Dylan Charles's Blog, page 13

The Law

Due to my vacation, y’all get two mini blog entries. Sorry about that.

I still don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life and that scares me. I know I want to keep writing, but I also know that I will never be motivated enough to just write. I will always need some sort of job to keep me moving, to keep me focused.

And I think I’ve found a profession that hits all the right notes. I’ve been working for a law firm for six months now and it’s intriguing me. Even though it’s in a field...

Moving

Due to my vacation, you guys get two mini posts. Sorry about that.

I’ve lived in small cities and big cities and suburbia. And I’ve decided that I’ve reached the point where I can say that the city is not for me. The people, the noise, the crowds, the smells: I’m pretty sure that I don’t want that for the rest of my life.

I don’t know if I want to live in the country, away from everyone assume everything, but I do know that this gigantic cluster of people is not ideal. I need the space and isol...

Brewing an Education: Porters and Stouts (Part IV)

The only way to gain an education in anything food related is with a lot of practical experience. If you want to know how to make bouillabaisse, you need to make bouillabaisse. If you want to know how rabbits taste, you need to taste rabbits (poorly worded, will fix later).

Similarly, with beer, you need to get out and drink a lot of beer. You can’t just read in a book about the flavor of hops and the intensity of aromas. That only teaches you the vocabulary and the techniques. But, after that...

I Do Resolve

As has become a tradition, I will spend today not looking at how I goofed up last year’s resolutions, but looking at how I can improve for the following year. As I grow ever older, I’m learning more and more about myself; not just in how I need to improve, but in the best way to improve. For example:

1. This year I want to write two to three blog entries a week. Last year I resolved to write ten blog entries a month and I succeeded, though there were a few months that the last week of the mont...

New Year’s Eve (Part 2)

Our excursion into Boston’s First Night was a miserable failure. Big crowds, little to do and a single ice sculpture.

But the important thing is that the year is coming to a close and soon it’ll be 2013. There’ll be a lot of new things coming along that I hope y’all will enjoy.

See you on the other side.

-D-

New Years

I’m now on the train heading into Boston to participate in First Night. I’ve never done much for New Year’s Eve.

But now I’m going into the heart of all things and I’m terrified.

Wish me luck.

-D-

Brewing an Education: Porters and Stouts (Part III)

Continuing on along our education of stouts and porters, we have come across our first porter. Now, from everything I have read, porters are a bit of a mystery. Once, a long time ago, porters were an extremely popular form of beer of which stouts a type. But, along the way, porters fell by the wayside and, eventually, people stopped making them entirely. The last porter brewed was by Guinness and they stopped in the mid-seventies. Then, after a good twenty years, people decided to bring back...

Going National

As you may or may not know, I spent the majority of last Spring getting into baseball. I watched Ken Burn’s Baseball, I read Jose Canseco’s absolutely riveting biography, and I even went to a couple of games last year.

Unfortunately, my truncated attention span only allowed me to follow the sport through mid-June, at which point I started preparing for Halloween.

But, in spite of my failure to follow a team through an entire season, something stuck. I’ve dug up my baseball. I started wearing my...

Brewing an Education: Stouts and Porters (Part 2)

I’ve been reading a book called Tasting Beerby Randy Mosherand I’ve been using it as a guide to beer tasting (obviously). While I already knew some of the basics (checking the clarity, the color, the aroma) I was/am still very much a novice. The best part about this particular book is that it goes into great detail about absolutely everything to do with beer; from how taste buds work to the history of particular brewing styles to the chemical compounds that produce the specific flavors. You g...

Brewing an Education: Stouts and Porters (Guinness and Sam Adams)

Part of my goals for next year is to try and become more educated, to develop a better palate and learn to discern flavors and textures and sensations with more adept discernment. I am, of course, talking about drinking more beer. But I want to do it smartly. Last year, I drank a lot of pumpkin beers and IPAs and random brews from random breweries with no attempt to learn about the histories behind the styles or even about how each style should taste.

After all, a Belgian shouldn’t taste like...