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Beer guru Greg Engert recommends some sparkling beers to toast this New Year's Eve in lieu of champagne. Courtesy of Powers & Crewe.

Perhaps it is because I associate it with that stomach-ache-inducing sparkling grape juice I gulped down during so many New Year’s Eves as a kid, but I am not a huge fan of champagne.

So my ears perked up when I heard that the Boston Beer Company (the maker of Samuel Adams) and Germany’s Weihenstephan, the world’s oldest brewery, were teaming up to unveil a bubbly brew called Infinium that blurred the line between sparkling wine and beer, just in time for the holidays. The festive effervescence of champagne with the hoppy flavor of beer sounded like it could be the perfect combination, and I wondered if there were other “toastable” hybrids out there.

Greg Engert seemed to be the guy to ask. He is the beer director at ChurchKey, a swanky beer bar in northwest Washington, D.C., and Birch & Barley, its sister restaurant downstairs, where he curates an impressive collection of craft beer: 500 bottles, 50 taps and five cask-conditioned ales. Both the bar and restaurant, which opened in October 2009, have been huge successes, and Engert’s hand in them hasn’t gone unnoticed. In April, Engert became the first-ever beer professional to be named one of Food & Wine magazine’s “Sommeliers of the Year.”

Engert was preparing for ChurchKey’s big New Year’s bash (tickets still available for an open bar of 55 drafts and samples from Greg’s “secret stash”) when I spoke with him earlier this week. ”I wouldn’t say I dislike champagne per se,” he said, “but I find that flavor options for sparkling wine are only subtly different. Craft beer, on the other hand, always provides the effervescence of a sparkler, but can do so with a wider range of tastes and aroma. You can enjoy roasty or even smoky flavors, caramel, toffee, toasty and nutty notes, herbal and citric hop freshness, or even fruit and spice aromatics that tend toward the darker side—plum, raisin, cherry—or lighter—peach, banana, apple.”

Engert seemed as ebullient as the beers he has on tap, explaining how the methods of making beer and champagne can be quite similar. A popular trend, he says, is for beers to undergo a secondary fermentation at a winery, in much the same way that sparkling wine does. And, as I had hoped, he offered up some recommendations.

So, now, without further ado, I present to you Engert’s top picks for beers to toast this New Year’s Eve!

Bubbly & Brut-esque: DeuS: Brut Des Flandres | Brouwerij Bosteels | East Flanders, Belgium

This beer is fittingly titled the “Brut” of Flanders, as much of its production mirrors that of the finest brut wines of France, albeit crafted of malted barley initially in the Flemish north. The straw pallor signals the intense dryness to come, no doubt engendered in congress with the méthode traditionnelle*. Post primary fermentation it is dosed with sugar and wine yeast, then carried to Rheims, France (the capital of all things Champagne). Only there is it bottled where it can continue to re-ferment for three to four weeks. More than a year’s maturation at cellar temperature then occurs, after which is riddling (3 to 4 weeks), then disgorgement. What remains is an ethereal brew, delicately emboldened.                                                                 * Note: Though Engert’s other three picks are brewed by similar methods, this is the only one made in the méthode traditionnelle.

Bubbly & Roasty: Black OPS | Brooklyn Brewery | New York

Here is an imperial stout loaded with intensely deep flavors of cocoa, caramel and espresso that is further layered by its four-month maturation in oak barrels once used to age Woodford Reserve Bourbon. Vanilla, spice, toast and coconut tastes abound in a brew that might have ended up heavier on the palate had it not been bottled flat, then re-fermented with wine yeast normally reserved for primary fermentation in sparkling wine. Black OPS ends up neither heavy nor sticky, but rather creamy and tantalizing while losing nothing of its mature character.

Bubbly & Tart & Funky: Hanssens Oude Gueuze | Hanssens Artisanaal | Flemish Brabant, Belgium

The “Champagne of Beers” as a moniker could have originally been applied to Gueuze Lambic, the classic-rustic brew of the Payottenland, a valley surrounding the river Zenne, which flows through—and even under—Brussels. While beer has been brewed in countless regions for hundreds, if not thousands, of years, this region has altered their brewing path very little over the centuries. Airborne wild yeasts and bacteria begin the ale’s ferment, and continue along with a hoard of microscopic brethren in oak casks for a number of years. The Gueuze style is naturally re-fermented, but not by some careful “méthode” or more modern bottle conditioning practice; the Gueuze is a blend of Lambic that has wildly fermented in oak barrels for one, two and three years. The still hungry and now starved micro flora of the three-year-old thread feed upon the as yet unfermented one- and two-year-old beers’ sugars and a natural fermentation results. Sparkling, yes. But wildly tart, earthy and even funky. These are rare craft-made ales that not only astound in their astonishing simplicity, but also stand as a sort of revenant of what beer once was…and is. And will be.

Bubbly & Hoppy: Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary Grand Cru | Our Brewers Reserve, Sierra Nevada Brewing Company | California

This is the final installment in the series of artisanal beers brewed to celebrate Sierra Nevada’s 30 years of craft brewing. It consists of two hoppy brews (Celebration Ale & Bigfoot), aged in oak barrels, then blended with fresh Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. While malty and firm on the palate, with vanilla notes from the wood, it exudes huge herbal and citric hop notes in the nose. Stunningly generous, as the re-fermentation serves to exude powerful effervescence that both brightens the texture and pushes the aromatic envelope as well.

Every December, the Salvation Army deploys bell-ringers to shopping areas to collect donations for the needy, acting as jingling reminders that not everyone has a roof over his head or food in her belly, much less gifts under the tree.

The ringers’ iconic red collection kettles, which represent soup pots, have been a tradition since 1891. That was the year, according to the Salvation Army, that Joseph McFee brainstormed an idea to fund a Christmas dinner for the destitute in San Francisco. Recalling his sailor days, McFee thought of the port in Liverpool, where passersby would toss coins for the poor into a kettle called “Simpson’s Pot.” He put out a similar pot by the Oakland ferry landing on Market Street, along with a sign reading, “Keep the pot boiling,” and soon had enough to feed 1,000 people dinner.

It’s no coincidence that a soup kettle was the symbol for feeding the poor, rather than, say, a roasting pan or a skillet. Soup has always been one of the most economical ways to provide nourishing, filling food to a large quantity of people. Although he was hardly the first person to come up with the idea to feed the poor, an interesting fellow known as Count Rumford is often credited with establishing the first real soup kitchen.

Born Benjamin Thompson in Woburn, Massachusetts, in 1753, he fled to Britain during the American Revolution, having been accused of being loyal to the crown. He went on to have a brilliant career as a scientist, social reformer and inventor. His work for the Bavarian government earned him the title of Count of the Holy Roman Empire, and he chose Rumford, the New Hampshire town where he lived for a time, as the place he was from (the full name was Benjamin Count von Rumford).

His biggest project may have been his plan to rid Munich of its beggar problem by feeding—and, more pointedly, employing—the poor. According to the handbook he wrote for other cities to emulate, “mendicity” was epidemic there—”In short, these detestable vermin swarmed everywhere,” he wrote. He was speaking specifically of those able-bodied cadgers would send out scuffed-up children to prey on public sympathy, and who had developed an elaborate system of mooching food from merchants, which they would then sell to other shopkeepers at a profit.

After sending out troops to roust the beggars, Rumford established workhouses, where poor people, including children, were employed to make military uniforms. Those who were too weak, young or awkward to do more strenuous work were given the easier tasks of carding wool or spooling yarn. The youngest children were to sit in chairs in the workroom, where they would be enticed by boredom to prefer work. Children attended an on-premises school before and after work and, Rumford noted, were also given the opportunity to recreate and play.

“At the hour of dinner,” Rumford wrote, “a large bell was rung in the court, when those at work in the different parts of the building repaired to the dining-hall; where they found a wholesome and nourishing repast.” This consisted of “a very rich soup of peas and barley, mixed with cuttings of fine white bread; and a piece of excellent rye bread, weighing seven ounces, which last they commonly put in their pockets, and carried home for their supper.”

Rumford was also an early proponent of the potato as good, cheap and filling food, though this New World ingredient was still viewed with suspicion by many Europeans.

Although some of his methods (like child labor) wouldn’t necessarily mesh with today’s sensibilities, the basic concept of Rumford’s program set the groundwork for the last century’s soup kitchens. And through his many scientific innovations, he developed tools that improved cooking for everyone, poor or not, including the cast-iron Rumford stove (the first commercially available kitchen range), which kept in heat and allowed temperature to be regulated better than on an open hearth; a pressure cooker (though not necessarily the first one); and a drip coffee maker.

But the item bearing Rumford’s name that is probably most familiar to cooks today wasn’t actually his invention: a brand of baking powder was named in his honor.

Dinner party, courtesy of Flickr user Amelia-Jane.

Entertaining friends and family is a big part of the holiday season. In my family, after we have nibbled on appetizers and enjoyed a meal and the dessert plates have been cleared from the table, it’s game time. Literally.*

If you are a game lover (or are just looking for some excitement), consider playing these games—some bought, some improvised—at your next dinner party.

*Warning: Wait 30 minutes after eating before charading.

Conversation Starters

Whether the group you’re hosting consists of lifelong friends, new acquaintances or a combination of both, Table Topics is a game with, according to its tag line, “Questions to Start Great Conversations.” It is a simple concept. The game consists merely of a deck of cards with questions on each, and the maker has come out with decks of different themes—Dinner Party, Not Your Mom’s Dinner Party and Gourmet, among others. From the original deck: “If you could do something dangerous just once with no risk what would you do?” And from the gourmet deck: “Which celebrity chef would you most like to fix you a meal?” Find out things about your friends that you might never have known.

Another game, called the Game of Things, takes this idea to the next level. A card might say: “Things people do when no one is looking” or “Things dogs are actually saying when they bark.” Each player writes down an answer, and the object of the game is to guess who wrote what. The board game can be improvised if your group comes up with a pile of “Things” prompts. But, I have to say, the topics that come with the game generate hilarious answers.

Trivia

There are so many trivia board games out there that you can pretty much play to a common interest of your group. If you are all fans of TV shows like The Office or Seinfeld, there are games that will challenge you to recall famous quotes and scenes. I recently saw a game called Name Chase, perfect for history buffs, that provides facts and clues about historical figures. The fewer clues you need in order to guess the person correctly, the higher your score. And if you are serious foodies, Foodie Fight, with over 1,000 food-related trivia questions, might be a good choice.

Taboo-Style Games

Catch Phrase has always been a party favorite among my friends. The hand-held electric game provides a word, and, in typical Taboo fashion, you have to describe the person, place or thing (without using the word in question) in a way that will enable your team to guess it. Then you quickly pass it around the room. Whichever team has it when the time runs out loses the round.

What’s great about the game “Celebrity” is that it requires only some paper and pens. Every player submits three or so names of famous people or fictional characters to a hat. The group is divided into two teams and the names into two cups. Each team has an allotted time, say two minutes, to pass their cup around and get through as many names as they can. In the first round, when you draw a name, you can give any clues to help your teammates guess. Then, the names are returned to the cup, and in the second round, you can only say one word and then you have to act out clues. The final round (and the hope is that you get through many names in the first round so that you are familiar with the celebrities in the cup) is purely charades.

In my opinion, this “Celebrity” is more entertaining than the version in which each person at the table writes a famous person’s name on a post-it note, sticks it to a neighbor’s forehead and then asks and answers yes-or-no questions until everyone discovers their post-it identities.

Easy Classics

For the game “Psychiatrist,” one member of the group volunteers to be the psychiatrist and leaves the room while the remaining revelers decide on an ailment. The ailment isn’t an illness in the traditional sense. For instance, you may decide that you will all act as if you are the person to your right. Then the psychiatrist returns and asks questions until he or she successfully diagnoses the group.

This last one risks creating some contrived conversation, but it can be fun. The host of the party pens some outlandish phrases (i.e. “I am loose as a goose” or “It tastes like pickled peppers”) on strips of paper and hides one (or perhaps three, ranging from easy to medium to hard) under each dinner plate. Guests read the phrases to themselves when they sit down to dinner, and then the object is to work them into the conversation as naturally as possible. Try to call out when you think others are using their assigned phrases, and the person able to slip in the most, unnoticed, wins.

A Google N-gram comparing the use of the word "oven" (red) to the word "microwave" (blue) in millions of books.

Google Books, the online digital library that allows you to search inside thousands of books, might be the most useful tool for journalists, fact-checkers and other researchers since the Dewey decimal system. I love my neighborhood library, and I still buy books, but sometimes I just need one quote from a weighty tome I would never buy and that my library wouldn’t carry. Occasionally I find what I need in a book that I wouldn’t have even thought to look in.

Now the evil geniuses at Google Labs have come up with another way to waste company time—I mean, conduct research. If you go to ngrams.googlelabs.com, you can enter two or more search terms and it will give you a graph comparing how frequently they appeared in books. It goes up only to the year 2000, but it’s still a fun way to track food trends of the last century, at least by one measure.

For instance, compare “microwave” and “bake” between 1900 and 2000, and you see that “microwave” overtakes “bake” in the mid-1950s. Many of these early references probably have to do with other uses of microwaves than cooking (the first microwave oven was patented in 1941, but commercial models weren’t popular until the 1970s), but there is a steep rise between the 1970s and the peak in the mid-1990s, when “microwave” starts to decline again. “Bake” hit a low around the era of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, but has been making a steady, if modest, comeback (like aprons).

Do you remember when you first heard of arugula? There’s a good chance it was around 1984, the year it overtook iceberg lettuce in references in American English books. Since then it has risen sharply, while iceberg lettuce has wilted by comparison.

“Tofu” was nearly unmentioned until around 1970. By the mid-1980s it shot above flatlining “roast beef.” Granola was also unheard of until 1970—not long after the Merry Pranksters introduced it to thousands of hungry, hungry hippies at Woodstock—but has risen steadily ever since, even briefly overtaking sushi for a few years around 1980, before raw fish made a flying leap and never came down.

It’s also interesting to see how our names for foods has changed. “Pasta” was flat as a noodle until the 1970s, when it began to rise, climbing past “spaghetti” around 1982.

A Google N-Gram shows big differences in which ethnic foods were popular.

A three-way race between “pad thai,” “moo goo gai pan” and “korma” shows Americans’ changing tastes in ethnic cuisines: the Indian curry dish had peaks (in the late 1970s) and valleys (throughout the 1980s) as steep as the Himalayas, while the Chinese noodles went limp after their peak around 1994, and the Thai noodle dish, relatively obscure until the late ’80s, shot past the others for a strong finish in 2000.

Can you think of any other good food-related queries? Report in the comments any interesting findings you discover.

Pavlova with strawberries and kiwis, courtesy of Flickr user avlxyz

I’m leaving for my first visit to Australia on the day after Christmas. Even though I grew up in Southern California—where Christmas decorations are palm tree trunks wrapped in lights and the annual New Year’s Day Rose Parade is a televised gloat-fest over the relatively mild weather—it will be strange to suddenly cross from winter into summer. Snow-free or not, even Californians have shorter, cooler days in December. In the Southern Hemisphere, though, the holidays fall when the days are longest and warmest.

So many American and European Christmas traditions revolve around the winter season—hot drinks, roasts, sides of root vegetables and other cold-weather fare—so I wondered how they do it below the equator. I hope Santa at least gets to change into shorts.

Here’s what I found:

Australia and New Zealand:

The British cultural legacy is still strong in these former colonies, and many people stick to traditional English Christmas foods, including roasted meats and puddings (in the British-English sense of the word) with brandy. Sometimes, in a concession to the weather, the meats are served cold. According to the Australian friend I will be visiting, others embrace the season and serve an outdoor seafood feast that might include prawns and oysters. The most distinctly Australian/New Zealand Christmas dish is a dessert called pavlova, which has a crisp meringue crust and a topping of whipped cream and summer fruits like strawberries, kiwi or passionfruit.

South America:

Turkey is the traditional main course in South America’s largest country, Brazil, but with a preparation completely unlike what graces the average American holiday table. It can be marinated in cachaça (an indigenous liquor made from sugar cane) or champagne and is often stuffed with farofa (toasted manioc/cassava flour) and fruit.

The signature Christmas treat of Colombia (which straddles the equator) is natilla, a creamy sweet, similar to dulce de leche but made with panela, a molasses-like byproduct of sugar cane processing. It is often served with bunuelos, sweet or savory fritters popular throughout Latin America.

You’ve heard of pigs in a blanket. In Argentina, they prefer children in a blanket—niños envueltos—usually cabbage or slices of beef stuffed with more meat.

Chileans drink cola de mono, a warm-weather alternative to eggnog with milk, coffee, spices and rum or pisco.

Africa:

The southern half of Africa, unlike the northern, is majority Christian. And, as Amanda discovered during her July (winter) visit to Cape Town, South Africans love a good braai (barbecue) any time of year. Christmas is no exception, whether it’s a twist on the traditional holiday ham or the sausage called boerewors.

In Mozambique the Portuguese influence is present in Christmas foods like chicken with piri-piri sauce and filhos de natal (Christmas fritters).

Tanzanians who can afford it might roast a whole goat for the holiday meal. Others go with chicken, either roasted and stuffed with coconut-flavored rice or in a stew.

Have you celebrated Christmas below the equator (or anywhere with hot Decembers)?

I wish everyone in both hemispheres a joyful holiday season. I’ll report back with lots more on Australian cuisine when I return.