Intellectual Ferment of a Different Kind
Imbibing Culture
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. Just as we had begun the short ascent up the hill to the Augustine …
In Sanlúcar One of my favourite food and beverage combinations is a glass of Manzanilla accompanied by shrimp sautéed in olive oil and garlic, dusted with Pimentón de la Vera, and finished with a shot of Oloroso. The bracingly dry sea-breeze crispness is the …
For this, the eighty-third installment of The Session, Rebecca of The Bake and Brew puts forward the notion of tasting “against the grain.” She urges us to consider how much our taste or opinion of a craft beer is affected by a few of the …
In this, the first of many guest posts to come on A Tempest in a Tankard, I’m extremely happy to welcome wine scholar, Kevin D. Goldberg, a friend and fellow German history colleague who has researched and written extensively on the nineteenth-century German wine trade. …
Last night I finally got around to brewing my chocolate peanut porter. With the cocoa nibs and peanuts I’ll add to the fermenter, the beer is no poster child for the German Reinheitsgebot (Purity Law), but at least I got the peanuts from the local …
*The inspiration for this piece comes from early November’s The Session topic. Here’s a scenario that was making the rounds in many a cultural sensitivity workshop about a decade ago. It goes something like this: A doctor was driving home early one evening and came …
The early days of September 2013 are days that will not go down in infamy in many places. But in a small corner of the interwebs, the September installment of “The Session: Beer Blogging Friday” generated no small quantum of sound and fury. These sessions …