The Yokohama Winter Beer Bash

After an uneventful train ride to Yokohama, we met up with Ian's friend Patrick, who had been living in Japan for ten years and is now happily married. Patrick lives and works as a wellness coach in Yokohama, in addition to several other business interests.

Patrick took us to lunch at a favored soba restaurant, where I had a delicious bowl of hot soba with slices of duck breast. We proceeded along the bay (which is great...a wide park between the city and the water running for maybe a mile) and then through the city to the beer fest, which was held at a pier in the industrial section of the waterfront.

The fest itself was far smaller than what I expected coming from the US, but made sense given the younger beer culture in Japan. Japanese craft beer seems to be 15-20 years behind the US. The beer list in restaurants is (literally) a choice between "draft beer" and "bottled beer" and (according to Patrick) there is no concept of beer beyond watery mass market Asahi/Kirin/Suntory for most people. There were maybe a dozen breweries at the festival, and probably half of them were started by American expats. I will have to list the beers I tried in a separate post, but the short story is that they were all new to me, which always makes me happy.

During the fest, I met a really nice Québécois, named Luc, who had brewed in Montreal for 10 years and was now going to start a brewery north of Tokyo...I will try to meet up with him at CBC this year in Washington, DC. The win for the day though, was meeting Scott Brimmer, who opened Brimmer Brewing just outside of Tokyo about a year ago. Scott brewed at Sierra Nevada for nine years before moving to Japan. We talked for a while and, unsolicited, he offered an invitation to visit his brewery, which I am doing today (Monday). Details to follow!

Observation: inside the cultural bubble that is Craft beer in Japan, the brewers and other drivers in the industry are rock stars, and I think they get a lot of people trying to ride their coattails, or get their attention. For example, Patrick had gotten me in touch with Bryan Baird, owner of Baird Brewing in Numazu, before arriving. We had a good conversation about beer in the US vs. Japan at the festival, but I got a very polite brush-off when asking about visiting their brewery (which is how I met Luc, fortunately). Likewise, I was introduced to and tried to speak with Ry, who publishes Craft Beer Japan, and got a very rude response, as in "I'm not even going to stop walking to tell you to buzz off." (In fairness, he was in the middle of running a beer fest, but come on.)

Finally, we wrapped up the day by walking back to the commercial district, very quickly visiting the Cup Noodles Museum, and having dinner at my favorite conveyor sushi restaurant in all of Yokohama. It was very helpful to have a near-native speaker with us to order all manner of delicious plates. Below: three cuts of tuna from "shitty" to divine o-toro. Of course, the worst cut was far superior to anything I could hope to get back home in Nashville, with apologies to Mr. Choo and Samurai Sushi.

Tokyo, take 2

I know there is no "take 1" on here, because I have been delinquent, due to having an infant (now toddler) and opening a brewery. I would say that I haven't travelled much, which is true except for the trip we took to Tokyo last March (2012).

Now I am back to visit Ian before he moves back to the US this spring. I am here for one short week, which is the longest that I'm wiling to leave the brewery in other people's hands. (In fairness, I am pretty pleased that Fat Bottom is stable enough that I can walk away for a week and be confident that nothing will collapse.)

It is Sunday now, and we are getting ready to go to the Yokohama Winter Beer Bash...more on that later. I left Nashville early Wednesday morning and got to Ian's place in Tokyo just before dinner Thursday. The weather here has been fantastic for January...clear and temperatures in the 40s, maybe touching 50 at midday. I came here on a beer and noodle mission, and can proudly say that I ate nothing but ramen and onigiri until dinner last night, which was tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet).

On the beer front we have done well. At dinner we generally drink local macro brews (all that is available in most restaurants), but we went to the Baird's Brewery taproom in Meguro on Friday night to enjoy some local craft beer and the poetry of Robert Burns, since it was his birthday, read by a very drunk and friendly Scottish-Japanese guy.

Six month teaser

So much for providing updates.

The "settling down" reference was that we've had a baby. (!) Meet Parker Everlee:

She was born April 16 and is perfectly healthy. She is now 16 weeks and Dru is going back to work next week, so we'll see how that goes.

The Travel Retrospective

Since January, there hasn't been too much because of baby Parker. We visited Portland, Maine, for a wedding. It was Parker's first plane ride (though second wedding) and she did great. The trip was great, but we managed to (almost) not have a place to stay our last night in town, due to some poor planning on our part.

Portland seems to be the Portland (Oregon) of the east. Cool city, great restaurants, a lot of beer, and everything is happening downtown. The Old Port core of the city has a very old-world feel with winding streets, tall brick buildings and open plazas.

We visited Sebago Brewing's new pub downtown (the beer was OK) and the meal highlight of the trip was lunch at Duckfat. Highly recommended if you visit.

Now there is one more bit of excitement, which I'm not quite at liberty to discuss yet. By the end of next week though, I'll have a big announcement for the world.

It has been entirely too long

...to go without posting, as noted by new Twitter friend @kateo.

So what's happening? Do Ben and Dru still...

• like food? Check.
• make and consume potent potables? Natch.
• travel? You bet.

Over the last year plus, we've traveled like mad, trying to see the world before settling down. Christmas 2009 through New Years in Aruba, Valentines day weekend in Paris, 4th of July in Portland, Oregon, and an October weekend in New York. Beyond that, I got to see the country from San Francisco to Maine for work.

The super summary by city, Twitter style

Aruba: sunny beaches, quiet island, and I got to read eight books over seven days. Drive the island and stay away from the tourist high-rise cluster.

Paris: three of the best meals I've ever had, incredible museums, long walks, and chilly weather. Food, wine, and strolling.

Portland: saw the Old 97s at Wonder Ballroom, had a great afternoon biking, eating tacos, and drinking at Amnesia Brewing

NYC: The New Museum = blah, MOMA = great; walking = COLD; Fatty 'Cue and Momofuku Ssäm Bar = divine, and hung out with Dru's sister Casey and my friend Becca.

Beyond that, I've adopted twitter @benheartsbeer, switched roles to work in marketing (for the same company), and "settling down" is imminent.

Updates to follow.

Singapore, Day 2

Marginally delayed (as usual), here is the account of Day 2 in Singapore. On the agenda:

• Singapore Botanic Gardens
• IT Malls
  
• SAM - Singapore Art Museum
• Beer (duh)
• Iggy's

First, the Gardens

Check it out at http://www.sbg.org.sg/

I was and still am very, very impressed with the botanic gardens.  The grounds are urban, in that the area is only a few minutes drive from the central business district, has connecting bus routes, and will soon have a subway station.  I arrived at the gardens around 7 AM, after waking up early (thank you, jet-lag) and then realizing that the gardens opened at 5 in the morning.  For reference, sunrise was probably around 6:45 AM, and the temperature was in the mid-80s, rising to the mid-90s by 11 AM.

What most impressed me was how much the gardens are used by people living in Singapore.  Entrance is free (with the exception of the Orchid Gardens), and there were hundreds of people out and about, running, walking their dogs, and particularly doing tai chi in groups of 1 or 2 up to 100.

The gardens are broken into several sections, including Swan Lake, the Ginger Garden, an urban rain forest, Palm Valley and Symphony Lake, and the spectacular National Orchid Garden.  Symphony Lake has a band stage in the middle of the lake, where the symphony presumably plays open air concerts.  Seating is on a grass hillside (Palm Valley).

The Ginger Garden is just what it sounds like...a garden of different ginger varieties.  Ginger is not a particularly spectacular plant, but it is obviously very important in Asian cuisine and to the regional economy.  Swan Lake has (you guessed it!) swans, both of the live and sculptural varieties.  The rain forest was where I started, and was really nice.  There are a few boardwalks wandering across a heavily wooded hillside, with some incredible trees...some with trunks 7 or 8 feet across.

I should set aside a special paragraph for the National Orchid Garden (NOG).  While I always knew that some people go nuts over orchids, breeding plants that might take a decade to produce a flower, I never really understood the obsession.  Having visiting the Singapore orchids, I get it now.  The NOG is about seven acres of orchids, bromeliads, and related plants.  I saw (no joke) thousands of different orchid varieties, some with flowers half the size of a fingernail, some with flowers bigger than my hand.

Ok, enough about the flowers!

So.  After a coffee and pastry in the gardens, I headed back to the hotel to cool off, and then popped out at noon to see the Central Business District (the CBD).  Sidebar: Singapore is obsessed with acronyms.  There is the CBD, the MRT (mass rapid transit), the SBG (see above), the CTE, PIE, and ERP (I don't know...something about roads).  So, I took the subway (MRT) on down there.  First stop: lunch.  I stopped into Ah Teng's Bakery, which is in the famous Raffles Hotel.

Lunch, and yes that is a coffee in the background.  Apparently coffee or tea is appropriate for lunch in Singapore.

Once that delightful sandwich was gone, I departed on a post-prandial tour, checking out two of the IT malls.  That's right...this is a city obsessed with shopping to an extreme.  There are many many malls in the city, including several (more than the two that I visited) that specialize strictly in electronics.  And I'm not talking about some wimpy American mall with 50,000 square feet of retail.  Both of these malls took up an entire city block, went up seven or eight stories, down one or two, and sold everything from cameras to laptops to chips to LEDs to specific cooling fans for a 1995 HP desktop that you can't even find online.  How happy was I?

Wanna know the weirdest thing about these two places?  In addition to all of the electronic goodies, they each had several sporting goods stores.  Because when I think of IT weenies, my mind immediately goes to athletics.

On to the afternoon!

One more stop before a quick run back to my hotel (I said I was tired!): the Singapore Art Museum.  The museum itself was quite interesting, as it is a converted colonial mansion.  There are open breezeways all the way around the building, which have been glassed in to protect the art.  The museum focuses on Singapore native artists, as well as regional artists from Malaysia, Thailand, China, etc.  No pictures inside, of course, but to the right is one of several sculptures in the museum courtyard...a wise man leaping over the mountain. 

On the plus side, I got in to the museum for free, but on the minus, the whole first floor was closed off to change out the exhibits.  Oh well...I leave you with the Buddha riding a dragon, with the museum building itself in the background.


My final activity of the day, after another visit to the hotel (I was still tired and sweaty), was to visit the waterfront and esplanade. They have built a large concert hall along with a long park, stretching many miles along the bay and coast.  The design of the hall was apparently inspired by fly eyes and durians...two things which I find particularly uninspiring.  Looking towards the hall:

And the other way, across the bay:

How crazy is that?  If I was in heavy construction, I would sure want to be in Asia.

It's been quite a day so far, but I'm not done yet.  Before the day was through, I found one of two brewpubs in Singapore and I had a late reservation at Iggy's restaurant, both of which I will save for another post.  The teaser is that Iggy's is on several "Top 50" lists for worlds best restaurants, and ranks #1 or #2 in Asia, depending on who you ask.  Yum!

Where am I again?

I'm in Singapore.  See, the thing is that I've always wanted to go to Asia, and then I found a pretty incredible deal to get over here while surfing flights and frequent flyer websites.  Strangely enough, even cheaper than just flying to Tokyo or Hong Kong, both of which I am flying through this week.  Cheaper than going to Europe.  In fact, cheaper (by several hundred dollars) than flying to Newark, NJ from Nashville.

So, I asked Dru if she wanted to go, but she was completely uninterested.  So then I asked what she thought about just me going, and I got an answer where she said "I don't have a problem with that" but the unspoken language (which boys can't hear, obviously), was pretty much "are you out of your mind?"  So I got my tickets.  Besides, Dru left me at home alone this year already, going to a frozen yoga retreat in the Smokies.  Basically the same thing, right?

Singapore, Day 0 (Travel)

Part A of this little saga is the journey from East Nashville to my hotel in Singapore.  I won't beat it to death, but let me point out that it is a LONG way...right about 10,000 miles and 29 hours.  I left for the airport a little before 6 AM on Saturday morning, for a flight to Chicago.  After sitting in O'Hare for a few hours, I got on a plane to Tokyo.  On a side note, it was my first time on a 747 probably since I was about 5 years old.  Big jets get me hot, and there is not much bigger than a 747 (okay, the A380, but I'll get to that).  So, ORD to NRT is scheduled at 13 hours in the air, and we used all of that.  Funny thing is, that is a heck of a long flight, but I wasn't even 2/3 of the way there yet.  I got off the flight and got on another plane for seven more hours.  Yikes!  At the end of the day, I had left home at 6 AM on October 31, and arrived in Singapore around 1 AM on November 2.

Singapore, Day 1

I was understandably bushed today, after a long journey and a short night of sleep.  I got up at 7:30 AM, showered and unpacked, and had a look at the guidebook.  The plan was basically to take it easy, see the city, etc.  I mapped out a route down Orchard road, which is probably the shopping mecca of this part of the world, and then over into Little India.  Little India was really neat.  While Singapore as a whole is very much "build it bigger, more steel, more glass", Little India consisted entirely of 2-3 story buildings that looked like they had been there for 50 years.  Every foot of street level space is shops, restaurants, and markets.  I did nothing but walk up and down the alleys for about 2 hours, soaking it in.

Finally I settled in at a place for lunch, serving Indian food, obviously.  I had chicken biryani, which was spicy and good.  Turns out that utensils are not par for the course, as everyone around me was just digging in with their fingers.  When in Rome....  Interestingly enough, napkins are also not standard, which left me with some greasy hands after lunch.  At this point, I decided to stumble on home, probably about a 2.5 mile walk.

Singapore is just one and a half degrees north of the equator, and I had heard about the heat, but I wasn't concerned.  Looking at the weather, the high was going to be mid to upper 80s, with humidity around 60%.  Ha! I said...I'm from Nashville, where we have 95 degree days with 95% humidity...mid 80s is a cakewalk!  Well, I set off on my trek, with my jeans and shoes.  After lunch, I needed a siesta, becase it was getting HOT!  The temperature may have not been through the roof, but that tropical sun was beating down.  I think the combination of the long plane ride followed by the heat got me pretty dehydrated and overheated, because I was litteraly stumbling down the hall by the time I got back to the hotel.  I drank about a gallon of water and went to bed.

After a nap and a cooling rainstorm, I hit the streets again, to find Chinatown and dinner.  Chinatown, interestingly, was not especially Chinese.  It was not like going to Chinatown in Boston or San Fransisco, where you have sudden culture shock walking in.  Singapore is extremely diverse, full of transplants from Malaysia, India, Japan, China, Britain, and many other places.  Hence, there are Chinese businesses all over the city, rather than being concentrated in one neighborhood.  The same is true of all those cultures...Chinatown is home to a number of very British-looking law firms, plus the Singapore office of Williams-Sonoma.  (Note that I have not seen a WS store, just the office.)

Dinner was at a hawker center, which I will write up in another post.  Suffice it to say that it was delicious and cheap.  Future posts will also include shopping mania and a strange observation on businesses here.  Sorry that there isn't much for pictures, but I am saving them for future posts.  With that, it is 9:15 PM here and 7:15 AM at home, so I think I'm tired.

Beer Review - Bullfrog Brewery, Williamsport, PA

Despite being severely delayed due to my laziness, I'm reporting today (October 14) on a visit to a Pennsylvania brewpub on August 20.

Williamsport

For work, back in August, I found myself in Williamsport, PA. For those of you not familiar with Williamsport, it is a) close to nowhere (about equidistant from Buffalo, Syracuse, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia, see map below), b) the home of the Little League World Series (which, incidentally, started the day I was there), and c) has some tasty tasty beer.


View Larger Map

The Bullfrog Brewery

The brewery is actually a brewpub, and it is pretty sweet. The pub is right on the main street in downtown Williamsport, which is an authentic small town business district. When you walk in, the copper kettle and mash tun are right in your face, just in case you didn't get the whole beer thing from the sign outside. Turn left into the restaurant and there are about eight big fermenters behind the bar. Check it out at bullfrogbrewery.com

The Beer

I had a sampler, as you can see above. I tried Apricot Wheat, Edgar IPA, the stout, an Oktoberfest, and several others.  Overall, pretty good beer, but the IPA was exceptional, as was the stout.  Oktoberfest and the Wheat were eh, but that was OK, because they have great atmosphere.  It was also extra delicious since I got to emailing with Dru and Bair, and because silly David chose to drive to Baltimore instead of having a beer and flying out of ol' Williamsport-Lycoming Regional. 

The airport, incidentally, is itty-bitty.  It is the kind of place with one airline (US Air), having one ticket agent, who is also the gate agent, who is also the ramp agent.  Seriously, she printed my ticket, went out an unloaded/reloaded the baggage on the plane, drove it around to "baggage claim" and then came back in to scan everyone's ticket and load the plane.  And she did all this in about 20 minutes.  Too bad you don't see that kind of efficiency in Philladelphia, Atlanta, Chicago, or any of the other dumb hubs that I have to fly through.