Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

1. Last weekend, one of my brothers introduced me to an outstanding beer brewed in our home state of Mississippi, Southern Prohibition's Crowd Control. I think this review is accurate:

Crowd Control Imperial IPA ... poured light orange and clear into the glass, where it formed a thick and lasting white head. Its aroma featured a huge, predominantly citrus hop nose and tropical esters and mild alcohol upon warming. The flavor included the same hop and ester notes harmoniously balancing ample pale malt ones. The mouthfeel was smoother than found in many double IPAs, and the alcohol, while present, was restrained suggesting an ABV on the lower end of the range for a double. This combination of attributes produced high drinkability for the style, though with a warning to go slow in case the felt strength is higher than perceived in this evaluation.

The brewery is located in Hattiesburg, a college town in the south part of the state. The next time I make it into that neck of the woods, I hope to visit the brewery or its taproom.

2. While I'm on the subject of beer, I learned yesterday that Stone Brewing named a beer based on the what3words coordinates of a location within its Richmond, Virginia Brewery:

Fittingly, Stone ///Fear.Movie.Lions Double IPA takes the East Coast influence of an unfiltered IPA, but spares any predictability beyond its juicy lack of filtration. Ringing in at 8.5 percent ABV with a notably West Coast-inspired bitterness, the beer manages to artfully include a balanced Richmond-style finish. The aroma provides a bounty of fresh fruit and fresh hops. Its fresh-squeezed flavors include a hint of white sage and pair beautifully with sweet, salty and tangy dishes like Pad Thai noodles, Hawaiian Fried Rice or Prosciutto-wrapped melon.

Stone ///Fear.Movie.Lions Double IPA is not named for its terrifyingly bold flavors or its Hollywood-worthy cast of brewers. No, it's named after a 3m x 3m square in Stone's Richmond, Virginia brewery with a square to mark the spot that includes said three words painted in black. What three words? Exactly! For the uninitiated, that's what3words, a global addressing system that enabled every place on Earth to be communicated using just three words. In your language of choice, no less. Ours is English, and thus ///Fear.Movie.Lions.

Among beers I can obtain easily near home, this has been a favorite for about a year. Being used to odd beer names, it only recently occurred to me to look into this one. How the unusual punctuation didn't prompt me to do this much sooner is beyond me.

3. What kid -- other than my son -- dislikes catsup? The condiment has been sweet and tomato-based for so long that I doubt many people realize catsup has a long and more varied history. A recent Gastro Obscura story explains how the modern state of affairs came about.

Part of the story involves an early anti-preservative crusader:

Image by Kim Holger Kelting, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

For the next two decades, [Harvey Wiley] proposed countless Congressional bills on food safety, each of which was killed. But in 1904 he formed "The Poison Squad," enlisting a group of healthy, young, male volunteers -- mostly his colleagues at the Department of Agriculture -- to eat all of their meals at work and ingest increasingly large quantities of preservatives. The results read like the last 10 seconds of a modern-day drug commercial: stomach cramps, headaches, sore throat, dizziness, decline in appetite, and loss of weight. Multiple trials stopped when participants became too sick to continue. Sensationalized in the press, "The Poison Squad" shifted public opinion against preservatives.

The above reminds me of similar scare campaigns that ignore the maxim the dose makes the poison. Or, as I remember my Dad putting it during a "chemical" scare when I was a kid, "If you feed a rat the size of your thumb a pound of anything, of course it's going to get cancer."

4. Yesterday, Queen Elizabeth passed away during Arsenal's Europa League match against Zurich, which I was following while catching up on minor computer tasks. Recalling that I'd heard she was a fellow Arsenal fan, I learned that in 2007, Arsenal were invited to tea with the Queen in Buckingham Palace:

Queen Elizabeth II had been scheduled to cut the ribbon of the new [stadium] and usher in a new ... era for the team. But after reportedly pulling out ... with a back injury, the self-described "world's most experienced plaque unveiler", Prince Philip, took her place. The new season kicked off, Dennis Bergkamp retired, and it seemed that would be that.

Except it wasn't.

The monarch had allegedly expressed her "disappointment" at missing the event...

And so, Arsene Wenger, the late chairman Peter Hill-Wood and the men's first team all received a hallowed invite, not just to a Buckingham Palace garden party, but inside her official residence for afternoon tea in February 2007.

The story is replete with photos of squad members in formal attire meeting the Queen. This was the one and only time a football club received such an honor.

-- CAV