January 2007

I didn’t plan on doing another beer review so quickly, but this beer has been a dream of mine for quite some time, so I figure it’s worthy.

I’m back in Ann Arbor, MI to recruit at UofM’s spring job fair. We decided to hit up one of my favorite local establishments, Ashley’s Pub, an excellent beer bar on State Street. I had the excellent “chicken curry fries” and after dinner decided to splurge on a beer I’ve had my eye on for years, Dogfish Head’s 120 Minute IPA.

Whoa. What a beer. I was expecting just an extra-hoppy IPA, but I was surprised with an amazingly smooth beer with almost barleywine qualities. It has an excellent, very strong, almost fruity aroma and looks awesome in a glass. Everything about this beer is strong, yet refined, from the aroma to the flavor to the color. With over 120 IBU and 21% alcohol content, that’s not surprising. Think of it as a barleywine with more “heart”. The hoppyness is much more subtle, and it sneaks up on you about halfway through.

Definately a beer to drink again. It ages well, so I may pick up a few bottles to keep around for special occasions.

(Picture borrowed from Lil’ El’s CC‘ed photostream on Flick.)

I have a confession to make…

I’m a beer snob. I’ve never been a big fan of lagers. Generally I’ve found that most of them taste the same - fairly boring, like beer I drank in college. Sure, there are occasional standouts, but nothing I’ve really stuck with. I’m more of an ale guy.

But Full Sail has proven me wrong with their “LTD Series” Limited Edition Lager. Just hoppy enough to be interesting, yet light and smooth enough that it goes down easy. Its reasonably priced but hard to find - I’ve only found it in six packs at larger Safeways and I doubt you’ll find it outside the Pacific Northwest - but its a winner indeed. Something to add to the rotation whenever you can find it.

I’m going to continue reviewing good beers as I find them. Its something that makes me happy and I figure it’ll be a good non-geek addition to my blog. Let me know if you enjoy it.

I’m sure somebody has to have bitched about this before, it has to be a common complaint.

I recently switched from using Bloglines to using Google Reader as my primary RSS/Atom feed reader. Great move. I love Google Reader. In my opinion, its the best online feed reader on the market. Seamless integration with my GMail, only marks posts I actually read as read, etc. Its a bit slow sometimes, but hell, so was Bloglines. I can live with it.

But the real problem with feed readers, and blogs in general, is social. People need to stop the “me too” posts. I’m sick of it. I subscribe to most of the big guys. Boing Boing. TechCrunch. Slashdot. Digg. Deli.icio.us. And tons of little guys. And about 20% of the content they post is the same damn stuff everybody else has posted. If one more person today posts anything about:

• Microsoft paying for people to edit Wikipedia
• Second Life (anything about Second Life. I’m sick of the whole concept)
• MySpace’s spam lawsuit

… I’m going to freaking kill somebody.

For me, the ultimate killer feed reader wouldn’t be yet another feed aggregator, it would be a meme aggregator, an agent to identify trends of similar posts and eliminate them so I only get the most relevent posts, not the same news story over and over. And while you’re at it, track the posts I actually spend time reading and don’t just scroll over, and use that data to figure out what topics I actually care about, so I don’t get carpal tunnel of the scroll wheel finger skipping posts I don’t care about.

I’m upgrading to Wordpress 2.1, so there may be some issues in the meantime. Stick with me…

Update: I’ve fixed the permalink redirection. Thanks for the heads-up Stuart.

So I’ve discovered a new delicacy - Asian canned coffees.

Across the street from my office is the Seattle branch of Uwajimaya, a chain of Asian grocery stores. Suffering from a long week of long days at work, I decided to check out new and exciting sources of caffeine. The Japanese are masters at the art of delivery my favorite stimulant in new and creative ways.

What I discovered was a whole aisle full of canned coffees. I settled on “Hello Boss“, a Taiwanese brand I picked mainly for the entertaining cartoon of what I think is supposed to be an Italian man, but I’m not quite sure. I picked the “Mocha Latte” flavor because I figured it was the safest. To my surprise, it ended up being absolutely delicious. I’d say it was about 90% as good as those Starbucks “Doubleshot” drinks, but 50% larger and only $0.65 instead of $2.99.

Next I think I need to try out some competing brands, including “Mr. Brown” and the cans that don’t even have any English on them…