Ah, time to relax with a good brew. You’ve got your comfy chair, a bottle of a nice beer, your beer glass…wait a minute! Where’s the bottle opener?!
Not to worry. Just grab an ordinary piece of paper and follow along with this how-to video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrXmDiYHUY0
(via Boing Boing)
Many people have never had Atlantic Blue Claw crabs, or can only get them at a restaurant. Most people usually think of Alaskan King crab legs when they hear the word “crab”. While King crab is excellent, it is expensive due to the how they are caught and sometimes they are too salty for my taste. Do not confuse King crab with Snow crab… Snow is that awful stuff you get at the Chinese buffet.
Atlantic Blue Claw crab is much closer to its west coast cousin the Dungeness crab. Blue Claws have clean white and sweet meat. The claws themselves have a darker meat which is just a tad saltier, but just as sweet. Getting the meat out of a Blue Claw is work. There are tricks to make it easier, but I don’t know if I can articulate the methods without pictures or video. Because it is work, many people just can’t be bothered; to those I say, “go buy yourself a bag of potato chips for a quick fix snack.” The point isn’t to eat ‘til you’re full, which is whole point of my previous entry; it’s a social thing.
Blue Claws are also a healthy, protein rich, low fat, snack. Forget a dipper of butter; you don’t need it. All you need is the crab and beer. What kind of beer? I recommend your favorite.
There are many ways to prepare crab in order to add as much other flavors as you like whether you boil or steam them. As far as I know, my Grandpa’s recipe is no big secret. As a matter of fact, it’s not much of a recipe at all because it is more like throwing in a bunch of ingredients in your own proportions. I do have a list of ingredients and instructions which you can follow as closely as you want.
Grandpa’s Crab Boil
Fill a 5 gallon pot halfway with water and bring to a boil with the following ingredients, portions can vary:
Now if you want to steam your crabs, you can still make the liquid portion with beer and vinegar and then put some of the powdered seasons directly onto the crabs. When steaming, the seasonings don’t penetrate into the crab, but they do stick to the shells and when you are eating them and licking your fingers, you are sure to get a mix of flavors. If you like them spicy, go with the steam method; but if you don’t want the crab sweetness and goodness hidden, go with the boil.
Whether you boil or steam crabs, do so for about 10-15 minutes. To tell if they are done, they should turn bright red and the legs should be easy to pull off.
Wondering where you get them? Hang in there for the final blog entry!
Foster’s Group Ltd. announced some very nice profits, 22 cents per share, for the 12 month period ending June 30. The share price then hit a record high, but not because of the nice profit report. Beverage giants InBev and SABMiller were both mentioned as being in hot pursuit to acquire the Australian beer and wine maker.
The party didn’t last long, however, as the share price dropped about two percent when Foster’s announced that there’d been no takeover talk.
Pete Coors, great grandson of founder Adolph Coors and vice chairman of Molson Coors Brewing Company, pleaded guilty last Friday to driving while impaired. This is a lesser charge than driving under the influence, with which he was originally charged.
Good old Pete was sentenced to 24 hours of community service, had his fine suspended, and needs to participate on a panel sponsored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving and go through alcohol education courses. He also has to pay about $500 in court costs. (I think he can afford it.)
There might be a little celebrity favoritism going on here. Would an average Joe gotten the charge reduced? Still, I suppose with all his money he might have gotten it swept under the rug. Expect a slew of new Coors-branded PSAs this football season.
On that note, your hosts at Hop Talk want to remind you that as much as we, and you, love beer, it is still an alcoholic beverage. Don’t drink and drive.
Catching, cooking and eating Atlantic Blue Claw crabs has been a tradition in my family for generations. After spending the day at the beach and getting covered in white sand and salty water, at about 4:00PM when we are all taking turns in the shower, the bar at our humble bungalow at the New Jersey Shore turns into my all-time favorite social hour.
Crabs and beer, friends and family; it’s the best! We pull out our bucket of crabs, all the tools, pour our favorite beer and just sit, pick at the crabs, and chat for hours. It is a wonderful time, even the kids join in (except for the beer part, but you may recall, this is where I got my first sip of beer from Grandpa).
Now, throughout the rest of the year, my family is one in the minority that still tries to eat every meal possible together. Reality is, as the kids get older, and everyone is busy with their own thing, it is increasingly difficult. On top of that, staying in touch with my family and friends is ever more difficult as the distances between us increase. This time to just be with each other is what life is all about and I intend to keep this social hour sacred and a continued tradition.
It is these tasty little crabs along side my beer that inspired our motto, “While life is not all about beer, beer is all about life”
Wondering where to get Blue Claws and how to cook them? Look for part III in this series.
Don’t you hate when you have to do something but you can’t really do it while drinking a beer? The folks who brew Brahma beer (from Brazil) do.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McE-X0wlUr0
Appellation Beer is quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs.
Yesterday Stan analyzed an article by the Wall Street Journal which talked about the increasing popularity of fresh hop beers, where fresh hops are added to the wort hours or even minutes after harvesting. Sometimes called wet hops. (Unfortunately, the article itself is behind a paywall, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is also carrying the story.)
As a self-described hop-head, I found it quite interesting. I used to be in it just for the bitterness, but I now find I am appreciating the other flavors that the hops bring to beer. If you can grab yesterday’s copy it’s a worthy read.
I have to apologize to Flying Dog Brewery. I have seen their product on the shelves of my favorite beverage center for some time now and because of their fancy-schmancy labels which they obviously paid an artist handsomely for, and because they took up so much shelf space, and because they had such array of styles to choose from, I assumed they were a mega brewery’s subsidiary trying to disguise themselves as a small craft brewer. I had even tried their Tire Bite at one point and didn’t care for it and thus made conclusions about them, and all their beers.
I’m sorry. I was wrong, and I should know that one bad sampling doesn’t mean they all are bad.
I had decided to give them another shot when I went on vacation and selected their Snake Dog IPA. I hope you like American hops because when you pour a bottle of this, *POW*, the aroma of the Columbus hops, with its citrus character, smacks you upside the head. (In a great way) The beer poured with a very nice, fluffy, white head and was bright amber in color.
Snake Dog turned out to be an excellent American IPA with strong hop aroma and bitterness that didn’t cross the line into way-to-bitter. It was clear, tasty, and left enough hop lingering in your mouth to make you want to have more.
I had paired this IPA with my sweet blue claw crabs and it was fantastic. The pairing worked well for that bittersweet contrast I love so much. It even worked well when the crab was spiced up with a little extra Old Bay.
Eating crab at the New Jersey shore is tradition in my family, a blog entry worthy to stand on it’s own as a follow-up. Look for it soon.
In case you missed it, a recent news item points out that while overall beer sales were flat, craft beer sales were up 11% since last year.
Stan over at Appellation Beer offers his 10 Reasons Craft Beers Sales Are Hot, giving some big props to that giant of the craft brewing movement: Michael Jackson.
Journaling is a great thing. If you didn’t know that, it might be be too late when you do.
Journaling is basically taking notes. It’s not a diary, though a diary is a type of journal. Journaling is great for anything important to your life over a long period of time because the whole point is to at some later date, go back and read what you wrote. As such, journaling subjects are usually things that you are passionate about. Things that you are passionate about don’t just come and go. If you are like me, you are probably passionate about several things… beer is just one of them.
Now, if you are a home brewer and haven’t realized that a keeping a journal of your brews is a good thing, well, then you probably haven’t made your second brew yet. Every time I brew, I re-read many of the procedures (and mistakes) I made in previous brews. I don’t get to brew that often, so the journal reminds of things I never can seem to remember, like the right proportion of bleach to water to sterilize. I’m glancing through my journal right now it also reminds me to name my beer AFTER I taste it.
For each brew, my brewing journal contains:
Some other “for instances”: On September 27, 1997, my “Autumn Amber” came out a bit hazy; my notes on September 6 tell me I forgot to add the Irish moss at the end of the boil. Another time, I noted that my Hoppy Porter just needed an extra month of conditioning to go from not-too-good to excellent! All good lessons learned. You may also ask yourself what you what you liked and disliked about a brew, and what you would change next time.
Serious brewers take serious notes, down to computerizing absolutely everything. For us at home, we don’t have to take it that far. As you can see, my Blackberry/Palm/PDA is actually good old pen and paper. Whatever you do, don’t let journaling get in the way of keeping it fun.
