WombatNation

The second annual Dimond Oaktoberfest was even bigger than last year’s event. Unfortunately, I could stay only for a few hours, because I was also planning to attend the 99 Bottles of Beer beer symposium and beer fair at Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley. More on that later. Of course, a lot worse things could happen than having multiple major beer celebrations on the same day.

The Dimond District had quite a few German Biergartens back around the turn of the century. The closest thing we have today in our neighborhood is Oaktoberfest. However, a fantastic group of businesses have opened in the past few years and the heavy retail traffic will hopefully bring us a brewpub like establishment.

The Oktoberfest event itself was free and very well organized. There were the traditional booths filled by non-profits, school groups, commercial sponsors and local businesses. The Bill Brand Memorial Biergarten was a lot bigger than last year’s biergarten, with a lot more participating brewers. The Mad Zymurgists showed up and handed out free samples of homebrew, as well as ran a homebrew contest.

I decided to spend $20 on a souvenir stein with 10 tastes and 2 full beers, instead of 4 full beers. This turned out to be a very savvy move, as the alleged 2 ounce tastes ended up being anywhere from 4 ounces (the mark on the glass) to 6 ounces. I think none of the people pouring wanted to look cheap by offering just a tiny taste. I salute them.

I started with a Bison Brewing (not listed on the t-shirt, but definitely there) Reunion Double Wheat. It’s a pretty powerful wheat ale with a lot of carbonation and a distinct lemon flavor with subtler coriander and orange aroma. I would definitely drink it again.

Then I went for the Orange Kush Wit Beer from Ale Industries. A little googling on the beer’s name suggests an, uhh, unusual possible ingredient. I just tasted hops, though. And, my god, the surprisingly orangelicious flavor. I’m thinking they didn’t just stop at an orange peel or two. Florida called and they want their crop back.

Next was the Iron Springs Oktoberfest. I didn’t like this quite as much I expected I would, though it was a pretty straightforward Märzen. I’ll try it again another time to make sure it wasn’t me with crazy expectations for the first Märzen of the day. It was probably me.

I probably went for the Linden Street Brewery Urban People’s Lager too early, as I wasn’t quite ready for the hop bite, which was stronger than I remembered. Maybe it was the food I was finishing off that wasn’t working, because by the last swallow of beer, I was really enjoying the lager. My glass was once again empty, but my palate felt crisp and clean.

The Beach Chalet Ocean Beach Oktoberfest seemed more like an amber ale than a Märzen. It was a little sweeter and less spicy than I was expecting. This was my wife’s favorite. It was pouring with huge carbonation, but not as much as Drake’s tap, which sprang a leak and nearly sprayed our backs. So sad to watch so much beer spray pour onto the ground. I thought about doing a Homer and diving (in slow motion, of course) with mouth wide open below the cooler. If I had been out of beer tickets, that would absolutely have been me.

I headed over to the corner of the tent for a Thirsty Bear stout. I’ve had the Kozlov stout at the brewery a few times, but this tasted different. Of course, maybe that’s the five previous beers talking. Seemed a little bitter for an Irish stout. Otherwise, silky smooth with a very creamy head.

On the way out I scored a Rubicon Amber. Very sweet malt with tons of caramel. If they told me they juiced the fermenter with a couple bags of those cubic caramel candies that I seem to see only at Halloween, I would totally believe them.

But it wasn’t just about the beer. I had parts of two delicious, soft pretzels with mustard from La Farine Bakery, part of a ground beef meat pie my wife picked up from some vendor and a boar sausage. I would have gone for the La Farine apfelstrudel, but I was feeling a little full by the end.

I went to the gorgeous Grand-Lake Theatre in Oakland tonight with wife and friends to see Quantum of Winter Solstice. I was totally expecting an educational film on astronomy, so the guns, car chases and boring villains were quite the surprise. However, I did take solace in the kick-out-the-jams performance of the organ player who rises up from the orchestra pit with his Mighty Wurlitzer Organ and then descends again just before the movie starts. That’s something you don’t get at the 38-screen multi-megaplex at the suburban mall.

Spoiler Alert:

I accidentally wrote Soiler Alert, at first. But that would be more apropos to the Baby Brigade at the Parkway Speakeasy.

Bond movies often have intriguing villains and well thought out storylines that meaningfully build to a climactic conclusion. Well, before the bit where Bond gets busy with the beauty pageant contestant, martial arts expert, nuclear physicist, gun/knife toting woman he’s been fighting/flirting with for most of the movie. Quantum Solace, in contrast, seemed to primarily be about Bond’s quest for revenge over a dead girlfriend being played out indirectly against a poorly explained pack of bad guys who seemed to be wedged sideways into the plot because there simply “has” to be an evil cabal in every Bond flick.

And usually the axis of evil has cooked up some plan that will result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people unless they get paid a huge ransom. Or will simply result in the annihilation of huge numbers of people because the bad guys are unrepentant misanthropes. However, Dominic Greene of the bashful evil supergroup Quantum has his sights set a bit lower. In the midst of arranging for a military coup in Bolivia, he tricks the new dictator into agreeing to pay double the going rate for municipal water.

WTF??? That’s the frickin’ evil plan? Is Quantum the secret name of EBMUD? After all, they raised our rates. I don’t think it was double, though. Heck, the real life Aguas del Tunari consortium in Bolivia raised rates by 35% after taking control of the water supply.

There’s has been a long history of water issues in Bolivia. In fact, when the little bit of a plot that was there played out and revealed a dictator trying to come back to power, I immediately thought of General Hugo Banzer.

An amusing aside for me was that Greene ends up being left by Bond to die in the Atacama desert (footage was shot in Chile rather than Bolivia) with a can of motor oil to drink when he gets thirsty. Many years ago Sandra and I were stranded in the Atacama desert when the truck that our guide was driving completely broke down before dawn on the way to the geysers near San Pedro de Atacama. Fortunately, the driver’s thermos of hot tea was more refreshing than motor oil. We also had to walk only about 7 miles before being picked up and brought back to town.

This afternoon I volunteered at the Alameda County Community Food Bank with some Voxify co-workers as part of a work sponsored event. We processed 2500 pounds of food and were able to completely sort and shelve 1500 pounds of that total. It was a great experience and I highly recommend helping out, especially this time of year and with the current state of the economy.

Food banks used to get most of their food from grocery overstock. However, improved technology and better supply chain management software has cut off much of that source. In addition, second tier grocery chains now buy up most of the remaining oversupplies, as well as items close to their expiration dates, for resale at deep discounts. That doesn’t leave much on the table for the food banks.

I was stunned to learn that approximately half the food that ACCFB now distributes is fresh produce. The great thing about it is that fresh produce is a much healthier source of nutrition for those most in need of a good meal. However, it also brings added cost with respect to storage, distribution and short shelf life. If I remember correctly, ACCFB now has a 120,000 square foot refrigeration room at their new location. They also have two big trucks devoted to deliveries that allow them to deliver the produce, along with other foods, while it is still good.

Food donations aren’t enough to cover existing needs, though, so ACCFB also buys food. Since they buy in such huge quantities, they have significant purchasing power. ACCFB is a member of Feeding America, formerly known as America’s Second Harvest.

While donating food to food banks is a great idea, I don’t recommend buying food solely to donate it. Your money will go a lot farther if you allow them to pool it with other donations and buy much more food for the same amount. Also, it allows them to better fill the gaps in what they currently have on store. However, if you’ve already bought non-perishable food and it’s still in good shape, but you don’t expect to eat it, then definitely donate it.

ACCFB is also planning a demonstration kitchen for their new facility. This is really important, because a lot of the organizations and people receiving the now much greater amount of fresh produce aren’t always prepared to cook a variety of healthy recipes. This educational training is a very admirable new part of the outreach effort of ACCFB.

Of course, I’ve simplified the flow of food through ACCFB. They have a great one page flow of food diagram in a PDF file that tells more of the story.

One of the many interesting parts of volunteering at ACCFB is learning about the pig’s bin. Food without ingredient lists, open bags of pasta or cereal, etc., all go in a huge plastic bin to later become pig slop. However, four items are not allowed in the pig’s bin.

• coffee
• chocloate
• top ramen
• cup noodle soup

Even if coffee isn’t bad for them, I can understand farmers not wanting their pigs to be hopped up on caffeine. Chocolate is bad for dogs, so it’s not a stretch to imagine it being bad for pigs.

But if Top Ramen and Cup Noodle soup isn’t suitable for pigs, then why do so many college students and others subsist on so much of it? Maybe it’s the incredibly high sodium content (at least in the “flavor” packs) that makes it bad for pigs. Maybe they don’t want to cure the ham until later. I couldn’t find much about it on the interwebs, though I found one article that reports that farmers are picking up the scrap ramen and noodles from the floor at a Nissin plant. The article wasn’t clear as to what animals were being fed the noodles. Next time I volunteer at ACCFB, I’ll ask why they ban the sodium bombs from the piggies.

This Saturday there’s an Oktoberfest celebration in the Dimond district from 11 am to 6 pm only about 6 blocks from our house. Obviously, we’ll be there. Local brewers Linden Street, Pacific Coast Brewing, Trumer and Triple Rock will be pouring their beer, plus there will be beer from New Belgium and traditional Bavarian brewer HB.

The Dimond district has a long history of having beer gardens, though sadly it’s been a long time since the last one closed.

There will be free valet bicycle parking (Biergarten Radlparkplatz) at Fruitvale and MacArthur provided by the East Bay Bicycle Coalition. Since I plan on getting the commemorative beer stein with 4 beers (only $20!), it’s probably better that I won’t even have to bike home.

I’ll be ready to order my bier and bratwurst and toast my fellow drinkers appropriately (Prost!), since I brushed up on my German a few weeks ago for the visit to Vienna as part of our vacation. I actually managed to have a few short conversations on that trip, so those three years of night classes weren’t all for naught.

Linden Street Brewery in Oakland has been throwing open houses on every Friday for the last 6 months or so, with free beer (two beers, usually their Common Lager and a beer from Drake’s), free food (contributions to the basket by the taps help buy next week’s food), and a shared gas grill (my friends and I have used it for bratwurst and tri-tip). It’s gotten to be too much, so William Brand reports on his blog that Adam says they are scaling back to just the first Friday.

Although being able to go there on any Friday was great, I had been wondering how long they could keep it up. I usually made it only once a month anyway due to other plans, so I’ll just have to plan farther in advance.

While I am thrilled they have finished brewing a batch of Black Bottom Lager, I’m even more excited that the city will be inspecting their equipment very soon, possibly this coming week. Hopefully, that will lead to PG&E hooking them up with gas to run the brewery.

Last Friday my wife and I celebrated our 15th anniversary by going to Linden Street Brewery for their Friday afternoon open house and then the Oakland Museum of California for the Best of the East Bay party. Both were excellent. Some of our friends brought a penne pasta salad with fresh-grated parmesan and grilled tri-tip on the Linden Street grill.

The Best of the East Bay party blew me away. It’s estimated that over 4,000 people attended. There were four stages with live bands playing all night. Lots of delicious foods and drinks (I enjoyed a very nice macchiato from Julie’s Coffee & Tea Garden) were available. The whole museum, except the parts they are refurbishing, was open. There was a mini skateboard park with ramps just below the sculpture gardens. Splash Circus was there with a roughly 35-feet tall tripod from which girls were performing acrobatics on ropes and fabric, a la Cirque du Soleil. Kid’s band performances, a guy typing out poems on an old typewriter, film screenings, bands like The Uptones and Flipper, and much more.

And most amazingly, we didn’t see a single security guard or policeman the entire time, and we also didn’t see a single sign of trouble anywhere. Everyone was in a great mood. So forget what you think you know about Oakland.

Saturday night we opened up a 1993 Boony Doon Le Cigare Volant. Lately I have had bad luck with some of my older wines being corked, but this wine was in great shape. It was very smooth and had a delicate cherry taste.