Battling the Starlings

Over the course of a year, I get a lot of visitors to my balcony, drawn in by four different feeders offering options for birds. I added a suet feeder late in 2009 after being briefly visited by a Townsend's Warbler in the snow. The suet feeder gets regular visits from chickadees, bushtits, nuthatches and a flicker. Drop-ins have included warblers and a Downy Woodpecker.

A week ago, the starlings found my suet and proceeded to demolish it. Researching the problem, I ran across a few discussion boards where someone inevitably asked "why all the hate? They're just birds." So, briefly: starlings are a non-native intrusive species that some idiot introduced to this continent years ago. They are large, noisy, and they crap everywhere. They descend in a flock and eat all the suet while chasing off any other birds (except the flicker, who is much too large to be intimidated). Starlings are also persistent and creative, more or less the rats of the sky.

The nice people at the Backyard Bird Shop offered a couple of different solutions to replace my feeder and discourage the starlings. One approach is to use a bottom-only feeder that has the suet cake lying flat with a roof over it; birds have to cling underneath to eat the food. This is no problem for most of my visitors, like bushtits and nuthatches but in theory, starlings can't do that. In theory. Like I said, they're persistent and I read reports of starlings that had learned to cling.

So I went with the cage within a cage. The inner cage holds two suet cakes comfortably and the holes in the outer cage allow little birds simple access as you can see. (I was taking a photo of the feeder with my cell phone, standing about three feet away when the nuthatch showed up.) So I crammed in two cakes and came home to find that the starlings had eaten about half. It turns out that they can easily stand on top and drill down to the suet quite easily. Furthermore, the juvenile starlings can cram their heads in from the side and reach the food.

Back to the shop, where it turns out that my only real problem was putting in all the suet. The trick is to cut one cake in half lengthwise and put the two pieces in side by side. Then the starlings can't reach it from the top and the juveniles haven't been all that successful from the side of the cage. Soon their nasty heads will be too large to fit in. Meanwhile, not only can the little birds get in and out with ease but the flicker is actually having a much easier time hanging on to the feeder and his long neck fits through the outer hole easily.

So yay me. Boo starlings.

A different beverage entirely

When my friend Ryan and I went to San Francisco the last week of April, we did not limit our drinking solely to wine, cocktails, wine and beer. On occasion, we started the day with coffee, thanks to the good folks at Blue Bottle Coffee (follow that link because it's a very interesting company). As good as many of the Portland and Eugene roasters are, I would instantly shift my loyalty to Blue Bottle should they ever open a roastery here, even though the World's Cutest Barrista works elsewhere.

That's the second-best latte ever, by the way, along with the remains of a Parmesan-fennel-sea salt shortbread cookie. The remains lasted only seconds after the photo. 

First stop was at the Mint Plaza cafe, home to the world's first five-light siphon bar.(which is apparently a big deal, besides looking extremely cool). UPDATE: And then I realized that the five-light is off to the far right in this photo. I still have no idea what the Frankenstein-looking thing in the clear box is supposed to be.

The Japanese have apparently gotten very serious about their coffee (Japanese always seem to get very serious about anything interesting), and their approaches to brewing coffee and the equipment designed for their techniques are finding their way to the US.

One adopter — and importer — of Japanese gear was James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee in Oakland, San Francisco and now Brooklyn. Freeman and his wife, the pastry chef Caitlin Williams Freeman, recounted a visit to Chatei Hatou, a Tokyo coffee shop where brewing coffee isn’t exactly a ceremony but is ceremonious. They said beans were weighed, ground, emptied into a filter and preinfused with a little bit of water that let the coffee bloom and release carbon dioxide. Cups and saucers were warmed, a slice of was set in the fridge to firm up. Only then was the coffee brewed, slowly.

“They’re going for a mastery of technique, then a mastery over all the important details of service,” Freeman said. “It adds up to an incredibly elusive experience. It’s hard to manufacture splendidness. It seems as though they have something very difficult figured out.”

And that giant siphon? There's a really beautiful slideshow about it at the NY Times, along with a YouTube video of the thing in operation:

While I was sucking down my latte, Ryan waited patiently for 10 minutes while his siphon coffee was prepared.

Showy, huh? And then the pot comes to the table.

I couldn't for the life of me figure out how the siphon worked, but YouTube came through again.

Was the coffee better? You'll have to ask Ryan, who seemed pleased (which might have been because he finally got his coffee). I stuck to the latte.

The next day, we visited the Ferry Building for the second time, and I had the Greatest Latte Ever at the "secret" coffee bar with the shockingly short line. It didn't take 10 minutes to brew, either.

Spoils of Love

It does seem like a lot of wine and spirits, doesn't it? Ah, well, it's not every day that I get to root through the liquor stores in California. I was on the hunt for vermouths and aperitifs I can't find around here, and a few other bottles seem to have fallen into the basket.

More to come on those vermouths, both foreign and domestic.

Random Photo of the Day

JELD-WEN Field, almost ready for first match on April 14. What had most recently been PGE Park has been converted from a baseball-friendly park to a futbol/football field for the Portland Timbers, now a Major League Soccer team. The entire season is effectively sold out already.

Random Photo of the Day

Night photography needs work. And a charged battery. The moon last night was spectacular.

In search of the perfect glass

"The perfect glass" being dictated, of course, by what is served in it. I may have gotten obsessive about this when I was becoming somewhat obsessive about beer. I treasure the few bars and pubs that make the effort to serve their beers (especially Belgian or Belgian-style) in the appropriate glass rather than pouring everything into a shaker "pint" designed for mixing cocktails.

Wineglasses are another subject entirely. I completely fail to grasp the need or distinction between a pinot glass, a burgundy glass, an Oregon pinot glass (wtf?) but I'm open to persuasion. I've been sold on the ickiness of a rolled rim, and I do understand the advantage of a glass large enough to really get my snout into. I've got glasses for red wines and different glasses for rosé or riesling, but there are subtleties I'm missing.

Beverages that sparkle, though, those I get. I love bubbles in my drink, be it water or juice or wine. Especially wine. As far as I'm concerned, it's impossible to go wrong with a decent sparkling wine and lately I've been churning through all sorts of moderately-priced and delicious sparklers -- cava from Spain, sparkling Riesling (well, not so moderately-priced) from Germany, proseccos and even a delicious wine from Georgia. No, not that Georgia, but Stalin's country. I've confidently poured them all into good flutes, which like the best pilsner glasses, encourage the formation and retention of bubbles. The carbonation not only provides the correct texture, but pushes the aromatics up and out, into my nose. What could be better?

The answer, it turns out, is a tulip.

So is the flute the proper glass for Champagne? Not so, according to winemakers at Chandon, Roederer, and Taittinger. Champagne is, after all, wine. Neither coupe nor flute allows the wine to fully express its aromatic qualities. There are actually two other possibilities, and they were explored together with coupes and flute glasses at a recent Maximilian Riedel tasting at the Manhattan Riedel showroom. 

Much more appropriate for a champagne-lover to enjoy the bubbly, especially if it is a “tête de cuvee” or a super-premium bottle, is the tulip glass. The glass is tall, but curves outwards to within a couple inches from the mouth, then curves inwards to the mouth. This design allows a little more space for swirling, and focuses the aromatics more towards the nose. Among the glasses we used for the tasting was the champagne tulip from the new Riedel Vitis line. The glass’ silhouette gracefully maximizes the surface-to-air space, allowing some aeration within the glass and the development of exceptional aromatics.

Clearly I needed tulips or my satisfaction would be shattered. Amazon couldn't deliver the goods, or at least not when I needed them. The Riedel Vitis glass turns out to be available at Macy's. Um, $40 a glass? I'm drinking $10 cava! Maybe there's something in the beer glass collection that will suit. Shuffle shuffle. What's this?

I got married (the first time) in 1983, and two of my favorite people, Sonja and Shannon, sent a wedding gift from Seattle. These two beautiful women sent two beautiful champagne glasses. Over the  years, I'd almost never used them, for fear of breaking them, or because other people were not enthusiastic about drinking from someone else's wedding gift, and the glasses were tucked way in the back of the cabinet for safety. Sonja had turned me on to real sparkling wine, Schramsburg, a year or two before the wedding gift. It's only taken me a bit over 25 years to catch up.Because, d'oh, the beautiful glasses were tulips and they are the most perfect glasses for drinking wine with bubbles.

Don't fear the vermouth

My friend Ryan and I visited The Secret Society Lounge shortly after it opened, an intimate Victorian-era bar specializing in well-crafted classic cocktails. I thought they were shaking too many that should have been stirred, but the effort was appreciated, and the offerings really were classic.

The downside of "intimate" of course is that it's difficult to avoid listening to neighbors' conversations. A new group plopped down next to our table and one of the patrons, barely glancing at the cocktail menu, announced, "I know what I want! I want a dirty martini!". My natural response was to throw her out of the bar, obviously, but I've become tolerant in my old age and realized it wasn't her fault to get it so wrong.

An order for a dirty martini is a cry for help.

It takes some time and effort to develop a taste for booze, which is why young people tend to cover it up with all sorts of nasty sweet concoctions like Jack & Coke. When someone is persuaded to try actual spirits, there's a natural tendency to choose something odorless and flavorless -- vodka. Even someone as smart and funny as Alan Cumming comes to believe that a "martini" is simply an icy glass of nearly-frozen vodka. Shaken, because that's how to get the drink really cold and notice: a sketch of vermouth to rinse the mixing glass and then poured out. The call for a dirty martini is a plea to have something to taste, even if it's only olive brine. 

My father's generation is probably to blame for this, or perhaps we can pin it on Winston Churchill, who championed a big nearly-frozen glass of gin, with the bartender glancing at a bottle of dry vermouth before serving. My dad subscribed to a similar view and would make reference to waving an open vermouth bottle near the martini pitcher. Considering the awful slop he passed off as gin, this only makes sense because the vermouth he'd have on hand was even worse. Bought from the bottom shelf and left unrefrigerated (probably for years), his vermouth was something to avoid.

As the SF Chronicle's Paul Clarke writes:

Fear, apparently, is a factor. "Almost 75 percent of my vodka martini drinkers are very, very afraid of vermouth," says Brooke Arthur, bar manager at Range. While many vodka martini fans are seeking a cocktail as flavorless as possible, Arthur says, drinkers enter the world of the contemporary bar with almost no exposure to vermouth.

"They don't even know what it tastes like, but a friend who gave them their first dirty martini didn't use it, so they don't want it in there," Arthur says.

Native to northwest Italy and southern France, vermouth - a wine that has been aromatized with herbs and other botanicals and lightly fortified with unaged brandy - is widely popular in parts of Europe, where it is usually served as an aperitif. But from the approach taken by most American bartenders - who typically dispense vermouth with atomizers, eyedroppers or simply a delicate hand when mixing martinis - vermouth could be considered some sort of bibulous antimatter.

There is, truthfully, a great deal of sub-par vermouth on the market; anyone who tasted the stuff straight would be justified in thinking of it as crap. Dry vermouth is made from a wine base, seasoned with botanicals. In civilized countries, it's treated as an aperitif, consumed before dinner with ice and perhaps an orange peel. That's good vermouth, though, starting with a base of decent wine, not from some ghastly "wine" you'd never allow on your table.

Vermouth was first produced commercially in the late 18th Century, but had been concocted at home for centuries. Paul Clarke again:

Typically made from neutral-character dry white wines that have been flavored with herbs, roots and barks - typically including cardamom, cinnamon, marjoram and chamomile - and then fortified with a neutral grape spirit, vermouth is classically made - and named - for another botanical: wormwood (the plant's name in Old High German is Wermud).  

Fortunately, really good vermouth (and aperitifs) are becoming more available, and truly distinctive vermouths are being produced right here in the US, although on a limited scale. The Quady Winery has been producing a dry and a sweet vermouth in California since 1999. Their dry vermouth is very dry indeed. On a base of Orange Muscat wine, they've added a unique blend of botanicals including lavender and various mints. (Also from California is Sutton Cellars dry vermouth, with great word of mouth--not going to taste it until some kind soul from California brings me a bottle. They are also developed a rosé vermouth, which sounds like heaven.)

Here in Oregon, a small company produces Imbue Bittersweet Vermouth, which is bitter indeed. Tasting it on its own, I found the vermouth shocking and demanding, but as a martini ingredient it is exceptionally good: pretty much the polar opposite of a "vodka martini".

The European vermouths included in the photo range from the gentle Dolin "Blanc" on the left (the also make excellent dry and sweet vermouths), Lillet Blanc (technically not vermouth, but filling a similar role in cocktails and on the table) and the very rare Cinzano Orancio, which is too sweet to be a "dry" vermouth, and too delicate to replace sweet vermouth. It plays well with oranges, oddly enough.

Find a bar that stocks good vermouth and ask to try a few on the rocks. A twist of lemon and a spritz of soda help to create a refreshing pre-dinner drink. And then try some serious cocktails. Make a real martini!

Martini the Right Way (or one of the right ways)

2 oz. gin (I like Tanqueray because it's good and it's cheap; there are plenty of other choices, such as Aviation; it's important that it be a robust gin
1 oz. Vya dry vermouth
2 dashes orange bitters

Stir vigorously with plenty of ice until well-chilled; pour into an frosty cocktail glass and garnish with lemon peel

Or try Neil Kopplin's Inverted Martini

2 oz. Imbue vermouth
1 oz. gin
add ice and orange peel

UPDATE: More on dry vermouth at this blog.