on THE TAPHANDLE

Liefmans de Boomgaard Kriek, a Fruit Beer by Liefmans

Friday evening meant a visit to Seattle to visit the friend D. Troy's Work Table was invited for dinner and a DVD. It was a wonderful, relaxing time. D. provided the food, and TWT brought some beer to accompany said food.

The first course was spaghetti in a marinara and parmigiana sauce, with a thick slice of artisan olive bread. The second course was a green salad in a balsamic vinaigrette, with another slice of bread. Both were accompanied by a Fire Station 5 Steam Pumper IPA. The third course, following two short films and the main feature—Pedro Aldomovar's Law of Desire—was a chocolate cake "filled with raspberry preserves and amaretto and topped with chocolate icing and toasted pine nuts."

The beer that accompanied the cake was Liefmans de Boomgaard Kriek. This fruit beer poured a brilliant, translucent ruby red with a thick pink head, which quickly diminished. The aroma was heavily of cherries and slightly less so of cereal grains. The mouthfeel was good, although the carbonation was a bit too fizzy. The flavor started strongly as an almost cloying sweet cherry (maraschino), and finished slightly tart. All in all, an interesting beer, and a good choice to complement the cake.

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"The meta-lesson of both relativity and quantum mechanics is that when we deeply probe the fundamental workings of the universe we may come upon aspects that are vastly different from our expectations. The boldness of asking deep questions may require unforeseen flexibility if we are to accept the answers."
—page 108, The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene

The rest of the evening was spent in conversation, the last couple hours which were grounded in theological matters. Between the devoutly religious (overly-moralistic, fundamentalist Christian evangelicals) and the devoutly anti-religous (fundamentalist atheists), D. and I find ourselves in the middle—D. a "non-believer" and myself a Lutheran-Christian "believer." Our viewpoints and "beliefs" share many similarities. We discussed theodicy and suffering, eventually ending up reading and listening and pondering passages from Annie Dillard's Holy the Firm.

Needless to say, it was a wonderful evening of food, drink, great cinema, great company, stimulating conversation, thought-provoking literature, and friendship. I need to do it more often.