Every glass of beer holds a number of miracles: the malt, so willing to turn its own starch reserves into fermentables; the perfect bitterness of hops that just happens to be a passable preservative as well; the complex protein chemistry that allows foam to form and remain just so, until the glass is drained. But of all the many wonders of beer, yeast remains by far the most profound.
The holidays are upon us, the pilsners and margarita mix are put away and the search is on for something truly festive. Holiday ales are nice, and so is a nip of something spirituous, like a well-aged rum. But nice as these are, they don’t have the drama of something rich and creamy, topped with a billowing cloud of whipped cream and dusted with the musky joy of nutmeg. It’s gotta be that last culinary survivor of jolly old England, eggnog.
If yeast didn’t exist, Douglas Adams would have had to invent it.
Among a host of imaginary species, the author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy created the babelfish, a creature that feeds on the soundwaves of one language and excretes the soundwaves of a different language. The interplanetary traveler slips a tiny babelfish into his ear—Adams wrote science fiction, after all—and can instantly understand any spoken language in the universe. The babelfish is “so mindbogglingly useful” that it triggers an intergalactic theological debate.
Wed Jul 3rd, 2013
The Young Turks and Old Lions of Breweries
Once a year the whole world of craft brewers, and I do mean the whole world, gathers together for four days of catching up, digesting new ideas, staying up way...
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