Lamb on the spit, beer on my mind

For my latest D.C. Foodies piece, I broke in my new rotisserie with a leg of lamb. I also baked my first cobbler on the grill (However, I have no idea what it tastes like as it ran out before I got to it.). But as great as the meal was and as well as the rotisserie performed, it's that vat of beer fermenting at Shenandoah Brewing that I'm most excited about.
Three days and counting.
Saturday is going to be a big beer day. At noon, Tim and I will be bottling five cases of hoppy brown ale and carting them back to my basement. Then I'll change into something a bit more dandy and head off to Savor, the Brewers Association's big to do in D.C. Peter Falk and I went to the inaugural event last year and reportedly had one hell of a time.
In the meantime, I scratched the beer itch with a six pack of Duck-Rabbit's Imperial Russian Stout. Holy crap, it's a big, rich, black beer. It's good though. Duck-Rabbit is the latest North Carolina beer to show up in the D.C. area, behind Highland Brewing Company and Carolina Beer Company. Hopefully, the other Tar Heel breweries will follow suit.

Grilling chops, breaking in the new grill

For this latest grilling post on D.C. Foodies, the missus and I tracked down our new local farmer's market. It may well have been the smallest market I've seen, tucked between a couple store fronts along H Street in D.C. rapidly gentrifying -- but not there yet -- Atlas District. With five vendors and 10 customers on a Saturday morning, I was stunned to learn the market has been around five years.
I should note that last weekend was the first market of the season and not all the vendors were in attendance. And the vendors who did show up brought some quality products, including David Ober, a West Virginia farmer who had every cut of pork the pig has to offer.
So we picked up some smoked chops, fresh vegetables and handmade booze-laden sorbet (mojito, strawberry tequila, Meyer lemon vodka, ect.).
Afterward, we swung by Schneider's of Capitol Hill to pick up beer to go with lunch. Despite my reservations, I grabbed Brooklyn Brewery's new Local 2. I was hesitant to try the Local 2 because of the honey and orange peel the Belgian-style ale is brewed with. I realize that it's possible to produce good beer with fruit in it, but in my experience few brewers do little more than muck up their product. Brooklyn didn't.
Cooking and shooting the post also gave me a chance to break in the new charcoal grill. It's an upgrade from my old Weber, which not only gives me a larger cooking surface, but also has a firebox that converts the grill into a smoker. The grill worked like a charm, and I should have time to get the smoker rolling next month.
Two weeks until the beer is ready.

I brew beer

Yeah I do.

At long last, I've gotten around to brewing. Thanks to a new house and the space that comes with it, I have room to brew. However, my first batch wasn't done in the house. I did it at Shenandoah Brewing in Alexandria, Va.

The idea was to get a batch under my belt before heading to the brewery supply store. That way, hopefully, I'll have a better idea of what I need and what I don't. Now that the first batch is behind me, is that the case? Probably not due to the professional equipment I used at Shenandoah, but I do have first-hand knowledge of the process.

For the inaugural brew, I followed Shenandoah's recipe for Hoppy Brown Ale. Brown ales are pretty straightforward beers, so I thought it would be a good place to begin. The beer used typical brewer's yeast, dark malted barley and two types of hops: Chinook and East Kent Golding.

Once the brewing is done, Shenandoah holds onto the vat of beer until it's ready to bottle. In my case, that's May 30. My buddy Tim, who pitched in on the brewing, will make a return appearance to help me bottle five cases of beer. That works out to 120 beers. That works out to a lot of beer.

As you might expect with a 2,000 year old process, brewing beer is fairly simple. The trick is in the combination of hops, malt, yeast and water. Each of these ingredients has many, many varieties, which can be combined in various ways and amounts. Throw in the fact that yeast is a living organism that sometimes does what it wants, and you have the potential for quite a few outcomes, i.e. beers.

Anyway, for as nice as Shenandoah's facility is, this batch will probably be the only one I'll brew there. The next step is to move the brewing from the brewery to my basement.

Scallops and schooling

After a brief layoff due to moving and the trip to Copenhagen, my grilling column is back on D.C. Foodies. It's the first one I shot in the backyard of my new house. Although I've upgraded my grills, I had to use my tiny grill for this one, but the new equipment will make an appearance soon enough. I also got a chance to try out Abita's latest beers, both were good, one was great.
So I ran my first beer class at CulinAerie last night. I've been volunteering at the D.C. cooking school for the past few months, mostly helping the chef instructors set up, break down and run the class. But thanks to a scheduling conflict with a guy from Dogfish Head, one of the owners, Susan, needed a beer guy to fill in. I'm a beer guy.
For the class, a private event for members of the National Potato Council, Susan taught the attendees how to grill salmon, bison and lamb sliders, and make homemade potato chips (they are the Potato Council after all), and I got to talk about beer. More importantly, I had an audience that seemingly enwrapped by what I had to say about beer. Well they were enwrapped or stuck because they'd paid for the course.
It wasn't such a bad night for the potato folks, though. I brought props and good beer, and Susan gave them the tools to cook some pretty solid burgers. I opened the class talking about the basics of beer, and passed around some fresh Silver Leaf hops and malted barley to give them a better idea of what goes into beer. Then there was the beer. We did a tasting of three beers: Oscar Blues' Mama's Little Yella Pils, Dogfish Head's Indian Brown Ale and Stone's IPA. Not everyone liked all three beers, but everyone liked at least one and most liked a couple. The Dogfish Head just wasn't working for them. However, we blew through Oscar Blues' pilsner.
The lecture portion of the class didn't last too long, maybe about 20 minutes. Then Susan took over with the cooking instruction and I spent the rest of the evening going around the room filling glasses and chatting about beer. Man, if only I could get paid for a gig like that.
Fortunately, Susan was happy with my performance, so I'll get to prattle on about beer again. Can't wait.

Mikkeller is a phantom brewery. I'm scared.

This brewery doesn't exist.
Well, clearly Mikkeller exists. I'm drinking the beer after all. But when I went to find the Danish microbrewery, all I found was a tiny apartment on a tiny street. No mash tun, no bottling line and definitely no brewery.
As I was getting ready for my trip to Copenhagen, I stuck Mikkeller on my list of places to visit. The beer has garnered a lot of positive attention during the past few years and I figured it would be an interesting contract to the Carlsberg tour I also had on my schedule. Besides, I'd discovered that Mikkeller was in the very shadow of the mega brewery.
Yeah, there's no brewery in Carlsberg's shadow. Just elephants that hate Jews.

I was explaining my trouble finding Mikkeller to my new friends at Den Tatoverede Enke, one of the few bars in Copenhagen that doesn't pour Carlsberg, when it was explained to me that I never had a chance.
"It's a phantom brewery."
Mikkeller is run solely by self-described gypsy-brewer Mikkel Borg Bjergsø. Rather than maintain a permanent location, Bjergsø rents space around Denmark, Europe and the U.S. ... and periodically shuffles on to a new location. He also partners with a number of craft breweries, including Three Floyds, De Struise Brouwers and Stone, for specialty collaboration beers.
This is all well and good. Interesting, in fact. But consider that this dude produces more than a dozen beers in multiple countries and continents. That's amazing. Imagine how productive this guy could be if he'd stay in one place.
And Bjergsø isn't just displaying a feat of productivity that's clearly of a higher order, he's brewing award winning beer. Although these beers aren't widely available, I was able to pick up a couple at The Wine Specialist. The Stateside IPA is delicious, hoppy without too much of a bite, rich without being too sweet. Santa's Little Helper 2008 is a fantastically made Christmas ale that's just as good in April as it is in December.
The woman at Den Tatoverede Enke said Bjergsø rents space to avoid paying business taxes. I don't know whether that's true or not. Maybe all the wandering keeps Bjergsø's creative juices flowing. Maybe without a staff and plant to look after, Bjergsø can focus on his beer. Who knows? Who cares?
The guy's making quality beer. He's just not offering tours.

Days in the Danes' land

Copenhagen was not on my short list of places to visit. But thanks to a bit of serendipity, I got the chance to spend a week there, so I tried to make the most of the time. I saw the sights, I ate the food, I drank the beer. Then I came back and wrote a travel piece for D.C. Foodies.
Of course, I didn't get everything in the travel post, and so I've been chronicling a few of the items here that I either glazed over in the D.C. Foodies piece or simply skipped all together.
One thing I didn't bother mentioning at all was Christiania, a commune of hippies, kids, garbage and graffiti in the Christianshaven quarter of Copenhagen.
I love the story of Christiania: a bunch of hippies taking over an abandoned military base a couple decades ago. When land prices began to rise 10 to 15 years ago, city leaders tried to eject the squatters from the land. To date, however, the residents of Christiania (and their legal team) have fought and won the right to stay.
As a free-spirit commune, prohibitions on drug use is pretty lax. Apparently there was a time where there were really no restrictions at all. But the rise of hard narcotics and the problems that often accompany such pharmaceuticals brought an end to that era. Now, it's down to the Deadhead staples of marijuana and like botanicals, which seems to suit the original Christianians fine.
All this is well and good of the community. In fact, it's that story that led me to wandering though. What I found, however, was a neighborhood that graffiti threw up on.
Dirty, tagged and in seeming disarray, Christiania looks far from the utopia the original community surely envisioned. Oddly enough, I place part of the blame on the youth who are drawn to this head shop of a neighborhood. Streaming in before and after me was a swath of teens and young twenty-somethings. Certainly some were tourists looking to discover the place. Many others were kids looking to score a bag and hang out. Frankly, the place was simply a mess.
Honestly, I'm neither trying to judge or be a prude. I simply didn't get the point. The commune the original Christiania settlers were trying to create was now a dingy, graffitied neighborhood. If that was the goal all along, they didn't need a legal team.
I will say there were bright spots. Amid the clutter were homes that displayed their owners' imagination. There was art. And the idea of a group of people living in a community of their own making was evident, if not ideal.

The other destination I'll mention here is the royal gardens. Surrounding Rosenborg Castle, these lush grounds flecked with flowers and Danes made for a beautiful spot to picnic, which the missus and I did with a few of her coworkers.

The rest of the places I visited are covered in the D.C. Foodies piece or will be in an upcoming post here.

Beers, bars and Denmark

You go on vacation, you check out the tourist sites, right? The historic this, the cultural that. Sure.
During my recent trip to Copenhagen, I saw Rosenborg Castle, the Danish Design Center, the Viking Ship Museum, which were all great. But these places can only teach you so much about Copenhagen and the Danish people.
Visit a few bars and restaurants frequented by locals, and you'll get a better idea of what the locals eat, drink and think. Besides, I like bars and restaurants.
However, I've written about the bars and restaurants I visited for my travel piece on D.C. Foodies, so I'm not going to dwell too much on them. One of the bars I visited that I didn't give nearly enough time to in my D.C. Foodies post was Charlie's Bar, a great British pub in the heart of the Danish capital.

Two things about this. I love British bitters and the place had free wi-fi. I never thought I'd care about this (the wi-fi, not the beer). But it is a pain in the ass to find a place in Copenhagen that doesn't bleed you for a few desperate minutes of Internet access. Even the hotel we were staying at charged a kroner a minute to get online.
So when I found a place that pumped bitter from beer engines and allowed my to check my e-mail for free, I was ecstatic.

It shouldn't have been as much of a surprise to me as it was, but I was really taken aback by the Danish craft beer scene. Carlsberg is the king hell beer in Denmark and Copenhagen. The beer's sold in every store and nearly every bar. Given this, I should've expected that a group of people would begin to push against Carlsberg's dominance.
Fortunately, the bars I sought out (thank you Beer Mapping Project) specialized in the other Danish beers. In fact, they specialized in craft beers from around Europe and the United States. One of these places, Den Tatoverede Enke, had Flying Dog's Snake Dog IPA on draft and tipped me off to Charlie's Bar, and you gotta like a bar that will recommend another bar.
As solid a selection of European and American craft beers as Den Tatoverede Enke had, Ørsted Ølbar was better.


Double digit taps, including one with Great Divide's Yeti, a refrigerator case full of beers I've never heard of and a Danish bartender with an American girlfriend. I was so enamored with the place and enjoyed talking beer with the bartender that I'm pretty sure I walked out without paying my bill.
Just to be safe, I swung back by the bar later that night, bringing a group in tow. And here's another reason Ørsted Ølbar is a good bar: the bartender I was talking too was no longer there and the one on duty wasn't concerned about my fiscal lapse. Nice, huh?
The group of us responded to the hospitality by staying for a couple rounds. One of the folks who joined the missus and I was Rob, a U.N. consultant and Dutch beer geek. I don't know much about Rob or what he does professionally, but I do know he was president of his college beer club, a member of the European beer union, PINT, and grew up with the guys who launched the De Dolle Brouwers brewery. Once the mutual appreciation of craft beer was discovered, Rob and I began to swap stories, tips and information on all things beer. This back and forth happened time and again in the beer bars I passed though in Copenhagen. It's like we share a secret beer geek code that works just as well overseas as it does here at home. I'm sure we'd have our own handshake as well, if our hands weren't already occupied.
Finally, here are a few beers I tried and liked. Don't worry, I can’t pronounce most of these either.

• Mikkeller's DSB
• Mikkeller's Drikkeriget
• Bøgedal #78
• De Struise Brouwers
• Bryggerier
• Amager Bryghus' Festival IPA
• Herslev Hvede
  
• De Dolle Brouwers
• Carlsberg