Intellectual Ferment of a Different Kind
Imbibing Culture
What do we taste when we drink a glass of beer or wine? Are we imbibing the liquid itself? Or is there more to it? What about the conditions under which we consume the beer? Are we with friends at a pub? Is the beer …
A belated Happy New Year to all ye faithful Tempest readers! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season filled with plenty of good cheer. It’s been a few weeks now, but I’m back at it after my Kentucky adventures tracking the shy and retiring …
~Malthead Manifesto~ A spectre is haunting the craft beer world –– the spectre of Sir Maltalot. Laid low by a tsunami of IPA, the wild yeasts have set in to consume his legacy. Extreme beerists have entered into an unholy alliance with sharp-fanged sours, enlisting …
Act II –– Night. Afterward, dawn. […] The scene represents a forest, and in the forest is a cave. By the cave sits a third actor in tights, representing yet another gnome. […] Enter the god Wotan, again with a spear, and again in the …
Nose, nose, jolly red nose / And what gave thee that jolly red nose? Cinnamon and ginger, nutmeg, and cloves / And that’s what gave me that jolly red nose. At the beginning of his chapter on warm beer, W.T. Marchant expresses regret that “some …
Cue up all the old clichés about time’s swift passage, for it has been three-quarters of a year now since I posted my first article on A Tempest in a Tankard. Thanks for all the support over these past several months! I’ve learned plenty from …
Some beers dare you try them. If you’ve spent more than a few minutes of your time perusing the offerings at any bottle shop worth its salt or reading the buzz surrounding “avant-garde” beers and breweries, you’ll likely have come across a curious cabinet stocked …
By noon the early October drizzle had turned into a downpour. Several hours lay between the Alpine peaks and meadows of Chur, where I had been visiting my grandmother, and the drab Saarbrücken way-station where the train traveling between Mannheim and Paris had just deposited …
Oxford American Dictionary’s “Word of the Year” for 2007: locavore. A locavore attempts to consume food that is locally produced – within a one hundred-mile radius, if possible. As of June 2013, the number of breweries in the United States had reached 2538, with more …
“Pinning Down Place” is Part II of my series on place and locality. For Part I, “A Reflection of Place, But Dimly,” click here. For Part III, “Romancing the Local,” click here. Turning Urban Space into Concrete Place Just as we had begun the short …