Beer Class Fin / Letter to Cook's Illustrated

I wrapped up Beer Class last weekend and bottled all my ale. It took a while, and my arm got sore from all the various movements it takes to get beer into an atmosphere-free bottle and pop a cap on it. I screwed up some of them and they're flat but for the most part I have a sizable quantity of imminently quaffable bottled beer. Not enough to throw the party I was thinking of, but enough to always have some on hand for the next few months. It's a nice feeling. An Amish kind of feeling.

Also, while I was making dinner tonight I came up with a technique that I felt was worth sending in to Cook's Illustrated, for their Tips & Techniques From Readers section. See if you spot this gem in their next issue:

Dissatisfied with drizzling and brushing as methods for getting olive oil onto bruschetta bread, I now pour the olive oil onto a dinner plate and rub the bread around in it. This gives me a perfectly even coating that is ready for grilling.

This technique also applies well to the bread for grilled panini.

Best Regards,
Téodor Orezscu
Achewood, CA

As soon as I came up with that I knew it would be perfect for their mag. Usually it's just filler from housewives who think it's brilliant that their biscuit cutters do double-duty as cookie cutters. My bruschetta technique is kickass.

Beer Class II

I had beer class at 10am on Saturday morning so Friday night I took it kind of light, didn't go to Ray's and just hung back watching "Deadliest Catch" on TV (this show about the horrible life of Alaskan crab fishermen, many of whom die every year). I was up bright and early Saturday and decided to walk to the class, which was about a mile away. Felt great.

When I got there no one was around, but the door was open so I wandered in and pretty quick this guy wandered out to meet me. The place was decorated like a really expansive two-level frat house, and smelled like a party. As it turns out the guy was the owner and I was the only dude on the roster who showed up for the class. I guess Saturday morning is not the best time to schedule an event for the alcohol enthusiast.

The dude was super cool and we set about getting a kettle of water hot enough to steep the ground barley mixture into. I had wanted to make a Belgian white ale but he poured me a mug of their blonde ale and I was pretty amenable to that, so I decided to make that. Their beers were strong, around 6-7%. It was a pretty stiff breakfast after the granola bar I had munched on the way up.

We threw the ground barley recipe into a ladies' lingerie bag and let it steep in the hot water for like forty-five minutes or so. After that we removed it and mixed in some syrupy thick stuff, I forget what it's called 'cause we went outside for a smoke and a mug of their California ale, kind of a lighter thing, under 4%. Extract or something. We talked about his tricked-out Ford Fairlane. Apparently it can go 186.

I think immediately thereafter we dropped some Dextrose and some other substance in and mixed it up pretty well. Then it was time for the hops. We mixed in three different kinds of hops that looked like little fish food pellets. I got to grind them up in my hand. If you ever wonder, hops seem like the main thing that ales get their flavor from.

After that we did a lot of stuff but most of it was pretty scientific and not a lot of fun to read about. The basic idea is that he's gonna crash the brew soon and kill the yeast, and in two weeks after that I can pick up all five cases. I'm thinking of throwing a party when I get 'em all back -- no reason Ray can have the only parties around here. My theme is gonna be stuff I made, from the beer, to the sausages, to the salsas, to the lemonade, to the potato salad to the guacamole. I'll prep for three days and get it all planned out, from paper towels to cutting surface area to lawn games. Nice. Maybe I'll do it for my birthday.

Beer Class

I saw in the Underground community news bulletin thing that some local brewery is having a "brew your own beer" two-part seminar where you get hands-on experience making your own batch of brew. You get to choose from most of the major styles, and take home a case and a half, completely bottled and ready to drink. The first class is tomorrow and the next one is in about a month when the fermentation or whatever is done. I'm hoping to do a belgian white beer-type thing.

It's been a long time since I took a class of any sort, and my main worry just now was that I'd have to be paired up with some dumbass. Oh, shit—what if Ray's in the class and we wind up as partners? Nah, if Ray wanted to learn to brew beer he'd fly a dude in from the Pacific Northwest and basically ignore me. Wait, that already happened. Sorry, sore subject.

I'm sure I'll have something to tell when I get back. Going to a beer-making class at 10am on a Saturday is a blog entry just dying to come into the world kicking and screaming. Maybe I'll hang out at the 7-11 next to the brewery before class and see how many of the aspirin/MGD customers toddle over to the seminar (or teach it).

There is a baby around

So Chris and Liz finally had their baby girl, and it's been pretty topsy-turvy in the house since then. It's hard to get any solid sleep, but I'm not considering moving out or anything. Chris says the baby's schedule evens out and it starts sleeping through most of the night within a few months. I think he felt kind of bad—he actually thought to buy me a bottle of Dalwhinnie at Trader Joe's, to help me stay asleep through the constant minor disturbances in the house. He's never done anything like that before. Maybe this baby is humanizing him a little bit. In the past we didn't really get much out of him other than occasionally watching Mr. Show DVDs together or drinking a bunch of beer and shooting his pellet gun at expired eggs, but lately he's seemed more...accessible. Maybe the veil comes down with enough sleep deprivation.

Whoah. I just walked into the kitchen to get a Diet Pepsi and he stormed in, the baby screaming its head off in the other room. He reached into the silverware drawer, pulled out a chopstick, and broke it furiously over his knee before throwing it into a corner and storming back out. He didn't even notice me.

I'm going to lock my bedroom door tonight. I don't think he'd actually use me as a thing to kill, but it at least might keep him from coming in and snapping my Giant Sequoia novelty pen in two (when you lean the pen over, the car rolls through the car-size hole in the giant sequoia).

Pat's "Oscars Party"

I saw Pat on the sidewalk this morning and he asked me if I would like to go to his Oscars Party. I hadn't heard anything about it, but didn't have plans so I agreed. I told him I'd bring some 7-layer dip and Fritos but he told me not to, that everything was taken care of. I forgot that Pat is weird about processed foods.

I got there around five but no one else had shown up yet. Pat's TV was playing Noam Chomsky videos, even though the red carpet coverage had started, and he was talking quietly with Nice Pete in a corner. There was a lot of paperwork on the table, but I didn't see any snacks. Maybe they were in the fridge, I thought. I didn't want to be rude and go opening doors, so I sat on the couch.

They kept talking while I sat there, and I couldn't switch over to the Oscars coverage because (a) Pat hides his remotes, and (b) the channel selection buttons on his TV have little metal panels krazy-glued over them. After about twenty minutes they were still engaged in what was an increasingly heated whisper-discussion. At one point Nice Pete slammed his opened palm really, really hard against the wall and ran upstairs. I figured I had about three and a half seconds before he came back down and murdered something, so I jumped up and walked past the table towards the door. I got a quick glance of a bunch of clipboards full of petitions to "permanently cancel the racist, classist, and obviously fixed" Oscars.

Pat was facing silently into the corner as I let myself out and ran like the wind back to our place, where I locked the door and turned on the tube just in time to see Chris Rock take the stage. Was I the only one in town who didn't know about Pat's "Oscar Parties"?

Garden State

Well, I was pretty jilted after we watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but then we watched Garden State. It was like going on a roller coaster where you got your life dumped out at the end and among the peanuts there was that one tin whistle. And when you blew on the tin whistle, it made that one pure sound. The one that makes German boys drop all the onions into their carts and scurry for home.

Eternal Coin Sorter of the High Concept Movie

We got Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind from Netflix and I have to admit I'm not very good with movies like that. I held my ground and didn't give up after fifteen minutes like I did with Memento, though, and it did pay off. It's one of those movies that will probably keep paying off for a few days, while my mental coin-sorter fits it all together and makes sense of it. I got the general gist, but I felt like I missed about 80% of the mise-en-scène's loaded guns. Maybe that's the mark of a great film, that you can watch it a dozen times and still not feel done. If I were an artist, I'd want people to revisit my work and find more in it, not just throw it away like some single serving Whip-It of "Friends." Sadly, I'm not an artist. I sit around in my room and bang out chord progressions that sound like stuff The Edge threw away thirty years ago.

Porn house moved

Just like that, they were gone. Roar, Self Made, the chubbies...not a trace. I looked out the laundry room window today and noticed that all the blinds in their rental were up, and all the furniture and posters were gone. When did they move? I haven't been away for any significant stretch of time, and I think I would have noticed such a big operation. Things like this make you feel like you're crazy.

So much for my catering business. How am I supposed to come up with next month's rent? If I have to freelance-design any more business cards and stationery for bullshit little businesses I'm going to hit my writing hand with a hard mallet. Where's Ray? Maybe now that the sun has come out it's time to hit the links. At the very least, we can set up a PuttPro on his living room carpet and throw some money around until I'm solvent again.

I got one of those little things for coffee.

You know, those little blender-stick things that you stick into a cup of milk and sugar to froth it. After dicking around with coffee drinks for a while this afternoon, I stuck it in a bowl of olive oil, lemon juice and egg yolks and made an excellent mayonnaise. Feeling clever, I stuck it into a bowl of smoked salmon, cream cheese and chives and made a nice spreadable mousse. At that point I felt pretty unstoppable so I used it to blend up a double grapefruit margarita. The tequila and coffee combo put me in the zone and soon I had used it to carve a pretty decent Ben Franklin in the side of a pineapple. This thing is awesome.

Quiet around here

There's been a really bad cold snap around here lately, so Roar took his crew down to Mojave to film until it warms up again. Too bad, I was really enjoying cooking for them. Lyle's not around and Mr. Bear and Philippe aren't big eaters, so I don' t have anyone to make chuck roasts or chickens or anything large-scale for. It's back to grilled sandwiches and little fish filets for a while. Maybe I'll head up to the funny Asian markets in San Bruno and try to learn something new. I've always wanted to make Peking duck, maybe I'll give that a spin. No, scratch that. The whole point of Peking duck is the crispy skin, which is worse for you than bacon, and I need to lose this winter weight. Bears usually lose winter weight while hibernating, but we don't really hibernate anymore, and it's a rough transition. We all look like mouth-breathing fatsoes in our Christmas pictures, but come Memorial Day we all look like Scott Weiland. Well, not exactly, but we don't look so much like furry little Paul Prudhommes.

San Bruno

Pat got me this gift certificate to an obscure used book/record shop up in San Bruno, so I took the NSTL up there tonight to see if there was anything I wanted. Honestly, I think he re-gifted the certificate from that Arthur guy, since neither of us would ever have any reason to be in San Bruno, but so what. It was an excuse to get out and see someplace new. As it was, I'm pretty glad I went.

San Bruno has an underground kind of like ours, but it's closer to San Francisco and more working class and more mixed-ethnicity. I got off the NSTL and after a few minutes I realized that there were absolutely no chains of any sort: no McDonald's, no Starbucks, no major groceries, not even a major gas station. It was like the entire downtown strip was locked in 1973. I saw two Korean bbq places, innumerable Chinese joints, a big A-frame pizza place, vacuum cleaner repair shops, Mexican mercados and taquerias, a red-checker Italian place, one of those shops that rents school band instruments, a kids' furniture outlet...I need to get back there. It reminded me of the kinds of streets dad would cruise down when I was a kid, taking us to pizza at a place that I so dimly remember as to not be entirely sure it ever existed at all.

Anyhow, I went to this used book/record shop and poked around a while. It was mostly self-published leftist literature from the 60s and 70s, including a physics textbook called Physics Needs an Enema! I flipped through Physics Needs an Enema! for a bit, but it quickly revealed itself as a book about how only published physicists get listened to and how to get published you need to tell a politician what they want to hear or be from "old New England money." It seemed like pretty personal invective, like the guy was a physicist who just wouldn't "play the game" and spilled his anger into a five-figure vanity printing project. He used a lot of Crumb drawings for which I'm sure he didn't have licenses. When he needed to illustrate a principle for which he had no Crumb drawing he had drawn his own in an approximation of the Crumb style, and it made me really uncomfortable.

I got sick of the scene pretty quick and tucked the gift certificate into the breast pocket of a log-sawin' Bolshevik. The counter guy, a jawless fuzz-faced old hippie who looked like an anutritional Marx in sweatpants, looked up as I walked out, but I figured he didn't have the local pull to sic the cops on me for Non-vocal Disrespect.

I picked up a hot bowl of birria at some place called Tacos Dos Tallarines, complete with chopped cilantro and onion, and hopped back on the NSTL.

Téodor's Temptations

Alright, I didn't actually name it something corny like that, but I did start up a craft services table at the porn set they have going next door. I'd never done anything like this before, and I didn't really know what I was doing, so I made a big pot of chili verde, which I served with spanish rice, black beans, corn tortillas, guacamole, sour cream, and flan for dessert. That went pretty well; people just ate what I had and stopped eating when I ran out of food. I cleared a couple hundred and Self Made (yes, that's what their crazy little Thai cameraman wanted me to call him) even helped me carry the pots back through the fence to our place. He works like he's cranked on speed but he's not shaky at all. I think he really just likes what he's doing. If his English was better we'd probably hang out after shoots. As it is, he makes a call on his cell phone and one of a rotating schedule of ruined 80s Nissan sedans m-m-mutters up (their mufflers are always shot; do they park in saltwater puddles?) to claim him.

I got the gig through Roar, who is kind of the main honcho at the set. I ran into him a few days ago at Trader Joe's and with nothing better to say I said "Oh hey, I think you guys just moved in next door to us. I'm Téodor." I figured he'd be personable, what with the porn gig and all, and he came through as predicted. "Oh, yeah, I been meaning to say hi," he said as he shook my hand. "Nice to meet you, T." He said it in that L.A. kind of way where you know he hadn't really been meaning to do anything, but since he immediately gave you a nickname you felt close.

I asked him if he ever needed any catering for his set next door, and mentioned that I was trained in catering and would be happy to set them up. He said to stop by sometime, and I did, and a few bowls later I had an unspoken contract for today's set. I'll be back tomorrow. They film a lot of footage every night, it seems.

Boogie Nights neighbors

Last week a little porn company moved in next door. They also rented out an office in this small-timey industrial complex around the corner, and every night all these chicks in new Mustangs show up, the kind that have the low-rise jeans and big old handlebar tattoos over their asses. They've already started filming at the house, which has a pool and hot tub, and I guess they rent the office so they can have a separate business address for when perverts stalk them. Seems like S.O.P. for a porno outfit. So far it looks like they do mainly BBW gonzo, with really skinny studs. Must be kind of a niche thing. I want to run across one of them casually one day and offer to cater the sets. It'd be a nice excuse to do some good cooking, get paid, and have a really weird afternoon.

Rat in the garage.

I was lying in bed on the "cusp" of sleep at around 2am when all of a sudden there was this horrible gushing noise in the garage. I figured the hot water heater had burst a hose, and if that was the case then a lot of my storage boxes were going to get ruined, so I jumped up and ran in there.

Apparently some rat had jumped across the faucet of the laundry sink and pressed on the hot water lever, because hot water was shooting out of it at full tilt. Shaken but relieved, I turned it off and made a mental note to make handle-clips out of old coat hangers. If that happens again while no one's around, there could be real damage. I also got the Rat Zapper out. The Rat Zapper is this little shoebox-size thing with four double-A batteries and an electrical floor that electrocutes rats who wander in after the bait (we throw in dog kibble). It looks sort of dumb but it really works. It killed a rat the size of a corn cob last time I set it up. I prefer the Rat Zapper to traps because it's bloodless and instantaneous. Sometimes when you use traps you just snap off like half the head and they wander around for a while, spreading bad karma and jammy thick blood.

Okay, back to bed. While I was up I put some phyllo dough in the fridge to defrost. I thought that maybe tomorrow I'd bake a Napoleon of phyllo, roasted red pepper, mozzarella, and chopped kalamata.

I'm allergic to brandy; lost hat

I went down to the Corner-Sav to get some Corn Nuts and an egg sandwich and behind the counter I saw this row of liquor bottles. Thanksgiving was here and there was a chill in the air so I thought hey, why not get some brandy. That's an autumn/winter type drink. So, I picked up a bottle and it gave me the hiccups immediately. This stinks. I've had the hiccups for almost two hours.

When I was walking down there I saw this baseball cap on the darkened sidewalk. I examined it and it said AMICI'S, the name of this local thin-crust pizza chain. I walked about ten feet past it and then thought that there might have been a dead body in the hedge along the sidewalk, you know, that belonged to the hat. I walked back and peered into the hedge but didn't see any feet or hands or anything. That's when it dawned on me: I watch too much Law & Order.

Is Thom Yorke a douchebag?

He's the guy from Radiohead. I read a big interview with him today and he sounds like kind of a wiener. "Politically active vegan," that kind of thing. Like Moby but with singles that don't rely on Gwen Stefani. I've always thought that he made pretty sweet music but now after listening to his self-indulgent whineliners he comes across more like the mope who quit high school to lose weight and work on his pallor.

My dad always said that Jay North got famous too fast. In 1959, at age eight, Jay played Dennis the Menace, and from that point on was apparently typecast and unhireable. He explored a life of drug addiction and weight gain and now works as a prison guard in Florida. Thom and Radiohead hit the big-time right out of college and apparently their mentality is suspended in the early-20s aspic: a lush death-ambrosia of emotional fear, inability to use Microsoft Excel, and terror at the prospect of waking up the next day lest they be a robot with a large black rubber differential instead of a neck.

I guess I don't need Radiohead to explore the depths of micro-personal despair any more. It's great stuff, and they're unparalleled in pulling it off, but quit being the Beastie Boys, you know. I don't want to watch a snowy-haired MCA chiki-cha'ing a mic and pronging like a land-elf. I want him to be reading about epidemiology in an upholstered chair on the upper west side. He's old enough to be my extremely young father, for christs's sake.

Chris did not move to Spain.

Chris didn't move to Spain, as threatened, but he has been considering taking a vacation at the cabin (his family has a place up in the gold country) soon. He grew up in that area and gets kind of nostalgic for it when it's snow season. Maybe I'll tag along and do some hiking and fishing. Or maybe I won't, and just sit around eating things out of bags and using the computer instead.

In other news...Cornelius wrote me. His big romantic adventure was kind of a flop (duh) and he's headed home in about a week. Says he's bringing me one of those big furry hats and some kind of rare vodka that we can't get here. It'll be nice to have him back around -- the place has been kind of a frat house since he left. He has this normative effect on the place, where people aren't as inclined to leave dishes and dirty magazines around. Except for Lyle. If we had the Pope coming over, Lyle wouldn't think twice about wearing his old "CHOAD MAN" t-shirt and drinking MGD out of a vase.

Election Night

It's pretty tense around here. It looks like Kerry's leading by a marginal amount, with four hours left in the vote. Chris is pacing around the house making all kinds of bold claims about moving to Spain if Bush wins. His thinking is that people always threaten to move to Canada if they don't like the outcome of an election, but why would you want to live in Canada? Spain has a lovely climate, a great food culture, and topless beaches. Canada's national dish is "poutine," which is french fries baked in gravy, and it's so cold there that any exposed nipples immediately harden into pebbles and fall off of the breast, leaving only a small spot of blood.

Brew Company Update

I spent about fifty hours pro bono making beer labels for Ray to look at. I expensed a bunch of those $3-$9 boutique beers, some domestics like Bud and Coors, and a few antique labels off eBay. I like to do a bit of research, let the ideas settle into my subconscious, and then stay up all night a few times when it's silent in the house, just letting the mouse go wherever it wants. I had some really nice vintage woodcut techniques going on, and even created a new typeface that evokes Copperplate but isn't obviously based on it. You could have seen any of my comps on any shelf in any liquor store.

I dropped them off in Ray's mail slot, since he wasn't around, and figured I'd hear from him later that night or, at the latest, the next day. I even skipped a few trips down to The Smoke with Beef (The Tenmen were the house band for a week) just because I figured he'd call and want me to come over so he could talk about getting the artwork into production. A week passed, no dice. I didn't contact him because I don't like to force people to say things about the work if they're still thinking about it. The ball was in his court.

After another week I started to worry that he hadn't gotten the package of comps, so I stopped by and knocked on his door. It swung open, so I wandered in. I heard him talking with Petey in the kitchen, so I headed that way, but then something in the living room caught my eye: huge stacks of cases of beer. Excited that he might have used my labels and just forgotten to tell me, or wanted to surprise me, I went and popped one of the boxes open.

I couldn't have been more shocked if I'd found my own disembodied head staring back at me. There they were, twenty-four gleaming brown bottles of beer, with...with the ugliest, most amateurish labels imaginable. The thing was, he and Petey had spared no expense: there was intricate die-cutting, foil embossing, even a hologram. I'll try to describe it.

In the center was a 3D hologram of a log cabin, about the size of an egg, and when you turned the bottle a little Abraham Lincoln came out and waved. On either side of the hologram were these low-res GIFs of eagles and barley that Ray had obviously gotten off the Internet and enlarged, and around these were gratuitous gold foil circles. There were typos in the copy about "authentic micro-brewwed flavor" and "rich, sophisitcated aromas." The thing that really killed me, though, was the typography of the title. Or rather, the lack of it. You know how sometimes a computer will replace a missing font with a version of Courier? That had happened to them here, so instead of whatever it was supposed to say, the text had overflowed the printable area and just said "HONEST AB."

I was so pissed off that I walked into the kitchen and glared at Ray. He acted like nothing was up and went, "Hey, Téodor! Long time no see! How you like our new bottles?"

I bit my lip, took the high road, and asked him if he'd gotten my label samples. He looked at me quizzically for a second and then said "Oh! Those other beer labels you scanned for me? Thanks, yeah! They gave us all kinds of ideas! How you like our new bottles?"

I didn't know whether to be flattered or to hit him on the head with a pan. Apparently my labels were so authentic looking that he'd assumed I had just given them to him for reference. I eyed a hefty skillet that was hanging from the ceiling rack, but felt the temper ebb. After a bit of explanation, he realized that they had all been for him, and he laughed and slapped his forehead while cutting me a check for two grand. I figure my stuff will get used after they sell out of this first batch, but the way things go with Ray, he'll probably win some sort of conceptual design award with those horrendous hackjobs and keep them in production.

Brew Company

Just got back from Ray's. He's really got something on his hands with these incredible new concept beers he and that Oregon Petey guy have been brewing. That Belgian fig/nutmeg lambic, Meyer lemon weissbier, crisp fennel/mint ale, roasted plum/brown sugar stout, chokecherry caramel barleymead, even this incredibly subtle toasted sesame single-wort that goes amazingly well with sushi....

He showed me this horrible logo he and Petey had sketched up. First off, the name they chose for their brewery is awful: "Rayle." Like "Ray" and "Ale." That was misstep number one. Secondly, it's set in the Copperplate font. Weinhard's wore that one out about fifty World's Fairs ago. Thirdly, well...who cares. It has no legs and it's not gonna fly. I'm going to set up some billables and creatively consult for them until they have a first-class ticket to slap on their packaging. This is good stuff and it shouldn't look like first-generation hackery. Given their druthers, these guys'd probably suggest a tie-dyed label concept and approve some second cousin's shaky line drawings of a jester riding a penny-farthing.