Why a Dinner Concert

I love to feature local musician’s on the site.  I also like to bring you music in video and audio, but I always feel weird having somebody perform for me alone in my house.  Also, I have been talking about homebrew beer for month and been totally unable to share it.  I want to take the blog the people.

Enter the chef

All of this was in the back of my mind during a recent conversation with my friend Maren. After hearing that I was a home brewer my dear friend Maren Keeley suggested we host a dinner.  Maren is a cook at Uncommon Ground and an all around food ninja, capable of making all seasonal holiday-onal deliciousness.

After Hearing this I immediately hijacked the idea and suggested that North and Clark sponsor a diner concert.  Because there are a lot of musician’s I have been wanting to share with you guys on the blog.  They are…

The Entertainment

Our featured musicians are James Farrel, Tom Fort, and Emily Claire Palmer.  They are fantastic musicians who are described in depth in a previous post.

So Come on out

To cover the costs of dinner and other nonsense we are asking for people to pop for 10 bucks (I wanted to charge 20, but Maren insists).  Either way it’s a steal.

If this sounds good to you leave a comment or write me an email @ northandclark@gmail.com, but be quick about it cause we can only fit twenty five people and eleven of those spots have already been reserved.

So there are only 25 14 5 SOLD OUT.

See you there,
Casey

Photo credit: Nate Falendysz and Augustus F. Sherman

If you want to here the rest of Larry’s interview or read more about homebrewing check out this and this

First, a brief disclaimer: I didn’t come up with any of these recipes on my own everything I brewed was either suggested to me or at least tweeked by the good people at Brew and Grow (Lincoln Park’s friendly neighborhood brew place).

The beers are Walter’s Pale Ale (after the dog), Avers Avenue (after the street), and Toad Spit Stout (after what the guy who wrote that recipe named it). As I described yesterday beer has five primary ingrediants: water, malt, grain, yeast and hops. To give you a sense of some of the different ingredients we used here is a chart.

These three beers represent a diversity of taste, body and style. So far, each of these beers has been delicious. I am not going to walk you through the steps of brewing because we got into that yesterday, but I will leave you with this picture of our first brew’s namesake.

Photo Credits:Marie Pavlich and Steve Graue

When I first heard of homebrewing it was from a bio-chemist and I mistakenly assumed that it was some complex and technical undertaking that only the truely dedicated could bring off. Not so.

Beer is almost as fun and easy to make as it is to drink.

Beer is made out of:
-Water
-Malt (a kind of sugar)
-Hops (a bitter plant)
-Yeast (the fungus that makes bread rise)
-Grain (barley, wheat, or something else)

Besides being easy its also rewarding.

You get a lot more than a buzz out of making your own beer:
-Its cheaper than buying the fine, exotic beers
-After a couple batches you’ll be making beer on par with or better than anything you can buy
-Homebrewing teaches you a lot about beer
-It makes a personal gift
-It’s a hobby you can have for life

My beers usually take a month or two to completely ferment and finish the brewing process. It’s explained in depth here.

My home brews take about 10 steps:
1. Heat a couple gallons of water
2. Add the grains, malt and hops (these ingredients will go in at different tempatures depending on the recipe and your preference)
3. Boil
4. Cool the mixture (this liquid is often called the tea or the wort)
5. Add to three gallons of room temperature water
6. Wait a couple weeks
7. Add some finishing sugar
8. Bottle
9. Wait another week
10. Drink up!

Check this blog tomorrow for recipes I have used in batches I am brewing/drinking right now.

Photo Credit: Marie Pavlich (my cousin!)

Don’t despair. You don’t need to buy a forty from the Shell station just yet. If you walk down North Ave a little past Wells you can stop in at the Old Town Ale House.

Notable Features of the Old Town Ale House:

• A long finger-nailed bouncer who calls you baby
• Juke box filled with Miles Davis and Billie Holiday
• A dirth of Dudebros and TVs
• Quasi-graphic erotic paintings behind the bar

Like Austin sticking out in the middle of Texas, this is a welcome bit of weird in the middle of too much of the same.

Keep your nails long old town.