Looking for a few good hop growers

...actually, I'm looking for a whole bunch, preferably from an array of climate zones. There's a shortage of hops this year, one that will hit craft- (over 15,000 barrels per year) and microbrewers (fewer than 15,000 barrels per year) hard, and homebrewers the hardest. Maltose Express in Connecticut, where I went on Christmas Eve for a much needed stock-up, has had to impose a strict 4-oz. per customer limit, and is frankly out of the more popular varieties. In the coming batches, I'll be substituting Challenger for Yakima Magnum hops, Hallertau for Northern Brewer, and Willamette for almost everything. I'm not really that much of a hop-head (that Bust article I mentioned recently claimed that aggressively hopped beers are more of a guy thing than an American thing per se), but there's no getting around the fact that they are a key ingredient. According to uber brewgeek Ray Daniels,

(Hops) provide bitterness to counteract the sweetness of malt, thus making the beverage more palatable. They also provide some antibacterial properties that at one time increased the safety and potability of beer. Today this quality still aids in the preservation of beer....Hops contribute to head stabilization...(as well as to) appealing flavors and aromas.

Most recipes call for the addition of high alpha acid varieties, also referred to as bittering hops, at the beginning of the one-hour boil to establish the basic sweet/bitter balance of the brew; medium alpha acid varieties, or flavoring hops, about 15 minutes before the end of the boil to contribute to the beer's distinctive flavor profile; and medium-to-low alpha acid varieties, or aroma hops, in the last couple of minutes. Aroma hops can also be tossed in dry and allowed to soak for a week or more as the yeast ferments the wort. This technique is called dry-hopping and produces particularly pungent aromas. Using different varieties and strengths of hops and adding them at different times layers their impact and plays a key role in a beer's complexity.

Anyhow, that's why I need them--and while hop vines are reportedly quite hardy, their root systems are necessarily too big for me to try to grow them in planters on our fire escape. That's where you come in. If you have a fence, trellis, or pole and a place in your garden that gets at least a couple of hours of sun per day, have I got some rhizomes for you. Or more precisely, if you have a good heart and that sunny patch and are someone whom I know, drop me a line and I'll see to it that some suitable plants are delivered to your door in early spring. Some growing tips here. We'll figure out how to ship the cones later.

P.S. I'm serious.

crazy, the sequel

Yep, it was her--the Minneapolis girl and my alter ego. We've decided to keep each other.

crazy

Here is a story.

In my early-to-mid twenties, I became aware of another person with the same name as mine. I ordered a new pair of frames, and when I arrived to pick them up, the optometrist handed me the other girl's glasses. I'd call for a haircut appointment, and the receptionist at the salon would say, "Weren't you just here last week? No, wait, that must have been the other one." Once in a shi-shi stationery store, a saleswoman urged me to "sign the guest book"--and when I bent to comply, I saw that the name inked just above mine was, well, mine.

I got pretty paranoid about it. This was in Minnesota, where my family is from and where my parents had returned after a detour to the East that had taken up most of my kidhood. Minneapolis isn't a huge city, but it is funky and offbeat, and I thought of myself as funky and offbeat; and I'd just be there for a brief visit, seeing what there was to see, and not only was there someone running around with my name on, but we appeared to have similar tastes and habits. What if she's not as cool as I am and she's giving me a bad name? I worried. Or worse, what if she's way, way cooler than I am?

What our name is is not important. It could have been, it might have been you, you understand. Don't pretend you were any more secure back then. That's just not what those years were about.

Anyhow, time passed and Google was invented. If you type in our name today you get 5,910 hits. About 150 are for a real estate agent in Seattle, a chemist who works in the same general field as my brother, or a romance novelist. When th'usband and I first met, he dredged up maybe three or four that were about or by me; the other 5,756 or so are all Her. She's a well-known photographer with a show this week in the West Village. She's the type of artist that critics call a Beautiful Young Thing or a Glamour Puss when they're trying to be withering. Mostly they just can't stop talking about her.

I still get mistaken for her every once in awhile, because we are about the same age and both live in Brooklyn and although I'm no longer making art, I still really like the stuff. After I read--in an interview in my favorite magazine ever, naturally--that she suspects her "completely un-feminist" tendency to conflate the beautiful with the broken woman traces to the back brace she wore in junior high and high school, I knew I really wanted to meet her. "I think that that had a lot to do with the outside isn't what the inside looks like," she explained in the interview. "I didn't have the kind of brace you could see, it was under my clothes, but it was hard...." I nodded reflexively as I read. Me, too. That's how the one I wore was, that's the way I am, too.

I'd actually forgotten about the back brace thing when a package intended for her showed up at our apartment this week. It was full of DVDs about the 10th Mountain Division, soldiers who'd fought on skis in the Alps before coming home to found resorts like Aspen and Vail. The documentary makers shared our family name. "This is beyond coincidence," said th'usband, who is a aspiring documentary filmmaker and a World War II freak. He'd just been telling me about the 10th Mountain Division the other day.

I had to do a little bit of digging, but I found her number and gave her a call. The filmmakers were her parents, who live near my inlaws in Colorado. It turns out that she did live in Minneapolis for a little while, and that we live just a couple of neighborhoods away from each other now. "I know you're much cooler than I am," I told her, "but I'm OK with it." She laughed, protesting. Come to think of it, now I'm not even sure that's true--not because she didn't seem incredibly cool or because I'm still an insecure little wanna be, but because she seemed instantly familiar, like someone I've been friends with forever. In any case, we'll find out tomorrow, when we meet at last.

Ask the Huisvrouw: Hello? Hello?

so what's the deal? no time to blog while basking on a beach in mexico? or have you been stuck in a hotel room the whole time? we the readers need a beer, book, baking, beast update. at least copy in a letter to grandma so we know what's going on over there . . . .

No, no, I'm back. I'll get right on that. Soon. In the meantime, here are some things to read:

1. A long interview with my friend Alberto Blanco published serially. It's about poemas. I've been reading a new bilingual edition of his work put out by Bitter Oleander, and thinking a lot about the act of translation again: what I like, what I don't. So that's one thing.
2. Dorris Lessing's Nobel acceptance speech. Those are always good. Thanks, jvan.
3. Oh, yeah, read jvan's blog. It's pretty impressive, and besides, if we wear a groove into the links between the two pages my technorati rating might go up.
4. An article in the current issue of Bust about female beer makers that someone passed along to me and that doesn't seem to be online. Damn. I'll have to summarize that.
5. Further evidence of the unstoppable power of this wave we're on.
6. ....except that we postponed the How to Homebrew event, drank that whole keg of saffron tripel and I haven't been brewing. Gotta get on that. I think I'm going to check out these folks. Or these. Have I mentioned how ridiculous it is that there isn't a dedicated supply store in NYC? Gotta get on that, too.
7. We did go here and got whacked with oak leaves by Russians. Thanks, J.
8. I'm trying to do a Zen mental flip on a difficult acquaintance. It's, well, difficult, but she did point this out to me yesterday, which was great.
9. OK, and to make sure you don't get anything done at work today, check out this teapot video and feel your own dry, clenched little inner flower unfurl.

That oughtta keep you busy. Meantime, I've gotta go to work.

Ciao, bella/o

Love chocolate? Thank beer!

I need to write a status update on the current batch, which I hope to keg tomorrow. In the meantime, there was an article in the NYTimes today reporting that research suggests that MesoAmericans probably first made beer from cacao pulp, and only later discovered the yumminess that could come from fermenting cacao seeds. It stands to reason that if you follow the family tree of good things back far enough, they'll prove to all come from the same place.

Free rice, for real

A couple of weeks ago th'usband sent me a link to a little vocabulary quiz site that promises to earmark 10 grains of rice for U.N. food programs for each obscure, scrabble-grade word you can correctly define.

I thought he was just trying to see if I could be distracted from my newfound corporate zeal, but I got so addicted to trying to push my "vocab level" up past a high of 43 or 44 that I managed to feed a village anyhow. A virtual village, I figured. After all, this is the same husband who is always finding my latest item of credulity listed on some killjoy urban legend-buster site, so I was careful not to let myself be too taken in.

It turns out that the rice game is for real, though, and generated enough rice to feed 50,000 people for a day in October. That's pretty cool, but I know we can do better than that. If me and you and everyone we know (to borrow a phrase) can just spend 5 concerted minutes a day slacking off with the rice game, I figure we can feed the world.

Onion Soup

I'm making onion soup. That's an excellent thing to do when you feel that there is nothing to eat at home, and it's the closest thing to feeding the masses with loaves and fishes that we mere mortals may ever know. All it takes is a pound or more of onions, sliced thinly and sprinkled with salt and sugar and left to brown in butter and oil over medium heat while you root around for the other things.

If you're like me, you've got all kinds of useful things stuck away in the freezer. Take out that old bread now, the loaf that was dry and just short of molding when you threw it in there for safekeeping or breadcrumbs, whichever came first; slice it into baguette-ish slices and brush each side with melted butter. Line these up on a baking sheet and stick the whole business in the oven, set at 350 degrees. Check back in 10 minutes to flip them, and take them out 10 minutes after that. When you do, have a garlic clove peeled and cut in half on hand, and rub it on the cut sides of your toasts. Leave the oven on for browning purposes later. Anyhow, baby, it's (finally) cold outside.

In the meantime, keep adding lots of salt. You'd be surprised how much it takes, especially when you're using homemade stock, which has no salt in it and which by this time you've taken out of the freezer too if you're lucky enough, like me, to have a husband who makes it and concentrates it and freezes it into little cubes for just these kinds of occasions.

When the onions are looking good and brown and nigh unto burnt, you can switch to flour and sprinkle a good couple of tablespoons over them. Then stir like crazy. After 3 or 4 minutes, pour in a half cup (ish) of a sweet, dark rich alcoholic little something-something. It's supposed to be vermouth, but if you happen to brew chocolate stout and have that on tap, I'm sure you won't mind if you do.

With the hooch to loosen things up, you'll be able to scrape most of that brown goodness off of the bottom and into your soup. To which you should now add about 6 cups of stock, more salt, a bay leaf or two, and any spices that come to mind. The dried thyme is good, and the fresh Italian parsley you bought for the dinner party but then forgot to use is perfect. Put a whole handful of stems in there, and crank up the heat. You're going to boil it first, then cut it back to a simmer and keep it there, covered, for a half hour.

Here's where I've gotten to now: I've just shut off the burner and ladled soup into two bowls and picked out the parsley stems. Th'usband is spending the evening with a friend whose father just died, so he won't be home for awhile and his bowl can wait. Mine I top with the aforementioned toasts and a good stiff layer of grated Gruyere left over from last week's fondue, even if Gourmet--on whose basic recipe all this is based--says I ought to feel relieved for the chance to escape the tyranny of overcheesed restaurant onion soup; I pile it on and stick the bowl in the oven. Whoops. I forgot the Worcestershire and the brandy. I just recently bought a quality bottle of brandy so you'd think I'd be putting it on my breakfast cereal. Oh, well. I pour th'usband's soup back into the pot--we've really got to stop eating so late, but I don't believe that he'll make it back from Long Island in an hour anyhow--and dose it with two capfuls of the Worcestershire and a huge salad tong-type spoon of brandy. This means that his will be better than mine later on tonight, and of course whatever is left will be even better tomorrow. That's the way soup is.

But by now, the cheese on mine has got to be melted and all that's left but the shouting is for me to put it under the broiler for a minute to brown it. Then lift my spoon to you, dear reader, and bid you smakelijk eten.