Bread

About that bread - it's the Jim Lahey no-knead bread that Mark Bittman wrote up in the New York Times a couple of years ago. It's the greatest thing ever, of course, especially since I lost the recipe. You don't need the sheet music to whistle 'Summertime' either. This bread is chewy with a great crisp crust, and the longer you let it sit before baking, the more sour it gets.

Here's the recipe in my head - possibly, probably different from the original. Mix flour, salt, and yeast, then warm water - half as much water as flour by volume. Make sure it's evenly wet, but don't worry much after that, then cover it somehow - I have a bowl with a snap-on plastic lid that is pretty airtight. You could just wrap it in plastic, but somehow you need to keep it from drying out over the next 12 hours or so. Let it sit overnight, then preheat the oven and a heavy casserole with a lid to 450 degrees. Flop the dough out and knead - no, sorry, don't knead it - roll it about a little and get it kind of round, then drop it into the hot casserole. You can rub the top with olive oil if you want. You can sprinkle it with salt. You can sprinkle it with rosemary. Cook it with the lid on for half an hour, then with the lid off for another fifteen minutes. Make everybody wait while it cools for 15 or 20 minutes on a rack - luxuriate in the power of making everybody wait. I wouldn't advise sticking too closely to this recipe - certainly not after you've made it once - it's more fun to figure out just how hard it is to screw it up. Don't let it cool too long.

Radio

Here's a good thing not to do again. I was listening to NPR Saturday morning and got angry during a segment where Scott Simon interviewed Judd Gregg, Republican US senator. The senator, a clever and determined liar, made a number of statements that Simon let pass without comment. I don't know why I was so much angrier at Simon than the senator - I think because the job of a GOP senator is to lie, which Gregg was doing perfectly well. Simon's job is to ask questions, which he was not doing so well. My opinion only.

Anyway, I found myself yelling at the radio, and then a bit later writing an email to NPR with the subject line "Tell Scott Simon to pull his head out of his ass". It was quite personal. I had a great time writing it, clicked Send and then took the dog for a walk in this frosty weather we've been having lately. Glorious walk! When I got home and checked my email, maybe an hour and a half or two hours later, there was a reply from Scott Simon.

It sure wasn't a form letter. He replied to my substantive points, alluded to my insults in that way people do when they receive a rabid attack from a stranger, and ended by making me feel about three inches tall. So I have decided not to do that again. I think and read a lot about politics, and while I don't want to renounce my citizenship or stop voting or anything, I know it would be better for my mental equilibrium if I cut back on the blind rage aspect of it. Another thing that I think would be good for the old brain and soul is to avoid insulting people I don't know - maybe even people I do know.

On the plus side - I made a great loaf of bread last night.

Dark Room

I suppose this blog is going the way of most - I haven't posted anything in a week. I've actually made two batches of beer since I last posted, and another sign of progress - I've finally broken (temporarily, I'm sure) the fatal hold P.G Wodehouse had exerted and now have a new obsession - R.K. Narayan. I came across him at random at the library, where somebody sharp and kind had turned a collection of his short novels face out at the end of the aisle. Narayan is one of these kooks who seem set on recreating a particular patch of the world, with all its inhabitants, in fictional form. This is a funny thing to do - I have no idea how it benefited James Joyce to make somebody like me feel I understand an entire city-full of 1904 people, or what advantage Narayan derives from my delight in Malgudi, but I'm happy he bothered.

"Swami and Friends" is a great classic schoolboy story of friendship, jealousy, hatred, daring, despair, bravery, all on the 12-year-old scale (i.e., about 10 times life-size). "The Bachelor of Arts" revolves around a young man's obsession with a young girl, but the relationship that killed me most dead in this book was that between the boy and his father. "The Dark Room" is about a painful situation - the abject slavery of a woman in her marriage with a callous husband - and ends in despair, more or less, but is so vivid that tragedy is eclipsed by pragmatic considerations, such as how to commit suicide; failing that, how to avoid entanglements; failing that, how to find a place outside of the home of her marriage; failing that, how to find enough rice to live. And how to leave young children in the care of an uncaring man; failing that, how to surrender. It's a great book! Still, I didn't name either of the last two beers 'Dark Room' - that would certainly have made them too bitter. Instead I made Swami IPA last weekend and Bachelor of Arts IPA today, and named this post Dark Room. I am unlikely to make an English Teacher ale next weekend, but only because all my carboys are full.

Dracula

I watched a DVD of Dracula with the Philip Glass music last night. I was interested in the music, and the movie was fun. I don't know when I last watched this - probably after school sometime in the 60s - or if I ever watched the whole thing straight through, but it was spooky and dripping with shadows, weird glows, and brooding sounds. The music is best during the long pauses while Bela Lugosi glowers at one person or another, and the slow scenes of hands groping out of coffin lids and so forth - the score oscillates in place while we wait to see what's going to happen next. There are a lot of slow scenes but the string quartet eddies and that's where the fun is anyway, watching the count slowly close in on another neck. Everything is in shadow, we see very little of what happens, and each victim basically ends up being swallowed by darkness. Dracula strangles Renfield, piqued at having been trailed to his lair, but otherwise doesn't even kick when he's staked, off camera. It's all very ritualistic. I don't know why Van Helsing stays in the cellar at the end. The last lines are kind of oddball - "Q: Aren't you coming with us? A: Not yet - presently". I suppose Van Helsing is just the type to seize on an opportunity to hang out in a vampire's lair a bit longer.

Or maybe not

Here's a post that doesn't make sense to me: Glen Branca in the NY times on how Music is At An End, or words to that effect. I don't know very much about music - my art form happens to be beer - but I have ears and it doesn't sound to me as if music is at an end. After all, if there is no new music, why is it that I'm always hearing new music? Plus, I don't like the squishy way this is written - check out the 'Maybe' construction here:

Muzak’s been around for a long time now but maybe people just can’t tell the difference anymore. Maybe even the composers and songwriters can’t tell the difference either.

You see the flaw with the Maybe clause at once, of course, and here it's heightened by the even more revolting 'Maybe even...either' construction. Luckily no one has ever read a Maybe of this shabby sort without immediately, and correctly, thinking to oneself, 'Or maybe not'. Because of course anyone can tell the difference between Muzak and music. Muzak is a protected brand name, for one thing. Ask any lawyer.

On the other hand, here's a post I really liked: Andrew Durkin on music-making as bricolage, cobbled together out of what is at hand. It isn't new, and it is. Roger Corman, quoted extensively in the post, made all those great Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price - 'Masque of the Red Death', 'Pit and the Pendulum', and so forth - those are going on the Netflix queue immediately. There's a great bit in 'Masque of the Red Death' when the evil prince played by Price realizes who the fellow in the red mask - or rather 'masque', I guess, excuse me - really is, and then flees through all the differently colored rooms of his palace. To no avail. So are those movies new, are they art? Was there any point to making them? God knows, but they are fun to watch. Anyway, it was nice to run into Durkin after Branca, and it had the effect of an antidote.

Here's a pumpkin masque, carved by my wife a couple of Halloweens ago. I inexplicably failed to document her jack-o-lantern activity this year, even though it was a banner year for her, in my opinion. You'll have to take my word for it, but her 2009 efforts were unlike any pumpkins ever carved before. They had a brand new eeriness. They provoked feelings of uneasiness never before provoked. I really should have taken a picture or two, but we'll have to settle for this.

November sun

Fantastic buckets of sunshine today. When this happens any time between November 1 and May 31st in Oregon, you take advantage or regret it for weeks. The river is so different with the rain and the cold. The willows are bare and the nests that have been hidden all summer emerge. The willows that are standing in the current tremble, or sometimes dip out of sight, maybe gone for good. It's been birdy out, as the birders say. Every time you stick your ears outdoors there are 30,000 geese swearing at each other overhead, and flocks of bush tits and chickadees are whirling through the undergrowth in profusion. I saw two hawks chasing each other, or chasing something, on a flat, direct flight through the trees on the east side of the river, then later I saw a sharp-shinned hawk with something limp dangling from one claw, and then later I saw a bald eagle.

I was also buzzed by some kind of big darner (dragonfly), but he didn't come close enough to be more than an impression. In another incident, when I drug myself through a patch of flooded willows, I found tiny spiders and fragile gnats in my hair and lap. A tough time for insects you'd think, but probably they know what they're doing. In memory of the jolly old days of August, here's one of my better dragonfly photos of the past summer.

Bones

Indians having made off with her job, my wife is now studying anatomy and physiology at the community college and the change is all for the best. She's enjoying herself, and eventually the corporation she used to work for will get its comeuppance, and the Indians have the paycheck and the headaches. It's a fine thing all the way around. Anyway, it turns out that there are a devil of a lot of bones within each and every one of us, and I'm fascinated by the names. The coracoid process for instance, up in your shoulder, is named that odd way because the bony protrusion looks beakish (crows and ravens are of the genus Corvus).

I've tried to do my bit to help her studies - singing of Ezekial in the Valley of the Dry Bones mostly, but I also made and shared with her a series of amazing discoveries of my own, clustering around the concept that the skeleton is a series of echoes of itself. For instance, the elbow is the knee of the arm, while the ankle is the wrist of the leg. The finger is the toe of the hand and the hip is the shoulder of the waist. The neck is a kind of tail, the teeth are thick white claws, and the eye is a nostril that inhales light. Every one of us has our own dry bones, and it is possible that at a word these bones might rise and dance.

Jazz

No new beer this weekend - every carboy is full and I don't have enough empties to bottle anything, though old Al dropped by a dozen from his beer-making days last century. And anyway, it's nice to take a breather and enjoy what I have, especially the Oct 4th bitter that is a little bit red because of a quarter pound of roast barley. And with time, a few beers, and an Internet connection, of course I buy music. How different from the days when I saved up for Coltrane or Mingus LPs at five cents per irrigation pipe moved. I still have all those records, though I haven't listened to them in decades. I made mp3s of a few of them, but the pops and hiss are unendurable, and now I can just download a new perfect copy. But I accumulated those LPs so slowly, like a guy with a telescope mapping canals on Mars, I can't throw them away now, even if the latest technology renders them somewhat beside the point. Let's just say I grew up a long way from the Village Vanguard, but I remember reading about 'A Love Supreme' (probably in one of those incredible Nat Hentoff liner notes), wanting ' A Love Supreme', having the money, but not being able to interest the guy at the store. He was skeptical. Made a good deal more money off the Bay City Rollers, of course. Somehow, back then, special orders were more special, something the guy might think about or dangle as a possibility, but mostly a small joke on a farm kid. He did write down the title, but check back as many times as I might, it was never in. Today I can download it for $9.50 and I don't even have to figure out how to get the wrapper off the CD.

Of course you know that album though - but do you know Steve Lehman? Try the Steve Lehman Octet - 'Travail, Transformation, and Flow'. He's great. Needs to work on his titles perhaps, but still great.

Decoctions

Most of Bach's keyboard music still only sounds right to me if Glen Gould is playing it, even though the gurgling he makes under his breath sounds like a sick dog. My understanding is that this conservatism on my part is a psychological phenomenon by which we cling to our first impression or introduction to a thing, or something. There's nothing we can do about it. If you pick up a CD of Gould's at age 18, you're doomed to find yourself still listening to it 30 years later whether you want to or not. Schiff just sounds kind of funny and you wonder "where's the humming?"

Likewise, when I first started making beer straight from grain, I bought Greg Noonan's book on brewing lager beer, and after I'd puzzled my way through it, I was of course a confirmed decoction masher, following the regimen of four rests achieved by removing and boiling thin or thick portions of the mash. It's difficult, time-consuming, and messy, but that's probably what makes it the right thing to do. And it's how the Germans do it.

Now, the thing is, you can't read anybody else's book without running into the assertion that with modern malts, all this is unnecessary - a single rest at 150 degrees or thereabout will do it. Still though, I've remained a decoction masher for years. You'd hate to make a mistake and have to throw out the whole thing, and that's what so often occurs when you follow haphazard advice about modern anything, isn't it? And how do the Germans do it again?

This is what makes yesterday something of a revolution in my career - my first single step mash. And damned if it didn't work. At least it appears to have, and I got about the same conversion I'm used to - from 11 pounds of grain I got 1.060 original gravities. Others do better, I know, but that's par for my kitchen. So now, with this apparently successful experiment, I have to wonder if perhaps I should cut back, from 4 decoctions to 3? Actually, I did do a decoction at the end yesterday, to raise the temp to 170 for sparging. Couldn't help myself. Probably some ghostly German whispering in my ear. Well, we'll see what it tastes like.

Here's a photo of a maple seed pod outside our window - I noticed and was impressed by how calm it remained yesterday, throughout the brewing process, even at the knottiest and most fraught points where decoction steps were being skipped.

Lichen aquarium

I took a couple of pictures today that I liked, particularly this spider out for a ramble among 25 or so different brands of lichen or fungi. There aren't many spiders out any more, or insects of any kind. It's cold, and hopefully they have snug burrows in which to spend the winter making beer. I suppose they actually die instead. But not the more sporting, or smaller types, like this one, still up for a prowl on a nippy November morning. Will he still be springing from coral head to coral head next weekend?

Guff about larks and snails

I'm re-reading "Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves". It's interesting that there are no bad lines. I'm watching, but haven't found one, and it reminds me of my short whack at graduate school at the University of Houston. Specifically, a class on Milton taught with so much authority you almost got the idea the poet might have been an old student of the professor's. These sessions were my first introduction to theology, demonology, free verse, and the rest of all that, and I remember one session where the prof, reciting a few lines from Paradise Lost to illustrate a point, stopped suddenly and said, "that's one of the two bad lines in the poem. The other of course is in book 3 - " and he recited the other bad line and shook his head. "Too bad he didn't fix those". So close! But perfection was reserved for P.G. Wodehouse. Wodehouse may have written the same book over and over, but he wrote that book perfectly every time. And the lines themselves are never the same. I don't know how many times Bertie misremembers "The lark's on the wing, the snail's on the thorn", but he does it differently every time. And, I think, each time better than Browning ever managed.

Current fav

I don't have a current favorite batch, probably because the 'Thunderstorm Bitter' I just finished is still green in memory. I made it on a thunderstormy day in July - one of the few beers I made this summer. It is no fun to boil five or six gallons of wort for an hour or so when it's hot, so I either don't, or try to take advantage of cool days. When I saw black clouds I bought malt, and, I notice now looking back, I treated my soft tap water with gypsum and epsom salt per some nut - maybe Noonan? I forgot all about that. All this time I thought it might have been the electrical storm - or the relief that the power hadn't gone out in the middle of the brew - or something unique to beers brewed in July - but it was the water. Maybe. I'll have to try that Epsom salt trick again.

Fruity

I'd like to apologize for yesterday's post. It wasn't appropriate and I apologize. I wasn't drunk, grieving, or distracted by anything serious here on the road as I type this on my phone - I just made a mistake. I know that no one goes to the Internet to read about or see the so-called 'antics' of household pets. Who cares about funny dogs or what cats think? Zero people, that's how many. I wasted every one's time with a strange and pointless digression on the morning habits of domestic livestock, and for that I am heartily sorry.

So back to home-brewing, at long last. Particularly fruit beers. What's up with fruit beers and why don't I make them, what's wrong with fruit beers and why would anyone want one, why aren't there any good ones and where in the world are there people who aren't foolish enough to waste water making them? Let me ask you this - hasn't this happened every time you've had a cherry bock or a blackberry porter, or worst of all, a raspberry wheat beer - you've drunk a bit of it, identified it as, yes, a fruity beer, and haven't you had the same thought every single time: the silly asses could have used this fruit to make a pie. Or put it on ice cream. Why do things go so wrong, why is the world so perverse?

Rank

This morning I had an interesting insight. Every morning when I make my appearance, the dog hoists himself to his feet and begins to wag his tail. This signifies that he is ready for his breakfast. In another hour or so, my wife arises and the cats spring at her feet, twining themselves among them and crying piteously. Also indicating breakfast desires.

If these cats were so hungry, they could have eaten an hour earlier, or at least tried winding among my feet and appealing to my softer emotions. Why don't they? My insight was this - cats are hierarchical creatures and I clearly do not rank. My wife is their feeder, and probably about Secretary of State in their estimation. I am the man who feeds the dog. Of marginal usefulness, like a moth to bat away the boredom of a few minutes, or like kitty litter. But they would prefer I kept my distance from the food.

The inevitable

I racked the Sorabji Stout I made last weekend, named for Kaihosru Sorabji, a composer I got interested in last weekend. Sorabji was a cranky composer of gigantic piano works. And why shouldn't he be cranky? He ended up in the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest piano composition. No piano genius wants to find his place in history on the same page as the lady with the largest neck wattle. What I'm intrigued by is the connection of Guinness with world's records in general, which I don't understand. Undoubtedly there is some history behind it.

I also dealt with the inevitable. I can rarely bring myself to clean up the very same day as the brewing ordeal. My wife probably has her own entry in the Guinness book, under 'Tolerance', but even she feels strongly that the floor can only remain sticky for so long. But half an hour with mop and scouring pad and it's nearly back to normal.

I also paddled my kayak up the Willamette a bit this Sunday, in some light rain but not much. The water is very high and a few logs and other debris are washing down. I saw the mad dogman. Actually, he's a canoeist I see sometimes with his two dogs, often playing a harmonica. The canoeist plays a harmonica, not the dogs. The dogs look longingly at the shore. I can't speak for his musicianship, he may not even be playing a harmonica, though his hands are to his mouth, shaking the way these guys inject verve into their harmonica tone. But I can't hear him as I have Sorabji on my iPod - the first twenty-five of his one hundred 'Transcendental Etudes'.

Update - I've been meaning to add a link to Music is Your Only Friend, where I read about Sorabji. You can also hear some of his music there.

Good evening

It was nice this morning, but by mid-afternoon the weather was suited for suicide or brewing, with no obvious third option. My wife and I were lulled by the glints of sun, the dog had his romp in the park, and we rode our bicycles downtown, but of course then got soaked when the clouds rolled in. I bought the grain and hops for Randy Mosher's 'Jaggery IPA', but the Jaggery sugar itself was unavailable. They didn't even know what it was, but after a googling, the owner called it 'palm sugar', available from asian groceries.

We also bought one of these incredible fractal brocoli things, a thing I'd never have imagined before could even exist. I

t's called a 'Romanesco brocoli'

At home I mashed in the grain to about 100 degrees. I don't understand the mashing in thing very well, but it seems to be indicated in cases where you're worried about glutinous matter fouling up the sparge, so I thought it might help with the wheat malt, which has of course fouled a few sparges of mine in the past. I got everything wet and then, fatigued by my labors, fell asleep for an hour. When I awoke, feeling a little glutinous myself, I added enough boiling water to get to 150 deg, then drove to the asian market indicated for Jaggery, which appears as big hockey pucks of sugar. I let the mash sit for a couple of hours, then tested with iodine and it wasn't done yet. I was

only baffled a moment before pulling out a bit of grains to boil and add back to raise the temp. After another half hour it seemed done and I sparged very slowly, with not a stick!

I'd misread the recipe and didn't have enough hops, but I made it up with some wild hops I'd gathered at the park in August. It was fun to find and gather these hops, but they don't seem to have much aroma. Still, I added a lot of them, which will maybe make up for that.

I made chili, sauted chantrelles, and cooked up our fantastic fractal brocoli. Seems a bit odd to chop up and eat anything that pretty. I suppose if the Mona Lisa (the painting, not the lady) was edible, it would have been consumed long ago, possibly by Leonardo himself.