You can’t drink ruins. But when you drink a beer, you are essentially drinking archaeology. Beer is a tangible, tastable manifestation of human history. Why is beer like archaeology? Both are modern whispers of the ancient Both are universal Both are diverse Both beg you to dig deeper and explore their mysteries. If weighed on a…
Category: Featured
Featured Posts
Day One…slow and easy
“It doesn’t feel like we should be that close.” It’s a funny thing to say when you’re still five hours away from your destination, but also funny when you’ve been on the train for 23 hours already. But Sunshine was right. We’d fallen into the rhythm of train life almost instantly, as soon as the…
The Blog is Back
The blog is back! We’ve been bad posters, largely on account of not having anything terribly exciting to talk about, followed by a stretch that had just way too much excitement. All day adventure, every day, and no time or energy at the end of the night to write about it. It’s a crying shame,…
Berliner Mauer
Our flat in Berlin is in Pankow, the former East. What’s amazing is that we are a stone’s throw from one of the S-Bahn stations. I can read the names on the shopping bags of the people standing on the platform. I mean it’s RIGHT THERE. But between us and the tracks is a little…
"Muslims go to Mecca. Swedes go to Islay."
It’s a running joke at the distilleries about the large groups of Swedish men–unfortunately out of shape and gray ones, not boyish blondes–who come to Islay. Like us, they are on pilgrimage for peated malt, and indeed every distillery tour we were on had a Swedish contingency. There were smaller groups of Finns and French,…
Cherry to Cup: A Journey Through a Vietnamese Coffee Heartland
Robusta coffee cherries are bunched like grapes on their trees in the hills outside Dalat. Vietnam’s central mountains are country’s backbone, running hundreds of kilometres in a north-south direction. Tropical mountains just happen to make wonderful coffee-growing territory, and that’s just what the French had in mind when they first came here. In the…
The Chickens and the Eggs
It’s rent day. Our landlords came to the door bearing two gifts: a bottle of local Franconian red wine (which replaces the South African bottle we drank last night) and a dozen eggs fresh from the farm. I’ve been meaning to write about life in Franconia. It would be redundant to say “rural Franconia,” because…
Love and Barley 