Posts made by WTFE

@Thenomain said:

Remember Big Bad.

Doesn't quite have the ring of "Remember the Alamo", but it'll do.

Be fair, @Thenomain. I started by trying to explain why their approach wasn't working too. I just got bored of them waiting their turn to talk so they could repeat their stance interminably without even once showing signs of having taken in what was said.

And when I get bored, I prod hornets' nests.

These ones:

The kind that melt holes like this into your flesh when they sting:

@Gingerlily said:

Anyway, carry on with your thing here.

You saw that, people. @Gingerlily is telling me to keep posting about booze!

That "customer service" model thing is, I think, an artifact of the sales persona leaking through again.

Shot. I don't sip. I mean seriously, do you think I'm going to write long love letters to booze from a sip!?

@Misadventure said:

Seriously, get your own thread for your booze photos.

I do have my own thread for booze photos. This one.

@Thenomain said:

@Misadventure, he's playing the Wora drinking game, taking a sip every time Jaunt posts for his own amusement.

Well, I'm taking a shot, not a sip. (Probably unwise with Tricky Dicky around.) And I'm posting the photos to give people possible options for their own sips/shots.

Here I'd like to introduce my latest obsession in booze. The first bottle here is the first taste of this stuff I had.

This was given to me by a friend who'd travelled to Inner Mongolia and wanted to bring back something unique and unexpected. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Now this particular bottle is not an exceptionally good one. It's 38%/76 proof and it's the tourist-grade stuff that's sold in souvenir shops. The bottle inside even had just a crimped, beer bottle-style cap! (Luckily I had kept the cork-based cap from a bottle of Wild Turkey for random reasons and it fit this bottle perfectly.)

Still, despite not being brilliant quality, it was a fascinating flavour. This stuff is distilled 马奶酒/kumiss, kumiss being a "wine" or "beer"-like substance (for want of a better term) made from mare's milk.

Yes, horse milk.

Traditional kumiss is consumed in roughly the same space that people drink wine or beer with a meal. This stuff, however, is double-distilled after fermentation to give you the essence of kumiss without the cloudy stuff. The resulting flavour is ... well, I describe traditional 白酒/baijiu as "what diesel would taste like if diesel tasted good". This stuff tastes like what diesel would taste like if diesel tasted good and were flavoured by additional whey.

Now, as I said, this was tourist-grade stuff and there were some unpleasant aftertastes in it. I wanted to test if this were an inevitable part of kumiss liquor or if this was just an expression of the quality. The stuff tasted good enough, but I wanted to see if I could get more. I went to Taobao and hunted around for some good stuff: on the expensive side of the mid range. I found this:

This is a much higher grade of kumiss liquor. Distilled to 52%, it could go one of two ways: either the alcohol content would distract from the flavours by its burn (thus removing the awesome parts I liked) or the good flavours would be more concentrated and shine through past the burn.

I'm happy to report that the latter is true.

Despite having a lot more alcohol, thus with the commensurate increase in alcohol burn, the awesome flavours of kumiss far overpower the pain. If anything this stuff goes down smoother and with less of a jolt than the weaker stuff. It has rapidly grown to become my favourite form of hooch (to the point that with all the extra drinking that Tricky Dicky, the asthmatic pit bull is forcing on me I'm rapidly running out and will have to order more). I'll definitely be re-ordering this, and I'll be trying out a bottle that's on the lower end of the expensive scale as well.

@Jaunt said:

See, some people here do come to our site.

Name three. You keep failing to substantiate this.

@Jaunt said:

I'm here ironically.

This, here, is why I've been posting about booze. Pick up your bottle of choice, gents. The drinking game begins anew.

Other than that, WTFE has the right of it: I'm here to counter-troll trolls, until it's not worth it to me anymore.

I think you mean @Thenomain here.

That was the joke.

@Arkandel said:

We're a pool of sharks.

Shit! I knew I was doing something wrong. I thought we were a pool of hippos.

@crayon : No sarcasm, you're doing well now. This is what we've been looking for since the beginning of this whole thread: a willingness to listen to other people and engage them with a clear understanding of both your position and theirs.

In the spirit of your newfound ability to engage in actual conversation, I take back the nasty things I said about you.

@crayon: Nice.

See, this is engaging. Well done.

@crayon

The first hard liquor I ever drank was as a child (yes, a child) in Germany. I was about 15 and had my eyes opened to a whole new world of flavour and pain in the form of this bad boy:

This is Kirschwasser (lit. "cherry water") and it's one of many German fruit brandies. Unlike most fruit brandies, however, and indeed unlike most cherry-based ones, Kirschwasser is made from the whole cherry (morello, to be precise) including the pit. This gives it an entirely different aroma and flavour from other fruit brandies: it is not sweet, it contains within it the essence of (sour) cherries and a hint of bitter almond (from the pits).

It's wonderful stuff. Drinking the best stuff is like drinking a hint of cherry mixed with liquid flame.

The stuff I grew up on was typically around 50%/100 proof, but the most common commercial brands are, like this one (Lörch is … competently crafted, but nothing special) are typically 40%/80 proof. Even that relatively weak stuff, I should note, packs quite a gasp-inducing wallop if you're not used to it.

This is, incidentally, a typical German Schnaps (sic). It is not that filthy "peppermint schnapps (sic)" that Americans think is the real deal. American schnapps is made from neutrally-flavoured distilled alcohols that have flavours (often fruit, but sometimes crap like peppermint) dissolved into them, sugar added, then some kind of thickening surfactant like glycerin added to make it seem smoother. A proper fruit Schnaps (Obstler) is usually made from fermenting the fruit's juice itself (with the exception of raspberries which don't produce enough sugar to ferment) before distilling. The other kind of Schnaps would be Kräuterschnaps, stuff made from a neutral grain alcohol then infused with herbs and spices like some of the better gins. The most famous of these (but not the best, IMO) is Jägermeister. (I've always preferred Underberg of this set.)

The bottle in this picture was my pride and joy; it was the first time I'd noticed that you could find affordable import spirits, wines, and beers in China. When I first came here that bottle would have represented a month's salary. Now it represents under 5% of a month's salary (if you count only my official salary). My salary has not gone up that much in 15 years…

No. No you wouldn't. All software developers think they can do better. They are wrong.

I would point and laugh, but you're the victim of the software, not its perpetrator.

Unless you're a software developer, in which case I will point and laugh because it's your fault software is so shitty!

A point of order, @Jaunt claims to be posting for his own amusement. Which is why I've been posting all that stuff about booze. We need something to drink for The Game.

@ThugHeaven "The L"?

There's about a million Chinese breweries. (I'm not exaggerating by much, I don't think. There's over a hundred breweries in Wuhan alone!) They almost, but not quite, all suck. The ones from Qingdao (the city) tend to put out the best because of the history with Germans in that city. (Ironically the actual Qingdao brand itself is ... mediocre.)

Personally, I buy German (and now Czech) imports. I only drink the local beers when they're given to me at meals by well-intentioned friends.

edited to add

I think the best way to describe most local brews is, "Well, at least it isn't Budweiser or Pabst." This, in the trade, is called "damning with very faint praise".

This interesting looking stuff is topical for this time of year. In five days' time is Mid-Autumn Festival and one of the traditions of the festival is expressing your appreciation to important others in your life, usually over a cup of this stuff.

So what is this stuff? It's called "cassia wine". for some inexplicable reason. (Well it's not entirely inexplicable, but bear with me.) I guess this would technically be termed a liqueur in the west.

By standards of Chinese hooch this is week. The stuff in the photo is 20%. It's made from a single-distilled rice-based spirit and then infused with osmanthus blooms and sweetened with sugar. (Not all cassia wine is sweetened.) The taste is actually exquisite; sort of tastes like peaches but not quite, with a bit of a kinda/sorta rice vinegar undertone. (Rice-based spirits all have that undertone when single-distilled.) The high quality stuff will have been infused with the essence of a lot of osmanthus blooms leaving behind a very complex flavour with a decent sustain on the aftertaste.

So why, if the flowers are osmanthus, is this called cassia wine? Well, here's the thing: cassia and osmanthus are very closely related plants. And at some point in history, someone apparently confused the two when labelling things in English and the English name became cassia wine instead of osmanthus wine.