Adam@Home by Rob Harrell for September 29, 2014

You can’t go back to Swisher Sweets after you’ve had an Arturo Fuente.

I remember reading somewhere something that went like this: “He read for the umpteenth time, ‘He selected a cigar’. And once again he wondered just how they selected cigars and why they bought the ones they didn’t select.”

“Cigar Aficionado” is snobby, for elitists who like to flaunt their wealth.“Pipes and Tobacco” magazine is for regular guys who enjoy pipe smoking.

Not only is there such a thing as chocolate malt (which does, by combination of sweetness and roast, does indeed taste “chocolately”), but there are beers—primarily dark-colored porters and stouts—that have a very pronounced chocolate profile, even to the point of tasting exactly like someone put a shot of Hershey’s or Bosco chocolate syrup into a Guinness. Of course, you won’t find a “hint of chocolate” in your North American Industrial Light Lager unless someone’s messing with you or forgot to clean the chocolate milk out of the glass first.As with beer and wine geekery/snobbery, the lines between coffee/cigar/etc. enthusiasm and geekery, and/or connoisseurship and snobbery, are often tenuously fine….

Of course Wikipedia is not really an authoritative reference, but when discussing mash ingredients it does say (emphasis mine): Chocolate malt Chocolate malt is similar to pale and amber malts but kilned at even higher temperatures. Producing complex undertones of vanilla and caramel (but not chocolate), it is used in porters and sweet stouts as well as dark mild ales. It contains no enzymes. ASBC 450-500/EBC 1100–1300.

I’m with you. I don’t put anything in my coffee but more coffee. In he Good Lord had intended cream and sugar, He would have put it in the bean.

Remember, too, that different people have different senses of taste. The number of tastebuds people have affects their ability to differentiate among flavors, as well as discern nuances. Even for super tasters, though, the ability to detect more than a handful of separate and distinct flavors in, say, a glass of wine, is limited to a relative handful (5-8).

Happy International Coffee Day to all you coffee drinkers. Happy reading Adam.

First of all, I want my beer to taste like beer! I don’t want it to taste “chocolaty” or “lemony” or whatever the flavor of the season is. Just barley, hops, and water and leave the rest of the crap out of my beer!.Now coffee, I like it strong and occasionally with some Bailey’s…

I must admit that in general I find all of this attribution of various “tastes” to things (cigars, tobacco, beer, wine) a bit pretentious. Yes, you can find some pronounced flavors in them. The silliest wine description I came across was “flavors of damp straw”. Well, folks I’ve been in a barn and I know what makes straw damp. I do not want my wine to taste like that.

I like my coffee full of coffee! Doc Toon’s World Famous Nuclear Coffee is just the ticket!

Think I’ll stop my ’toon tour and make a caldron full of the stuff!!!!!!

I use black patent malt and roasted, unmalted barley when I make stout. Different varieties of hops have different levels of bitterness, aromas, and sub-flavors. Chinook hops, for example, has an undertone that reminds me of pineapple. Some guy at the homebrewing store once told me that he noticed this.