Category: beer

The Magic Beer Bottle

I’ve had my Magic Beer Bottle for ten days. It’s a harmless novelty, like Mattel’s famous Magic Eight Ball. You ask the Magic Beer Bottle a question and give it a shake. Then you turn it over, so the bottom is up, and the answer floats up to the bottom of the bottle.

Made by Magic Hops, there are caveats to using the Magic Beer Bottle. One, all your questions are supposed to be about drinking beer. That’s it, actually, except using the Magic Beer Bottle can affect your counting ability.

I find it an excellent aid for when I’m torn about having a beer. “Magic Beer Bottle,” I say, shaking it, “Should I have a beer now?”

Peering at the answer, I learn, “All indicators point to yes.”

That frees me from feeling guilty. After all, it’s fated for me to have a beer. Although your questions must all be about having a beer, the Magic Beer Bottle provides interesting answers. “Go with wine, this time,” it once told me. “Yes, drink an IPA,” it answered another time, while it suggested, “Yes, enjoy a lager,” at another questioning.

It has also told me, “No, you’ve had enough,” and, “Go pee first,” so it’s not all about encouraging me to drink. What really interests me about the Magic Beer Bottle are three things: one, the brown bottle is empty. There’s nothing in it. It doesn’t have a cap, so you can blow into the bottle.

I’ll get back to you on the second thing, as it escapes me now. Time to consult the old Magic Beer Bottle.

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Today’s Theme Music

We heard this on the blues station last night on our way home. We love Koko Taylor, and I like beer, so this works. I don’t know what year it’s from, or anything like that. It’s the blues, and it makes me feel good.

Here’s the fabulous Koko Taylor with “Beer Bottle Boogie.”

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The Beer Tree

I was with a friend at a concert last night. He drank a Bud Light while I enjoyed a 10 Barrel Apocalypse. He always drinks Bud Light.

Cool for him. My beer buds don’t align well with Bud Light. I find it too thin, and lacking in depth and flavor for me to claim as a regular, or even to have in my rotation.

I contrast this with my Wednesday night experience. One of the BoBs regularly brews his own, and brought a couple bottles for us to sample. He called it an Imperial IPA. From his description, it sounded like a double IPA. However you reference it, this beer was fantastically smooth and flavorful. He’d bottled it in May, so it was just under two full months old. I’d expected high I.B.U.s and hoppiness, but neither were present. With an A.b.V. of eleven point two, it had a kick.

What impressed me that night was first, his explanation of the ingredients, and how he brewed it. Next, another friend’s insightful questions about where the hops were sourced and other factors surprised me. In retrospect, it seemed like he’s contemplating brewing his own.

As I do when drinking beer – or wine – I became contemplative. I ended up contemplating beer over my coffee this morning. My coffee choice is much narrower than my beer choices, but it’s evolved to that point. For my morning coffee, I like a French or Italian roast, without milk, cream, or sugar. For my writing session, I prefer a four shot mocha.

For beer, I have a choice tree. I prefer dark beers, so they dominate my beer tree, but my beer choice depends upon the food, event, and offerings. At the top of my list are Imperial Stouts. They usually deliver a significant kick, so they’re not often chosen. Dropping down the list, I’ll look for stouts and porters, followed by ales and I.P.A.s, Pilsners and lagers. Besides enjoying dark beers, when sampling one of the others beer variations, I’ve discovered I like citrus overtones, especially grapefruits. I don’t usually like fruity beers, but this year, I enjoyed several delightful beers with watermelon. I’m not surprised, as I enjoy buying and drinking watermelon juice.

And yes, I like my beer cold. I’ve tried it warm, several times (you know, to get a data set), and I prefer cold beer with a moderately small head. As an aside, I’m not fond of coffee in beer, unless it’s in an ice cream float. A coffee flavored stout with vanilla ice cream on a hot day is a damn fine dessert.

The thing with all of this, as with so many things, is that our individual choices are unique, and our reasons for reaching them are often more complex than the thought we give to them. While I give my beers a lot of thought and like to taste from a large swath of samples, because you never know what might impress you, my buddy preferred his Bud Light because of its light flavor, low alcohol content, and the lack of need to think about which beer he’ll drink, and whether he’ll enjoy it.

Which is why I’ve made the coffee choices I’ve made.

 

 

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Today’s Theme Music

Had beers (Caldera Pilot Rock Porter for me, thanks) with my friends last night. A staid group, they’re retired materials and sound engineers, doctors, university professors, and physicists. A small group, just eight last night, I’m the youngest by eight years. None of those present last night knew this song. Hope you do.

Here’s ZZ Top performing “Beer Drinkers & Hell Raisers” on their nineteen seventy-three album, “Tres Hombres.” I listened to this album a great deal during my junior and senior high school years, especially in art class.

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Love Those Search Engines

I decided on a whim to look up my grandfather. He passed away long ago, and I was curious about what the Internet would uncover. It’s actually because I’m killing time while KDP manipulates my files.

So I put in “Paul Seidel Pittsburgh PA” to begin.

The search results were quick: “We found Patricia Seidel.”

Who is Patricia Seidel, and why is she coming up when I’m searching for Paul?

Besides Patricia, I found Paul Seipel and Mary Seidel. They did also find Paul Seidel, but not nearly as often as Patricia Seidel. She, I thought, must be amazingly popular or mourned.

I decided that I would add “obit” to see how results changed. That made a fundamental difference; besides adding Robert Seidel to the results, John, and Jonathan, I was also presented with the latest in Pennsylvania obituaries, and Harrisburg, PA. All references to Paul Seidel were now gone, except in my query.

Other variations were tried. So were other search engines. None of it mattered; they had found the results they wanted to present. It’s too bad it didn’t match what I wanted to find. Google was best, coming up with an ad for Family Tree that had seventy-nine death records for Paul Seidel. A few of them were in Pennsylvania. Besides that on Google, though, they found Suzanne Seidel for me – just in case I really wanted to find her, I guess – and Paul Uranker. Paul Uranker was Jayne Seidel’s brother. Boy, that cleared up a lot for me. I always wondered about good ol’ Paul and Jayne, and their relationship, although I never knew her last name was the same as mine. You learn something new, you know?

Google also gave us the results for the Railway Journal for some specific date and month that mentioned St. Paul. Grandpa Paul was a good guy who drank a lot of Iron City beers, worked for Montgomery Ward, smoked packs and packs of Pall Mall cigarettes, and rooted for the Steelers and Pirates on TV, but I never heard anyone call him a saint.

 

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Of Fitbits & Porters

Eight of us were in attendance at the weekly BoBs to toast Q (our late founder) and Harold Schlumberg. Of those eight, three were drinkers on the dark side. On that day, we were partaking of Caldera’s award winning Pilot Rock Porter. It’s great to be able to support a local business.

The three dark drinkers were arrayed together on one side, not by plan to sit with the other dark drinkers, but by choice about where we preferred to sit. Then, it was noticed that the dark drinkers all wore Fitbits. No one else had one. Further, all the Fitbits were the Charge 2 models.

Coincidence? What is the probability of the three dark drinkers sitting side by side wearing Fitbit Charge 2s while the five light drinkers, imbibing the Amber Ale, did not wear Fitbits?

Hell, I don’t know. You do the math.

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The Energy

Hey writers, Ever experience one of those days when small matters happen and escalate in your head? People and animals seem to act unreasonable. You spill something, clean it up, only to spill something else within a few minutes? And the news makes you want to take the vacuum cleaner and suck your brains right out of your head. Then you discover, look at the time, you’re well behind what you’d planned and now you need to rush, but things keep happening to detour and divert you, fueling greater exasperation and frustration.

No?

Well, I’ve had that sort of morning. It’s only minor things, but it’s distracting, enervating and debilitating. In fact, it’s downright degenerating.

Tell you what I’m going to do about it.

I’m taking all that frustration, bitterness, anger, resentment, despair, exasperation, well, all that negative shit spinning me around like a food processor on frappe, and I’m channeling it. I’m putting that crap into my own box and converting that energy into something helpful.

To do it, I have an imaginary bucket. Metal, painted purple with bright blue and yellow trim, it holds about five gallons. Rebel is written in orange cursive writing on its side. I scoop all that negative energy out of my aura and the air around me and put it into my imaginary purple bucket. Then I mime washing that crap clean, because I’m going to re-purpose it, but I want it clean.

Next, I have an imaginary red plastic funnel. I connect it to the imaginary port on the the side of my head. (Note: the head is real.) My imaginary port is up on the right side of the rear of my rear skull, above and behind my ear. (Note: the ear is real.) The port isn’t easily reached but my hat — which is real — covers it so people don’t stare at it, so I like it there.

Holding the funnel connected to my port up, I pour that bucket of negative energy into the funnel. The port has an imaginary tube inside my head. The tube leads to my energy transmogrifier. Originally invented by that amazing scientific team, Calvin & Hobbes, the transmogrifier can turn anything into anything else. Today, I’m changing that negative energy into positive writing energy. Once the transmogrifier has done its work, I press an imaginary button on an imaginary panel. The panel has a wireless connection to the transmogrifier. Once the button is pressed, the transmogrifier releases that fresh writing energy into my bloodstream and nervous system.

It feels great. It feels like I’m sitting on a warm, comfortable beach being courted by a wide aquamarine sea that teases me with a balmy, fresh breeze. An cloudless, azure sky acts as an umbrella against the world’s evil, mundane, and hate. I sip an icy cold IPA, just because, close my eyes and sigh with contentment.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

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Cheeseburger and Beer Ice Cream

I’m working on the chapter, “Ice Cream Headache”, which is part of the science fiction novel, “Long Summer”. I’ve been writing about the cheeseburger and beer ice cream that Carla once made for Brett.

Unlike many things in their society, her concoction wasn’t compiled, but was handmade. As an expert in Earth culture with an emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first century in America, she likes sampling ‘the real thing’. The cheeseburgers are one inch in diameter, with real cheddar, bacon, onion, mustard and pickle, as Brett likes them. After freezing them, she made ice cream with Venus Mon IPA, folding the frozen cheeseburgers into it, “Just like they did in state fairs,” she says.

She scoops it into a malt cone ‘that she made herself’. Brett restrains himself from his observations about her use of bots. She’s always using bots but claims she does things herself. In a flash into the future, he knows he eventually tells her this, causing a rift that can’t be mended.

Before letting him sample the ice cream, Carla asks if his taste buds are turned off. See, the sensory input from taste buds in the future can be controlled so you never taste anything foul by your standards. But she wants him to have the real experience, not something filtered by his taste buds and his preferences index. He lies, telling her, “Of course, it’s off,” while checking with his systems to turn it off. Then he samples the ice cream.

The sample is not the one I described, but another one, a moderately dark chocolate flavored with bourbon, with small chips of bittersweet chocolate, nuts, and marshmallows and swirls of salty caramel. This is one of the problems with being shuffled through moments of now. One thing is being experienced and then details change.

For some reason, after writing all of that, I now want a cheeseburger and beer, followed by some ice cream.

Time to go eat.

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