I’ve had the makings for a Wit beer around for a good long time — some torrefied wheat, some raw wheat, and some beautiful whole chamomile flowers I picked up in Fukuoka. However, I haven’t had a chance to get my Wit on… until yesterday. Earlier this week, I procured a sample of Wyeast Belgian Wit yeast from a brewer friend in Seoul, Bryan; this is supposedly the classic Wit yeast, in other words a version of the strain used by Hoegaarden. The last Wit I made, I used the other Hoegaarden strain, which is known as Forbidden Fruit; though …
Month: April 2012
Hoppy Brewday: Wonmisan aɪ pʰiː eɪ? (Partigyle Part 2 – the Micro-IPA)
This is the second brew of a parti-gyle brewing session. I discussed the first part of that session, and the naming of the brews, here. I decided to experiment with making a lighter, milder, but still-intensely hoppy IPA-ish brew after reading a bit about experiments towards that style by The Mad Fermentationist, and discussions among a few brewers here in Korea regarding the brewing of a hoppy session ale. I figured I would try making a hoppy, low-ABV beer with some of my favorite hops — Citra and Sorachi Ace — to see whether I could pull it off. Since …
Hoppy Brewday: Wonmisan aɪ pʰiː eɪ? (Partigyle Part 1)
I want to name today’s brews — a partigyle double batch, both in the AIPA-ish style — simply “IPA” but I want to write it in the other IPA — the International Phonetic Alphabet. Apparently, that looks like this: aɪ pʰiː eɪ? If I planned on bottling it, I’d probably have fun doing up a label, but I’ll almost certainly be kegging these two batches. As I mentioned, this is to be a parti-gyle brew, and instead of blending runnings, I’m simply going to cap the mash and let it sit for an hour more before pulling the second half …
Blogging Pound’s The Cantos: Cantos VIII-IX (The Malatesta Cantos, Part 1)
This post is one in a series of readings I’m posting of each poem in Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, one by one (so far — I may deal with a few at a time on occasion). These are not exactly typical readings of the poems, so much as readings I’m doing with a specific research project in mind — how to write Ezra Pound as a figure in a novel in which modernist artists, poets, and musicians secretly waged an occult war in the earlier half of the 20th century. If you’d like to know more about the project, I recommend …
Politics and The Hunger Games
I haven’t read The Hunger Games or the other books in the series, in part because I hadn’t caught much buzz but also just because I’ve been busy with other things. (The first book has been on my shelf about a year, as have many other books.) But I hadn’t heard much of the buzz, like I said, but it seemed like a potentially interesting North American, SFnal treatment of the Japanese film Battle Royale, so I thought we might as well give it a shot. When I heard there was a movie coming out — which was not long before it did come out, by …