“And that he calls for drink, I’ll have prepared for him a chalice for the nonce…” (King Claudius to Laertes, Hamlet, Act IV, Scene VII) “For the nonce” is a phrase that’s stuck in my head since I first encountered it in Hamlet — not constantly, but it’s a phrase that occurs to me at times, usually when I cannot use it. It was one of those unfamiliar phrases I needed to have explained to me, and when it was explained, I wondered where the hell he’d gotten that word. Turns out there’s a complex etymology behind it, but one suited …
Month: April 2011
Fusion Brewday: TriplIPA Riff — Wonmisan Tripel IPA
On the weekend, a few of the brewers in Seoul gathered for a goodbye party for a brewer many of us have known and learned from over the last few years, Kevin. I brought a bottle of the OpperBacco brewery’s TriplIPA Speciale, a beer that I’d picked up in Rome on recommendation from the proprietor of the excellent Johnny’s Off-License. We sampled it at the end of the night, which was probably not optimal, but the beer seemed to be well-received. Fitting with what I noticed about Italian craft brew — that there’s a marked Belgian influence — this seemed …
The Don’t Talk About History Law
It’s really hard to talk about Langston Hughes in the context of the Harlem Renaissance without touching on not only his interest in the Soviets and their system, but also touching on why a number of African-American intellectuals (Hughes, W.E.B. DuBois, and many others) were drawn to “revolutionary” ideas, and to Communist ideology — after all, after hundreds of years of things not getting too much better, of pretty constant material, cultural, and social oppression and marginalization, I think it’s not hard to see why some African-Americans would have felt that a sudden, forceful reorganization of society would be the …
Yeasts and Gaming and Why I Wish There Was 30 Hours in the Day
Well, there are things that are new, but I’m trying to stem the tide of crap and use my blog to talk about things either neat and shiny, or interesting and cool, or personal-but-not-complainy. So anyway, let’s see. Coming home to find the Bavarian Weizen I’m got brewing is cool. It’s pretty encouraging because it’s actually bubbling like crazy now. It took about 40 hours to start up, but now it’s going well.I’ll probably try to pitch a second wheat beer, same approximate grist but slightly different hopping, onto the yeast cake and build it up a little more, when …
Bavarian Weizen
I brewed up a Bavarian Wheat beer on Saturday. A Bavarian wheat is a beer that ought to be strong in the banana and fruity esters (along with some clovey and vanilla phenolics) given off by the particular yeast strain used to make it (which, in this case, was Wyeast’s Bavarian Wheat yeast (Wyeast 3638). I got somewhat poor efficiency with this batch (getting a gravity of about 1.040 instead of 1.048), perhaps because I did this batch brew-in-a-bag or, more likely, because of the less-than-optimal grain crush on both the wheat and the pilsner malt I used. Oddly enough, …