Tom Pepinsky

Category: Food and Drink

  • Stark Beer (Bali)

    Four years and two days ago I reviewed three beers from the Storm Brewery in Bali. Yesterday, back at the same mall, I picked up two more from the Stark brewery (also in Bali).

    I also had to pick up a Bintang. You know, as a control beer.

    ASIDE: Apparently that last post attracted a lot of comments! Note the Australian commenter David Horovitz holding forth that some lousy “craft” brewery in Bali produces a beer that’s so complex that an unsophisticate like me just can’t understand it. This is why the developed world doesn’t take Australians seriously.

    But I digress. For my last post, a review of two Stark beers. And as before, the disclaimer that I don’t know how to taste and rate beer applies.

    Stark Wheat

    Medium head that dissipates quickly. Golden-to-orangish color (at least when viewed through my hotel room coffee mug). Citrus-y nose, with some light hops, not unlike a Sam Adam’s Summer. Very forward citrus on the initial taste, verging toward sour in the middle. Lingering finish, with yeasty notes appearing. Overall: a mass-market style wheat beer, lacking something in the subtlety department but not unpleasant. Would be a nice change from the adjunct lagers that dominate the Indonesian market.

    Stark Dark Wheat

    Bigger head than the Wheat, but still doesn’t linger. Brownish color in the mug. Same citrus on the nose, but also hints of nut and malt—the exact same aroma as characterizes Ithaca Butt Brown. Initial taste is citrus. Nutty flavors emerge later, and the finish is mostly sour. Overall: Like its lighter cousin, an interesting alternative to Bintang and Anker, but probably less drinkable over the course of a long evening.

  • Malaysian Food Vocabulary Smackdown Watch, Brinjal Edition

    One of the benefits of having maintained a blog for 8½ years is that people end up looking at your old posts for all sorts of random reasons. For example, in the past 24 hours, people have found this blog by searching for

    • char kway tiauw
    • tom pepinsky causation
    • volkstellingen java
    • south vietnam what it could have been
    • roti canai using wheat flour recipe

    and dozens of other weird search strings. Every month or so I get an angry comment about how we wrote something outlandish six years ago. Which leads us to today’s Malaysian food vocabulary correction.

    Let’s go back to 2005—when I was still a graduate student, JMP was JM, our two kids were negative 4 and negative 7 years old, George W. Bush was early in his second term, etc.—to our post on the etymology of eggplant. We wrote that

    The local Austronesian word, terung, is kept in Indonesia, but has died out in Malaysia.

    However, a helpful Malaysian today commented that

    No it hasn’t

    Hmm. I just checked our Malay-language recipe books, Masakan Favorit Nyonya and Aneka Kerabu dan Sambal. The former has a recipe for Terung Masak Santan (eggplant with coconut milk), and the latter for Kerabu Terung (mixed veg [or however you’d translate kerabu] eggplant). If you google “kerabu brinjal” there are a couple of hits, but they are basically English-language pages. There are no results for “brinjal masak santan.”

    It is clear that the Malaysian commenter is right. We stand corrected. Brinjal is one of words used for eggplant in Malaysian English. Terung is the Malay word, just like in Indonesia.