Headed off to play basketball, so I'm keeping it short. Hey, even Shakespeare wrote some short stuff; it wasn't all Hamlet. Gearing up for the playoffs, need to hit our stride and get on a hot streak.
Today's beer is an unusual offering - the Lambrucha by Brouwerij de Troch. It was brewed specifically for Vanberg & DeWulf, a specialty beer importer in New York. This beer is unusual because it's a mix of two live yeast beverages - Kombucha tea and lambic beer. Two things you usually don't find hanging out together, as Kombucha is a tea steeped with mushrooms. I think they sell that in the organic section of my grocery store, but I haven't yet worked up the courage to buy one.
However, when you mix it with a lambic, you get a pale gold color, with a lingering white head. There's a funky aroma, almost something like deviled eggs. The taste is good, with tart notes of lemon, grass, and yeast, and it's quite light and effervescent. Marci was more fond of this beer than I was, her review can be found here. I don't really like mushrooms, so maybe the idea of mushrooms fermenting in tea created a mental block for me on this one. I can certainly appreciate it, but I doubt I'd go out of my way to buy another one.
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| You can't see the mushrooms, but they're in there. |
This space has been exclusively reserved for Olympic triumphs, and I'll admit it's been a bit heavily slanted towards track and field. Deal with it, track and field is better than gymnastics or swimming. However, it's been unfairly slanted towards male competitors, which we'll fix tonight. However, it's not all my fault - due to some incredibly boneheaded and ignorant thinking, women's distance running was excluded because it was thought that women would injure themselves running longer races.
Joan Benoit (now Benoit Samuelson) arrived on the scene in 1984 just in time for the first women's marathon in the modern Olympic games. You want some drama with your marathon? Sure - Benoit ran despite undergoing knee surgery in April, just a few months before the games. To make it more interesting, she was squaring off against Grete Waitz, one of the all-time greats in the sport (Waitz would win nine, count'em, NINE New York Marathons). Despite that and the blistering heat and smog that comes with having your Olympic games in Los Angeles, Benoit surged to the front just 14 minutes into the race, then proceeded to stay there the rest of the way, leaving her competition in the dust. Her mantra? "Are you prepared to deal with victory?" Sounds like a champion to me.
