The Champagne of Blogs

All these beer reviews lately, you’d think this blog was about … beer. Au contraire, my friends (French for “nuh uh”). If you’ll point your attention to the navigation over there on the right side of this page, you’ll note a mysterious, delicious category called “Meat Stunts.” That’s where you’ll find instructions for home made bacon, the legend of the curiously named “La Caja China,” and our last Superbowl centerpiece, “Snack Stadium XXXL.”

After last year’s surge in post-game web traffic, I knew we had to do something spectacular this year. This time, inspiration came in the form of a slab of shelf-stable Broadbent pepper bacon I acquired from bacn.com (now owned by baconfreak.com). The predictable thing to do would have been to chunk it up into lardons (French for thick-ass pieces of bacon) or simply slice it thick for superdelishtstic BLT’s. But the meat stuntman in me wanted to stuff it with something.

So of course I went to the best stuffing of all: more pork. I picked up a whole pork loin from Gartner’s, along with some pork sausage-stuffed pork tenderloins. If you’re counting, that’s four types of pork product so far.

I had a plan going in, but it was just a bit of stray cholesterol until I actually opened up the slab. I had no idea how much room there was in there! I got so excited I forgot to take photos of the assembly process, so instead I’ll let you digest the photo below, and describe what’s going on after the break.

Back? Not what you were expecting, was it? Heh. So the body’s the pork loin, sliced at one end to form a mouth. Inside the “mouth” are two garlic cloves acting as incisors, and the traditional apple. A couple more garlic cloves form the eyeballs, and two apple slices form the sow’s ears. The legs are those sausage-stuffed tenderloins I mentioned, with garlic toes (Mmm, garlic toes). Now, I wanted this thing to actually be tasty, and I was a bit concerned about overwhelming samplers with a lot of grease. This creation was going to be wrapped in bacon for a few hours, after all. So before I tucked her in, I sprinkled her back and legs with fresh rosemary “bristles” and lots of chopped up garlic “garlic.” Beneath the sow, I cut some drainage slits in the bottom of the bacon blanket.

I set the oven to 350, and tried not to open it every 15 minutes to see how my monster was developing. The house smelled … so delicious it was actually almost sickening. Imagine a foggy morning so thick you have to turn your headlights on. Now imagine that fog in your nose, and the whole thing smells like bacon, rosemary and garlic. It was difficult to concentrate. But four hours later, I pulled the pig and … wow. I wish you could have tried it. It was delicious, and those that could get past its eerily lifelike appearance were able to taste all four meats in one bite. Best of all, no one got sick, despite the Russian Roulette-like meat game we played. Four chances to get trichinosis, but all cylinders came up empty.

Soooo-ey!

Hey, Portland audiophiles! I’m going to be on Lisa Morrison’s radio show this afternoon talking about the 33 Beers books. The show, “Beer O’Clock” airs on KXL 750 (AM) from 3-4 PM every Saturday. If you’re not within radio distance of PDX and would like to hear what I sound like on the radio through an iPhone, you can download the podcast next Monday from the station’s website.

In other 33 Beers news, I restocked both Belmont Station and Saraveza last night, so be sure to stop by after you hear my colorful, rambling origin story on the radio. Bailey’s Taproom is also stocking the books and represents our flagship downtown location.

And of course, you can also purchase the booklets online if you’re outside PDX but inside the USA. I’ll guarantee pre-Christmas arrival for any books ordered online before 11 PM Pacific time on Sunday, December 20th.

Still not sure about the books? Here’s some unbiased reviews from some of my favorite bloggers:

• Beervana
• Appellation Beer
• Brewvana
• Brewpublic
• realbeer.com Holiday Gift Guide

We’ve been to a lot of beer festivals. A LOT of beer festivals. Mostly in Oregon, but earlier this year we made our way down to San Francisco Beer Week, and took on the Great American Beer Festival in Denver this fall (photo below).

I’d like to say that the recap blog posts are forthcoming, but as every festival attendee can attest, the details tend to get hazy as the samples take hold, and SMS/Twitter reconstructions can only go so far toward recalling the flavor profiles and production details on some of the more obscure or original microbrews tasted.

Our first product, 33 Beers, is an attempt to solve this “memory problem.” It’s a beer journal we designed for rapidly taking down the important details of a beer. A unique “flavor wheel” is included on each of the 33 pages of note-taking area, and it provides a quick, visual way to describe a beer’s flavor (and recall it later). Simple check-boxes for serving method (draft, can, bottle, etc.) and other key information further speed up the process. The idea is to take notes for later recall, but do so rapidly so you can, you know … enjoy the actual beer?

Best of all, it’s highly portable, unlike the 11×17-sized, color-coded Excel spreadsheets we used to tote around to beer festivals. It easily fits in the front or back pocket of a pair of jeans, and is thinner than most mobile phones. It’s printed in the Northwest on 100% Washington-recycled paper using US-grown soy ink, so it should satisfy even the hippiest of hippie beer drinkers.

We’ve set up a web site to sell the book at 33beers.com, and it’s available in a few stores in the Portland, Oregon area (Saraveza, Belmont Station and Bailey’s Taproom as of this writing). It’s been largely a labor of love, and we’d love it if you’d help us spread the word to the other beer geeks in your life. It’s pretty inexpensive, too; it retails at $4 each or a three-pack is $10. Wouldn’t these look great under your tree?

While surveying the internet for kegerator-making instructions, I fell upon a now-lost (to me) web page that described an unusual process for saving some money in the brewing process by saving, then re-using yeast from previous batches. At $8/smack pack, this seems like a good way to save some coin on homebrewing, further improving the value proposition.

I’ve heard all about making yeast starters and dividing that up after adding it to wort created expressly for the purpose of breeding, but frankly, that has always sounded like a lot of work.

This lost to history web page I discovered had a simpler way to harvest yeast for re-use: simply poor the dregs of a carboy into sanitized plastic bottles after doing your kegging/bottling. Up to six months later, simply open the bottle up and dump into your wort. Even I can do that.

Anyone out there tried this method before? How did it work? For the record, the yeast I’m attempting to re-use is Wyeast 1056 American Ale.