Beverages - Prague and Berlin

It's snaining out.

Basically, it means we've all gotten a day off of work (at least those of us in the government/education/nonprofit sectors, and everyone who works for Yahoo! because they can't work from home) for the fact that it's cold, windy, and spewing some sort of snow-rain combination from the sky. The National Weather Service keeps promising that the snow will begin in full force over the next couple of hours, and that we're guaranteed 4-8 inches (heh heh), but I have my doubts.

Nonetheless, I am embracing my day off in true "snow day" style - yoga pants and my old University of South Florida sweatshirt, cinnamon gingerbread coffee, and a mimosa. (Duh.) My plans for the day include finishing up this blog, and then going back to "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" (which I CANNOT PUT DOWN) and perhaps some more episodes of Downton Abbey later on, although I can't say that I'm particularly pleased with the current plot line. I'm still catching up on Season 3, and I feel like I've spent the last couple of episodes transitioning from sobs of despair to tears of joy and back again. 

So, it seems like the perfect day to listen to some Stan Getz, drink mimosas, daydream about the fact that in less than 3 weeks I'll be in Cancun, and reminisce about all the delicious things we drank in Prague and Berlin.

Now THAT is an Irish Coffee. Strong, barely sweetened, with lots of real whipped cream on top. And full of caffeine! So that you can stay up late and drink more drinks!

So, let me be clear and say that neither my boyfriend nor I particularly LOVES absinthe. I am not a fan of liquorice to begin with, and a very strong alcoholic beverage that smacks of anise and liquorice is not my cup of hallucinogens. Which brings me to another point: despite popular opinion, no where in the world still sells wormwood-laced absinthe. This is not the Green Fairy of legends - it's just a super strong, gasoline-smelling, thick liqueur that people order for the sheer thrill of ordering absinthe. But it's making a comeback in America. Absinthe was big in Philly when we were there a couple of years ago; I remember it being a key ingredient in a lot of cocktails at various bars. And that we enjoyed as well, because when mixed with the right ingredients, absinthe can really pull a cocktail together.

That all having been said, there's a pomp and circumstance with straight absinthe that almost makes it worth the taste, and for this alone The Gentleman and I tend to order it whenever we see it on a specialty bar menu, just to compare presentations. So, naturally, our first night in Prague when we saw absinthe on the menu, we ordered it. 

At this particular Czech establishment (Staropramen Brewery in Praha 1), it came with its own pitcher of sugar water. Normally, there is some sort of sugar-cube/fire/dripping water process, but this one just came straight up with sugar water on the side. All absinthe is meant to be drank with sugar and water, but this was the first time we'd had to do all of the work ourselves. It was exhausting.

Because we were there a few days after Christmas, all of the Christmas markets were still up and running. Wooden stalls selling sausages, beers, mulled wine, and trinkets line pedestrian areas. And you can buy alcoholic beverages and walk around on a cold winter's eve with warmth in your hands. I AM STILL NOT OVER THIS.

Warm honey mead at a stall at one of the Christmas Markets. It basically tastes like warm, alcoholic honey. It was a bit sweet, but I could totally see adding this to some hot tea for a delightful toddy.

After we sampled the absinthe at Staropramen, I ordered an apple liqueur. It tasted like apple-infused gasoline and warmed me right up. 

One night, without any real plans in mind, we stumbled luckily across the Prague Beer Museum.  Here, you can order flights of beer selected from their impressive (and detailed) menu. Each beer is outlined with its own history, tasting notes, notes on the brewer, and interesting facts about the brewing culture at the time the recipe was originally brewed. We sampled about 14 flights of beer. No, not really. But kind of. Maybe.

Damn, Prague has good beer. And it's not stingy, either. Competing with Germany for Largest Stein:

I mean, it's basically the size of my head. And that beer drank like a meal. I think I finished about half of it and gave the rest to The Gentleman who drank that in addition to his own Giant Stein O' Beer. Because he is badass.

 Because we were in Prague for New Years Eve, we'd booked tickets for a Jazz Cruise. Don't be fooled - it's not nearly as swank as it sounds, but it WAS fun. It was definitely Czech-down-homey, complete with a "welcome drink" (a shot of schnappes) and jazz that definitely sounded more "OOMPAH" than "BA DA DAAA". I think the tickets were like $75 each, and included champagne, welcome drink, and a buffet dinner. The rest of the drinks we had to pay for, and while they weren't the cheapest drinks we'd had in Prague (where a Giant Stein O' Beer will cost you about $4), they were certainly cheaper than anything you'd find stateside or in the rest of Europe. I think a bottle of champagne was about $20, and individual glasses of wine/beer were about $7. 

We shared a table (because you have to share tables on this cruise) with a young British couple who got engaged that night. We celebrated their engagement with champagne and shots (Jeger for the boys, Sambuca for the girls). At midnight, everyone went up onto the roof of the boat for the fireworks that exploded up and down the river. It was a perfectly beautiful way to ring in 2013. 

The first round.

Later that evening....

I mentioned there was a vineyard next to the Prague Castle.I should also mention that the wine served there is....young. Very, very young wine. The kind that makes you suck in your cheeks. And possibly your eyes might water a bit. Just tell yourself it's the breathtaking scenery. 

A typical order in a typical Czech restaurant of: a dark beer and a white wine, please. Someone in this picture is getting gypped. 

I have no idea why, but there is some obsession in Prague with cannabis-flavored everything. Teas, beers, energy drinks...I can't imagine why you'd want to flavor a perfectly good beverage with the taste of my college roommate's breath.  

One night, we went out to "Europe's Only 360-degree Rotating Bar" at the Fusion Hotel. I had expected some sort of giant tower/rotating floor situation, but it turns out that the room stays still and the bar ITSELF moves. It was still pretty awesome, and they played good music and had a nice crowd. They also have side rooms with Playstations and couches. My God, I love Prague.

Drinks at 360 - this was some kind of whiskey strawberry concoction that looks a lot fruitier than it tasted.

We stayed at the Boscolo Hotel in Prague, and I fell in love with the bar in the lobby. 

I WANT THIS. Glass rack at lobby bar, Boscolo Hotel.

To Go-sie mulled wine at a Christmas Market. At 8:30am. IF THEY'RE SELLING, I'M BUYING.

There were also Christmas Markets still set up in Berlin when we arrived on January 2. SELLING MULLED WINE AND BEER AND SAUSAGES. Hooray!

Drinks at the rotating bar at the top of the Berliner Fernsehturm. Mine was some sort of cranberry-bourbon-spritzer thing that was deeeelisshus.

For a hotel bar, Catwalk at the Marriott in Berlin was gorgeous and had an excellent cocktail menu. We wound up there on our last night, because it was cold and raining and we had to get up at 7am to catch our respective flights back to Baltimore and the United Arab Emirates. After a week of traipsing around Eastern Europe, it was lovely to kick back in an up-scale bar twelve floors below our room and just enjoy cocktails and pretty scenery.

A grand "cheers" to end our week-long trip to Prague and Berlin for New Years, 2013. More adventures to come!

And so, I wrap up our holiday trip. Just in time to prep for heading out to New Mexico and Mexico in a couple of weeks when The Gentleman comes home for leave! Hooray vacation! 

Heavy Seas and Restaurant Week

Let's take a quick break from Prague and Berlin (don't worry - we'll be back with more on the bars, museums, and clubs) to discuss the delightful little Saturday I had last weekend.

One of my girl pals is on one of those New-to-Baltimore List Serv thingies (even though she moved back here six months ago) and happened upon a chance to tour the Heavy Seas brewery just outside of Baltimore City. Heavy Seas makes deliciousness like its flagship IPA Loose Cannon and the delicious new Siren Noir (a chocolate stout aged in bourbon barrels). Even so, I never pass up an opportunity to see where one of my favorite things (beer, wine, chocolate, what have you) is made.

$5 gets you in the door and 5 "free taste" chips, each good for about 1/4 of a pint of beer from the sampler bar. Like many tastings I've been to, that 1/4 pint swiftly turned into 1/2 pint tastes, and there seemed to be chips materializing out of thin air, so I'm pretty sure we had more than five tastes. We might have had twelve. But who's counting?!

Beer? No beer here.

Much like my embarrassing recycling pile every Thursday morning.

Bottle conveyer belt thingy with mesh = technical term.

If I made beer, I would be too.

No one goes thirsty on the tour.

We're helping the local economy by drinking beer!

This is where the beer comes down the chute and into the...bigger chute.
And stuff.

Good for 14 free beer samples.

You earned every one, Heavy Seas, EVERY ONE!

Loose Cannon and Siren Noir

SHINY TANKS!

Following our beer tour, my gal pal and I headed back to the city to meet a bunch of my friends from high school for Restaurant Week, another favorite Baltimore activity.

Restaurant Week is held twice a year (in August and January) and local restaurants have special prix fixe menus with two courses for lunch ($15.13) and three for dinner ($30.13). Generally, the idea is to encourage traffic to visit higher-end restaurants to sample the best of the best, but the list of participating venues grows every year. Depending on the restaurant, it's only occasionally a great deal money-wise, but the pairings tend to be excellently chosen, and if going with a crowd it's a great opportunity to share and get a broad tasting of the menu. This particular night, we went to Grille 700, which is inside the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront. 

Here's my menu for the evening:

Buffalo Sweet Breads, Local Bleu Cheese Spread, Pickled Carrots, Micro Celery 

I had never eaten sweet breads before, but I am always down for trying new animal parts. (For the most part. I might draw the line at, say, haggis...but having not yet been presented with the opportunity, I can't say for sure.) A misnomer about sweetbreads is that it's brains - it's not. It's the thymus gland (and can also be the pancreas if it's called "heart" or "belly" sweetbreads) and comes from a calf. The consistency is kind of like a tougher tofu, and the taste is incredibly rich as you'd expect any organ meat to be. I also happen to LOVE buffalo sauce and bleu cheese, so you probably could have coated a pig's ear in that combination and I would have gladly eaten it. But, truth be told, I actually really liked the sweetbreads and would absolutely try it again with a different kind of preparation to see if it's thymus gland I enjoyed or just something vaguely meaty and smothered in buffalo sauce. 

House Made Duck Ravioli, Hominy, Smoked Duck Broth

For my main course, I did the duck ravioli. It was good, but incredibly rich. Duck itself is a deliciously fatty meat, and although the ravioli was fairly light and not overdone on pasta, the whole meal was kind of heavy. Especially after the sweetbreads. In retrospect, the two did not pair particularly well together. But this was nonetheless quite good, the broth was rich and sugary-smoky, and the hominy was roasted beautifully. Hominy is sort of like giant kernels of corn, and provided a nice sweet balance to the richness of the ravioli. By itself, this dish was a meal and a half, though. I probably would have done better starting off with something lighter.

And dessert didn't help:

Smores Tart, Graham Crackers, Dark Chocolate Ganache, Creamy Caramel, Marshmallows

Oh. My. God. I love s'mores. I LOVE them. They combine all of my favorite dessert elements: graham cracker, marshmallow, and chocolate. You don't even have to mess with this recipe too much to get me all excited.

Let's take another look though, shall we?

 Yes, they've added MORE AWESOME STUFF like chocolate ganache and caramel to the inside of it. And it's all encased in some kind of crunchy, delicious graham cracker cookie crust thingy. Swoon.

And once the beer tasting and the three course dinner were all over, I went home and went to bed. At 9pm. On a Saturday night. And had delicious, delicious dreams.

And this is why I run half marathons. So I can eat like this.

Weddings, Brew Fests, Cool Runnings, Et Al

Oh, man.

So, been super busy (as always...not really anything new there) but also working in preparations for Snap's wedding this coming weekend. I've got the dress, the shoes, the awesome date, and am fine-tuning the toast. I don't want to give too much away, but suffice it to say that I tried to incorporate a spectrum of emotion that includes Supreme Humiliation. Ok, maybe not humiliation, per say. A touch of humor, maybe. At Snap's expense. Har.

So I went on a long run on Saturday (working towards the Survivor 7 on June 12), and was running peacefully along in some sort of Zenned-out state when I realized that there were throngs of people lining the sidewalks. So I shifted over and ran in the street. Curiously, no cars. Excellent running conditions, however, and the street was even conveniently mapped out with lines of orange cones. Then I realized people were cheering. Just as I was congratulating myself on such good form, I glanced over my shoulder to see Fifi gliding along behind me. Apparently, I had found my running trail along AVAM's annual Kinetic Sculpture race route.

Slightly embarrassing, especially because there wasn't any place for me to turn off, so I just went with it for probably another quarter mile.

So if any of you witnessed the early part of the route and saw some ass running while everyone else was biking, it was me. Oops.

Also worthy of note here was that City Paper's Annual Brew Fest was a couple of weekends ago. As always, it fell on the most gorgeous spring day. I don't know how they do it every year, but it always seems that the weather is in gross extremes leading up to this event. 90 degrees with 100% humidity one day, 45 degrees and raining the next. And then CPABF comes along, and it's 75 degrees, sunny, no humidity. Just perfect.

I'm digging beer right now. Among my favorites:
Boulder's Kind Blue, blueberry wheat
Allagash White Ale
Hitachino Nest, white ale (harder to find, given present export situation)
Dogfish Head Midas Touch, ancient Turkish fermentation recipe (ridiculously hard to find, and ringing in at a whopping $14 per 4-pack in some cases)

So, spring is in full effect. Which means running outside, beer consumption, weddings, and soon- KAYAKING!

Hooray, spring!

Oh, and somewhere in there I'm gonna turn 29. Awesome.

Style and Fun, Not Competition

I do also need to add in here that I could not have asked for a better marathon relay team. Far from being overly concerned with timing, performance, and endurance, our focus is on two primary objectives:

1. Looking Good. This was accomplished through forming a cohesive identity and complying with a design scheme involving matching sweat bands and a commitment to an 80's aerobics theme. If you're going to be running a marathon relay, you damn well better look the part. Forget about high-tech fabrics that wick or expensive sports outfits- we're going for retro style here, and if you can't go big then you can go home. So completely committed is my team, that our captain has cautioned us against running too fast for fear spectators and other runners won't be able to fully appreciate the visual.

2. Obtaining Extra Beer Tickets. Each team member is awarded 2 beer tickets upon the completion of the relay. This is, obviously, not nearly enough. Our goal is to obtain additional tickets by any means possible (and I think El Capitan is quite serious about any means...) Why? Because we just, collectively, ran 26.2 miles and will be in need of refreshment. And, because we have seasoned livers, we require more refreshment then the more serious runners who will most likely want to forgo the free beer. And we will be happy to relieve them of their tickets.

I could have wound up on a team where performance was the number one goal. Although I certainly am going for a PR here, it's nice to know that my team is focused primarily on these aspects and that timing is, really, only thirdly important. I don't think I could be on any other kind of team.

Our team motto: "Rule #1 of Marathon Relay Club: Never apologize, never explain. We run for style and fun, not for competition!"

Rock on.