On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
Here are pics of some hops vines that I plan to harvest this week and turn into beer. Don’t bother asking what kind of hops it is. I have no idea. A neighbor had them because a friend of his gave him rhizomes as a housewarming present but forgot to mention that hops vines run riot over any bed that you plant them in and once established you CAN NOT get rid of them. We transplanted some rhizomes to the side of his garage, put up some nylon rope for the vines to climb and now we have a good thing going. Of course the first vines that grew exploded out of the ground last year and produced a magnificent crop of not-brewable male pollen anthers (bottom pic), but this year we added some gender-normative vines that have produced bajillions of appealing and (we hope) tasty flowers.
Details of the pic are more or less the same as here.
Chat about whatever.
LittlePig
Go easy on ’em until you know how much of a kick they pack. Unless you’re one of those ain-t-an-IPA-too-bitter-for-me! fellers.
R-Jud
Agreeing with LittlePig. I don’t brew, myself, but the father-in-law does, and his last offering was hoppageddon. Hopnarok. Too much hops, is what I’m trying to get at here. I’m sure you have a recipe all sussed out.
BGinCHI
Mad hops.
rlrr
Mmmm, hoppy beer…
joeyess
I would like to take this opportunity to unleash this fantastic community on my community’s chapter of the American Family Association’s effort to stifle free speech and art in Kansas.
Here’s a direct link to the godbotherers that are spearheading this nonsense.
Fly Monkeys, fly!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Apparently last night with Castro’s speech the village has just discovered Rubio isn’t the everyone man Latino as billed. Yahoo news was pushing Castro shows split in Latino community.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@joeyess: You got to love their vapors over a nude statue is these days of the internets. Kids will just have to get their naked ladies the old fashion way via live video on their computers.
Tbone
I just brewed a wet hop ale three weeks ago that I dry hopped last weekend, and will bottle this weekend. If you’re using wet hops, you need to use at least 5 times the amount. One oz dry = 5 oz wet. Or you can use 1% alpha acid to calculate your IBU.
Mine tastes good so far. We added about 12 oz cascade and 5 oz centennial, plus about 2 oz of pellet hops. The recipie called for 40 oz wet hops for 5.75 gal.
joeyess
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I’ve contacted them and politely asked them to explain how this was an attempt to glorify “sexting” when the statue was created by 12 or 13 sculptors each with no idea of what the final piece would look like? They had no answer other than it offended them.
Pathetic little people.
BonnyAnne
That third picture is particularly lovely; it looks like a still life painting. Well done. (Also, yay hops!)
Dennis SGMM
My understanding is that the art of brewing beer is several thousand years old. I always wondered how it came to be. I can imagine the first successful brewers’ reaction though; “Guys, have I got news for you!”
joes527
@joeyess: While the “think of the children!” is silly, so is the statue. It doesn’t seem to say anything other than: “Look at me! I’m art!”
I guess I’m just not a fan of the idea that cut up women == art.
Culture of Truth
I read a theory that the effort to brew beer led to the rise of human civilization.
Hey it was the one thing that made men on the move want to stop for the night.
General Stuck
House GOP and Wall Street? In bed and having fun.
Yutsano
@joeyess: The big problem with Kansas is we can’t just cut it off or give it back to France. Maybe we can carpet-bomb them with nursing mothers. That should go over well.
NancyDarling
Proving that the Romney campaign is full of Democratic operatives, they announced this AM that they are forming a Black Leadership Council and one of the chairs is Alan West. Yes, that Alan West. I read this at TPM and NOT The Onion.
quannlace
Probably like the discovery of leavened bread. Wild yeasts creating a happy accident.
I always liked the quote attributed to Dom Pierre Pérignon, the supposed inventor of champagne, ‘Come quickly, I am drinking the stars!”
(Course, like all good stories, it turns out to be mostly fabricated. That quote really doesn’t occur until a 19c. advertisement. Oh, well)
jibeaux
I once listened to podcast on the bad old days in Brazil of really insane hyperinflation. As in, more than once a day the grocery store employees went through the store putting stickers with new prices on everything. But the really tragic effect was that people stopped brewing beer. If you bought the ingredients and let it ferment, you’d lose a lot of money in the meantime from inflation and you couldn’t sell it for what you put into it. My theory is that this is probably what was ultimately responsible for Brazil tackling hyperinflation.
MikeJ
@NancyDarling: You know you could have read it here.
mb
You can graft hops onto marijuana roots and the hops flowers will contain THC.
I’ve never tried it but read it in an ancient (1960s) text on pot growing.
kindness
Well yea, hops & cannabis are family linked. One of the local brewery’s that gives tours always throws a pillow around filled with hops and makes a crack about it as it is very skunky.
Brachiator
@Culture of Truth:
There may be something to this. Also, women were often important to this. I recall reading about some South American tribe that has a drink of fermented fruit or vegetables, the production of which is done exclusively by women. And I always wondered what was behind the lines in the Epic of Gilgamesh suggesting that beer drinking was part of what made you human.
Enkidu knew nothing about eating bread for food,
and of drinking beer he had not been taught.
The harlot spoke to Enkidu, saying:
“Eat the food, Enkidu, it is the way one lives.
Drink the beer, as is the custom of the land.”
Enkidu ate the food until he was sated,
he drank the beer-seven jugs!– and became expansive and sang with joy!
He was elated and his face glowed.
He splashed his shaggy body with water,
and rubbed himself with oil, and turned into a human.
He put on some clothing and became like a warrior(!).
He took up his weapon and chased lions so that the shepherds could eat
He routed the wolves, and chased the lions.
With Enkidu as their guard, the herders could lie down.
A wakeful man, a singular youth, he was twice as tall (?) (as normal men
ETA: I wonder how much the recent news about beer making in the White House is going to encourage home brews.
quannlace
“Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.” Benjamin Franklin.
Jay C
One bit of bad news from the DNC: apparently forecasts of severe thunderstorms for Thursday night have caused them to cancel the outdoor session at BoA Stadium – they (a lot fewer, one supposes, than expected) will be hearing President Obama speak in the Arena, instead.
CarolDuhart2
@Culture of Truth: From what I read about the theory, it was also combined with breadmaking as well. Think about it for the moment: both beer and bread were one of the first foods that was really portable. That’s why bread and beer could be considered the staff of life.
Mnemosyne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Heh. My friend’s 6-year-old and 8-year-old just discovered that some statues are naked and there is nothing they find funnier than spotting a statue with no clothes on. It’s actually quite adorable to see them giggle about it.
Mnemosyne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Heh. My friend’s 6-year-old and 8-year-old just discovered that some statues are naked and there is nothing they find funnier than spotting a statue with no clothes on. It’s actually quite adorable to see them giggle about it.
Brachiator
@CarolDuhart2:
But you had to have a settled place where you could grow the crops, make the vessels and the fire, prepare the materials, etc.
But yeast for bread has got to be close to yeast for wine in terms of some early humand going, “Hmmm? I think I got an idea…”
SiubhanDuinne
Just stopping in quickly to see whether Valdivia is around. There’s been a 7.6 quake in Costa Rica, and I believe she has family there. Apparently some damage to buildings etc., but I haven’t seen any reports of casualties in the first round of wire service dispatches.
V, if you see this, I do hope all your loved ones are safe. Please check in when you can. I’m at work but i’ll keep this thread open on my iPad for a while.
SiubhanDuinne
@CarolDuhart2:
Beer = drinkable bread.
Bread = chewable beer.
It’s been a few years since I read it, but Tom Standage’s A History of the World in Six Glasses is an interesting read. The first of the six (the oldest of the beverages discussed) is beer. The others, with equally compelling stories and social/cultural histories, are wine, whisky, coffee, tea, and colas/soft drinks.
SiubhanDuinne
@Brachiator:
The book I mentioned in @SiubhanDuinne: makes the point that early bread makers sometimes had leftover grain, and if it got wet it fermented. Yeast of course an important element in both bread and beer. But yeah, baking and brewing pretty much developed in tandem back during the Stone Age.
Brachiator
@SiubhanDuinne:
Thanks for the reminder. I had heard about this book, but had not put it on my ever growing list of books to read when I have some free time.
But now thanks to Evernote, I can at least keep track of them, even if I still lack the time to read them.
As a related aside, I am reminded of the wonderful stuff we are still learning about less ancient societies. Some great photos here.
Revealed: Fashion and beauty secrets of 2,500-year-old ‘tattooed Siberian princess’ after body was found in ice-clad burial chamber
I particularly liked this part:
YoohooCthulhu
mclaren
These look like facehuggers from the movie Alien.
4jkb4ia
It’s over, and I cried. Del Potro 6-7(1), 7-6(4), 6-2, 6-4. Roddick wasn’t an institution like Andre Agassi or otherworldly like Federer but he carried the flag of American tennis until some of these young guys were ready to pick it up, and you never doubted that he was a decent human being.
KRK
Hops are actually bines, not vines, which isn’t that important but I just like pointing it out. What is important to recreational hops growers is that however much they grow over a season (and boy do they grow), they’ll die all the way back to the ground for winter. Much more manageable than most vines.