A few months ago I posted a photo of some street art I came across over by the Fulton Market while on a run to get some propane for brewing. I was struck by the piece’s scale, but I was also taken aback by what seemed a kind of mocking, mischeivousness that animated the death inside the piece. It was almost like life and death were both at odds in the same moment, mimicking and making fun of each other simultaneously in the piece. To find this “hidden” below the skyline of the city worked to bring our entire municipality into the joy and menace and menacing joy that was animate in this work.

It’s rare, but one of the great treasures of living in Chicago – or any cluttered urban environment for that matter – to be struck by the shrapnel of one of these cultural bombs. Like an aerosol sorcery, their cast onto mercurial obscurity, patiently waiting for your nervous system to be ready for their discovery, to take over your life in that moment and flatten some neurons in the name of pleasure and revelation.

After I posted it, Lee Chameleon, one of Chicago’s great Cultural Gastroentronologists, followed up that this was the work of a Belgian street artist who goes by the name ROA. Belgium – Brussels in particular – still has one of the most interesting and unique examples of street art of any city I’ve been in. The volume is impressive, but the singular visions in the work are what really make it stand outside of places like Amsterdam, London and New York City. A train ride south from the airport and through Brussels will give you an incredible tour of some world class graffiti artists. A stroll off the Central and North stations might change the way you look at street art forever. I was not surprised at all to find that ROA was, at least partially, a product of Ghent.

Above is a piece on some partially abandoned office building that is the first thing to greet you when you come out of Central Station in Brussels. It framed my entire experience of Brussels instantly upon seeing it, a smokey spirit of madness escaping from the failed beuracratic facade of Belgium’s capitol. It looked unchained, dangerous, and not at all comfortable with revealing itself in any time, but it’s own. It’s as if the artist knowingly placed it there in the shadow so that it would never be imprisoned by the light.

Times are hard right now for first world fat heads. I joked recently that back in ye olde middle ’90s, when I was living on a steady diet of TVP and LSD, reading Terrance McKenna’s “Invisible Landscape” for the first time, and sitting around with my friends, like a puddle of stoned poodles, running on at the lip about 2012 and Time Wave Zero, I don’t think any of us were high enough to predict that the great 2012 rending of the personal and cultural veil would mostly involve the apocalypsis of personal income and career choices. No, none of our senses of humor were that dark or twisted. Leave it to the grand, sprawling magnet to come up with the sickest of jokes.

But, whatever. Money pains and dashed hopes of metaphysical meglomania are really just the belly gripes of the post-modern honky and should be penned in proper perspective. My personal Robert Bly, Rick Steves, nailed it in this Salon interview when he basically offered the seemingly non-Rick Steves advice of “get over it”. Ah so.

And if you need a nail to seal that super-sized casket of sagastic advice, why not investigate this little hot air balloon for your black heart: the Uganda Skate Union.

If you can manage to scroll through these photos without spilling your grande machiatto on your Old Navy cargos and bitching about how this will make you late for work again, well then, sir, you really don’t have a heart or any real aspirations.

Or, maybe, you just don’t have a job. Either is possible, I suppose.

I had the chance to try Pipeworks second effort last night, the End of Days milk stout. Made with ancho chilies, cinnamon and cocoa nibbs, End of Days delivers a beer that doesn’t stumble over any one ingredient, but elevates into a synergistic whole greater than any of it’s parts. I couldn’t be happier to know those guys are doing their work in our big-boned city.

The beer drinks like a Vosges chocolate bar, silky, expertly balancing it’s lactose sweetness with the earthy and the tactile, but understated heat. This might not be a beer for everyone, but if you don’t have shit in your too-far-apart eyes or sagging between your strange looking ears, you’ll most likely find more than a few things to enjoy in it.

We did an interview with Pipeworks about a year and a half ago when they first put out their video to announce their funding. Since then they’ve progressed from a couple homebrewers with an audacious plan to a fully licensed brewery that’s actually gotten real press, including a pretty flattering article in the Tribune the other day.

It’s been fun to track their progress as they’ve put this project together from a heady mix of over-sized confidence, community support and tenacious will. I’m glad to see with the release of End of Days that their eye towards balance didn’t end with the inauguration of their business, but is carrying over into their products as well.

Chicago and it’s exploding beer scene should be proud to call Pipeworks it’s own.

I know I admitted to my first full-fledged mancrush on Damon Zex a few weeks ago, but I may be developing another on Brian Strumke from Stillwater Artisanal Ales. I tried his Folklore on Friday for the first time and it immediately turned me into a quivering puddle of little girlness, pigtails and all. I’ve since covered my walls with all the pull-out posters of Strumke that I could find in Teen Beat magazine and have been carving his name into my desk and my arm here at work. These feelings I am having are new and strange, but I think I like them.

I’ve said it in hushed corners before, but I think Stillwater is as close to an Americanized take on Fantome as we have right now. Clearly there are some real differences, but what Strumke is doing with yeasts and herbs is starting, more and more it seems, to be coming to the same conclusions as that maniac in the Ardennes.

Anyway, I’ll have a chance to bat my pretty eyelashes at Strumke tomorrow at the Bottom Lounge. Wait until I tell him we have the same first name! OMG!!!!!!

This past Sunday West Lakeview Liquors hosted Jérôme Rebetez from BFM to tap and pour a wood cask of his 2010 Abbaye de St. bon Chien. As always WLV played the expert host, not only pouring the bon Chien, but also a Terrapin collaboration barley “ryne”, as well as BFMs entire bottle portfolio. There was the obligatory selection of delicious cheeses and cured meats, too.

If you don’t know, St. bon Chien is one of the great outliers in the world of sour beers. BeerAdvocate calls it a biere de garde, I’ve heard it compared to a geuze, but really it’s neither of these. The malt base is most likely where BA derives their style designation. There’s a deep orange color to the beer with only light hop notes and that leave room for some carmelly notes most likely derived from some dark sugars to shine through. But the majority of the flavor is derived from the barreling process, combining three different barrel types to the beer and then blending to achieve their final result. Jerome mentioned on Sunday that there’s no addition of wild yeasts or bacteria to the beers, only the aging in the barrels which, apparently, are loaded with bugs the multitudes of which would make Noah envious.

The complexity of bon Chien is unrivaled, even amongst styles known for their complexity. And you could write a master’s thesis on the differences between each years personality. The 2010 was tart with a strong, spicy acidity to it, while the 2007 they were pouring was hung in deep berry and plumbs. Even with American craft beers it’s too easy to forget that beer is a living organism that is changing, developing, degrading and unfolding in time. Even as Americans come to appreciate the expanses of possibility available in beer our underlying programming by the McDonaldization of flavor keeps American producers anxious about truly indulging in the craft and chaos of the living beer. This is decidedly not the case with our friends on the other side of the spittoon.

If there is any one lesson I wish American brewers would learn and employ it is to recognize, trust and explore the dynamic arc of a beers existence. We can see the first puritan pokes at this with the barrel aging trend right now. But, where some are truly relaxing into the vulnerabilities inherent in this pursuit, too many others are just trying to get their imperial stout portfolio effort to keep pace with the rest of the herd. This is fine, and it produces many enjoyable results, but I’m excited for when these breweries finally feel comfortable to take their shirts off in the pool.

That said, there are notable exceptions. Jolly Pumpkin is probably the most exciting when it comes to American brewers exploring the vitality of yeasts. By actually spontaneously fermenting, following seasonal fluxuations in their brew schedule, and noticably and wantonly producing different results under the same recipes, Ron Jeffries’ operation is doing the dark lord’s work for the American palette.

While I’m not always crazy about the results, Stillwater is another producer that is always fun to try. He doesn’t seem to be playing with yeast development as much, but, with his adoption of the rather oblique title of artisanal ales, he has found a medium to really draw outside the seemingly boring lines of American styling. I’ve heard many people bitch about it, but for the same reasons folks are complaining, I find Existenst Brian Strumke’s most interesting and encouraging effort to date. It’s confusing, it’s unsettling, it’s not what you expect at all. And isn’t that what art should be? It should rewire your expectations to bring you to new places, if it doesn’t do that, it’s not art.

There’s others too, probably many I’m not yet aware of and I can’t wait to find them.

But let’s be clear, I don’t think that burdening your beer with a bunch of strange-ass adjuncts makes it art. That kind of thumb-fisting makes it naive and green, like too many American efforts. A lot of these beers that spasm with adjuncts remind me of the shit painting and music production and films that are direct heirs of the Surrealist’s and Beats influence of spontenaity and the schizophrenics of subjectivity. While a demon box in the hand of an expert, this kind of open-verse nonsense becomes oppressive in a young voice. Sometimes limitation is the best avenue to towards expression. Sometimes – yes, Virginia – sometimes less is more.

Case in point – Goose Island’s Matilda. Say what you want about Goose Island, but a properly matured bottle (which I’m finding about 10 months is good) of Matilda is about fucking perfect. The wooly coarseness of the brett drawing chords in your tastebuds to gently settle the peach back bone in? Come on, it’s unmatched in America beers. But, to be sure, you can taste the puckered rectum of the Goose in this beer. There is no doubt about that and there is no open-verse in the cinder brick walls of the Goose Island brewery. The Matilda is no work of art, this is science, to be sure. But, Goose Island’s Matilda is where science has become art and they deserve all the recognition they get for it.

In the masterful addition of brett to a beer world, Green Flash’s Rayon Vert is no slouch either. I had the opportunity to try that the other day and was thrilled by how nicely the brett played along with Green Flash’s hop assertion. It reminded me of an infected bottle of Emmit’s pale ale I had not too long ago. Boy was I disappointed when my attempts to find another 6-pack of that failed, realizing my last experience was a fluke of QA issues and not their stable of flavors. Please Emmit, start adding brett to your Victory.

So, yeah, American breweries have a long and compelling path before them until they can truly play ball with the great European brewers. But, why shouldn’t we? Those maniacs over seas have several hundred years of a jump on us. And, let’s be fair here, right now everyone is looking to America for developments in beer. But that won’t last. Once we strike a flare under international interests in beer again, pallettes that know and palletes that are learning will get sick of the fireworks and demand more depth from their beer.

We’re starting to see it now, I count myself amongst those that are learning and ready. And I’m consistantly finding that outside our four American walls. And the reason I’m finding it and finding new and exciting ways to stumble down this slippery slope, past the rabbit hole and into the devil’s playground of great fucking beer is because of the passionate work of so many brewers and also, just as importantly, the proprieters of stores like West Lakeview Liquors, who through owner Kristina Bozic, is making Chicago a better place to enjoy great beer and, in turn, the world a better place to live in. And this world could certainly stand a little improvement on it’s living conditions. So thanks!

This past weekend was great, friends came into town and we drank, and we cooked, and we ate and we drank some more. On Monday, the party continued when some Family came into town and I cooked some more and we drank and we ate. This morning… I cooked and we ate.

I haven’t started the drinking yet today, but I did get my face loaded up with one of my three favorite -caines at the dentist office. Dentistry, I’ve found, is a decent replacement for legitimate intoxicants. There’s something about the tools, the endorphins and the team of pretty girls with rubber gloves pulling on my helpless face that tides me over until the beveraging hour. Which today should be just after 4p.

But, back to this past weekend. A lot of our eating and drinking this weekend took place at some great Chicago standards. We hit Farmhouse, Gilt Bar, and the Gage on Saturday.

Farmhouse is always great and their selections of sours this week made it even better. The drinks at Gilt Bar were awesome and the bar tender was actally a really nice guy despite his dubious choice of profession as a ‘mixologist’.

The Gage had terrible service, slow and poorly paced. And, let’s be clear, when someone whose been drinking for 12 hours notices your service being slow, there’s a real problem there. But the duck breast was fucking amazing. So amazing I wouldn’t think twice about going back despite the service.

In between stops we made drinks at home. I had picked up some St. Germain to fuck around with and found several good recipes with that including a St. Germain Gimlet. I also put together a drink mixing St. Germain, Campari, Gin, Bourbon & syrup to pretty decent results. I made one of our guests a Clover Club which she dug, too. 2 measures of Gin, 1 measure of Grenadine, half a lemon and an egg white.

But the cooking is the important thing here. I made some awesome stuff. A big hit was the liver sausage on butter browned spaetzle topped off with some fresh horse radish and parsley. This dish would put tits on a bishop, my friend.

Another hit was the fried chicken. Super easy, but always a show stopper. I bit on Michael Ruhlman from heel to toe on this one.

THE BRINE
15 ounces water (or 1/2 liter)
3 ounces salt (or 100 grams)
fresh herbs (I used sage above)
4 cloves garlic
1 small onion sliced
1 lemon halved
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons black peppercorns, cracked beneath a saute pan
15 ounces ice (500 grams ice), or 15 ounces of ice water
1 chicken (3 to 4 pounds)
Combine all of the above except the ice and chicken in a small pan and bring to a boil over high heat. Cover and remove from the heat and let sit for ten minutes.
Put the ice (or ice water) in a bowl or large measuring cup. Pour the herb brine over the ice. Stir till the ice is dissolved.
Put the chicken in a plastic bag, pour the brine in, seal the bag, and let sit at room temperature for 2 to 3 hours.
Remove the chicken from the bag, discarding the brine. Pat it dry and let it sit out for another hour before using (or you can refrigerate it till needed).

THE CHICKEN
8 legs
8 wings
3 cups flour
3 tblspn black pepper
2 tblspn paprika
2 tblspn sea salt
2 tspn cayenne
2 tblspn baking powder
2 cups butter milk
peanut oil

The key with the chicken is flour/buttermilk/flour. And while you’re at it, why not fry some cheese curds, too?

This morning I made some crepe suzette that I served with some ginger & sage sausage. The crepes are super easy. 4 eggs, 1/2 cup of cream, 1/2 cup of orange juice, 1 tablespoon of sugar, 1 cup of flour. Let it sit for 30 minutes and then cook in a cast iron skillet. Right before you serve it dunk it in a syrup of sugar, orange juice, orange zest, lemon juice, Grand Marnier, butter and bourbon. Garnish those fuckers with some mint. Then go get your face Dremilled by a lady in rubber gloves.

That is all.

There’s two events on February 24th that I’m willing to publicly wet my pants over. I’m not entirely sure that that is necessary, but I like to give this whole ritual-of-self-abuse-thing 110%.

First off you’ve got SmallBar Fullerton with their 2 year anniversary party hosting an evening of sour beers. Their tap list includes some Cantillon Fou Foune (that means ‘pussy’ for all you youngsters out there), Dogfish Head’s Noble Rot, and a cask of Jolly Pumpkin. Finally, I’ll have a reason to go to that creepy-ass Fullerton location.

But then, in an act that reminds me the universe is often benevolent, but always petty in it’s indulgences, the Bavarian Lodge is hosting BFM’s Jerome Rebetez whose bringing with him La Douze, BFM’s gose styled beer, on cask as well as a couple of other treats.

I’m not sure if Jerome will let you photograph his tits that night or not, but based on his picture on this flyer, I’d say your chances are on the upside of the 75 percentile.

Ok, there you go America. Line up and take a number, February 24th is bound to be a Patriotic display of excess and flavor. I foresee a train ride in my future.

Anybody can brew beer, but it can be like handling plutonium to create great beer that is repeatable.

Your two greatest allies in that pursuit are time and temperature. Giving the beer the time it needs to fully bloom is essential, and something that took a lot – and I mean a lot – of discipline to grab a handle on. Obviously, you have to let your beer hit it’s FG, but that is the easy part. It’s waiting after the critters have done their job that has been a painful lesson for me.

But no beer is ready immediately after it’s been fermented.

Or at least no beer I have tried. Every style of beer I’m aware of needs at least another month to sit and fully unfold itself before it truly hits it’s flavor potentials. Many beers take a great deal longer.

At this point, my rule of thumb is, after I rack off the yeast cake, I put my keg in a cooling fridge for no shorter than 4 weeks. I’ll test it at that point and decide to either put it on gas, put it in a bottle or let it sit for even longer.

The other great revelation for me in controlling the chaos of brewing has been understanding the need for creating healthy yeast with a starter and nutrients and giving that culture the proper conditions to develop the desired effect. To do that a temperature controller is essential.

There’s more than a few different ways to attack this, but my approach was to pick up a full size fridge from a foreclosed apartment building in the ghetto, add a 2 stage temperature controller from Rebel Brewer and a space heater. The temperature controller is fine, although if you want to save about $35 you can build it yourself. Here’s some instructions.

Everything has been working great until recently. I’ve been able to make my yeast do all kinds of fun things to my beer and have been able to get them to do it over and over again. It’s an awfully proud parent who teaches their yeast a new trick. And it’s a richer, drunker parent who chooses yeast rearing over baby wrangling.

But since winter has finally come to Chicago in mid-February, the temperature has dropped and my space heater has been having to do more work than it likes to bring the fridge to temperature. This is causing a safety feature on the space heater to shut down power as opposed to over heat and burn my house to the ground. Good thing.

So, I’ve had to forego my previous and incredibly dangerous solution and replace it with a FermWrap and a carboy shield. The FermWrap is a variation on reptile cage heaters that are totally effective at bringing your wort to the proper temperature at a very low power draw. The carboy shield helps to optimize the FermWraps efforts, keeping valuable heat from escaping off to the sides.

Life is good again for me and my yeasts. Time to find another way to temp the fates.

I love making beer, truly I do. If ever there was a way – perhaps a reality-augmenting piece of stainless machinery – that would allow me to curl up close with my beer making and kind of snuzzle my junk up and down on it’s leg all the time, i would totally be in to that. But, unfortunately, that technology is at least a singularity or two away from happening. In the interim, I’ll just attach one of those flashlight pussy things to my brew rack and buy it dinner every couple of weeks. I’ll name it for a french whore, like Fantine or Inara, and together we’ll grow old together, slowly falling apart, drinking too much and always humping like fat, feral dogs in mud. It’s not perfect, but then, neither was Don Cornelius.

But until I can horse glue a flashlight pussy to that filthy lipped, castor strutting, rusting piece of sticky industrial slut I’ve got sleeping in my garage, I’ll use reading to hold me over between brews. With that in mind, I’ve found, time and again, that Gordon Strong’s “Brewing Better Beer” and Randy Mosher’s “Radical Brewing” are my two favorite pieces of bathroom trash that I return to over and over again. They are both very different books in approach, but both work towards a similar end of prying free the detritus of pedantic mimicry that inevitably comes after an initial investigation into something as byzantine as brewing.

Mosher attacks from a kind of joy-filled revelry, combining history, technique and an artist’s notebook to undo the scale of many intimidating crests, juggling probabilities to reveal that the true nature of brewing really is art or, at least, at turns as equally elusive and accessible.

But where Mosher sings Gordon Strong whistles along. There is a zen simplicity to Strong’s approach as he unhinges the mysteries with systems analysis as opposed to Mosher’s poetry. He gently guides the reader into re-examining what is truly important when it comes to the brew day and uses some solid recipes to deliver his message home.

Both are equally effective, rich with information, and indispensable for me on my journey. There’s definitely other resources I use – I love the Brew Strong and Can You Brew It podcasts, Ray Daniels Designing Great Beers is fantastic, the interwebs never fails me, as well as BeerTools and more than a few spreadsheets – but when I think of two books that I lean on more heavily than any other, I always seem to be coming back to these two.

A co-worker just hit me up with the news that Alan Lake is going to be the new chef at Chief O’Neil’s.

About two days ago, Lake told me he took the full-time chef position at O’Neill’s. What cinched the deal for him, he said, was his experience at the famous Shelbourne in Ireland, where he earned the kitchen honorific Underpants O’Malley (I have no idea what that means, but it sounds Irish and a little naughty).

“My goal is to elevate the food at O’Neill’s,” Lake told me last night, and he has plans to cure his own corned beef and take the native simplicity of the cuisine and see what he can do by sourcing locally and applying to this traditionally simple food the skills of an accomplished fine dining chef.

As Achatz had his way with Thai street food, Lake wants to see how far he can push Irish pub grub toward a kind of haute Hibernian.

Hopefully this means they’ll be adding some decent beers to their draft list as well!!