Photo: Craig Kalnin
When asked by our regular Beer Hobbyist to take over the posts for a little while, we immediately though “Awesome! And we have a GREAT beer to start off with!”
Welcome to the Hobbyists Unibroue. We are very excited to have you with us.
We’ve long been a fan of the work that Unibroue does; they were, in fact, one of our first steps outside the bounds of the university mantra of “whatever’s cheapest!” Encouraged away from the Blues and Kokanees of the world (don’t judge, we all started somewhere…) by an older, wiser sibling, we ventured into one of their classic beers, La Fin du Monde, and never looked back. Dial the clock forward to 2007 and an impulse splurge on a single bottle of their just released “17” in celebration of their 17th Anniversary. Wow! Bold dried fruits, rich toasty malts and a complexity we’d previously thought reserved for the whiskies of the world (we had so much to learn back then…). We came home the next day with a case of 12 and an ear-to-ear grin.
Fast forward another 5 years, having lugged our case of beer through several moves, and 5 bottles remain. Untwisting the champagne-style cage we are excited and nervous, it has been over 2 years since the last bottle was opened. Would it have gone bad? Skunky? Stayed the same? Or would time have worked some kind of magic…
With an encouraging pop we liberated the contents, which pour a slightly cloudy, rich brown, almost like a root beer float as the ice cream juuust starts to melt. Fine, lacy head appears and stays with us until the end of the glass. The nose has retained much of its inviting dark fruit and toasty malts with a nice spicy edge to balance the sweetness; this is a beer just asking to be tasted. The flavour doesn’t disappoint – after 5 years this beer has clearly matured from being a young, rambunctious powerhouse of dried fruits and powerful malts, into a velvet wrapped steel bar. All the wonderful strength of the characteristic flavours remains, but time has smoothed the edges and allowed some of the subtler flavours to shine. The vanilla notes are much easier to detect throughout along with a great uplifting oaky finish, a result of being aged in French Oak, along with hints of rich dark chocolate, salted caramel and even a touch of grapefruit.
This is a beer that gives you plenty to linger over and think about but doesn’t completely overtake your palate. We can see why it has won numerous international medals, including the 2010 World’s Best Dark Ale (World Beer Awards). The strength of the beer was never overtly apparent when it was young, and even less so now – its 10% lies in wait like a cougar – you may not know she’s there until it’s too late – definitely a bottle worth sharing.
Unibroue suggests 5-8 years as the aging potential of this beer, and notes that the yeast added to the bottle helps maintain the shelf-life, consuming those dirty, rotten excess oxygen molecules that can ruin all your hard work… er… sitting around. Some basic rules on cellaring beers – cool (5-15 degrees Celsius), dark and stable temperatures are key, but so too is upright storage – even a corked bottle like this will fare better standing up tall than laying down on the job.
4 tablespoons each of coarse sea salt and sugar
one lemon
one lime
one orange
a 600 grams filet of fresh wild salmon
¼ cup of fresh dill, roughly chopped
Zest the citrus. Combine the sea salt and sugar together. Cut the filet in two pieces. It will work best if the two pieces are the same size.
Lay one piece of salmon skin down in a glass casserole dish. Cover the flesh of the salmon with the sea salt and sugar mixture. Cover the salmon with citrus zest and dill. Cover the other piece of salmon similarly with the sugar and salt mixture. Place the remaining zest and dill on the first piece. Place the second piece on the first piece to sandwich them together, flesh sides facing each other. Cover the casserole with plastic wrap and store in the fridge overnight.
The mixture will cook the salmon and as it does so, the salmon will throw off a lot of liquid. The next day, remove both pieces of salmon from the dish and drag each flesh side down through the liquid that the salmon has thrown off. Sandwich the filets together again (fleshy parts toward each other). Repeat this twice each day. Flip the sandwich stack so that each filet gets equal time sitting in the liquid mixture. Remain covered for 48 hours. If the fish looks like it has thrown off too much liquid and its edges are being cooked too much by the liquid, pour some of the liquid off so that it does not overcook the fish.
After 48 hours, the salmon will look bright with a lovely colour. Taste the brine to determine the flavour. Lay the salmon on a metal drying rack over a casserole dish and place in the fridge overnight to dry off some of the residual liquid.
The next day the salmon will be ready to serve – either on its own, or with red onions, cream cheese and capers on bagels, on salad, in smoked salmon eggs benedict – the possibilities are endless! Enjoy this recipe which one of our favourite chefs, Sandi Irving, taught us to make during a great visit we had together. This recipe was a critical way to help deal with the homesickness solely felt for the home-smoked salmon we devour whenever back in the northwest. Sandi is the Executive Chef at Nimmo Bay Luxury Wilderness Resort and in her off-seasons, she works as Entremetier at the Sooke Harbour House, both on British Columbia’s locavore heaven, Vancouver Island.
*A quick safety note: The fresh salmon that you buy at the store will have been frozen at sea, which is sufficient to stave off worms and other lovelies. If you are using salmon you’ve freshly caught yourself, please freeze it for 24-48 hours in order to ensure that this is done. Once the Gravlax is made, it can be stored in the fridge for up to 5 days – if it lasts that long.
Townsite Brewing: Zunga Blonde Ale
Photo: Craig Kalnin
We have been following the progress of Townsite Brewing, the new kid in BC brewing from Powell River, for some time now. We love our trips to the Sunshine Coast and the idea of having access to local, freshly brewed beer there is more than a little exciting. The brewery has been finished for a little while now and the beer has started to flow, so when they announced that the Lower Mainland got it’s first shipment of bottles we were right there!
Having first tried their Zunga blonde ale, it is a bit like a Transformer, there is more than meets the eye! There was a lot that made it seem like the least exciting of the range. BC isn’t exactly a hotbed of great blonde ales but then, this isn’t really a blonde ale in the North American sense. The name is not, as we initially thought, a reference to a dance based exercise craze (silly us, that is Zumba). As stated on the bottle, it is a reference to a local word for a rope swing, a much cooler story! We really like that they kept it local.
As you may be starting to guess, some of our initial judgements were wildly wrong, this beer is great! It’s light and crisp and refreshing yet nicely bitter. It’s perfect for summer. Despite being only slightly bitter (at 25 IBU) it comes across as a nicely balanced ale, much closer in style to a British Golden Ale. There is a influence of piney rather than the traditional North Western citrus hops and a sweet golden base that make for easy drinking. It’s a little bit different, not something commonly seen in this area, but that makes it a little bit special.
Honestly, our only gripe is that the label could be a bit more bright. This beer is perfect for summer. The label even features someone in a bathing suit on a rope swing, but the colouring is muted and dark. That said, it does have everything we would want to know about the beer (other than perhaps the hop varietals used) and we love the brewery logo!
We haven’t had a chance to sample many of Townsite’s other beers but after trying the Zunga, we will be keeping our eyes open. As a lighter beer, it pairs excellently with seafood, but would also stand up to summer barbeques (steaks and sausages). We will definitely be consuming more as the weather gets hotter – this could be an early pick for our Beer’s of Summer.
Cormac McCarthy - All the Pretty Horses
Although it’s a McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses, doesn’t necessarily break up the list of coming of age / first romances that seems to be unfolding on this list – but it does so in a characteristically McCarthy way. I read this on one of my first trips to Austin and couldn’t put it down – except to think about hitting the road south for Mexico. If you have seen the film, try to leave it at the door and let this novel take on a life of its own. His prose is often without par, making you stop short and re-read sentences with a respect for his skill level. His characters are dense and raw, taking on a real presence with you as you read it that is not often attainable for many writers.
The duo who have pushed the envelope and succeeded in developing Frieze into the successful art fair that it is today, taking over London each October, have expanded across the ocean with Frieze New York, which launches today. Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover, with artist, Tom Gidley, founded Frieze magazine in 1991 and launched Frieze Art Fair in London in 2003.
Having just missed Frieze last fall in London, and now missing the launch of Frieze New York, we are understandably green but coping through the help of great art fair online material these days that allow you to live vicariously. For now. Frieze New York is taking place on Randall’s Island with 180 of the leading contemporary galleries worldwide as exhibitors, an impressive Sculpture Park curated by Tom Eccles and Frieze Projects, which launches annual artists’ commissions for the fair.
Art Newspaper estimates that art worth a total of $2 billion has been brought to the city for Frieze New York, falling quickly on the heels of the sale of Munch’s The Scream on Wednesday night at Sotheby’s NYC, creating an auction record at $119 million. Signs that the art world is the canary in the gold mine, as this market appears to be rebounding to pre-recession highs? Perhaps. But what it does do is push the increasingly loud debate of investment vs. obsession to the fore, which often distinguishes the rise of art investment as distinct from the acquisitions by art lovers. As Barbara Kruger’s 2012 work, Too Big To Fail, queried the financial system’s stability, so too can the same question be poised at the secondary art market for art masters. Across the Frieze exhibitor list, it is by far the secondary market pieces that will be making up the biggest portion in terms of dollar figures of works brought to New York this weekend. In this, Frieze will take its place amongst the list of international art fairs where the same level of deals take place in what may be one of the only truly burgeoning markets at the moment.
Feeding one of our favourite trends in the art world, Frieze has a virtual component, of course: Frieze Virtual New York 2012, where you can search by terms such as the artist’s age, price, etc. amongst 1560 artworks represented by galleries at the fair. http://virtual.friezenewyork.com/
One of the best, but sometimes overlooked, aspects to any art fair: the lectures. On this, it doesn’t look like Frieze NY will miss the mark. Of course, no art fair lecture series would be complete these days without a nod to the man, Gerhard Richter, having just had his retrospective at the Tate Modern. Sunday afternoon’s talk, On Land Occupation, should be a relevant discussion about art and practice moving beyond the walls of institutions with artists and writers looking at land occupation and different ways to reimagine borders. It will be interesting to see what reviews follow Friday’s Expanding Museums discussion about the contemporary art museum’s role in the way that we experience our cities and cultures which is to be held by a panel of directors and a chairman of only the biggest stalwarts in the NYC scene. Being francophiles though and avid readers of Andre Malraux’s work, we are green with envy to be missing Georges Didi-Huberman’s discussion of Malraux’s Le Musee Imaginaire.
And for the celebrity car crash that no one seems to be able to turn their eyes away from already? Courtney Love’s first ever art show entitled And She’s Not Even Pretty by Frieze exhibitor, Fred Torres Collaborations. While her watercolours and works on paper are said to be surprisingly good and even giving Frieze darling, Karen Kilimnik, a run for her money, is it necessary for her to clutch a photocopied Art and Culture by her great-uncle, Clement Greenberg as her invitation into this world, as she apparently did at Wednesday’s opening. We are not entirely sure what the granddaddy of modern and contemporary art criticism would have thought of her work and, perhaps her most notorious work, her life – but we’ll see what the critics continue to say at least of Love and the fair.
Spinnakers Gastro Brewpub: Northwest Ale
Photo: Craig Kalnin
As we have noted before, Victoria is fast becoming British Colombia’s craft beer mecca which makes it a great place to take a trip. However, when you can’t travel to the beer, it is really nice to have the beer come to you. As a result, we were more than a little excited to hear that Vancouver was getting a shipment from Spinnakers Gastro Brewpub, whose beers we have heard so much about but been unable to try.
We cracked their Northwest Ale first. A beer that is everything you would expect based on the name. This beer is a mighty fine representation of BC brewing. It’s light but it’s hoppy. It’s refreshing but also nicely complex. It it were any more representative of BC, it would be running off to yoga class in Lululemon pants and sipping a non-fat caramel macchiato. Except this beer is the opposite of that.
It pours a deep golden copper colour that glows in the glass. With an emphasis towards the three C’s of Northwest hops – Centennial, Cascade and Citra – the aroma is heavy in citrus and pine normally associated with IPA’s from this part of the world. It’s more the great outdoors than a Kit’s yoga studio. It’s the sunrise on the top of Grouse Mountain. There is some lingering sweetness, like maple syrup, and a fruitiness from something we can’t quite put our fingers on (possibly mango). To the taste, the beer is bitter yet balanced. A lot like we would expect from an IPA. There is a strong hop profile which is to be expected from 85 IBU’s but it’s not overpowering. It’s actually quite refreshing.
The bottle looks great too. All of this is captured quite well in a beautifully painted scene of a surfer against a West Coast sunset. Definitely a beer that made us want to take the hop to the Island!
Zadie Smith - White Teeth
Smith made herself noticed instantly with this amazing first novel. It offers you a view into South London and the ethnic melange of cultures that is contemporary England. Exploring the lives of two kids from very different cultures raised in an area of South London, falling in love and dealing with the fallout, White Teeth enraptured me with its characters and their backgrounds, while doing so with a sense of humanity and insight into the struggles of many immigrant communities, all framed in the context of a universal story of coming of age and first romance.
This is an annual hobbyist canning tradition and signals the end of winter and beginning of canning season. Along with a delicious marmalade the first signs of spring means making Preserved Lemons. This is one of the easiest things to can and it has so much versatility for cooking. We inevitably devour ours over the Fall and Winter months. Since you eat the peel of the lemons we always use organic lemons. Regular table salt will give them a chemical taste so be sure to use kosher or sea salt.
Ingredients
10-12 lemons
Sea Salt or Kosher Salt
Directions
Wash and dry the lemons. Slice off the stem end and place flat part down on the cutting board. Cut a ‘X’ through the lemon stopping about 1/2″ from the end. Pack salt into the lemon (1-1/2 tbsp. per lemon). Repeat, stuffing salt filled lemons into a clean glass jar with a tight fitting lid. When the jar is full press down on the lemons firmly to get the juices flowing. Cover and let stand overnight. In the morning press them down again to release more juice. Repeat this for 2 days. If you need extra liquid squeeze the juice of an additional lemon into the jar to cover the salted lemons.
Put the finished jar(s) in the fridge and wait 4-6 weeks. When they are ready to go, scrape out the pulp and slice or dice the peel. This is a fun one to experiment with so be creative. We love it tossed with some quinoa, shallots and roasted vegetables. It is also a hobbyist favorite on naan bread pizza. Enjoy!
Photo: Craig Kalnin
Newport, Oregon’s Rogue Ales makes some great beers, but right off the bat, we knew this beer was going to be something a little special even for them. First it is an Imperial Pilsner, not exactly a run-of-the-mill style. Secondly, the beer bears the name of renowned Chef Masaharu Morimoto. Last, but not least, the ceramic, flip-top bottle really sets it apart. With bold Japanese influenced art work (likely tipping their hat to its namesake) on a subtle white backing. It makes a nice show piece that, not surprisingly, has won a number of packaging awards.
The beer inside the bottle was no let down either. It pours a deep golden colour with the fresh straw aroma and hints of sweet malt. Tasting the beer, the strong malt is prominent and balanced with a little straw hoppiness. It’s like a super-pilsner, everything is ramped up to extra strength other than the hops. At 74 IBU (international bitterness units), we were expecting a bit of a hop bomb but instead there is a light, refreshing tartness and dryness you would expect from a pislner. We did wonder if our bottle had aged on the shelf. There was a bit of alcohol bite that warmed the throat as it went down.
We paired our bottle with a variety of grilled meats (pork sausage, buffalo) and some roasted vegetables. It worked wonderfully.
A bit of a pricey bottle for those of us in Canada, but in our opinion, well worth the splash. If you think of the purchase more as a cheap bottle of wine (and at 8.8% it’s not too far off the strength), it doesn’t seem so extreme. Splitting the bottle over food is a great idea (and strongly suggested by Rogue). Along those lines, it would make a great dinner gift. The beer is a little different but not overpowering and so very accessible to a number of preferences. The bottle also makes it look a little special.
Eden Robinson - Monkey Beach
For anyone travelling up the Northwest Coast – either on a fishing trip or an exploration of the Haida Gwaii, this book is for you. Robinson, a young Haisla/Heiltsuk writer from Kitimat, B.C., received several well-deserved accolades for this stunning novel, including a Giller nod. Set in Kitamaat Village, it’s an enthralling story of two youth growing up in this remote setting and all that comes with that – dealing with getting older, falling in love, grief and loss.
