5 posts tagged “beer”

Sunset (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

It had rained for most of the day. As the afternoon light faded, I sat outside under the eaves of the house with a tall glass of beer and edamame. There were no butterflies or dragonflies or wasps. The few mosquitoes didn't disturb. Beyond the garden hedge, the air was thick with moisture. I read my book, and the grey sky turned pink with the sunset.

Damp autumn twilight:
Drinking beer in the garden
as the sky turns pink

--Julian 

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

On Monday after work, sitting on the patio before dinner with a tall glass of beer and the newspaper, surrounded by green, the air balmy, something or a combination of things took me the other side of the world to a garden of an English country pub, sitting with a tankard of ale on a long summer's evening.

--Julian

My friend Chris recently walked away from a secure career in order to devote himself to what he loves: craft brewing.  He's now the head brewer at Baird Beer.  I respect the hell out of him, and, of course, can't get enough of the beer he produces.  He sent this around to help his friends understand what gave him the courage to make the career leap.  There is an opportunity for audience participation near the end of this clip.  If you want to take part you should have a beer ready.

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  All my traveling life I have used Lonely Planet guides.  They have always seemed to me more or less okay, and once upon a time (before one started noticing them poking out of the backpacks of just everyone) they even seemed cutting-edge and hip.  Fodor's, on the other hand, seemed like the sort of guidebooks that my parents might have thought about before rejecting independent travel altogether in favor of a guided tour.  In Prague I had occasion to compare the guides to that city published by each of these companies, and I'm here to tell you that Fodor's Prague beats Lonely Planet Prague hands down.  The information they include is the information I need, and the maps are actually usable.  Either Fodor's guides have gotten hipper, or I, approaching fifty, have grown into them just as I imagine I will, all too soon, be comfortable sporting loafers and stretch pants.
• Another misconception: I had always had the notion that, as far as Europe was concerned, there was no point in going North of Paris.  Anything above the French capital, I had mistakenly believed, was expensive, and the people (also the weather) frigid.  The stereotype seemed somewhat true in Germany, but in Vienna and Prague not at all.  The Viennese seemed almost Italian (I'll keep the national stereotypes coming fast and heavy here) in their approach to the pleasures of life, and the Praguers with their great good humor, were a treat.  The cities, too, were remarkable, both architecturally and in the artistic treasures their rulers had managed to amass.  Add to that the beer and the excellent food and . . . what's not to like?  (Something I learned is that German restaurants outside of Germany suck.  I had been lead, by eateries in Japan and the States, to believe that Germanic food began and ended with hot dogs and stodge.  I discovered on this trip that this is not the case at all.)  I look forward to further travel in the former Hapsburg Empire / Eastern Block.
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  Berlin Noir (Crime, Penguin)
  The three novels collected in Berlin Noir, which (though I only spent one day in the German capital) seemed appropriate reading for the trip, are not nearly as good as the cover blurbers (Salman Rushdie among them) say they are.  Though the author, Philip Kerr, does manage occasionally to rise to Raymond Chandleresque levels of wit, he is also capable of writing sentences which are just phenomenally bad. Take, for example, the second of this pair: "Smoke drifted up to the vaulted ceiling of the nightclub like the thickest underworld fog.  It wreathed the solitary figure of Belinksy like Bela Lugosi emerged from a churchyard as he strode up to the table where I sat."  To be fair, however, I should add that, sloppy writing notwithstanding, the narratives are compelling enough that I read the whole anthology in the course of my journey.  Alan Furst, however, does this sort of thing much better.
  

—David

" . . . that expansive, unanchored, and vaguely drifting state of mind which anything over three pints will induce."

                   ---Nicholas Blake (a.k.a. Cecil Day Lewis)

I came across this phrase at 7:30 this morning on a crowded commuter train, and, even--or should I say especially--at that ungodly hour and in that inauspicious setting, the words made me thirsty for both the pints and for some expansive, unanchored drifting.

---David