Not sure if anyone’s noticed it or not, but I’ve been in a bit of a beer funk lately (no pun intended). It hasn’t really called to me these past couple of weeks, but that didn’t stop this offering from catching my eye. Hard to pass up a chance to drink beer and play with Legos!
Beer Name: Double Dry Hop Light Speed
Brewery: Toppling Goliath Brewing Company (Decorah, IA)
Style: Pale Ale
ABV: 5.9%
Description: Brewed with a fantastic blend of Millennium and Falconer’s Flight hops, this pale ale is billed as one you’ll want to drink at light speed! The not so inner geek in me highly approves. I believe it was around $15 for a four pack of tallboy cans.
Appearance: It had a hazy, pale yellow body with roughly a finger’s worth of slightly off-white foam that formed with the pour.
Smell: Citrus upfront, followed by a raw, sticky sweet bitterness.
Taste: It started out with citrus zest, mainly orange mixed with a bit of lemon. Kind of want to say there was a hint of melon in there, too. It picked up a sticky sweet towards the finish with some distinct piney/earthy undertones.
Mouthfeel: Fluffy, roughly medium body with moderate carbonation.
Hype: I loved the name!
Overall: I liked this. It didn’t blow me away, but it delivered exactly what I hoped it would for style. It had some nice sweetness, some nice hoppiness, and was overall a refreshing and easy drinking brew. That it had a fun name was just an added bonus. Very happy with this purchase.
Today I’m here to talk to you about one of my favorite non-beer beverages, a blending sake and plum wine that I’ve been enjoying for quite a few years now. I’m not sure if this is a popular thing or not (a quick search of the internet brings back the phrase Sake Martini), but it’s a little something my friends and I started doing back in our Chinatown drinking days.
For the uninitiated, I’ll first offer a very basic introduction. Plum wine is a type of fruit wine popular in Japan and South Korea and tends to be quite sweet with a slightly tangy finish. I typically find it in screw top bottles, which depending on the style can contain liquid only or have actual plums inside soaking up all the alcohol goodness. These plums are perfectly fine to eat, but I often find them a bit too sour and tough for my tastes. The bottles I buy usually cost around $15-20 for 750 ml and have an ABV around 10-14%. The one pictured above isn’t one of my usuals, but I did end up liking it quite a bit.
Sake, on the other hand, is a Japanese rice wine with a brewing process that generally comes in the neighborhood of 15% ABV. Very light in body, it has a very distinct dry, slightly herbal taste (some call it savory) with a finishing heat that can vary widely in strength depending upon the type. Personally, the Gekkeikan brand pictured above is my go to as it costs only about $10-12 per 750 ml bottle. I find that it walks that fine line between being good to drink on its own (you’ll have plenty left once when the wine is gone) while not being so fancy that you feel bad about blending it.
So why mix two beverages perfectly enjoyable on their own? Well, I find that they have taste profiles that compliment each other perfectly. What I do is pour myself a glass of the wine and then add to it one full shot of sake. You can adjust to taste, of course, but I find those amounts to be the perfect balance between the two. Plum wine on its own (while delicious) tends to be a bit heavy on the palate and exceptionally sweet. The thinner, drier notes of sake though, mellow these out perfectly and (depending on the amount added) can give the drink the distinctive warm kick of rice on the finish. As a warning they are very easy to drink on account of the sweetness and can really start hitting you by the second glass!
Does anyone else out there do this? If so, I am very curious to hear about your preferred combinations in the comments below!
Random Tag Tuesday is a feature I came up with in order to mix things up a bit. The name is a throwback to my college days when Tuesdays were the day for, well, random adventures. For my blog, it will mean that on any given Tuesday I’ll tackle one of the many tags I always wanted to write about but never got around to. Please note that most of these will come from my backlog notes and that I am terrible about keeping track of where I find these. As such, I probably will rarely, if ever, tag anyone. It is not personal.
If you happen to look back to my Part 1 of my Playlist Tag, you’ll see that this was one I really wanted to explore further. Now that I’ve better organized my music I am ready to do another installment. As a quick refresher, my goal here is to listen to five songs at random and then associate them with a book or character I’ve read. As always, a big thank you to the video posters!
Lithium Flower, Scott Matthew/Yoko Kanno: Breq (Imperial Radch Series, by Ann Leckie)
And is she really human?
She’s just so something new
A waking lithium flower
Just about to bloom
I smell lithium now
Smelling lithium now
This song immediately made me think of Brew given “her” rather unique existence as a former Justice of Toren auxiliary. She also has some common ground with Major Motoko Kusanagi, for whom the song was originally written. Apparently the full version isn’t available on YouTube, but can be found here.
Been Caught Stealing, Jane’s Addiction: Wayne (Mistborn, Era 2, by Bradon Sanderson)
I’ve been caught stealing
Once when I was 5
I enjoy stealing
It’s just as simple as that
Well, it’s just a simple fact
When I want something,
I don’t want to pay for it
I walk right through the door
Walk right through the door
So technically Wayne doesn’t steal things necessarily, but most people he comes across don’t appreciate his enthusiasm for making unannounced trades of whatever he may have on him for things he likes more.
Secret Wars, Part One, Last Emperor – Ready Player One, by Ernest Cline
What if I had the/power to gather/all of my favorite emcees
With the illest comic book characters/and they became arch enemies?
Inconceivable? Unbelievable? Yet as wild as it seems
The Emperor and Stan Lee would coach the two opposing teams
The off the wall fun provided by this track’s constant name dropping of comic book characters and hip hop artists makes me thing of the pop culture mashup that was Ready Player One. This track is serious fun thanks to both the lyrical content and Last Emperor’s superb voice acting. Notable battles include Professor X vs. KRS-One, Dr. Octopus vs. Busta Rhymes, Lauren Hill vs. Storm, and Das Fx vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Zero Signal, Fear Factory: Shallan Davar (The Stormlight Archive, by Brandon Sanderson)
So withdrawn and feeling numb
Watching life come all undone
Growing fear, a human grace
A drowning mind in a dark embrace
While Shallan is one of my favorite characters from this world, she certainly hits some very dark places for a variety of reasons. As for the song, I just love its energy despite some rather bleak lyrics. It makes want to get up and move.
Hand on tha Pump, Cypress Hill: Amos Burton (The Expanse)
Thinkin’ like a peace smoke, comin’ on a homicide
You talkin’ shit, tryna take me for a ride
I’m not a bad guy, but I’m the funky feel
Finger on the trigger with my hands upon the steel
To find a character from my recent reads that best embodies a casual, almost gleeful embrace of street violence it’s Amos Burton. Sure he has some redeeming qualities and is absolutely a guy you want on your side, he is also a highly efficient killer shaped by a very rough upbringing.
If you’ve been following my reviews for the past couple of years, you may have noticed that I have had some rather mixed feelings about The Expanse series. I’m in way too deep to turn back now though, so here we go with book eight, published in March 2019.
The story picks up several years after the end of the previous novel and deals with the aftermath of its events. The action focuses specifically upon the fledgling resistance to Laconian conquest, James Holden’s imprisonment, and High Consul Duarte’s continued experiments with protomolecule technology despite increasingly severe push back from some unknown force. These stories unfold from the perspective of old friends Elvi Okoye, Naomi, Alex, Bobbi, and Holden along with newcomer Teresa Duarte, daughter of the Laconia colony’s ruthless ruler.
Wow, now this was the book I’ve been waiting for! Here is where the series finally steps up to its potential and delivers a huge payoff for the reader following all the starts and stops I’ve written about in the past. No longer held captive by the often frustrating whims of James Holden, this intriguing universe has now fully opened up to stories on many fronts, each headed by a character we’ve come to know and care about.
It was for precisely these reasons that this installment hit all the right notes for me and avoided many of my previous criticisms. The story was excellent and advanced both the galactic politics and protomolecule arcs to some really interesting place while simultaneously providing plenty of action, intrigue, and philosophical quandaries. That it also at long last starred a full cast of characters you could actually care about (Holden included), made this read even sweeter. The former Roci crew really do feel like old friends at this point, Elvi remained fantastic, and the addition of Teresa offered a very interesting perspective on the enemy camp. Not to give away too much, but when certain prominent characters die each hurt in a way I don’t think would have been possible in the previous books. My only complaint here is that I wish the authors more slowly revealed a certain character’s true identity. I knew immediately who it was and I think the impact of their death would have been even greater if they kept us guessing until closer to the end.
At this point I am now pretty excited about the upcoming finale, even though I am a bit worried that it will have a lot to wrap up in a relatively short amount of space. Shortly after finishing the book I came across another post in which the reviewer mentioned that reading the novellas associated with this series made the read even better and for the first time in eight books I am tempted to do so. If you were like me and on the fence about whether or not to continue this series, my answer to you now is to do so. This story was totally worth getting through the occasional disappointing read for.
Beer Name: Double Dry Hop Light Speed
