It's another beer fair at a friendly neighborhood market, Mercado de Vallehermoso. There are several places that serve craft beers with their food inside, and La Birratorium is right across the street. Plenty of opportunities for whatever you feel like. I decided to take advantage of the food offerings for lunch, and try Craft 19's pastrami sandwich. I got Tempest Brewing's Brave New World IPA to go with it, thinking it would be a good combination with the saurkraut and mustard. It was excellent, in fact, although the beer was much softer than expected. It has a bright and clear color, the head dissipates quite rapidly, and it was served lukewarm, so authentic, I suppose. It starts with a very mild bitter flavor, none of the sharp citrus notes of American IPAs, and goes a bit sweeter later on. Really very good with the slightly spicy and acidic tastes of the food. Without that pastrami and pickles I might have been a little disappointed, or I would have chosen a stronger beer to begin with, but as it was I was quite pleased.
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| First look |
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| Deli pickles, yay! |
Then I wandered over to Drakkar to see their northern offerings. Lots of Estonian beers at the moment. Still feeling like a lighter beer is the thing (it's damn hot today) I chose Põhjala's gose. It's a bit cloudy, darker than the IPA, also little head, and a strange kind of grainy aroma. It is immediately sour in taste, wakes you right up, and then dies off quickly after you swallow. Not any strange aftertaste here. Maybe I just got used to it, but it seemed to get less sour over time, calming down to only slightly attention grabbing. It does have a finish that seems like it should feel drier than it is. This gose is practically juicy.
North Brewing had the attraction of a serve yourself cask. I went over to see why everyone was crowded around the place and ran into an acquaintance from beer fairs past, who asked me why I didn't have my notebook with me. I did, just not in my hand. He recommended the cask beer, the only one at this fair, Sputnik cask pale ale-ambar. The lemony colored beer is quite tasty, and surprisingly sweet. It's subtle for an ambar and on the sweet side for a pale ale, so whatever you are expecting from it, you'll probably be surprised. There's kind of a dusty feeling to it too, and it is slightly cloudy in the glass. A good suggestion!
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| When the crowd has vanished |
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| Don't spill, don't spill... |
I hadn't had any dark beers, and there was a stout on tap overseen by La Birratorium, but it was a bourbon stout and I'm just not feeling that today. Beavertown's Luponic Plague NEIPA might be a good thing to shake off the early summer heat, though. It really looks like a Lemon Julius, very pulpy in appearance with practically no head at all. I was warned that it is very hop heavy, and it's pretty clear from the scent that it's true. It's served nice and cold, but there isn't a lot of strong flavor...at first. There's a little snap at the end of the swallow that keeps you on your toes. While also a tad dusty, this NEIPA feels like it has some natural lemon juice as a big part of the recipe. It becomes a very bitter, rather astringent tasting beer, not quite clean enough for be a good palate cleanser. While I like to try new beers, I think I'm happy to know not to keep an eye out for this one in the future.
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| Just tucked into the super-spicy food place |
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| So I could have had porter with tobacco...yeah, no |
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| Have a kilo of happiness before leaving |
And now, the other two German films from last weekend.
Spoilers, if you really need them for 80 year old movies!
Spione/Espías/Spies is a film from Fritz Lang that seems a lot more for the general public than his famous Metropolis. It’s got spies, action, love, betrayal, even a train crash. The evil mastermind of the story has a day job as a bank president, but when he’s playing the evil genius he lets his hair down. His latest scheme is under the eyes of the secret service of...whatever country this is. Lang and Thea von Harbou seem to go to great lengths to not identify the European country it takes place in. It’s not France, because they say in the beginning that the French embassy has had some important paperwork stolen, while the secret service was basically useless. They do come off as quite incompetent, although maybe this is how real secret service agencies really are - full of moles and double-agents who exploit their gullible colleagues. The only one who appears to be good at his job is agent 326, whose name we never find out, although when he is first summoned to the station it’s through a paper addressed to Hans Pockzerwinski. He uncovers one mole immediately on entering the boss’s office and takes up the case to investigate what plans their nemesis has. An agent has been deployed to stop 326 already, because the bad guys are always one step ahead of this secret service, and they meet at a hotel where he thinks he has saved her from police corruption and perhaps an abusive boyfriend. Who she shot. They of course fall in love, which the mastermind uses to manipulate his agent while 326 does his best to make up for his bumbling co-spies. The head of security for the Japanese embassy warns him about the female agent, plus he discovers her negotiating state secrets from an army officer of another unidentified country. He is sent to the signing of a treaty between his country and Japan, a treaty that is the object of the mastermind’s latest scheme, for some reason, and he goes by overnight train. Evil henchmen unhook his car from the rest as they roll through a tunnel, it conveniently being the last one on the train, and he wakes up and realizes the danger just in time to see another train come zooming through. The female agent hears about the accident and races to the scene, managing to get into the wreckage and find her beloved actually outside the smashed train car, under rubble. Plan after plan by the secret service gets foiled by internal espionage, and finally the female agent is put in custody of the evil organization, along with 326’s right hand man. 326 has to get them out of a death trap in the mastermind’s bank, besides finding the mastermind himself. They manage to do find the secret lair, barely, through clouds of gas that were meant to suffocate the prisoners and keep the police and secret agents busy while the mastermind made his escape. He appears through most of the film in a wheelchair, but looks like he’s going to leap out of it to attack somebody in more than one scene. It’s actually no surprise when he does get up and walk away from his prisoners towards the end. And naturally he gets captured, when 326 realizes he has yet another job as a clown - who is an “undercover” agent for his own agency to boot! They go to the clown’s performance and stand stonily in the crowd, guns visible in holsters, while the clown pretends to shoot balloons and other things with a pop gun. Except he also shoots at a couple of officers before he realizes he’s surrounded, so maybe it’s a real gun after all? And when he sees that there’s no escape, he shoots himself in the head and yells, “Curtain!” while the crowd applauds enthusiastically. It’s a damn weird ending.
Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse/El testamento del Dr. Mabuse/The Testament of Dr. Masbuse is also a Fritz Lang film, but from a few years later. This one is a talky. It’s also a police thriller, based on a novel, and a sequel to a movie I have not seen. Dr. Mabuse is a mad genius, so mad that he has been confined to a mental hospital where he incessantly writes out instructions for committing crimes. Some of them are run-of-the-mill robberies, but there are also what are basically terrorist attacks. The whole point of Mabuse’s activity is to instill fear and destroy hope in the populace. He’s something of a prototype for Christopher Nolan’s Joker. Although he’s locked up, somehow his plans are being leaked to a criminal gang and the police want to know how, dammit. The police commissioner is taking the case rather personally, since a young man he sponsored for the force has been driven mad by what he has discovered about the gang. They find Mabuse’s name scratched into the glass of the man’s apartment and talk to the head of the hospital, only to discover that Mabuse has died the night before. Another doctor from the hospital is gunned down in his car, which leads the commissioner to talk to the head of the hospital again. The doctor is acting more and more suspiciously, but there’s nothing to connect him directly to any of the criminal activity. He does see Mabuse in spirit, but you might think he’s just hallucinating due to overwork and stress, or is one of those people who go into psychiatry to solve their own problems. One of the gang members is getting tired of his life of crime, however. He has fallen in love and wishes he could go straight to give his girlfriend a more stable life. Like any gang, though, it’s much tougher to get out than in, and the other members lock both of them in the “meeting room” where they receive instructions from an unseen man behind a curtain. It turns out there is only a cutout silhouette and a loudspeaker on a table behind that curtain, and no way out of the room, that has a hidden explosive somewhere. In desperation, with no way to break out, the repentant criminal cuts open a water pipe, hoping the water will protect them from the explosion, which might blow a hole in a wall for them to escape before they drown. The hole actually ends up in the floor, all the water rushes out, and the pair follow it, ready to run to the police. The commissioner has captured some of the gang and works it out so the doctor has to come to the station to recognize them. None of them recognize each other, but when the other one shows up and says his name, the doctor reacts. He then says he only repeated the name because the commissioner said it, which is still kind of weird, but no proof. He returns to the hospital and the ex-criminal goes with the commissioner to see if they can catch him doing something. They go into his office when the ex-criminal recognizes his recorded voice as that of his former boss, plus they find the plans to blow up a chemical factory and cause terror. They are too late to stop the attack from happening, but they manage to catch the doctor watching from the woods and they chase him back to the hospital, where he gets into the room where the commissioner’s protegé is, where Mabuse himself once was, and the doctor begins to tear up the plans that Mabuse had left behind for him.
