Take heed dear glutton there is even but a refuge for thee amongst the beige bulging bastions of the western suburbs!

My wife and I took the brave venture into the western suburbs this weekend to knock some glasses with my folks. Determined to find a dining experience that didn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out with baby toys, I decided to use this here internets to aide in my acquiring a high-fat, high-calorie, high-delicious meal that would be served with a decent selection of carbonated beverages.

I turned to the trusty BeerAdvocate BarFly directory and looked for a well reviewed beer bar in the area. After reading several mediocre reviews that all mentioned the Bavarian Lodge as a preferred alternative, I looked it up.

My christ, I have seen the face of god and it smells like Schweins Hax’n!!!

Located unassumingly on Ogden Avenue just north of Yackley in Lisle, IL the Bavarian Lodge is a tudor-style house with room for probably 150 to 200 guests. It’s split evenly in half, the west side is a sit down dining area and the east side is a bar with plenty of tables to belly up to and dine as well. The walls are appropriately decorated in murals, mounts and glass cases full of beer steins and glassware.

They serve authentic german cuisine and serve it very ceremoniously well. Cabage rolls, potato pancakes, schnitzel out the wazoo, rouladen, saurbraten, schpaetzel, thuringer and, my favorite, which I’m not sure I’ll be able to go another full week without ordering again, the Schweins Hax’n properly crisped.

From their menu:

A two-pound boiled pork shank, served skin-on… the best Eisbein this side of Munich!

What’s more is that their beer selection would hold it’s own amongst the finer beer bars in Chicago, and is, hands down the best beer selection you will find anywhere in Illinois west of the city. On the night we were there I was able to sample the following on draught: Duchess de Bourgogne, Surly Smoke (amazing!), Founders Backwoods Bastard, and Dogfish Raison D’etre. And this was only a fraction of the options of their 29 pulls. Their belgian bottled section lists near 100.

Now I’m a guy who will speak with a certain amount of hyperbole perhaps a little too often, but believe me that I am not speaking with even an ounce of hyperbole right now when I say this was the best dining experience I’ve had in possibly my entire life. How about that? And I’ve eaten at the Publican, the Bristol, Aqua in SF, Sabatino’s on Irving and everything in between pretentious haute bullshit and low rent greasy spoons in the best cities around this planet. The Bavarian Lodge was authentic, delicious, warm, unpretentious and totally fucking educated about their food and beer. The setting was inviting and home-like, the staff was attentive and friendly and the bill was surprisingly low.

I’m all itchy and bug-eyed and I’m afraid I may try and start a religion or something. I’m prepared to offer my first born just to see how the chefs might prepare it.

And, if you haven’t already been tossed into a tongue rolling revelry of culinary and zythological ecstasy than how about a set of house rules that ban children and hollering dipshits from the bar area?

I now understand how movements are started and empires are built. I now comprehend how the mind can be enslaved to a world of senses for ever and, more than certainly likely, for the betterment of all.

Amen.

I made a meatloaf yesterday for the USA v. Canada game. The meatloaf turned out better than the game.

I used New Holland’s Dragon Milk Oak Barrel Ale to flavor up the sauce. I kind of realized it wasn’t the best choice while I was buying it, but I was tired of looking and wanted to get started cooking. In retrospect I think a smoked beer like Schlenkerla or maybe even New Holland’s Charkoota Rye would have been a much better solution. Doppelbocks always seem to work well when cooking with red meat.

Anyhoo, here’s the recipe:

1lb 85% Ground Beer
1lb Jimmy Dean spicy breakfast sausage (I will use 3/4lb next time)
1 cup Ritz crackers crushed up
1 small white onion diced
1/2 a green pepper diced
1/2 a red pepper diced
7 garlic cloves diced
1 tsp Worsteschire sauce
2 eggs
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp cayenne
1 tsp garlic powder
2 tbsp black pepper
2 tbsp Baldridge’s

Mix all that together and put into a loaf pan. Cook at 375* for 45 minutes. Then cover with this sauce and cook for another 15 minutes.

1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup Captain Curt’s BBQ Sauce
8 ounces of Dragon’s Milk
1/2 cup of diced onions
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp cayenne

Reduce the sauce until it’s nice and thick.

After the meatloaf is done, transfer that bad boy to a plate and let it sit for about 15 minutes or so. While it’s doing that why not crumble up some bacon on the top of it?

Delicious.

This is a great article on how to clean off your yeast to reuse in your next batch of homebrew.

This is one of several ways to drop your costs for making your delicious homebrew.

We recently brewed a maibock using Rogue’s Pacman yeast as distributed by wYeast that we picked up from the nice folks at Homebrewer’s Outpost.

Today when we checked our gravity after about 5 days of fermenting we were a bit below our goal of 1.016, coming in at about 1.023. Knowing that PacMan yeast is supposed to attenuate quite well I was curious as to what caused the yeasts to be so bashful at the dinner table. Our temperature was decent at about 68*, I made a good sized starter, so what was the problem?

I checked out the wiki at homebrewtalk.com and read over their page on attenuation. Using a formula I got from that page

Attenuation = 100 % * (starting gravity – current gravity) / (starting gravity – 1)

I realized that our attenuation was about 62% as opposed to the 74% we were shooting for. Further down the page I came across the following:

water to grist ratio: the enzymatic activity of the amylases is affected by the thickness of the mash. Thinner mashes enhance the maltose production and therefore increase the fermentability. See The Theory of Mashing.

We had indeed gone short on this. When we did our first few brews we followed Papazian’s recommendation of 1qt/lb of grain. After a few brews we started noticing that 1.5qt/lb was actually giving us a better brew. But, as is sometimes the case, we flaked on our math and wound up reverting to the 1qt/lb. We noticed this and took note, but had little idea how this would effect our beer. Now it’s clear that a higher water to grain ratio is preferred in order to increase the fermentability of your beer.

Duly noted.

Go here to read the whole comic by the Oatmeal.

My wife and I went over to Bluebird last night for a few beers to celebrate – I’m not sure – the ever grinding wheels of time as they continue to where down on the thinning teeth of our souls’ cogs, forcing us to move slow and want to move even slower? Yes, that’s probably a good approximation of what we were celebrating.

We started with a bottle of Saison D’Epeautre that was served at the perfect temperature. This was a tasty, dry, mildly-spicy beer with just the right amount of a fleeting sweetness to keep it interesting.

But where the evening really came into it’s own was with the ordering of a 750ml bottle of Jolly Pumpkin’s “La Roja”. Brewed in the “flemish style” this beer hit every note presently getting my fairly large panties in a bunch. Funky with a little sour and fruit on the nose the beer drinks creamy, full, and with the perfect balance of sour and spice on the tongue. My eyes grew wide with amazement every taste I took of this well-crafted brew. I bowed in reverence and saw, perhaps, just a shimmer of light from the future radiating back onto my present self, beckoning me down a road of better living and finer brews cobble-paved by a deeper exploration of the flemish reds.

I was pleasently surprised to find that the unfortunately named Jolly Pumpkin brewery is not far from home, just over a couple borders in Dexter, Michigan. I will definitely be paying them a visit this summer. Too bad the motorcycle riding between here and there is pretty crummy.

On our way home the wifey-poo ducked into Hot Chocolate and picked up a baker’s dozen of Mindy’s cookies. All the cookies were insanely delicious though the molasses seemed to actually defy certain laws of physics.

Tim Webb, probably the most prolific writer on Belgium Beers and author of Good Beer Guide Belgium
, has a new TV series that is hopefully going to make it to a market near me (and you) sometime next year.

Belgium Beer Boner… Engaged!

Snowboarding is not a cheap hobby, especially for an aspiring degenerate living in the flatlands of Illinois. For that and a myriad of other equally limp excuses I managed a 15 year hiatus between our daily hill bombings after school at 4 Lakes in Lisle and when my wife finally inspired me enough to get back into boarding in 2005. A lot changes happen in a guy’s body between the ages of 16 and 31 – especially in the areas above the balls and below the neck – but what didn’t change in that time was the resounding pitch my neurons hit as I shuttle down a mountainside with a piece of plied fiberglass bound around my hooves.

Getting back into riding at an age just on the ripe side of young I wanted a board that was competant without getting ahead of me, reasonably priced, but well built and had some grounding in my roots as a rider having learned what passed as my skill on an 1988 Burton Air. After some research and demos I picked up a 2005 Burton Triumph.

Burton’s answer to an all mountain board fit the bill, but also came with some of the drawbacks lower priced Burton’s are known for: it was a bit stiff, a little too heavy, and didn’t have a whole lot of pop to it. This was fine for the first season or two as I was getting my sea legs back, but by last year my skills had progressed well beyond where I left them in the early ’90s and I was longing for a board that had better action and response, something that felt like an extension of me and not simply an addition.

After some research I settled on the 2009 Ride Prophet 164. I wasn’t doing any park riding and prefer mostly nice long runs hitting walls and kickers so I wanted something a little bit longer than the 160 I was riding on the Burton. I also wanted something that was going to edge a bit better as I was getting more comfortable at higher speeds. The Prophet and most of Ride’s boards are known for their great edging due to the high angle steeps on the edge as well as the material used – the same as is used in skateboard wheels – that help dampen vibrations on rougher, tighter snow. This has proved pretty beneficial in this year’s pretty underwhelming snow accumulation. What further put the Ride Prophet as my top contender was that it’s lines were a bit more severe than the very conservative Burton Triumph with a more spooned out nose and thinner mid-body, this combination would help it perform better in powder as well as packed stuff on groomers.

I picked the deck up for dirt cheap from The House Board Shop last spring when they had a 50% off sale. At $250 there was literally no better board that could come even close to suiting my specific needs for the mountain and then when you add in the wicked, magic dork graphics that bespeckled the board with wizardy sigils and all-seeing eyes laid in a gorgeous multi-layer transparency with a minimal color scheme, you had a snowboard cocktail that wooed all my little buttons into a seriously focused spending frenzy.

So she looked pretty and was hyped appropriately, but how did she ride?

Pretty good, I must say. I’ve tried her on the crummy packed shit at Devil’s Head, the crummy packed shit at the Canyons, the fluffier shit at the Canyons, some pretty decent stuff in Reno, Tahoe and also at Solitude and in every condition the response has been fantastic; the action is super live, the edging has been like a race car, and the weight distributes very well across the board making the board seem almost invisible or at least not in need of any conscious negotiating.

The one downside I’ve come up against so far is that it doesn’t seem to take a beating quite as well as the admittedly more brutish Burton Triumph. I’ve had my Prophet out for about 8 outtings this season and I’ve already pierced through every layer of my base and have begun chipping down through multiple layers on the top of my board. I do have a tendancey to go harder on my stuff than most, though I still can’t figure out how the hell I tore up the bottom the way I did as I haven’t been doing too much crazy stuff on rocks that I can remember. But the damages aren only disconcerting in relation to the time spent on the board, they are nothing some epoxy and TLC won’t fix.

All in all the Ride Prophet 164 is head and shoulders above the also very competant though clumsier 2005 Burton Triumph. It was the perfect progression for me with more aggressive handling and more taught action, the Ride Prophet certainly stands up as one of the more enjoyable all mountain boards available.

Anat Baron’s “Beer Wars” is finally available to stream on Netflix.

“Beer Wars” attempts to give the general consumer an insider’s look into the politics and pitfalls of the beer industry. With a couple of case studies, the most interesting being Sam Calagione and Dogfish Head, Baron shows the sysophisian struggle of the passionate craft brew industry against the monolithic big 3.

While not always successful “Beer Wars” does manage to illustrate many of the economic sleeper holds multi-national corporations have on America’s present interpretation of capitalism using the craft beer underdogs to help define and defend the more satisfying role in this battle of good versus evil. The film is at it’s best while exploring the passionate craft beer enthusiasts drafting them as the high-minded Robespierre’s pursuing great beer as both the finest weapon and the ultimate prize of this heated and holy war.

Baron has taken some annoyingly unsurprising criticism from beer geeks posturing as arm chair film critics, though typically these critics can’t seem to get beyond editorializing on the beer and brewers as people and recipes and miss the forest for the ultimately, in the context of what the film is exploring, not-very-important trees. In that way, “Beer Wars” works also as a successful mirror for craft beer enthusiasts to stare at themselves, smug and contemptuous, for a little while longer.