January 2008 Archives

it's Frobuary 3, YOMHC 0x24. another day, another mohawk.

the green flash is too bitter. bitterness outweighs the hop flavor.

it is not balanced in the direction i'd prefer. definitely very piney in the belches, though. the swell thing about being a homebrewer is that if i'm lucky, i can get exactly what i want: piney, grapefruitty, minty bitterness, with delicious hop burps and a non-lingering bitterness, or at least, a lingering earthy/gritty bitterness.

more beer this weekend than usual.

friday kicked off with a tour of devil's canyon brewery. to be honest: i'd never had their beers before. but i've been many times to jersey joe's and admired the devil's canyon tap handles. about 20 minutes into beer friday, we happened upon jason, the brewmaster, and struck up a long, wonderful conversation. he revealed many secrets, many not-secrets, and many tidbits of interest. i sampled three beers: the habanero loager: habanero burn: holy crap. otherwise: meh, even bleh. stout: yum! chocolatey and earthy, solid and thick. scotch ale: somewhat meh, but quite drinkable.

overall, a solid 2 outta 3. not bad. the party was good, even though i didnt know anybody. we shouted "freebird" at the band and they played the first 3 bars of "sweet home alabama". close, but no cigar. this was after i and my hetero life mate had sung along, at lung's top, to "southern man". good times.

at some point during the weekend, i got it into my head that what needed brewing was an amarillo lager. so that's what i plan to do: brew me up a decoction mashed amarillo-hopped lager. someday. not sure when.

to assist in this matter, i purchased a sixer of warsteiner. and then a sixer of stone ipa, and a sixer of green flash ipa, since i have had and liked one of the ipas but could not remember which, and they wouldn't let me buy single bottles (the bastiges!).

so: the warsteiner: kinda meh but very drinkable.

the stone ipa: it was my new favorite beer, until....

the green flash: wow! a metric assload of bitterness, with huge hop flavor, tons of aroma. piney, resiney, grapefruity -- balanced, bitter, and huge. my new favoite ipa.

no, that's not so: it's my second favorite ipa. my own "desert heat" beats them all. while desert heat did not have a balance of hops (it was all grapefruit), it did have a huge malt character which the two IPAs tonight seem to lack. still, they are educational, to say the very least ;)

Q: what is the best way to enjoy the hop character of a west coast IPA?
A: belch.

warren slocum sent me a mail. warren slocum is the chief elections officer and assessor, county clerk-recorder. warren slocum did not properly assess my age. he said:

Dear Under 30 Voters in San Mateo County,

I'm over 30, you insensitive clod!

we're out of Desert Heat, the greatest beer i ever brewed.

a tragedy of incalculable proportions.

and with it, doubts about the remake:

to date, or not to date, that is the question. whether tis nobler in the carboy to suffer the esters and aldehydes of outrageous quantities of fermentable date sugar, or to take yeast against a sea of maltose, and by opposing it, ferment it?

but i suspect he is. he has many youtube videos, here's the last of them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5dwUqCGJeE&feature=related.

the g-woman is so sniveling, so clearly dressed down, so obliviously, sinisterly in the wrong, that i wonder if it isn't all staged.

now that i've got me a "bike computer", i can say with some amount of confidence such things as, "i rode 28.9 miles today with an average speed of 12mph, taking about 2 and a half hours with lots of resting and backtracking to make sure the wife was still with me".

all right then, here i go already:

i rode 28.9 miles today with an average speed of 12mph, taking about 2 and a half hours with lots of resting and backtracking to make sure the wife was still with me.

that's right, second week with my bike and i rode nearly 30 miles. granted, 30 very easy miles from fester city to burlingame (doh, always thought it was milbrae!) with lots of stopping and so forth, but i'm easing into things. i did two minor hills (up to the captain's house at coyote point, and up to the top of the garbage heap on 3rd) and had no trouble climbing or shifting, both highly problematic ops on my old mountain bike.

sadly, i found a problem with my bike: on the way back, i stopped to ask a woman if her dog was a bouvier (it was! and it was grey. wtf?) and managed, somehow, to twist my seat around. now i'm not sure if it's at the right level, since it follows that if it's loose enough to twist, it's loose enough to descend. this led me to a realization: i ought to carry an allen wrench, at the least, when i ride. many more specialized tools are required to adjust my new bike than my old bike. no tools needed to adjust the seat on the mountain bike. an allen wrench isn't too much of a burden, and it's good for training to carry that extra weight.

speaking of training by carrying extra weight, when i was hanging back with hops some dude came at us on a bike with big bags of somehting hanging from the handlebars and the saddle. now, i was wearing my SPORTS SUNGLASSES, which are exactly like my regular sunglasses only slightly broken. actually, my regular sunglasses are slightly broken also, but my SPORTS SUNGLASSES are slightly broken in a slightly different way. the distinguishing feature of my SPORTS SUNGLASSES is that they are so covered in dried, salty sweat, that i cannot make out details finer than a small elephant or shetland pony. many times i have been out running with my SPORTS SUNGLASSES, admiring the figure of the hottie running toward me, only to discover once they were right next to me that they were less of a hottie and more of a 90 year old man with a peg leg.

you may thing a "but i digress" would be appropriate here, but you'd be wrong. i looked at the dude on the bike with the bags and pronounced in a loud voice, "he must be training!" you know, cuz why else would he be on a road bike with bags of crap? if he were commuting he'd have saddlebags. i figured he was on some weird, hardcore training regimen.

whelp, once he got into seeing range, it turns out he's a crusty old homeless guy with bags of cans or garbage or clothes hung from his bike. ha!

anyhow, aside from my seat twisting, all my gear performed admirably. i had one of those energy goo things and didn't know what to do with the empty. it has some feature on it that suggests there's a clever solution to this problem (a recycling handle or something, i'd go look but i'm apathetic) but i didn't spend the time to figure it out. i just tossed the empty into the bay.

ha! ha ha! i kid. of course i didn't.

my water bottles are too small. i rode 30mi and drank maybe 2 pints of water. not good. my toes freeze. this is partly because my shoes are well ventilated, partly because it's chilly out, partly because i ride fast, and partly because of genetics. yay, genetics! also, maybe my bike is out of whack. i dunno.

so, that was fun, and if i'm not all miserably sore tomorrow, it's off to cañada for a leisurely (wtf english! l-i-before-e-except-after-c-surely isn't a word? WHY BOTHER HAVING RULES AT ALL IF WE'RE JUST GOING TO LIVE IN TOTAL CHAOS ALL THE TIME ANYHOW?) 15 or so miles.

so right after biking mightily for the first time in years, after squatting 295 (yeah, kinda poorly, but the 275s were solid and the argument still stands with 275) for the first time in months, i walk into the climbing gym and notice shoes on sale.

get to my changing seat and whip out my own shoes -- doh! a hole in the rubber! time for new shoes, and how convenient that they have some on sale. not a mighty sale, mind you, but a sale.

and, what's more, the shoes they have on sale just happen to be (if my memory serves) the second-choice shoe that i had when i selected my current (now old) set of shoes, which are pretty much out of stock everywhere or i'd have another pair.

so i purchase a pair of the shoes, a half size too small (maybe). and then, i proceed, after a 5.9 warmup, to climb a 10b, a 10d (my very first!), and 2-3 more 10b's.

my best of late has been a bunch of 9s and a 10a if i'm lucky. i dunno if it was the shoes or something else, but in any case, i'm suddenly biking, lifting, and climbing above my level, in the span of 3 days.

then i went home and had some Desert Heat, and realized i'm also brewing above my level (heh).

fuck that shit.

pabst blue ribbon!

i did a squat pyramid last night, i dont think i've done that since i was training with sheiko (heh), and then, it was not small-set pyramids, that hoser makes you do big long sets.

i did 1x5x205,225,275,295,275 and then, when i got to my set of 5x225, i was amazed by how light it felt. it did not feel light the first time i did it. i checked the weights after i was done to make sure they were all there, and by gum, they were.

i've done that sort of thing with the bench press and it never feels light after i drop it down. but with the squat, i feared i'd toss the weight off.

just more evidence that i'm a cyclist, eh?

i spent a couple hours sunday afternoon out on canada road with a couple hundred of my closest biking pals. my bike and i did rather well. at one point, after blowing through a series of stop signs, my riding buddy remarked that i was a born roadie. i agree!

i haven't ridden in years. i love riding. how do these two reconcile? i had not the right bike, until now.

i don't want to give too much credit to the bike: after all, it's me doing the pedaling. so it's i and i that do the work, and i and i tend to fly, at least when it's flat. i'm quite slow on the uphills, though not nearly so slow as when i was riding the wrong bike: mechanical advantage, baby!

mechanical advantage is something i have to get used to. shifting is easy and effective now (this is new) and even when pedaling at a good cadence, just the slightest increase in power output or a small shift of toe position can have a surprising effect on my speed (also new). on this ride, there was not a lot of stopping, so i didn't get much practice with the clipping/unclipping of the pedals, but i did get the opportunity to feel some of the difference that clipless pedals + shoes make. i was not dragging the crankshaft up, but i did find that i could pedal lightly to great effect -- not possible on my old bike.

overall, i enjoyed my ride immensely, and am happy with my diversion into a new sport. now i just need some time to ride (uh, not a request for a layoff, in case you're listening, universe).

my first ride on my brand new road bike, i did not fall.

now, i have good balance overall as a person, and i haven't fallen off a bike since that one time i was pedaling home in the rain on my mountain bike, braked on top of that metal plate, you know the one, and went skidding all over my knee, which required three weeks of convalescence, but not before i went home and set a deadlift PR (heh -- and then came the pain!)

anyhow, i wasn't expecting to fall due to balance or traction issues, but because i now have clipless pedals, which, for non-riders, means my pedals clip onto my shoe (hence the name clipless -- no, really!). the danger is that when approaching a stop, i'm unable (or forget) to disconnect myself from my bike, and thus have no free foot to set on the road, and fall. or, as the bike shop owner told me, unclipping a foot, setting it down, and putting my weight on the other side of the bike -- whoops!

anyhow, i did none of these things and stayed well on my bike. i had some trouble getting reattached after every stop, and although i am very confident in my ability to unclip (though perhaps not in an emergency -- the tension (adjustable, i know) is pretty high on my pedals) i am not so great at clipping in.

that's not a problem, it's better to become quickly proficient at unclipping.

the ride was nice, not easy. i wasn't exactly comfortable, but i also was not uncomfortable. hills were hard but thats because my huge, muscular, deadlifting arse is full of so much extra huge muscles that they actually hold me back when climbing (hills or walls).

anyhow, it was my first ride, and it wasn't bad. i need to find a better place than alameda de las pulgas: so many stop signs, so many teenagers in mustangs.

i dont know why i didn't see it sooner.

i plugged the CO2 into the DBT, with unpressurized gas lines, and watched DBT shoot up into the tubes.

oooops!

fortunately i had a splitter so i could pressurize the line, hook it up, and remove hte other to clean while the DBT carbonates. huzzar for clear lines!

it's Frobuary 1, YOMHC 0x23!

another trim for the hawk. it's very tall now, even with minimal gel. cool.

but little sichuan !<3 me :(

i used to eat their spicy green beans by the truckfull, but now it seems i can't even tolerate a little.

is it the chilis? or just e.coli?

i realized this morning where my hair styling is leading. here's me in another month (only i wont be smoking) :

it's been at least 6 months since the last time i rode my bike.

it's been at least a year since the last time i rode it more than once in a month. probably been a year since the last time i rode it.

i decided to ride it today. this involved no small amount of prep work: pumping tires, searching for bike shorts, searching for insoles for shoes to wear, searching for bike shorts, eating a light-ish lunch, jump starting the jeep, attaching the bike rack, and so forth.

when we finally arrived at our insertion point, i got all my junk on (helmet, gloves, camel sack, and so forth) and biked for a good 1-2 minutes -- just enough to ensure allergy irritation and muscle soreness for the next 2 days -- before my bike stopped operating. apparently, there was no power transfer between the chain and the rear wheel. i could pedal and shift all i wanted, but it had no effect on the turning of the wheel.

i spent a good ten minutes proving that i had no idea how a bicycle works before walking back to the car in defeat.

so whoopie, now i am determined on account of this to do at least two things:

1) become knowledgeable in bicycle repair
2) buy a road bike since that's really what i should have gotten 7 years ago when i got my mountain bike what what i only ride on roads
3) make room indoors to keep my bike on account of our crummy garage here is no place to keep a bike and neither is my patio on account of things rust out there and there's no room on account of the tomato plant
4) become knowledgeable in bicycle repair

i am sure that had i done 1 and 4 last year, i'd have known how to apply $simple_fix to get my bike working again and could feel like i'd actually done something to deserve the aforementioned soreness and allergies.

i attended an xmas mass with my parents-in-law in lovely waynesville MO. it was, afaik, the first catholic service i've ever been to.

to quote an unrecalled jewish comedian, the catholic mass is a lot like synagogue, only with less hebrew and comfier footrests.

har de har.

the mass itself seemed more goofy to me than the jewish "equivalent" partly because it was all in english, partly because i hadn't been raised to consider it anything other than slightly goofy, partly because i'm much wiser to the purpose of repetition and prayer, and partly because i really paid close attention to what was said. so close, in fact, that i recognized the closing benediction was ripped straight from the jews. it was literally word-for-word, other than the bits about jesus christ, that is.

there was something else that bugged me about the service, but honestly, i can't recall what it was. at the end of the service, i came across the page in the back of the prayer guide detailing what various flavors of non-catholics were supposed to do at the various points of the service. where was this page when i needed it, at the beginning? ah well, i did all right, i think.

i came out of it still a non-catholic. that's good.

somewhere along the tour, when a fellow tourist asked where all the workers were, i replied that the oompa loompas had the day off. they didn't get the joke, the philistines, but it was fitting. the budweiser WHQ in st. louis MO certainly has the look and feel of the mythical wonka factory, right down to the areas where we weren't allowed photography (not, imho, because we might snap a shot of the secret ingredient to the everlasting budstopper, but because we might expose aging budweiser to harmful light and thus give it some flavor, any flavor at all, even if it's skunky, oh geez let it have some flavor!!! sorry).

anyhow, the first thing I saw was this magnificent building, apparently a Barley Cleaning House:

in st. louis, many buildings are old-school brick, the sort you never see in CA for reasons that are evident to anyone who's lived in CA for any length of time (hint, as if any of you aren't living in CA right now: it's because of the big bad wolf). because of all the brick buildings, many of which were also quite tall (see above, re: buildings in CA), the factory had a magical, quaint appeal to it which probably went unobserved and unimagined by others in our group more used to tall, brick, old-looking buildings.

right on the way in to the entrance was this:

way to go, guys! huzzar! keep those fingertips and noses out of your fine product!

so, we dilly dallied in the lobby as we waited for our tour to depart. right there in the lobby was the secret recipe for their flagship, with one *big secret* left out (which will be revealed in a moment):

i didn't have time to shoo the gits away, so there it is. i also didn't have time to read the details on how rice improves their beer, i had to wait until the free sample to experience it for myself. more on that, too, in a bit!

as we exited the tourgroup pooling area, the fresh (cold!) air brought with it a very familiar odor: boiling wort. it was fantastic. boiling wort, along with roasting coffee, are two aromas that are always welcome to me. i've tasted beer i didn't like, but i've never smelled a boiling wort i didn't like.

i sniffed hard (eyeing the clydesdale stables that we were approaching, realizing that my sniffing opportunities would soon cease) and thought i could even smell some hops. yum, and yum.

to our right, as we approached the horses, was an entrance. what's not to like?

the horses, of course, of course, were big. and smelly. and pissed off about being in a smallish pen. probably cold, too, as i was. who can say? we looked at them, and then went into the indoor stables, and heard some junk about them. honestly, if i wanted horse, i'd go to mexico and order a taco. i was there for beer. move on!

staged photo-op relating to horses somehow:

back outside, we saw pipes, smokestacks, clocktowers, oh my!

as we approached the lagering room, we stood next to what i guessed to be a maltings floor. there was the sound of Small Bits Of Things Moving, like beans in a coffee roaster, which i have heard before, or dried barley being moved about a floor, which i have never heard before. there was a wonderful smell of roast barley, but that my have been from a brewpot. there was also a pipe with a cloth around it, the sort of thing a truck would drive up to and have stuff come out of into the truckbed. like the coal spouts for old trains.

anyhow, we're standing there outside the lagering house, being told that we're not allowed photography once inside, surrounded by the thick smell of boiling wort and/or malting barley, and Doofus #1 behind me says to his friends, "wow, smell those hops". i sniffed. i snuffed. i strained my imagination and checked my references. barley: yes. hops? no. methinks the lad was confused.

inside we got to stand near enourmous lager tanks. there were about 4, i think, but they were also stacked 4 stories high and many rows deep. they each held about 10,000 six packs of america's largest selling beer (that's what the sign said: america's largest selling beer. largest? what?). inside was the secret ingredient: strips of beechwood. the beechwood, the tour guide said, attracts yeast sediment, naturally filtering the beer. inside the lager tanks, said the tour guide, the yeast produces carbonation, naturally fizzifying (uh, my word, not hers) the beer. wow, bud sure is all-natural! i wondered to myself whether the beechwood contributed sugar to help revive the yeast. myself, i'm more of an ale brewer, so lager yeast may behave differently, but when i want to carbonate beer naturally, i have to add more fermentables to arouse it from its slumber.

i asked hops whether she thought the beechwood contained sugars that roused the yeast to carbonation force. she didn't know, and i told her she ought to ask the tour guide if they add sugars of any kind into the lager tanks to rouse the yeast.

Doofus #1 (note to readers: i do not mean to set you up to hope for the appearance of a Doofus #2. There really wasn't one, unless you count me when I ordered my second (and third) beer, which we'll get to later) must have overheard us, because he turned around to offer his expert opinion.

"The hops have sugars in them for the yeast," he sagely advised.

Hops would have none of this, and assumed a fighting stance. "Actually," she said, "they don't."

This bold, unelaborated statement of fact seemed convincing enough for Doofus #1, as he backpedaled to save face before his pals. "Well," he said, quoting almost verbatim from the informative but un-detailed signs he evidently read in the lobby, pre-tour, "the hops give the beer its distinctive flavor and aromas."

hops wasn't going to let him continue to spout bullcrap, but i wanted to get on with the tour so i poked her in the back to signal that doofuses will be doofuses and engaging them in doofusery helps nobody. i think there were some more words exchanged regarding rice giving the beer body or some such claptrap. we moved on. we asked the tour lady our question about sugars, and explained that i was a home brewer, and told her about priming sugar, and so forth. she revealed that she was just a tour guide and not a brewing scientist. she didn't know from priming sugar.

after the lagering tanks, it was back on in to photography land. we stood in a little presentation area (also, i think, a national historic landmark because fritz busch or someone died there or took a leak in the restroom or something) and the tour guide blazed through the brewing process, as illustrated by the following photo, at blistering speed:

i am certain that nobody was entirely illuminated by her speech, but perhaps interest may have been sparked and a homebrewer or two born. she knew phrases like "primary fermentation" but knew not really what they meant. meh.

as the tour group crammed into the elevator, hops told the guide that hops in the glass display case were painted green. the tour guide was startled and replied that hops are naturally green. hops agreed but pointed out that the ones on display were picked, dried, and thus naturally brown. the green color they had was (upon minimal inspection) clearly paint. the guide took a close look and agreed. i guess even tour guides can learn something every once in a while.

they held the elevator for us (they had to, on account of we had the guide, har!) and we crammed in. upstairs, we got to see the real action: mash tuns, and brew kettles, and plumbing, oh my!

the brew kettles were undergoing a cleaning cycle, it seemed. steam was billowing around inside them. yum!

we climbed some stairs and got to peer into The Control Room, filled with fake computers and SAG nerds. if you look closely you can see john travolta in the back, hacking into NSA networks. uh huh.

then, it was back outside for more impressive brick buildings and wonkalike gates:

one of the funniest things not shown in this photo is the emblem of the busch "bread yeast" that was sold during prohibition. in the pre-tour lobby there was a display of the non-alcoholic products sold during prohibition, including anheuser-busch malt syrup (for "baking") and anheuser-busch "bread" yeast. the tour guide made note during the tour, right before i took that picture, of the "non-beer" products sold by AB during prohib. she mentioned 2 of the three non-water ingredients for beer without batting an eye.

pictured here is <name-i-don't-recall>, the AB mascot of "non-beer" products during prohibition. that's not a sandwich he's eating.

what do you reckon gets canned inside this building?

if you said "employees", you win the prize:

also, "budweiser" would have been accepted. the canning/bottling lines were the second no-photos area, so i have no photos of them. it was quite a dingus, the canner. they had several floors of canning/bottling/kegging machines, with impressive robots and beer-stank. the touring cannery was shut down for maintenance, so they took us into THE FORBIDDEN ZONE where actual, non-touring canning was going on. i saw Natural Ice being canned, which is favored by my brother-in-law for reasons i cannot understand, if it's anything like michelob ultra, which i'll get to in a moment.

german beer has four ingredients. budweiser has five. here's one of them:

we ended up in the tasting room, where, to budweiser's immense credit, we were served samples in actual glasses (a set of which i later purchased, because they are actually really nice glasses). i ordered, of course, a budweiser. we were to get 2 samples each, and hops said i could have most of hers. she ordered a "belgian white".

the belgian was rather flavorful, with orange peel and the usual suspects for a WIT (i guess AB figures americans can't figure out that wit == white, so they translate it for us. speaking of AB figuring stuff about americans, at the beginning of the tour, they told us that Mister Busch decided to call his beer budweiser because a) german-americans would like the german name and thus drink it, and b) non-german-american americans would be able to pronounce it). however, since it was, in fact, a bud, it was the boringest wit i've had, and i've only really ever had 3 or 4.

but, to the bud: as you may or may not know, this was the first budweiser i've ever had (i am pretty sure the beer-sip i got as a kid was a michelob, which, as it happens, is also a budweiser brand, but still not THE KING OF BEERS. btw, i hated that sip. bleh). excitedly, i sipped from my tasting glass before i even got to my table. it was all right! i was surprised!

there was a toasty finish, which i dig. there was a fair hint of hops -- not just bitterness, either, but an earthy, grainy, hop aroma. now, it wasn't at the level of a seirra nevada celebration ale (which i had, for the first time, about 5 days later, oh dang, that's good!) and it wasn't at the level of, say, a westmalle, which isn't a sierra nevada, and isn't even really "about" the hops but still manages, with an overseas shipment, to boot, to have a delightfully fresh hop aroma. no, it was none of these, but it was fresh hops and i tasted it.

i had read that budweiser intentionally (everything in a bud is intentional, right? those guys are control freaks and scientists) cultivates acytaldehyde in their brew, and as i aspirated it, i could taste the green-apple flavor that earned me so many dings against my tripel. to round it all out, there was a bit of malty maltyness in the beer. it was cold, it was crisp, somewhat flavorful, and had a neutral finish.

i liked my budweiser!

i downed it quickly and went back to the bar. there were lots of choices, some of which were craftyish, but i was there for the classics. i wanted a michelob to compare to the bud, since michelob was supposed to be even more premium than THE KING OF BEERS, at least, according to the ad copy in the lobby. so i looked at the different michelobs that they offered, and ordered a michelob ULTRA, since, after all, what could be better than the ULTRA BEER. also in the running was a budweiser SELECT, since SELECT means "best" and how can you do better than the "best" of the KING OF BEERS?

i got back to my table and gagged up a spleen. holy crap was michelob ultra awful.

it turns out, dear reader, as i am sure you already knew, that michelob ultra is not, in fact, the BMW of beers, but rather a light beer no-carb entry! egads, was it awful. it was like drinking seltzer water. seriously, the dominant flavor was CO2 gas. what? who would drink this stuff? it contained no alcohol to speak of, had no flavor, color was disgusting, and tasted like seltzer. why not just get a seltzer? maybe in a bar the seltzer is more expensive than michelob ultra? i know not.

hops went back and ordered a michelob "amber bock". the name is a bit redundant, but i guess you have to be when marketing beer to americans. of the 4 beers i tried, the bock was certainly the most heavily flavored, with a strong hop bitterness and fair amount of aroma. i can't say with certainty that i've ever had a bock. i've had a fair share of dopplebocks, though, and if we assume that a bock is a weaker dopplebock, then the michelob bock sucked. it's a weak offering in the category, with little to distinguish itself from the budweiser besides somewhat more bitterness and color. the maltyness of a dopplebock was pretty much absent.

overall, of the four i had, i enjoyed the budweiser the most. of the other three, i'd rather have a seltzer than a michelob ultra, i'd rather have an optimator than the "bock", and i'd rather have anything from any part of belgium than the wit. but there's nothing else like a bud.

we sat briefly with another couple and it was revealed that i was a home brewer. they asked (dunno why) if people can drink unfermented wort. i told them what i knew, which was that not only can people do it, people do do it, and that just a month ago i'd had a jamaican bottled unfermented wort called "malta".

exiting the serving room, i visited the men's room, and as i whizzed away my free beer, i thought to myself: this goes straight back to the lagering tanks.

from there we went to the gift shop and dropped a load. most expensive free beer ever.

later that night, we went out to dinner at a crummy chain seafood place a couple blocks from the hotel and no more than 2 miles from the budweiser world headquarters.

i ordered a budweiser. my second ever.

it was a true bud. tasteless, but not tasteless enough to hide the soggy cardboard. no hop flavor whatsoever and just minimal bitterness. carbonation was off. it was awful, and hops confirmed for me that it was much more like "a budweiser" than what i'd had in the brewery.

as dinner arrived, i realized the appeal of the true budweiser: it goes with food like a flavorless sprite. it clears the palate, washes bits of shrimp from between the teeth, and sparkles nicely beside the plate. i'll stick to water.

i said to hops that i'd had my first and last budweiser on the same day. if i ever go back to st. louis, i may have another, but only if it's at the brewery.

overall, i've enjoyed 50% of the budweisers i've ever had. curiously, that's a better average than i've got with duvel, but i keep on buying duvels in the hope that someday i'll enjoy one.