Beer and Homebrewing - Four Fun Facts By Michael M Thomas

If you're like most people, you probably love trivia. Come on - admit it. At some point or another nearly every one of us has played a game of Trivial Pursuit at a party or watched Jeopardy on television. So how would you like to know a few fun facts about beer and homebrewing?

We all know about how the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. But did you know that the pilgrims stopped where they did because they had run out of beer? If they still had beer on board, the pilgrims probably would have kept sailing South (to somewhere warmer). If the pilgrims had more homebrew beer on board, the world (or at least North America and the United States) may have been a different place today.

Did you know that July is officially "American Beer Month"? When you stop to think about it -- what with the Fourth of July, summer barbeques, and plenty of ballgames -- having July as American Beer Month makes a lot of sense. But if the pilgrims hadn't run out of their homebrew beer, maybe there wouldn't be an American Beer Month at all.

Did you know that over 30,000 people visit Denver each Fall for "The Great American Beer Festival"? What's to do at such a festival? Well, by now I am sure that you can guess: you can talk about beer, drink beer, learn about homebrew beer, and you can even try a few kinds of homebrew beer.

Surely you know that beer (homebrew and store bought) is not solely an American tradition. But did you know that rules and regulations about beer go back to ancient times? In fact, in Babylonia there was a law that prevented bars from serving watered down beer. Now if you love beer, you know how disappointing a watered-down beer can be. But the punishment for serving watered-down beer in Babylonia was that the bartender was drowned in a barrel of the watered-down brew. That's a serious punishment!

Did you know that it's simple to learn how to homebrew your own beer? To be honest, it's actually quite simple. Go to http://www.howtobrewbeer.com and download a free guide to homebrewing. The homebrewing guide includes more than a dozen recipes for different varieties of beer.

A Wine Lover's Weekly Review of $10 Wines - An Alsatian (France) Sylvaner By Levi Reiss

Over the years I have enjoyed and reviewed many wines from Alsace, France with their distinctively shaped bottles and sometimes, but not always, their distinctive taste. This is the first time that I have found one in the inexpensive price range here defined as $10 and less. I'd like to say something about this price limit. I live in Ontario, Canada where wine prices tend to be somewhat higher than in many parts of the United States. Our dollar fluctuates and I don't want to cut off a wine because the Canadian dollar inched up a bit. So I specify about $10 when it's floating near the limit.

Alsace is a relatively small wine-producing region. Its wine growing area is a mere 60 miles (100 kilometers) long and at most 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) wide sitting on the German border to the east. Almost all its wine is white. While Sylvaner is fairly widely planted, it is not considered a fine grape in Alsace or elsewhere. For $10 did you expect to get a fine grape from an expensive region in an expensive wine producing country? However, this wine just might turn out to be a bargain.

OUR WINE REVIEW POLICY All wines that we taste and review are purchased at the full retail price.

Wine Reviewed
Dopff and Irion Crystal d'Alsace Sylvaner 2007 11.9 % alcohol about $10

Let's start with the marketing materials. Tasting Note: Pale straw color; light floral aromas with hints of pear and melon; fresh and lively with green apple, lime and herbal notes on the palate; crisp, clean finish. Serving Suggestion: Seafood or fish; quiche, etc... And now for my review.

I started by sipping this wine alone. It was lightly sweet, quite long, and mildly acidic. The first meal was smoked turkey thighs cooked with chickpeas. The wine was appley and refreshing but uni-dimensional and light.

The second meal was a commercial shepherd's pie. Now the Sylvaner tastes both lemony and appely. Its acidity is pretty good but the length is inconsistent. When I added some Turkish hot pepper it became stronger and wasn't overwhelmed. This is not the hot pepper sauce that I love (even if the two share the name Harissa). I can only wonder how this wine would handle the pungency of the real thing.

The final meal consisted of chicken meat balls slow cooked with soft wheat. The wine became rounder and was sharply acidic, tasting of citrus fruits. It was palate cleansing.

I finished the tasting with two cheeses. The first cheese was an Italian-style Ricotta cottage cheese. It was hard to define the wine's fruit, perhaps gooseberry. The wine became somewhat sweeter. This wine and cheese pairing was better than average. Then I went to a Provolone. The Sylvaner was citrusy, modestly long with pleasant acidity.

Final verdict. I would buy this wine again. It does qualify as a bargain. You can easily pay much more for Alsace wine and not get better. But it's not a wine to rave about.

Levi Reiss has authored or co-authored ten books on computers and the Internet, but to be honest, he would rather just drink fine Italian, French, or other wine, accompanied by the right foods and spend time with his wife and family. He teaches classes in computers at an Ontario French-language community college. Among his many web sites he is particularly proud of his new love and relationships site celebrating mostly spiritual and on occasion physical love at http://www.loveamourlove.com You will find a wide range of articles devoted to various aspects of love, and a special collection of love quotes in both English and French (with translations.) Check out his global wine website at http://www.theworldwidewine.com with his weekly column reviewing $10 wines and his new sections writing about (theory) and tasting (practice) organic and kosher wines.