hounsou's character sees the Roman coliseum for the first time and says "I did not know men were capable of such things." I imagine that's a little what it's like to use an oven or turn on the lights after a dozen days whose rhythms were controlled by the Sun's rise and fall; writing notes on the back of a wooden shovel with a lump of coal by candle light, that kind of thing. The long nights of the winter can now once again be banished by the sorcery of compact fluorescent bulbs, but some elements of the wintertide are to be embraced, like seasonal brews.


Friday Froth: Buck The Trend...Drink Good Beer

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Modern hipsterism is a weird and annoying thing. Here's how it goes: people had settled into a fairly stable fashion landscape by the time the millennium rolled around so they naturally started looking around for the next big thing. Lacking any creativity or new ideas of their own, they decided to take the most hideous and outdated clothing they could find and wear it as publicly as possible because "Haha, aren't I funny and clever and please oh god look at me." Since wearing ugly clothes is easier than actually being interesting, and neon hats from 1992 were cheaper than water, it caught on. Then everybody found out about The Cobrasnake and now the landscape is littered with "Aren't I cool for not looking cool but really that's what's cool about it but I'm too cool to acknowledge I actually really think this is cool." It's the Inception of pop culture trends, and somehow beer got caught up in it. I'm sure PBR doesn't mind that every idiot with an ironic mustache and Ladyhawke on their iPod has to have a Blue Ribbon tallboy in their hand, but this is the acid reflux disease of trends. It was ugly the first time, let's not have it again. Let's try something new, and let the revolution start with beer.


Friday Froth: Nelson's Red Oktober

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

On October 21, 1805, Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson lead a British fleet against the combined power of the French and Spanish fleets miles off the coast of Trafalgar, Spain. Napoleon wanted a French hegemony in Europe, the British, not so much. Nelson had twenty seven ships at his command against thirty three in the Franco-Spanish fleet. By the end of the battle twenty two ships would be destroyed and Nelson would be dead. Twenty eight ships would eventually sail on to England - every single British ship, plus the French flag vessel Bucentaure, and its Admiral, Villeneuve. The British hadn't lost a single one. As for Admiral Nelson, his body was placed in a barrel of "spirits," likely rum, and Nelson became one of the biggest heroes in British history. The story goes that when the barrel was opened back home it was found to be empty of liquid - the sailors had drilled a hole and drank it all. Thereafter rum was given the nickname "Nelson's Blood" on ships of the Royal Navy. Honestly though: this column has almost nothing to do with any of that. I just like the story. Shall we?


Friday Froth: Oktoberfest...Let the Party Begin

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Oktoberfest is the most popular town fair in the world. The town, in this case, is Munich, and the party attracts about five million people, yearly. Oktoberfest started when Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria married Princess Therese of Saxony in 1810. That party has been repeated ever since - 201 years as of last week - and continues through the first few days of October. Only beers brewed inside the city limited of Munich are allowed in the enormous tents constructed on the Theresienwiese each year, but thankfully we have no such restrictions in the 203. Let's dive in. 

It's only fitting that we start with an actual Munich Oktoberfest beer like Paulaner.


Friday Froth: Drinkin' Turtles

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

One does not generally drink a turtle, but there I was. The time was last Friday night, and the place was the beloved and reborn Georgia Theater in Athens, Georgia. The night's entertainment was the newly formed Chris Robinson Brotherhood, and the beer was a local Terrapin. The confluence of warmth, fellowship, location and good brews was that delicious kind of overload which tends to put one in a trance like state. Trances are not conducive to note-taking. Er, sorry about that. But do try a Terrapin or a Dale's on the rooftop bar at the Theater next time you happen to come-to in Clark County. You won't regret it.


Friday Froth: No End To This Summer

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Imagine yourself in a favorite summer spot. You might be slowly swinging in a hammock in the cool, green shade of sunlight filtered through leaves. Maybe you're rolling through the waves in a kayak, putting a final coat of wax on your car, or clustered with friends in a horseshoe of beach chairs, pushing sand beneath your feet and turning your face up: squinting your eyes closed in the welcome glare. Keep that feeling. Hold onto the details of it, because fall's on the way, and we want to make this summer last as long as we can. Let's take a look at a few more seasonals to keep within our reach as we hold onto the summer.

Friday Froth: Hop Heaven

Ingredients Friday Froth Beer

James Gribbon

Holy Mother of God, do I love IPAs. Hops are as important an ingredient of beer as water, in my opinion. Without any hops you may as well put a plate of dry barley and yeast in front of me - I guess I could do something with it, but it's not really worth the effort. Hops are the spice of beer, I've said it before, and as such India Pale Ales occupy the same space in the temple of my mind as Thai and Mexican food. I will shoulder your grandmother out of the way if she comes between me and a kaeng phet. This week we're going to roll around in IPAs like a freshly bathed dog in a questionable pile of dirt. My tongue's already hanging out, but don't worry, hop-shy readers: there's something for you, too.


Friday Froth: Bats, Balls, Pils and Hops

Ingredients Friday Froth Road Trip Beer

James Gribbon

Does everyone still have all their fingers after Monday's festivities? You do? Great, because we should really play some catch. Baseball's midsummer classic is coming up, and those of us so inclined are by now completely engrossed in America's pastime. Even those who don't like the game can't escape the news of Derek Jeter's impending 3,000th hit, and everyone should go to Cooperstown: home of the baseball hall of fame and Brewery Ommegang. 

Ommegang is an American brewery which specializes in Belgian style beers. They're pretty damn good at it, too, having taken top awards from Belgian brewers in Belgian beer contests in Belgium.