A carnival of technology

So I went to Iceland last week.  I had some money and some vacation saved up, I was already hopping on planes and going places on account of Chris’s getting hitched (congratulations!), and I just wanted to get out of the country for a while and see something new.  Here is my self-indulgent attempt to document the trip.

One bit of common wisdom about the Scandinavian islands is that Greenland is made of ice and Iceland is green.  This is a gross over-simplification.  Iceland is the Alaska of Scandinavia: it’s a barren, inhospitable land, full of active volcanoes, frequent earthquakes from the Mid-Atlantic Ridge a few miles east of Reykjavík, and, by the standards of a travellin’ Southern boy, some really awful weather.  A day over 50°F is a good day in the summer, and the varied landscape of oceans and rivers and glaciers and volcanoes ensures a constant, brutal wind nearly everywhere on the island.  The most common sight is a lava field, craggy rocks reminiscent of the American southwest, covered in the only green that so much of the land can support: moss.  Agriculture consists of a handful of hot spring greenhouses and a whole lot of pasture.  The only creatures that can survive on this island are sheep, some curious-looking hairy horses, a fox or two and a bunch of stubborn Icelanders.  To say that the island is green is very misleading.

Icelanders have a reputation of being awful drivers, but I didn’t see it.  Maybe I’m just used to bad driving.  They seemed to make do pretty well in a country where pretty much anything outside the one city is a poorly-maintained country road.  The speed limit is a reasonable 90kmh, and I didn’t see anyone crash or veer of the road or cut someone off even once.  One thing I found interesting with their traffic signals—and maybe this is something they do elsewhere in Europe, I don’t know—is that lights would do the usual green, yellow, red thing, and then the red light would add a yellow again just before the green, letting drivers know when to get ready, and, by encouraging everyone to jump the light a little bit, ensuring that no one ever ran a red.

I have a weird knack for blending in a lot of the time when I travel.  If I stay somewhere long enough I’ll be asked for directions or advice or whatever one asks a local, but here it meant that a lot of people assumed I could speak Icelandic.  Of course it’s reasonable to address someone in your native land in your native language, but it seemed a little weird when in a knickknack shop for tourists, stuck behind people unable to figure how to spend a Euro or a dollar, to get to the front and be greeted by a cheerful “Get ég hjálpað þér?”  I feel like I should have at least learned the numbers.  I think I let a lot of people down with my constant English apologies.

Iceland has better Mexican food than New England, but it’s still not quite up to par.  I guess it’s a little hard to get some of the herbs and spices, like cilantro or adobo, but at least one place there knows how to swing a pepper.  The Indian dude must have had some connecs; that daal I had for lunch one time was delicious.

My first meal in Reykjavík was in a vegetarian restaurant full of people in keffiyehs, copies of an English language alt-weekly spread around and Joanna Newsom on the stereo.  I’m not sure if that says more about Reykjavík or about me.

Since I was too lazy to write anything on Monday.  Today we have a beer from Michigan that was quite pleasant and a beer from California that I was expecting to hate.

#44: Third Coast Old Ale

Internet says that Old Ale is a separate style, but I’m not convinced.  The Bell’s Brewery website further confuses things by calling it a barleywine, and it seems a lot like a barleywine, so I’m going to think of it in those terms.  It poured a hazy, dark orange, with a smell full of yeasty bread, apples, oranges, and, just before you start to think that maybe is this some Belgian abbey concoction instead, a gust of grassy, flowery hops.

This is a pretty nice tasting beer.  It’s thick and feels a little syrupy with a caramel taste, some oak flavor, a lot of malts and a bit of a sour, roasty edge.  The hops are sharp but not too intense, and there’s a hot alcohol feeling that sneaks it’s way through the flavors.  Overall it’s a big, sweet sipping sort of beer.  I think I’ll revist the rest of the six-pack in the winter.

#45: Arrogant Bastard Ale

And now something from the other side.  I’ve never had anything from the Stone Brewing Company, but in what I’ve read about them I haven’t seen much to like.  For one, they seem like the sort of brewery that mistakes hops for creativity, and for another their marketing schtick is just infuriating.  There’s a rule of thumb in advertising: don’t talk about the competition.  It makes your product appear unable to stand on its own merits, and, worse, it makes people think about the competition during the impression for your brand, so if you decide to bring up the other guys you’d better have a good reason for it.  Arrogant Bastard doesn’t directly attack the competition so much as it does their connoisseurs in a virulent appeal to elitism.  I agree that there are some pretty bland popular beers out there, but drinking them doesn’t make you a bad person.  Drinking them doesn’t even make you unable to enjoy other, more complex beers.  Some of those big-name beers have a bit more going on than the “tasteless fizzy yellow beer” credit they get, and there’s more to answering tastelessness than razing a field of hops.  I started with pretty low expectations.

My dread was confirmed as I poured the bottle and I caught a strong, distinct whiff of pine tar.   But it disappeared quickly, leaving a beer that really didn’t smell like much of anything, so maybe that was just a fluke.  I took a sip, and…nope, there’s the hops.  And that’s all there is.  It’s not something as intensely unpleasant as my experience with Sierra Nevada’s Torpedo, but I couldn’t find anything to like.  It was very bitter and astringent, there’s hardly anything to balance it, and that oily taste and feel of the piney Cascade hops stuck around well past its welcome.  As it warmed up a sweet malty flavor started to emerge, but not nearly enough.  I can drink this beer; it doesn’t make my throat close up or make me want to spit it out, but I’m just not happy about drinking this beer.  I kept a glass next to me while writing this, and every now and then I’d pick it up, forget what I was drinking, not smell much of anything in particular for a warning, and wham! another senseless, unhinged hop punch.

I like hops, but I don’t like hops in a vacuum.  The first beer of tonight’s reviews had a lot of hops, and it would have been poorer without them.  They added some different tastes that barley and yeast alone can’t provide, and they kept the big wallop of malt from being undrinkably thick.  Even beers with a strong hops focus can be pretty nice, but geez, dial it down a notch or two, and use some more interesting hops, something that doesn’t just taste like trees and dirt.  Club soda and bitters is more interesting, and more pleasant, than this beer.

If this were another beer I’d just shrug it off as unremarkable and move on, but the ad copy that accompanies this one makes it maddening: the accusation that I’m to blame for not enjoying this garbage instead of whoever thought it’d be a good idea to remove the malt taste from an IPA of the worst American sort, the idea that rejecting a company out-of-hand is any less blind brand loyalty than simply drinking their products, the sneering, holier-than-thou attitude backed by nothing more than the abuse of a curious European flower.  You were right, Arrogant Bastard: this beer is not for me.  Because it sucks.

The Third Coast Ale really was quite nice; I don’t want that idea to get lost just because I have another reason to hate California.