Beer!

"My" red tail at Pearson's Mill came in off the lake high, maybe 200 feet, over the small cliffs and the trees on the hills that rise to the north. Soaring into a northwest wind, flying as the master of the sky he is.

No jealousy, only admiration and the purest love.

Something of interest came to light today from its hidey-hole between the covers of a book, "Falconer on the Edge", by Rachel Dickinson. The eyes of the peregrine falcon are so large they are separated in the skull only by a membrane. The eye of the peregrine has two foveae, the small pit in the eye composed entirely of cones (of "rods and cones" fame) and responsible for the sharpest, clearest vision.

Your eye has one.

The bird goes into an accelerated dive (stoop) from up to several thousand feet in the air and strikes prey with an impact that explodes feathers off birds five, six, seven times its size.

The stoop isn't a long roaring swoop. The path describes a gentle spiral, as this awesome predator uses all four foveae and the constantly changing aspect of perception to provide true stereoscopic vision and enable the falcon to deliver a fatal blow to a usually flying (as in moving! as fast as terror can motivate!) large bird, with infrequent damage to itself.

Okay, quick lesson. You have never travelled at 200 mph, except in an airplane with no fixed point of reference. So get down to a speed you can work with, 50 mph, about 25% of the peregrine's impact velocity. Your homework: drive your car at 50 mph into a brick wall, obliterating it, but not so much as scratching the car.

Yeah, it's that amazing.

As some of you surely know, I am slightly unbalanced.

Okay, that's like saying televangelists and faith healers are slightly unscrupulous.

To paraphrase Richard Dawkins, I will pay attention when one regenerates a missing limb.

So this frozen world is starting to irritate me.

Everything is dirty, outside and in. Outside, there's not been enough rain to move the dregs of the past few months. And inside - I burn wood for heat, and it's been going full speed since I got home Thanksgiving Day. There's soot, ash, grime and dust on everything, everywhere. I can wipe down anything in the morning, and by evening a kleenex passed over it comes up blackened.

Thank the Blessed Sisters of Divine Mercy it's snowing again. Now.

I've always felt "brewing" was a deceptive term when applied to making beer. Maybe because my first exposure to the word was in reference to preparing proper tea, correctly "steeping".

The single most important step in making beer - not to minimize others - is fermentation. Where yeasts convert the sugars into alcohol, the soul of the matter.

There are two basic operators in this process: top-down and bottom-up, or cold, fermentation.

Top-down yeasts make a foam of activity on the surface of the wort (all the ingredients combined, before filtering) and the tiny used-up sugars give the beer a dark color as they settle - ales, pale ales, stouts, porters.

Bottom-up yeasts require much cooler fermenting temperatures, and all the stuff stays on the bottom. The beers, lagers and pilsners, are the classic golden color, and lager is the preferred beer in America, accounting for as much as 90% of the beer sold (my guess), maybe more.

So what, besides color, is the difference?

Why do some people prefer lagers and pilsners in the summer, ales, porters, and stouts in the colder months?

The body, or taste, of a lager or pilsner is in your mouth, making it more "refreshing" when you're thirsty.

The full flavors of dark brews release on the palate. Mix the sip in your mouth, there's almost no sensation. Swallow it slowly, and appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into a fine bottle of ale.

My home brew experience was a different beast entirely.

Home brewers necessarily start with ales, because most can't get a five-gallon bottle of wort to a consistent 40 degrees F.

Everything is easy until that all-important fermentation step.

The problem is sanitation. One must totally sterilize all equipment.

Household hint: if you sanitize with bleach, it takes a full 12 minutes to kill all the bad guys. No cheating. Time 15 minutes to be sure.

Yeast is a living, breathing organism. If there is enough remnant sanitizer, a portion of the yeast you add, at a cost, will die. When this happens, your high-priced homebrew will have a watery phenolic flavor, and it is all but unpalatable. Keep enough cash to get a store-bought box when you crack your first homebrew.

I spent about $300 brewing two cases of undrinkable bilge. I couldn't make a suitable habitat for the yeast to prosper. Couldn't figure how to clean stuff and leave it clean, not lethal.

Don't know what I was afraid of. Yeast infection? In my experience, that tastes awful. Makes you wonder if your Special Someone has been sleeping with a baker.

Successful homebrewers are fortunate, no tax, control of every ingredient, every step.

Amateurs must be prepared to "brew" bottle after bottle of home-made urine.

Question: would it be pure joy to launch a 1 1/2 lb. falcon from your wrist, watch it climb to a half-mile high in a clear blue sky, then see it streak down at speeds close to an Indy racer, and turn a hurtling duck into feathers and a roast?