The other night, I was sitting in on Tim's Beekeeping 101 class when he mentioned that prior to 1622 or so, there weren't any honey bees in North America. Yeah, that's right.
Europeans brought them upon emigrating, and though they hit the East Coast early, it took over 200 years for them to get all the way to California. One colonist, John Eliot, even says that Native Americans referred to honeybees as the "white man's fly."
The...
We're kicking off a new bar room lecture series all about food, and you're all invited to our very first one on Tuesday, January 31st. Welcome to Masters of Social Gastronomy! That's MSG, of course.
Each month, Sarah Lohman of Four Pounds Flour and Jonathan Soma of the Brooklyn Brainery will take on a curious food topic and break down the history, science, and stories behind it.
This month's topic is STRANGE MEAT! Sarah will recount...
I just returned from the frozen outdoors after today's Lower East Side Street Art tour, taking in some of the city's most interesting and illegal art.
Lia, our awesome guide, showed us a million stickers, tags, wheatpaste posters and murals, and I've done my best to remember a few of them are so you can tour at your own leisure.
One thing to remember--beside the fact that these works can fade into the city's background noise if...
Last night I sat in on our Sour Beer class. You might've had a lambic before, or seen them sitting around at a bodega around you - fancy half-wine-looking contraptions full of corks and wire and a comparatively hefty price tag. Although there are a ton of types of sour beer, lambics are probably the most easily found.
Preface: Sour beer is a traditionally Belgian brew made in an unsterile environment, which lets all kinds of crazy yeasts and...
My favorite fact from last night's Coffee: Comparative Brewing Methods wasn't about brewing methods at all, but about the coffee beans themselves: Coffee is seasonal. Just like anything you pick up at the farmers market waxes and wanes over the year, coffee beans are the same way.
Let's take Guatemalan coffee as an example. It's harvested between December and March, but there's about a 3-month lag between harvesting and shipping, so you...
