This past week, Elianna and I passed a significant milestone in our relationship – we’ve managed to keep our house plant alive for more than a week.  This is a big accomplishment for us – neither of us are gifted with a green thumb, and growing our own hops is out of the question. This is because of  lack of ability, as well as lacking any soil in our San Francisco apartment.  To celebrate our newfound abilities to raise living creatures, we got a pet. He’s named Traify.

 

 

Isn’t he adorable?  He’s super friendly, and we’ve been trying to teach him tricks.  We tried to feed him, but it turns out, Traify doesn’t much like Caesar salads. 

 

 

 

(Aside: Does a Caesar salad by definition contain anchovies?  I vote no, since there are anchovies in Worchshire sauce, a key ingredient. Eli, and the rest of the civilized world, seem to disagree.  Do I have any defenders out there?) 

Traify is quite the diva, and insisted on professional lighting for this photoshoot.  <Shameless Plug> Thankfully, we were able to accommodate that thanks to some help from Lightspeed LA, your best source for set and event lighting in LA. </Shameless Plug> Thanks Avi!

 

 

 

As you can see in the above photo, we had prepared a nice place for Traify to sleep, in a pot of salted boiling water.  Sadly, our inexperience in raising pets really showed *sniffle* Traify didn’t make it. 

 

   

 

 

I cleaned and prepared Traify to be eaten over newspaper (as is the traditional burial in his culture,) and poured a beer that might pair well with his subtlety sweet meat.  I settled on a Eel River Brewing Acai Berry Wheat. 

  

 

People seem to have very strong feelings about fruit beers. I’m not including sour Lambic style beer in this discussion – rather, fruit beer with traditional yeast fermentations, like Apricot Ales or the Longshot Cranberry Wit. In this case, Eel river has used a gentle touch to balance this drink.  The fruit character is plainly evident, the the beer is more dry than sweet, and the wheat character shows through in the background.  It’s not  my favorite beer in the world, but I certainly had no trouble finishing a pint, and Elianna wants to know when I’ll get more.

 

 

It also happens to be a “Certified Organic”  beer, which is especially impressive given the inclusion of the fruit. It also provides me a great opportunity to plug a new entry into the beer blogging world: Sustainabrew.com.  Sustainabrew’s author Jason Sahler has created a website dedicated to craft beers that are green (as in environmentally sound – not in green bottles or too young to serve!)  I particularly like his tasting notes, which in addition to providing detailed flavor profiles, also provide the context of where the beer was enjoyed and how it was served.  All of this is illustrated with some stellar beer photography.

Back to dinner, and Traify, who by now, wasn’t fairing nearly as well as our houseplant. He was however, delicious.  We served Traify alongside of melted butter, and a caper-creme fresh sauce Eli put together.  He would have wanted it that way. 

 

  

 

 

Tags: crab, eel river

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 11:40 pm and is filed under Pairings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.