PEIBlogs.com: the definitive Prince Edward Island blogroll since 2004.: Islanders Away

One of the things I don't get about beer lovers is the seething disrespect of corn - aka maize for some of you. OK, maybe not seething but my comment the other day that I now craved New Glarus Spotted Cow was met with particular surprise by Jeffery Glazer of Wisconsin's Madison Beer Review who wrote to say that "Spotted Cow is good, but to drive halfway across the country for it? I'd be really curious to hear what was said about it to cause such a reaction." In response I wrote:

It's the king o'corn, baby! I like the ur-cream ale Genesee Cream but I also like cream corn, corn chowder, corn on the cob and corn chips. I think the taste of corn gets a bum steer as far as corn and beer goes. Why praise other grains yet diss the maize? I have grown corn, have watched it grow and, I have to admit, admire it privately. Stan brought the Spotted Cow (as well as a few other New Glarus) and this corntastic beer made me love it. It is clean, has the raw chew-the-cob sweetness and is also balanced and without a tinge of chemical, the hallmark of modern corn-y brew...Did I mention it comes with corn?

I asked Stan when we were sipping his giftie if it had flaked corn and he thought maybe it was just corn sugar but was not in the know. I would be surprised if there is that much unfermentable corn in it from just a powder. Nonetheless, I am here to bear witness, bretheren and the real lesson here is that cream ale like Spotted Cow is corn ale and cream ale should be great! It is just a style, after all. Corn is, folks, and corn should be more than the flakes in your breakfast bowl. As I mentioned, I understand that there are two ways to get corn into beer. The most common is through glucose or corn sugar which is derided as an adjunct gone mad in American macro lagers but praised in Belgian tripels when, as I learned from Al Korzonas in his useful Homebrewing, Volume 1, simply combined with a little fructose to make candi sugar. This sort of addition of corn gets you a little more alcohol and a little less body but not much flavour - and certainly not the creamed corny goodness that is at the heart of Spotted Cow. Flaked maize is more like rolled barley or oats, a raw grain product that leaves plenty of unfermentables to add flavour. That is what I think I am tasting in that brew.

Maybe you know more than me but where are the rest of the corny adjuncts - the malted corn, the roasted corn or the crystal corn that some agronomist or another sort of lab-coated egghead should have developed by now? Surely a grain as versatile as corn could be subject to more treatments that might make for some other great beers. Surely there is a Department of Cornology in some Midwest US state working on coaxing more flavours from the humble yellow kernal. As far as may daydreams of future beer goes, I would think that the residual sweetness of corn could work in a roasty stout. The huskineess of a dried cob might also work when blended with a little rye malt. And Jeffery pointed out that it would also fit with the local and sustainable trends we are seeing becoming more and more important.

If corn can make a fine whiskey, why not a beer? And are there other fine corn beers out there, some modern chichas, that I do not know about?

My gracious server masters are the most gracious server masters ever. I just got an email that they have gifted me with two more URLs which make a little more sense than the one I have been living with for about 4 years now. You now can also get your daily dose of A Good Beer Blog at agoodbeerblog.ca and agoodbeerblog.com.

Nobody has server masters like my server masters.

So beer writers Stan and Daria and family were here getting a break from the camper on their world beer tour 2008. As it turned out, so were Steve from Beau's and John o' Church-key. Between them the lads drove 500 km to get here and as much to get home - nothing compared, however, to the Hieronymi land cruiser which hit the 10,000 mile mark yesterday. And, after hours of great beer and some good chow I threw together, I came away from what I will call the first Kingston Symposium on Craft Brewing realizing I pretty much know nothing about beer. Zippo.

Hanging around with such people of the beer is always a great education but listening to two such knowledgeable beer thinkers as Stan and Daria (who is also a recent winner on Jeopardy) over a whole evening with two of Canada's most interesting young brewers was pretty amazing. Not to go blow by blow through the beers but I shared some Ontarians including our local Barley Day's Wind and Sail Dark, some Stuart's Natural and made some fairly snazzy scallops in a pan with a slug of Wellington Dark. Good Ontario and Quebec craft cheeses also shared the table.

We talked about beer price and value, the regulatory challenges of the Ontario market and the Canadian border as well as the opportunities a province that is trying hard to catch up to our southern neighbours provides. We also poured bottles of Steve and John's brews including Beau's flagship kolsche and Church-key's West Coast IPA - as well as half year cellared bottles of Bog Water and Lactese Falcon, that beer that begs to be next to a rib-eye. Each of these showed really well and, in their comparison, begged the question as to which better expressed Ontario-ness: the traditional Algonquin Park canoe trip invocating bog myrtle or the funky blue cheese tang of the beer of the 22nd century. I just made that up. I am sure John will pick it up as the LT's catch phrase.

To finish, we popped the tangy spicy dry and quite fascinating Fuego del Otono, a seasonal chestnut beer which is also very under-priced from Jolly Pumpkin. Stan and Daria had passed Dexter on a Saturday when the brewery was not open so it was fair to include it in their year-long continent hopping search for the essence of global local beer. By the way, that last beer is one of the ones that make me think there should be a web based auction for craft beer where beer lovers could set out what they would pay for a beer. If Ron at Jolly Pumpkin would set me aside a mixed case of beer like Fuego del Otono for pick up when I am in the neighbourhood, I would definitely pay $11.99 or a bit more compared to the $8.99 I paid for this one last fall at the ever excellent Bello Vino of Ann Arbor. Other beers of the moment might not get such a price boost from the set you own auction, if my suspicions are correct.

In the end, one in the morning came far too soon and, as with the best gatherings like this, I came away having added understanding as well as happily convinced in how little I still really know. There is so much to learn about good beer. For one thing, I now crave New Glarus Spotted Cow and may have to drive to Wisconsin just to get me some more.

This opinion piece in The Australian today speaks as much to the state of beer as the state of writing in newspapers in Australia. This extended quotation of James Jeffery's writing is remarkable both for its coarseness and its plainness about the moronic nature of the cult of globalized ice cold macro-lager that is at large in his land:

...danger awaits if your tastebuds haven't been completely cauterised and you want to branch out and drink something that might make your tongue dance while laying waste to your brain. Stand by for the local piss prefect to accuse you of drinking yuppie beer or worse still, boutique beer, which makes it sound like it's got more than a touch of handbag about it. Talk about the glories of kolsch, porter, bock, pale ale or Trappist booze and you may as well say you've joined the local eunuch guild. But the masters of the beer universe aren't exactly a bunch of blouses who sit around with their noses and pinkies in the air. The Germans are responsible for a whole spectrum of beers of weeping complexity and subtlety, all brewed according to a 500-year-old set of commandments, yet still managed to invent the Beer Hall Putsch. The English are behind such towering achievements as Theakston's Old Peculiar and the perfection of the soccer riot. The Belgians invented beer that inspires poetry yet goes off like a liquid depth charge. And the Czechs, who gave us the unparalleled gift of pilsner, are probably the greatest brewers of them all, yet still found time to manfully shrug off fascism, communism, Neville Chamberlain and a shortage of vowels.

Remarkable. Rude yet accurate. Thick yet inspiring. We should speak so plainly in all things that affect us, not just the pleasures of life including beer but all those things that bear upon us, that restrict or do worse than fail to enlighten.

When I was a wee laddie back in Halifax and it was pushing 90F...or 33C...one pal inevitably declared "it's a drinker!" The undergrad group I hung out with - now doctors and lawyers and such as Waylon put it - considered drinking beer an activity in itself like, say, going to the movies, a dance, bowling or heading out in a herd to annihilate an all you can eat Chinese buffet. But on a day like today there was none of that. It was all ice + bucket + beer + porch.

These days, however, I am much more restrained - by choice and circumstance. A BBQ and guests and planning are needed which means a lot more work than the shared rental's porch ever required. I'm also inclined to different tipples that the ever present case of Oland's Ex of a couple of decades back. On a day like this now all I really crave is cold hefeweizen. It's too hot even for a hoppy IPA as far as I am concerned. Other than that, we are talking sweet vermouth and a whack of soda - the drink I would drink on the surface of the sun.

What about you? What is the one thing that really works when it is stinking hot, either beer or that other thing called "not beer"?

The difference between America and Canada is that Americans don't care what the difference between America and Canada is.

Adams' method was established in Fire and Ice: he notes at one point that in the U.S. SUVs outsell minivans by two-to-one, whereas in Canada it's vice versa. That's a fact. The fancy is in the meaning he appends to it. "This is a stark difference," he writes, "whose roots can be traced directly to the differing values of our two countries." This assertion seems to have no basis other than a casual assumption that Canadians are more environmentally responsible and thus more concerned with "excessive gasoline consumption, pollution and safety violations."

Isn't there a more obvious correlation? Minivans are cheaper than SUVs, and Canadians have less disposable income than Americans. It's easy to be "socially responsible" if you've got no choice in the matter. On the Continent they're driving around in things the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger's cup holder, so presumably they're more "socially responsible" still. In Canada those who can afford SUVs buy them, it's just that their numbers are smaller. Remember Herb Dhaliwal? Well, no, you probably don't. But a couple of years back M. Chrétien made him minister of natural resources, and he certainly got through a lot of them. He drove around like a Hamas warlord in a three-ton Cadillac Escalade. That's bigger than my SUV and I'm in favour of global warming. The difference is that the high living of a Liberal cabinet minister is confined, north of the border, mainly to Liberal cabinet ministers while down south it's more widely available.

I don't often cross post on Pownce and here on my blog, but this is worth an exception I think. A few minutes ago, a friend reminded me of the Barenaked Ladies' cover of Lovers in a Dangerous Time. I hadn't heard it in years and I'd never seen the video. The song is as good or better than I remembered. I don't care what you think of what the band's done since the famous (at least in Canada) and elusive Yellow Tape, this cover stands on its own.

The fantastic Canadian Design Resource has an article today about the historical flag of Canada's Metis people. I've made several posts in the past about flags and the Metis flag fits well with the other standouts I've mentioned previously. According the description, the Metis flag "represents the coming together of two distinct and vibrant cultures, European and indigenous, to produce a distinctly new culture, the Metis... the infinity symbol suggests that the Metis people will exist forever."

I've been spending many of my recent weekend days working from cafes near my apartment in San Francisco. There's a new one called On the Corner on Divisidero about two blocks from where I live and it gives me a nice break from my small apartment to go down there to write email and work on Pownce stuff — plus their coffee is very drinkable.

However, I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels guilty throwing down a couple of bucks for a coffee and then mooching wifi, power, and a comfy chair for a few hours. I try to get up every once in a while and grab a snack or a coffee refill. I hardly need the extra caffeine and I especially could handle eating fewer pastries, but I feel obliged to support the cafe.

In many ways, cafes serve a very similar purpose as co-working space. Many people come much more often than I do and stay longer, essentially using the cafe as temporary office. For co-working space, like the Queen Street Commons, people pay a decent sum for the convenience.

I'm curious if anyone out there has seen cafes experimenting with alternative payment schemes? I could imagine either a subscription scheme or something as simple as special tip jar clearly indicated as a 'thanks-for-the-wifi-comfy-chair-music-bathroom' donation. I know I'd be willing to pay — and my body would thank me for the reduced consumption of guilty pastries and extra cups of coffee.

I'm currently in Toronto at the Mesh conference taking place at the MaRS centre on College Street. Today was the MeshU day of workshops, including great presentations by John Lax, Leah Culver, Ryan Carson, John Resig, and a bunch of others. I presented in the morning and promised that I'd stick my slides online, so here they are. If audio is available later, I'll try to add it on, but I promised to get them up there at least in a basic way. Thanks to anyone/everyone who came out!

As I've talked about at a few conferences recently, one of the exciting/difficult things about working in-house, on a project with the scope of something like Digg, is the luxury/challenge to adapt your own work. The comments system on Digg is a perfect example. Just this past week, we rolled out the latest iteration of the comments system, which is the fourth major adaption of the system since the site launched over four years ago. It's a project that's been a long time coming and has been under development for a fairly long period. What a relief to finally see it out in the wild.

In his blog post about the release, Micah described several of the important changes that we made from both a design and performance standpoint. From the design side, we've made the comments visually lighter, reduced the metadata around each comment, improved the visual flow down the comment threads, added subtler functionality, and significantly improved the interaction design. When I say we improved the interaction design, I mean that as you interact with the comments (e.g. digg a comment, write a comment, edit your comments, etc) all of the pieces fit together more naturally.

The next step will be to iterate on the comments system once we've seen how people use, abuse, and break the one we just built. We certainly plan on doing more small adaptations over the next months as opposed to waiting to perform a large revision. As always with Digg projects, it's pretty exciting to watch a few million people use a feature that, up until launch, had only been seen or used by a few people... it'll be interesting to see what they do.

Well, I suppose that the promised break in the days of rain that have been mid-July in Easlakia has to stand for something. I can't think when I last took a summer week off and did not load the family for somewhere - which is just as well as a van full of damp is not a happy van. It has been a time of napping and of reading something other than the glowing screen. I did not home repair. Of that you can be truly proud.

• Ben is proxy blogging Berlin. I hear we need change.
• What do you think about the fence?
• My new found status as Canada's sixth most popular political blogger demands that I make some obtuse observations on the state of doings in Ottawa. Except nothing seems to be going on. Who cares about election plans - I want substance. But aside from the general quality of Federal leadership, there seems to be only one big issue: carbon tax. I still think this is a yawner and a loser for whoever gets marked with the green tint. It shouldn't be so but as there are no strong answers yet, proposing the unpopular and the unlikely-to-succeed is seldom a yellow brick road to a majority hold on Parliament. And it's no more than a plank at best. We need more.
• So which Federal issues deserve more airplay?? The recent premiers' gathering raised the prospect of actual steps towards First Nations reconciliation. Wouldn't that be nice of real steps were taken towards that national quandary? How about infrastructure - Ottawa and Toronto have made nice to buy bridges and buses. But do you run an election on that? Rideology not ideology??
• Al Purdy's cottage is for sale. Owning that would be rather neato.
• This week's weather shattered the promise of a massive harvest for a lot of Ontario fruit growers. Hailstorms. We need to start the "Buy A Peach With A Bruise" campaign. Why do all the farmer's protests have to be around the combine harvesters? Who's behind this anyway?
• Apparently the oversight committee decided to lay off hitting each other in the head with hammers. Who thought that was ever a good idea?

Full disclosure: I wrote most of this Thursday. Between the dodgy internet access and my new found love for not being up at 6:15 am, I thought it would be prudent to plan ahead so as to ensure you desk jockeys have your moments of bulletty bliss at the crack of dawn.

I suppose it is good that I can't get on the internet for more than 7 minutes at a time this week. Maybe Sympatico considers this part of the service that I am buying. The "Make Sure You Smell The Roses" feature. I should really switch providers but I am too lazy even for that.

I have to say, you know, that the idea of plucking tin-pot dictators off busses to have them taken to global justice warms the heart. Careful readers will know that I met many refugees from the Bosnia war in PEI of all places where early relocatations took place. I coached a mens soccer team that was more than half former soldiers, many of whom had knees half healed from concentration camp beatings. Suffice it to say, I learned too much and am quite content on behalf of those old teammates that Karadzic now faces life in a cinderblock cube.

Still, Ratko Mladic is still out there. Apparently he may have squealed on the boss to save himself for a few more months. Heroic characters all.

It's not like I am not blogging, you know. It's just that I am not blogging here today. But you would, too, if this is what you got up to.

I don't mind "stay-cation" except that you can't spell it without the hyphen. Better than being called an unimaginative twerb who can't get it together enough to take the family camping. I have excuses - I always have excuses. First, family reunion on Saturday. Then, the annual vintage base ball game that got rained out yesterday. Today, a beer writer or two visit as part of their multi-continental trip. So even though we are at home, we are getting something of an edjification.

I hope I don't just watch TV but the twisted back makes that a possibility. I watched the ESPYs last night, thinking they would be lame. Best TV awards show ever. Justin Timberlake was a dreamy host - I say no more for fear of affecting my cred. Now, on a Monday morning in July, I hunt in vain for reruns of Mr. Dress-up and The Friendly Giant. What the heck has happened to the CBC? Thank God, I can at least look forward to Elwood Glover's Luncheon Date at noon to go with my egg salad and parsley sandwiches.

1. The honeymoon, or tourist, stage;
2. The irritation-to-anger stage
3. The rejection/regression stage
4. The integration/assimilation stage
5. The reverse, or reentry, stage