I missed Earth Day, which would have been the perfect time to write on this subject, but recently caught an article about the greenness of clasic style on Off The Cuff.  Chris Hogan argues that quality clothing is environmentally friendly because it can last for decades without going out of style, and usually can be repaired instead of simply discarded.  These are great arguments, and are entirely true.  I would also theorize that custom-made clothing and shoes have a smaller carbon footprint, though I have absolutely no data to back up that idea.

Once in my early twenties, while taking a break from my taxes, I decided to write up a list of where my precious, measly pay had been spent.  Housing had accounted for $6,000; books and music an estimated $1,300; and I worked in the restaurant industry so food costs were nominal.  To my great surprise, when I had calculated out my beer budget, a whopping $2,100 had gone to---you guessed it---the glorious Pabst Brewing Company.  It was a staple that continually needed to be stocked: a welcoming offered to every visitor and consumed with relish, like Irish soda bread or tea.  Not once do I remember a nose being turned up at it, as I can only imagine my nose would be prone to do today.  I don't know if there were many beer snobs in Richmond, Virginia, at that time, but if there were they certainly weren't running in my circles.

Upon moving to Southern Oregon from Costa Rica, the only libation I craved was the cheap, clean, astringency of guaro (sugar cane rum) and coconut water.  There was none to be had.  I had noticed that the convenient store coolers here in Medford carried more than the average Coors, Miller, and Budweiser trio.  I spotted numerous Ninkasi and Lagunitas branded hoodies on the same scenesters that I once would have assumed were PBR diehards.  It wasn't until boredom brought me into the specialty bottle shop, Bear Creek Beers, that I did begin to comprehend how vast the world of beer truly is.   Confronted with hundreds of glistening bottles, I requested anything with a high alcohol content and the dapper young beer monger directed me to the Celebrator doppelbock from Ayinger.   A relatively high 6.7% was cloaked under a taste that I simply couldn't put a finger on, and to be quite honest, repulsed me.  It seemed to my untrained palate like a Heineken that had been reduced on a slow burner for hours.   At $3.70 a bottle I choked it down, the perplexed salesman trying to puzzle out what caused my face to pucker so.  Upon multiple returns we determined that a rich Black Boss Porter was more to my liking and the most likely offender was Munich malt, used in many German beers.  It was a revelation that such an subtle aftertaste could be pinned down and  attributed to a region and style.  Beer was beginning not to be just beer.

The first day I heard of Hollandaise was the very same day I was attempting to make a half gallon vat of it to the sounds of a moaning and very frustrated souse chef at a job I had chanced my way into.   For two years he patiently introduced me to the basics of the culinary world.  Mirepoix and truffles and duxelles, oh my!   After my stint at The Jefferson  food was never the same.  I wonder at the homogeny of my former diet.  How I could have lived in a world void of the occasional daikon salad or 12-year aged balsamic dressing?   Now, after a season of winter warmers, drinkable session lagers,  rich barley wines, effervescent Belgians, smoky rauchbier, and nectar-like lambics, I am left pondering much the same.  The ever-hoppy IPAs help to define the Northwest in my mind, as ESBs leave me looking forward to trips to London.   Guiness is left by the wayside behind heady coconut porters and Young's Double Chocolate Stout.  Beautiful experimental  beers such as Dogfish Head's World Wide Stout or New Belgium's Lips of Faith series continue to challenge the palate.   Luckily my area also has two fantastic microbreweries, Caldera and S.O.B., to satiate my desire to support local businesses.
  
If you are interested in expanding your beer horizons don't be shy.  Like Guinness?  Try a Murphy's Irish Stout.  Is New Castle your style?  Try a Samuel Smith Nut Brown.  I've found many ladies who gravitate to the more fruity beers also love the over the top IPAs like Russian River's Pliny the Elder or Oscar Blues' Gubna.  But most of all, keep trying, because tastes, like all good things, mature.  To which I owe the illustrious Munich malt an apology, for now I find you absolutely delectable.

I have never had a very impressive palate for wine.  Most of the time I can tell what I like and what I don't like, and from time to time I can be lucky enough to pick up on one of those elusive aromas wine geeks are always talking about.  "Blackberry," usually.  Sometimes "pepper."  I have never really had the best of luck with tobacco, leather, pit fruits, flowers, duck fat, or any of those other weird things that people pick up in wine flavors.  But I am sure they are there.  I have seen people identify wine regions, grapes, alcohol content, and other impressive things by taste alone, and there is one isolated case where I usually can do a good job, too.

It was a bottle of 2007 RoxyAnn Claret that first made me stop and think about this interesting flavor I was tasting.  I think I would describe it as "peppery," but what I knew for sure was that it was delicious.  It was a flavor I ran into frequently in Claret-style wines, and I just couldn't figure out what it was.  Clarets were delicious, but usually rather expensive.  Why did they taste so good?  Was I just paying for quality?  These questions plagued me, and obviously deserved some investigation.  So I put on my favorite battered fedora, pulled out my magnifying glass, and grabbed some Riedel stemware, and began to work on this puzzle.

The bright afternoon sun filtered through the Lodgepole and Ponderosa pine to illuminate the workshop of pipemaker Brad Pohlmann.  Though it looks to be a classic false-fronted shop out of the Wild West, it was created relatively recently by the former owner of the property as a painting studio for his wife.  Now, it is filled with the tools of a master pipemaker.  The walls are sparsely adorned with pipes and smoking memorabilia, and boxes of briar blocks sit beneath smoke-filmed windows that look out over Pohlmann's beautiful Applegate-valley property.

The three of us had loaded our bags with beer, tobacco, and the trappings of smokers, and made the long-overdue drive to the valley to visit Pohlmann.  We used the excuse of celebrating his selection as Pipes & Tobaccos Magazine's Pipemaker of the Year, and the arrival of Daylight Savings Time, but in truth, we'd been planning to visit him for quite a while, and were just now getting around to it.  Pohlmann moved to the Applegate Valley in Oregon in 2004, and sometime in 2006 or 2007, Jesse Williamson came to me eagerly, that excited gleam in his eye, saying, "Erik, I've discovered a pipemaker!  He lives here!"

I know that Mr Maujean spends quite a bit of time doing burpees, which it would be great to hear more about, and it's odd to think of exercise as being an important part of leisure, but it is.  My own exercise, when I get around to it, consists primarily of hiking, walking, and riding my rather heavy bicycle.  However, The Art of Manliness recently posted an article called The Odd Object Training Primer that includes a number of exercise ideas that sound rather entertaining.

Pipe tobacco comes in a variety of blends, cuts, and flavors.  One of the most difficult for the beginner to smoke is probably flake tobacco, which is delivered in dense, long strips of leaf that has been pressed into cakes and then cut into this odd shape.  When properly prepared, this form of tobacco can provide a cool, slow-burning, and satisfying smoking experience.

Let's go back in time to 1183 AD, to the setting of that Peter O'Toole classic, The Lion in Winter.  Europe was rather chilly, and neither coffee nor tea had yet to be introduced to England, nor had hops yet been introduced to beer.  One imagines that mornings would have been pretty dreary, because poor old Henry II couldn't even get a mimosa (no oranges, no Champagne!), and his hot braggot would have been flavored with heather or nettles or something unpleasant like that.  It's really no wonder he had so much trouble with his sons.

Luckily, in these modern times, we have a variety of morning delights to distract us from our filial tribulations, and in winter months hot coffee or tea can be used to warm our troubled spirits as well as our chilled bodies.  It is this cherished attribute we wish to draw your attention to today.

When the colder months approach, waxing one's moustache in the morning can become rather taxing.  During the day, the wax stays nice and firm, as the Winter sun doesn't seem that good at melting it, but chilly fingers do a poor job of softening and spreading the wax to begin with.  This is why you should have a hot, fresh cup of tea or coffee with you while working on your moustache.  With it, you can warm your fingers, perhaps warm the wax a bit, and if the going gets really rough, you can take a few sips and let the hot steam from your beverage increase the suppleness of your 'tache, for easier working.

"Some day," I told myself, "I'll have a house to keep all my stuff in."

I was right. What's particularly strange to me is that when I actually start looking through my precious hoard, it doesn't generate the comfort and security I had dreamt of. I won't bore you with an inventory, let's just say that I have a tremendous amount of things that I don't need. Over time, I also have excelled at burdening myself with another category, many of which those things I don't need have become: things I don't want.

The things I don't want generate worry and a tremendous psychological burden: the things I thought would root me to my home have done just that, and it has turned my house not into a personal museum dedicated to displaying my awesome array of interests and fine taste, but instead into a burdensome place that offers me only problems and limitation. Do I really need laser discs? VHS tapes? Manuals for computer operating systems I will never use again? Will I really scrapbook those old party invitations? How is it that I allowed myself to accumulate so much pure crap?

Persons with far greater understanding of economics than my own have surely meditated at length on this issue. What troubles me is the specter of artificial need, and what scares me is the thought that I am the one who always has given myself permission to have such junk to begin with. I can understand how my changing tastes might contribute sometimes, but what on Earth has been so wrong with me that I let it get so bad?

To participate in society, we must exchange. One fundamental reason so many goods are available is because they are so ubiquitously needed, and of course we most often purchase certain goods because the labor or expertise required to produce them exceeds our own means, or because the expense of producing them at small scale is greater than the number on the sticker-- especially when marked down. How simple it would be if when surveying my piles of junk I only saw evidence of that kind of buying: Instead, somewhere I allowed the signal to noise ratio to become very poor.

I'm not really questioning whether it's okay or not to buy things, and I can't possibly comment on anyone else's perception of their possessions and their personal value. I am saying that if I had considered the burden of physically possessing my junk before I let it get so far out of my hands, I would be able to look around and say "I use that" or "I like having that", instead of being worried with where I was going to put things or how hard the junk would be to get rid of. I want my sense of freedom back.

One of the Chap's hallmarks is a kind of disdain for the mass-produced. It's not that a Gentleman of Leisure avoids ever purchasing anything meant for a broad market, but that he knows that such owning such goods requires giving up some individuality-- almost by definition. It's one more handy ideological tool that can be used to evaluate whether or not something's worth having, because by the time I paid for that one gizmo and all those extra boxes to keep floppies in, I could have afforded two tickets to Shanghai after all.

Good memories don't take up any extra space.

Some other ruminations:

http://www.wikihow.com/Buy-Nothing

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac