What? More beer? This time another Hitachino variety I haven’t had yet, the XH. Labeled as matured in sake casks. Pours cloudy dark brown with extremely strong head. Sorry, I passed out before I could write a review so my thoughts are a bit cloudy on it. I blame the high 8%ABV. I didn’t really detect the cask flavors. I recall the sweet then sourness. It reminded me again of drunk juice malt liquors that I do not like. I can’t say I’m having a very good track record with the Hitachino’s, 2.5 out of 4 booze sleeping monkeys.
Archive for the 'Review' Category
Catching up on a past brew here! Seasonal brew, pours with small head, very dark. Pretty strong roasted flavor, pretty effervescent feel on tongue, dry, lingering bitter from the roast. I like, but not an intensely complex beer. 5.3% ABV, not high. 3 out of 4 dark roast monkeys.
Discovered at Foodland Farms this Hitachino variety I haven’t seen elsewhere. Pours with a pretty good head, cloudy medium dark brown. Touch floral aroma and hint of spices but not strongly hoppy. There’s some sour in there, and a bit of lingering bitter. Reading the label tells of vanilla, corriander, orange peel, but this is no Hoegarten, which I just happened to have had one earlier. Though not offensive, it does not appeal to my tastes. High ABV of 9%. Not quite 3 out of 4 drunken monekys.
There is no better way to antangonize anything than to threaten it’s food, and us humans are no exception. So it was this Saturday evening at Windward Mall IHOP. I had heard rumours of bad service, but I had no idea until experiencing it first hand. This night after a Cruise night found us in need of some food, the IHOP was conveniently located, and pancakes sounded good. We thought there might be a wait, but stepping inside that wasn’t the case. It wasn’t that crowded inside. What we didn’t realize that this also seemed to apply to the staff, there aparently wasn’t enough staff. Or so we would like to hope. It took an hour, at least, from when seated to getting our food. Tell me it takes that long to make a bunch of pancakes, steak & eggs, omlette, and sausage. I actually didn’t have much to complain about the food, it was tasty, the steak was tender, eggs cooked properly, but it took ridiculously long. Five minutes longer and we would halve walked. 
Hana hou? I sure as heck hope not! And I am sure not going to give them another chance! 1 out of 4 raving mad hungry monkeys (Moe “I want some cake” anyone?) because the food was decent for what you expect from a place like this, but the delay was simply unacceptable.
Popped into the newly remodeled and opened Foodland Farms at Aina Haina. It’s kind of a mini “Whole Paycheck” market. They borrowed a lot of aspects with the areas of higher end products, deli, and prepared foods, but not quite as extensive. The beer selection is also pretty good with some items I haven’t seen elsewhere, but again is nowhere as extensive as Whole Foods. What I did spy was this Sierra Nevada Bigfoot Ale. With a name like that I simply could not resist. Pours with a pretty strong head, simply popping the cap produced bubbles in the bottle neck. Color is a medium dark somewhat cloudy amber. Immediate floral aroma without even taking a sip. It is strongly hoppy, the bitter hits you from the begining, it’s no aftertaste here! I guess Bigfoot like drinking flowers? 
It demands to be drunk while eating something hearty and strongly flavored, I had it with a herbed roasted chicken and it worked well. I don’t know if I could handle drinking this by itself. Thankfully it doesn’t have the syrupy sweet that immediately turns me off, although I have to wonder how they achieved the butt kicking 9.6%ABV, and the label does say barleywine style. I only now coming off the buzz from that one bottle. I have a hard time rating this. I enjoyed it with my meal, perhaps the ABV helped, but I had a hard time finishing it after my food was done. I guess go with middle of the road 2 out of 4 bigmonkeys?
In anticipation of the upcoming Whistler snowboarding trip, I wanted to update my first aid kit. I have heard of these coagulating products from reports coming back form the sandbox. For heavy trauma, even arterial bleeding, this stuff forces the leaking blood to coagulate and form a mass. The blood flow in adjacent tissue is unaffected, so there are none of the necrotizing effects associated with tourniquets. For amputations, a tourniquet would be required, but for nearly anything less, packing on coagulating agent seems to be the best course of action to stop the bleeding while the victim is being transported to a medical facility. Bigger hole = more packs of coagulant. Continue reading ‘Quikclot Sport’
I dropped by Target in Kapolei for some small items from the pharmacy. They had neither the simple breath strips nor the esoteric traumatic bleeding clotting agent that I was looking for. While looking at their selection of bandaging tape, I took a look at their in-house brand. Unlike the in-house Long’s/CVS stuff, the Target stuff was made in The PRC. No, there really is no way I’m going to buy medical-related supplies, of all things, from China. Sorry!
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Alright guys, you need to give the people in the packing department more material and stop skimping. This is the second package of high dollar fairly sensitive electronic and optical equipment I ordered from them that arrived with inadequate packing. Is the risk and return rate worth the savings in material? Sheesh! When I picked up the box and did the tilt test, I already could tell they had done it again, hearing the item inside sliding around freely. They were lucky with this one, Panasonic’s OEM packaging for this lens was fairly minimal. I am going to yet again write a negative feedback on packing to Amazon, this time probably more scathing than my previous one. Lemme dig up my pic for that one….
Ah, here we go, the camera had some fairly robust OEM packaging, but still…. It bugs me. Both pieces of equipment appear to have survived intact and fine, but really, a big name mail order business like this really should take more care in their packing. Even a monkey could have packed these better!
I was cleaning out my wallet today at lunchtime, and found the receipt from the time I went to Good to Grill after the Honolulu Marathon. $8 USD for the Surfer Special (2 pancakes, 2 eggs, bacon or SPAM) and $2.50 USD for a cup of coffee. The food was fine, and they actually had real butter instead of margerine for the pancakes, but all the service items were third-party prepacks from like Y. Hata or somewhere like that. The service was excellent. One of our group even knew the owner, and we got to meet him when he came by before just we left, but we had attentive service before any of the staff knew this. I would have to drop by for lunch or dinner to really pass judgement, but from this breakfast experience, I’d say that I was underwhelmed, in particular value wise. The Euro Illy coffee was just coffee – there are so many good locally-produced coffees that the rationale of bringing in a supposed premium European brand feels like pompous name-dropping.
Ambivalent – give them a try and see what you think
Two-and-a-half out of four breakfast scarfing monkeys.
The New Year in Hawaii means interesting seasonal entertainment from Japan on KIKU-TV. The general worldwide economic downturn has been reflected in this annual spectacle in more austere sets and decreased use of expensive shots like the helicopter fly-in on ELT on a rooftop stage at the opening many years back. The talent level has remained fairly consistent through the years, so the enjoyment level has remained pretty much the same. Here are some reflections on this year: Continue reading ‘2010 60th Annual NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen’