Masala Rogue IPA

You might not have heard of this beer... That's because it is a homebrew! My homebrew! And it is delicious!  This beer starts off life as a nice, slightly bitter, dry hopped IPA. Then I add in an Indian spice extract that I made myself to provide a flavor boost and mellow down some of the bitterness. I love drinking IPA's with Indian food, so I figure, why not mix the flavors together and see what happens?

Although I have been brewing off and on for a few years; I haven't had my own set up since I moved here from San Francisco. My company has a yearly Oktoberfest party where they buy supplies to brew a batch of beer for anyone who is interested. This has gotten a lot of people at my company very interested in brewing beer. This also gives me places I can brew on other people's rig without having to get a large brewing system into my tiny condo. 

This started off as a clone of Rogue Brewery's Yellow Snow IPA, but I immediately needed to make some changes which in the end I think paid off. Rogue Brewery uses a Pacman Yeast which I wasn't able to source, as well as certain malts they grow in house "Dare and Risk" However, what I wanted was a base IPA beer with some nice hoppy bitterness and aroma which would play well with the flavors I add later. The Amarillo hops provide both a nice bitter flavor as well as aromatic flavors from the dry hopping. Using only a single hop rather then a blend of other hops gives a nice flavor without getting too complex, which makes for a perfect canvas in my opinion. 

Live blogging the Great Taste of The Midwest Beerfest!

Welcome to the 28th annual Great Taste Of The Midwest with over 1000 amazing Midwestern microbrews from 160+ breweries around the Midwest. On tap each brewer has brought their most popular beers along with some of their most interesting. Many breweries have timed taps for one-off barrels of especially rare beers.

The first thing you are handed upon entrance is a tasting mug with this year's great taste logo:

I will be drinking approximately this much beer. And apparently farting a lot.

The second thing you are handed is the program tome; A 122 page pamphlet which is still a better love story then Twilight. This was immediately placed into a pocket and made me limp the rest of the day.

U Jagušky Part III Cheese

Pivní sýr or Beer cheese. A soft, not quite runny cheese very pungent in a good way. This one has paprika sprinkled on it. I can't find exactly how it's made, some say it's marinated in beer, or you eat it mixed with beer or you just eat it when you drink beer. All I know it's very very tasty, heavy creamy and soft. The diced raw onions served as an amazing pairing with this strong cheese. It's possible to spread this cheese on bread, but will hold it's shape. Great cheese.


Olomouc cheese spread. Olomouc is a region of the Czech Republic famous for their Olomouc cheese. This is a very stinky sweat sock type of cheese reminiscent of Limburger. They used this as a base mixed with diced onions butter, maybe some flour and milk. It tasted like stinky cheese mixed with raw onions. Incredible. Really a tasty cheese spread. It's not at all creamy but rather a little chunky. I'm not entirely sure if this is cooked at all, but it's served cold. Spread on bread if you like. I actually made a little roll-up with the lettuce on the plate and it was quite good.

Smažený sýr
Breaded and fried edam cheese. Served with a wealth of vegetables, at least it is lot of vegetables for the Czech Republic. On the side is Tartar sauce to dip it in. Very stringy and delicious. Jessie still talks about the big stupid grin on my face when I was eating it. I'm from Wisconsin damn it, I love my cheese!


Now I need to go eat some lunch damn it.

-NOM!

U Jagušky Part II starters and small plates

Let us start at the beginning. Need a small bite to whet the appetite? A little nibble to get the gastric juices flowing? I hope you are hungry. Klobása is the Czech word for sausage. This one is a wonderful pork sausage, fried with punctured skin to crisp the thick natural casings nicely. The uncooked sausage has almost a black skin. Not too fatty because of the punctured skin, it's nice and meaty. Eaten with very good mustard and some freshly grated horseradish it is divine. The horseradish is grated but doesn't have too much of a kick unless you really chew it, the longer you chew the more horseradish kick you get.


The next starter is was a piece of beef brisket. Obviously cooked very low very slow, the salty tender kick of well brined beef, overall just good quality meat that hasn't been screwed up. The brisket is basically the chest of a cow, the big chunk of meat that it rests on when it lies down. It's got huge muscle fibers and tons of collagen running through the meat, making it super tough and chewy, but if you very very slowly cook the meat at very low temperatures all of the collagen, instead of binding up into tough chewy wads, instead relaxes and turns into more of a jello like consistency between every muscle fiber, making it soft, flavorful and amazingly tender.

Add a big dollop of mustard and more grated horseradish and you have yourself a first class starter.

They claim Goulash as their own traditional food pretty much everywhere in the former Austria-Hungarian empire and Balkan states. It's a pretty basic cattleman's stew. The most traditional recipes call for very tough cuts of beef, onions, and paprika(hot or mild). Just like American chili the ingredient lists just grow from there. Purists say you don't need any other herbs or spices then the onion and the Paprika, but you could add garlic, bay leave, thyme, etc etc etc. You can add some root vegetables, and anything else you would use in a stew. This one from U Jagušky is a pretty basic thick goulash with beef and they served bramboráky (potato pancakes) on the side. Simple, easy and hearty.
Next the king of the sausages. The blood sausage. A mix of pork blood and a lot of little chunks of fat and mince meat. Seasoned lightly. Their menu called it a "andouille" style blood sausage but it's definitely not smoked and not cajun. I think it must have been a mistranslation on their menu. It's a very classical Czech blood sausage. Boiled, and served with potatoes mixed with sauerkraut.
The flavor of blood sausage is one that isn't very familiar to most Americans. Blood on the whole is not often consumed in the US. What a shame. This sausage was almost entirely made of coagulated blood without the rice or starch filling common to a lot of French, Spanish and Italian blood sausages. This gives an honest and strong flavor of blood. Cooked blood tastes, looks and smells absolutely nothing like fresh human blood. The flavor and aroma are much closer to the smell of cooked liver, kidney or marrow. The flavor isn't as overpowering as liver, but it has a very similar taste, perhaps because the liver is basically I giant blood filter?

Actually it has a flavor very similar to marrow, which makes sense because the marrow is "stem" cells that will produce all the blood in your body your entire life, so I guess the similar taste makes sense. (Side note, if you don't like the taste of bone marrow... You are wrong)


Now that we've gotten our appetite started with a few light bites, should we move on to the main course? What? Full? But we haven't even had our 1.95kg(4.29 lbs) pork knee yet! What about the cheese course? Don't worry, Czech restaurants usually come fully equipped with a wheel barrow to take you home.

-Nom!

U Jagušky part I

As soon as we got off the metro to our little place out in praha(prague to the rest of us) 9 we were confronted by this little bustling restaurant, U Jagušky. Literally it translates to At the Jagušky, we never found anyone who could properly translate what Jagušky means. We just think it has something to do with witches.

The inside was covered in murals of fairytale stories presumably from the traditional czech cannon. Unfortunitely I don't know any czech fairytales, Altough this one is teaching mermaids to drink I believe.
Also creepy witches lanterns
And really good beer.
They only sell Pilsner Urquell at this bar. And it's really really good. This type of beer is called Tank beer, and you can only really get it in the Czech republic. It's an unfiltered unpasturized type of beer which is stored in large tanks under the restaurants. I heard that large tanker trucks back up to a restaurant and pump the beer into a specifically designed tank. This makes the bottom fermented pilsner style lager, really come alive. Pilsner Urquell I've had in the states was tinny, overly floral, and not a very pleasant drink at all.
While it would be possible to write a whole blog entirely devoted to the beers we have encountered on our trip around the world, I think I'll leave that to the more beer inclined to write about.

For the next couple of posts I am going to delve deeply into the menu of this restaurant, because well basically we ate almost everything in it.


-Nom!

Dinner party!

In celebration of having such a great host, I decided to prepare dinner! Here is the menu:

Delicious beer!
Penne Pasta with Schinken
Cream of wild mushroom soup
Tasty french bread!

for some reason our camera was malfunctioning and almost all the pictures from the night are horribly blurry! Here is one of Jess enjoying a bowl of Cream of wild mushroom soup! This was made by soaking 100g of wild mushrooms that we got at the Viktualienmarkt in boiling water for 45 minutes(turn off the heat when you add the mushrooms.) Then I prepared a roux with butter and flour. I cooked 500g of fresh brown mushrooms in the roux along with a tablespoon of fresh thyme until the mushrooms had given off their juices. I added the stock I made with the wild mushrooms and finely diced the now reconstituted wild mushrooms and added it back into the soup. Simmer for 30 minutes just to allow the flavors to meld together, season with salt and pepper. Just before serving I add whipping cream to thicken and make the soup more creamy. Don't bring the sauce back up to a boil once you add the cream or you risk one of two things, the cream will break and you will have oil floating all over the top of the pot or you will form a skin on the surface of the soup.

Schinken is basically German ham, It's a hot smoked ham that is cut razor thin and packaged a lot like prosciutto. We made a pretty basic pasta dish consisting of a can of whole tomatoes, garlic, onion, basil, fresh tomatoes, and eggplant. The sauce was simmering and at the last minute I added the Schinken so that the smokiness would remain in the meat and not permeate the sauce too much. Sorry there aren't any pictures, just think of a big bowl of penne pasta with little shreds of prosciutto in it.

Here is a great beer we had with dinner. I have had it before in the states but we learned a little more about it at the table. All the beers that end in TOR (Optimator, Salvator, etc) were specialty beers made by the monks for times of fasting. For religious reasons they couldn't eat anything during this time, but could only drink. So what do you want to drink during a fast, they strongest, heaviest, more stick to the ribs beer you could make, and thus were born this style of beer which always ends in a -TOR. I think this particular beer is about 9.8% and dark thick and heavy.
We had heard that a friend may be coming over later in the evening, so we figured that we should make some extra. We cooked 500g of Mushrooms and 1kg of pasta. Boy were we lucky we had. By the end of the evening we had a small party going on! And as all great parties do, this one ended up in the bathtub.

This was part of an artistic photoshoot organized by another one of the guests that me and Jess snuck up behind and photographed as well. In the end Stella's two friends from high school came and brought another guest. I guess my mom always taught me right, there is no excuse for not having enough food so I always prepare 2-3x more then I really aught to(plus I love leftovers). In the end we had plenty of food to feed the 6 of us and there were even some leftovers for Joerg(who was off playing with his band in Switzerland for the night.)


Stella has a bike that Jeorg fixed up for her that is exactly this color. So she named the bike Milka!
-NOM!