liqueur

ASTROLIQUOR for December 7-13—What the stars say you should drink!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Here’s your booze horoscope:

Aries, you’ll have unexpected expenses this week and through the New Year, so stay away from expensive artisanal gin and find yourself some rotgut. You’ll make hotel reservations, only to have them fall through when you reach your (expensive) destination. Hope it’s a warm area of the world; you might be bedding down in cardboard. This could be good for your love life.

Taurus, you feel introverted, causing your friends to wonder what’s wrong with you. The world is heavily skewed toward extroverts, and we can’t all be naked-dancing-lampshade-wearing-Mike’s-hard-lemonade-swilling entertainers, so just own your need for a little quiet and privacy this week. Any friends who can’t respect it are dildos.

When you mix lager and stout in the same glass, Gemini, you feel empowered to do whatever the hell else you want to do too. Moreover, you get the sense that everyone admires you and would like to mate with you. In psychiatric parlance this is called narcissism, and many Geminis enjoy it. The important thing is that you radiate positive energy. You emit  bright sunbeams, even if you think they’re shining out of your shorts.

Cancer, new people enter your life this week—a good thing, since you burned a few bridges in November. You may end up traveling with your new friends and learning about new societies and cultures. You may start drinking Yellow Chartreuse with cognac. All this will be very expensive, but don’t worry about the bruises on your credit card; you’ll win the lottery later in the week.

Leo, you don’t feel like working this week. Instead you’ll fantasize heavily about future plans, watch a lot of porn, and hit on strangers. In other words, this will be a fun week, but it will come back to haunt you in February, depending how many people you piss off. Still, it is in the stars, so you can’t exactly elect not to misbehave. Champagne for you.

Staying home alone may appeal to you, Virgo, but it will actually end up sucking, especially since you’ll miss out on meeting someone special. Not only that—if you mix with other people, someone might offer you a job. However, if it’s not a job but a “lucrative business partnership,” run! The last thing you need is to get financially reamed before the holidays. You need money for vodka, rum, brandy, and amaretto.

Libra, responsibility is the last thing on your mind. Your life has been very mundane lately, and you’re itching to go berserk. Will you make it until New Year without shaking up a 4-L jug of creme de menthe, Frangelico, and vodka? If you restrain yourself, you’ll become very moody at work…. Best to work drunk and happy. Your colleagues like you better that way, and so do you.

What a boring week lies ahead, Scorpio. It’s like you’re in a little pocket of weak celestial influence. You’ll get restless on Wednesday and mix this:

  • 5 oz rum
  • 5 oz pear liqueur
  • 5 oz orange juice
  • 5 oz pineapple juice

You may wish to hollow out a pineapple or a coconut and adorn this amazing drink with umbrellas and whatever weird things you can find. Consuming it should take care of Thursday (who does anything on Thursday anyway), and then on Friday you’ll need to explain some kind of accounting slip-up at work that’s concatenated throughout your department. Rum is really the worst spirit for doing math.

Sagittarius, you’re getting excited about your birthday. Even if it’s already happened, you may feel you didn’t get enough gifts. Why not make yourself a calendar featuring nude pictures of yourself? It will be an interesting conversation piece for a whole year, and you’ll still have money left over for Sailor Jerry. Make sure you go grocery shopping every day if you want to have a hook-up this week.

Your popularity continues, Capricorn. Go with it—an evening with friends will boost your spirits. Make it an inexpensive one, though; find a cheap dive and drink the house beer. This way you can restock your liquor inventory (Frangelico, Haagen Dazs cream liqueur, Grand Marnier, and Kahlua—yes, you need these). Make sure you don’t go to any musicals. No handling livestock either.

Aquarius, you have to fight for your rights this week. The battleground is information. Be suspicious of everyone. If you think you’re being surveilled, it’s because you are. When it comes to drinks, think odorless and colorless. Despite your current vodka-fueled paranoia, you’ll look back at the week with a sense of accomplishment. Except for the part where you bump into an old friend who defrauds you in a get-rich-quick scheme.

Pisces, you need liberty this week. Off with those confining clothes; it’s time to run around in a thong. Surprisingly, your friends won’t interfere. Be thankful for them, but keep things platonic; the stars call nix on any sort of rutting or matting. Turn your tongue and internal organs blue-purple with some blackberry schnapps.

Balls!

My Fellow Inebriates,

Our Canadian Cream is almost ready for consumption. Not that we haven’t had a small sip already, but at the end of this week it should be as good as it’s going to get—i.e., ready to chug. I have a few nagging worries, though.

Canadian Cream Label copyWhen we made the liqueur, we bought a one-litre carton of whipping cream. Two and a half cups went into the mix, my mum put half a cup or so in some solid-food risotto-like thing, and the rest sat in the fridge with nothing to do. Recycling day came along and, since the unused cream was two days away from expiry, we gave it a sniff. OMG! Holy shit, people! That cream smelled rank. Holy crap, two days early the stuff was horrid. Mum poured it down the drain and rinsed the carton…but it was hard not to look at our giant Canadian Cream jug and think…the same cream’s in there! OMG!

That’s really the reason we got into it early—to make sure it wasn’t off. You wouldn’t want to take a big slug of sour milk products and end up barfing. But it smelled fine. It tasted fine.

Alcohol keeps food from going off.

So what is this amazing preservative power of alcohol all about? How does it work?

Simply put, alcohol is poisonous. At concentrations above 15 percent, bacteria and fungi can’t survive. That having been said, cream-liqueur experts advise against keeping homemade concoctions more than a few weeks, and only then in the fridge. Roger that—we’d better finish this shit now. Review…on the way 😉

To this sage advice, my mum said, “Oh. I guess we’d better not make another batch then. It’ll be enough to get through this lot.”

This is exactly the opposite of what I meant. Of course we should make another batch. Right now.

But instead she said we were going to make whisky balls.

rum balls

I was immediately suspicious. Another recipe requiring us to cook with booze? OMG! The angels’ share is supposed to be miniscule—the tiny portion that evaporates naturally, not liberal gases spewing into the air from a hot saucepan. Damn it, why do the angels get any of our booze? Aren’t they supposed to be perfect creatures? Not addicts jonesing in distillery cask rooms.

“Relax,” said my mother. “Behave yourself.”

Apparently you don’t cook whisky balls.

They’re just like rum balls, which you don’t cook either—only they’re made by people who are too ungenerous to buy rum for loveable bears who have repeatedly requested it. Whisky balls are a not-horrible-sounding variation on rum balls. Let’s do this shit.

Here’s what we need:
  • 3 ¼ cups vanilla wafer crumbs
  • ¾ cup icing sugar
  • ¼ cup cocoa
  • 1 ½ cup walnuts 
  • 3 tbsp light corn syrup
  • ½ cup whisky

Life is a compromise at LBHQ, so we’re using graham crumbs. We have to do this without Miss V seeing, or she will demand a bowlful of them (not that she would deign to eat a graham cracker).

Next two ingredients: check.

Walnuts…the kids will bitch a very great deal if walnuts go into this recipe. But perhaps they shouldn’t be the arbiters of our whisky-ball ingredients.

Corn syrup is one of those things that doesn’t age, and ours is probably older than I am. We’re going to use it anyway.

As for throwing half a cup of Canadian whisky into this recipe…what the hell. The plastic Wiser’s jug is enormous and its somewhat atonal siren song has been relentless lately—better do something with it other than just pound it. Sigh.

rum ball mixingOkay, so you really just mix all this stuff up and shape it into balls. (OMG, I’m not even allowed to help with that—what’s the big deal, a little fur?) Then you sequester your balls away for a few days in an airtight container so the flavor can mellow. Five days is about ideal. But it’s hard to be away from your balls for five days. You might find yourself opening the container and sniffing your balls every so often, wondering if they’re ripe.

Whisky or whiskey balls?

If your balls are Scottish, Canadian, or Japanese, they’re whisky balls.

If your balls are American or Irish, they’re whiskey balls. As a rule of thumb, if your country has an “e” in the spelling, so does your whisk(e)y and any balls made therefrom.

The Parallel 49 Brewing interview…plus a Mountie, some gin news, and a groundhog in a bowler hat

My Fellow Inebriates,

Let’s face it, when it comes to remembering stuff, neither of my two neurons exactly has its axon on the answer button. So I’ve been very remiss toward one of my favorite fellow beer reviewers and two very kind booze purveyors:

Beerbecue tweeted me to ask about the legalities of LBHQ Canadian Cream.

Naturally I hadn’t thought about getting busted (nor had I honestly thought of sharing the liqueur, internationally or otherwise; it represents about four good days of blotto). But beerbecue instilled the fear of Mounties with this picture.

Mounties are notoriously honorable and this one is probably no exception. Regarding the Canadian Cream biz, it probably wouldn’t accept a hush bribe, and then I’d end up in jail where someone would forge the orifice I don’t yet have.

♦ ♦ ♦

Julia Gale sent me a lovely newsletter mentioning that BROKER’S GIN has been relisted by the BC liquor authority.

This whole thing has been an absolute odyssey, so much gratitude goes to Julia for listening to my whining. Once we get that delicious hooch back at LBHQ we’ll have our much-threatened Gin Shoot-Out Part Deux.

If this groundhog has a Broker’s Gin bowler hat, I imagine mine must be in the mail.

♦ ♦ ♦

Anthony Frustagli of Parallel 49 Brewing was kind enough to do an interview with me.

Since only house-trained bears are allowed at the brewery, we did our Q&A via email. Be warned, this is a real interview! It contains actual answers and information, which are anomalies for this space.

LB: Thanks for agreeing to talk to us about Parallel 49 Brewing. I’m still reeling from how good LOST SOULS CHOCOLATE PUMPKIN PORTER was. I’ve been tasting SCHADENFREUDE this week—quite bold and spicy. As soon as I bought it, I noticed a ton of other pumpkin beers. I was also surprised to note it’s a lager rather than an ale. Where does SCHADENFREUDE sit on the pumpkin-beer spectrum in terms of flavor profile?
AF: It’s the only pumpkin lager that I know of. We designed it that way because as a lager it has a much lighter body than most of the ales out there, so we didn’t have to spice it as aggressively as some of the other pumpkins. At the same time, the bready malts in Oktoberfests provide a perfect backdrop for the spices.
LB: Do you get a lot of feedback on specialty beers such as SCHADENFREUDE? What would it take for this to become a year-round product?
AF: Feedback on the seasonals has been fantastic. In fact, an article in the Globe and Mail today called SCHADENFREUDE “one of the best pumpkin beers in the country.” Having said that, it is staying as a seasonal beer.
LB: What do you see as your market demographic?
AF: Our demographic is people interested in new, exciting, well-crafted beers.  We’ve only had product in market for about five months, so our demographic hasn’t changed much.
LB: Is craft beer suffering the same doldrums [as macro beer], or is it able to weather the vicissitudes of style/popularity?

AF: Craft beer numbers are soaring, showing double digit growth every year for the past decade. I think macro drinkers are moving over to craft beer more than they are switching to wine or spirits…. Differentiating ourselves from macro beer is not hard at all. Macro beer is amazingly homogeneous in terms of both flavour and image. Convincing macro drinkers to give you a shot is the hard part. In terms of production and planning, “craft” shouldn’t immediately imply “small.” There are many amazing craft breweries in the US that are HUGE (relatively speaking). Small-batch breweries are not necessarily craft, and craft breweries aren’t necessarily small. A brewery’s commitment to the quality of their product is what determines if they can be considered a craft brewery or not.
LB: Is brewing more art or more science? Both?
AF: Very much both. Our top two brewers both have degrees in chemical engineering, and are both avid home brewers. Designing great beers is an art; actually making the beers as designed (and on a large scale) is definitely a LOT of science.
LB: There must be a lot of stories about how everyone at Parallel 49 got into brewing. Is everyone at Parallel 49 passionate about beer?
AF: We all are insanely passionate about craft beer. In fact, we all left relatively secure, well-paying jobs because we wanted to work in a field that was a little closer to our hearts.  
LB: How do you decide what sort of beer to produce and market? Do you ever butt heads?
AF: All five of us, along with our brewers and sales reps, have weekly meetings where we sit down and taste each and every beer in production or testing right now, and ask ourselves how we can improve on those. At the same time, we try to answer the question “what would be really awesome to drink right now that I just can’t find anywhere.” That’s how our beers are born.
LB: Which beer is your personal fave? How much does personal taste play a role in deciding which beers to market?
AF: Our motto is “Driven by thirst.” We brew the kinds of beers that we want to drink. Personal taste is pretty much the most important factor in deciding which beers we bring to market. Do I have personal favourite? Depends on the date, weather, my mood, time of day, alignment of the planets, etc. In other words, no… I don’t have a favourite 🙂
LB: Have you ever produced a beer that just didn’t work out?
AF: Several dozen. They never see the light of day outside the brewery though.
LB: What’s your next new beer? Or is it a secret? How soon can we get a taste?
AF: Our next seasonal is UGLY SWEATER MILK STOUT…and we also have a salted caramel Scotch ale, and a cascading dark ale being released in 650ml bottles in mid-November.

LB: Are you getting a lot of traffic in the Parallel 49 tasting room?
AF: Yes, the traffic through the tasting room has exceeded our expectations several fold.
LB: Do you have any advice for tasting-room visitors?
AF: Please bear with us 🙂  Our growler program has exploded beyond our wildest forecasts (we have over 1000 growlers out to market in just over three months) and we only have one growler filling station. We’ve ordered two more, and they will be installed soon.
LB: What do you like best about brewing?
AF: Drinking beer 🙂  And watching people enjoy our beers.
LB: Do you allow bears in the tasting room?
AF: Are they house-trained bears? 🙂

The Parallel 49 brewery and tasting room can be found at:

 1950 Triumph St.

Vancouver, BC, Canada

V5L 1K5

Tel: 604-558-BREW (2739)