Contracervisial

SECURE STORAGE CATALOG RECORD 23-0-119674
FACILITY 23 / LEVEL E / CELL 1138 / NICHE 4-11
BLACK UNCLASS
HAZARD RATING: NEGLIGIBLE

DESIGNATION: The Antibeer

HANDLING PROCEDURES: No physical (baryonic matter) contact beyond border of magnetic bottle. Ensure radiation shielding remains in place except when work with this item is in progress to prevent scintillation effects. Maintain electrical power supply to containment at all times; in event of power failure exceeding two (2) hours in length, execute special disposal protocol CT-14. Not for cismaterial consumption.

DESCRIPTION: A synthetic fermented drink, the Antibeer is the product of a somewhat ill-advised wager made during an afterparty following the sixth day of the 147th Conference on Particle Physics Applications. After a heated and liquor-enhanced argument over the merits of Academician Perna Medanis-ith-Medanis’s proposed method for the production of stable higher-order anti-atoms and their orderly combination into anti-molecules, a challenge was offered and accepted, and the participants in the aforementioned argument procured the use of the host institution’s particle physics laboratories.

The end result of this was a small quantity (approximately 125 ml) of liquid antimatter composed primarily of antiwater and antiethanol, packaged in a modified commercial magnetic bottle with a handwritten label attached, designating it “The Antibeer”.

The Antibeer itself was voluntarily surrendered for secure containment, on the proviso that it be returned to its developers for testing when and if, in the future, an antidrinker should exist capable of consuming it.

Trope-a-Day: Drink Order

Drink Order: It’s always hard to give solid answers when it comes to these things, but maybe we can have some generalities.

The most common (non-alcoholic) drink on Eliéra is esklav, from the bean of Esklavea sendaren, a shrub with no exact Terran analog. It’s close to coffee but not quite so harshly bitter, with hints of cinnamon and chocolate in its flavor. Served traditionally in small cups (or diluted in large mugs) with brown sugar, cacao chocolate, and cream. And contains both caffeine and theobromine, along with a number of other alkaloids of similar chemical structure. People drink a lot of this. It’s what keeps the world working.

Also popular in various regions:

On the Cestian continent, cider (of a variety of varieties) is most popular, followed up by mead and beer, the latter especially in the Alatian port-towns. Selenaria started out mostly wine-drinking and has excellent vineyards to the south and along the foothills of the volcanic Makerforges, but beer made rapid inroads during the Era of Steam and Steel, as more compatible with operating heavy machinery after lunch. Currently they’re big beer producers because they’re also big grain producers.

North of there, in Veranthyr, cider is the day-to-day drink, but they make a variety of liquors from fruits of all sorts which are classically deceptive. Taste sweet, and harmless, and delicious, and moreish. And then you fall over.

Up in the Silver Crescent, they drink strong black beers, mead in the lowlands, and whisky, varying from whisky smooth as golden nectar to rough firewhisky best drunk with a dollop of the local honey mixed in unless you enjoy having the lining stripped off your throat and sinuses.

The beer tends to come from microbreweries. It’s not that there aren’t large breweries, but those tend to be microbreweries-in-spirit, the sort of places that we might call minibreweries, because (a) it is hard to scale beer production without losing experimentalism, quirkiness, and the attention to detail that stops it from turning into rat piss, and (b) it is even harder to convince people that you can brew non-rat-piss beer on a large scale.

Taking a brief look at some other species, dar-bandal favor beer almost universally, typically heavy stouts and porters with the yeast unfiltered – and don’t forget to lap it up, it improves the bouquet. Anything kaeth particularly enjoy drinking is certainly flammable and probably radioactive, so use caution. And ciseflish drinks are served around 80 K, so warm-blooded oxygen-breathers need not apply.

Esseli drinks are always innovative and delicious, but unless you’re accustomed to and comfortable with biotechnology, do not ask what they were secreted by.

 

Ballistic Brew

Ballistic Brewery, ICC to Hanth & Mallon Restaurants (Pádíäz System), ICC, greetings.

Valmiríän Oricalcios,

Thank you for your interest in our selection of fine beers for the discerning spacer palate.

To be sure that we can satisfy your requirements, let me explain to you how the Ballistic Beer process works. The initial stages of brewing are carried out in our own facilities, in your case at Gallítra Station in the Pádíäz-Solar L4 point. We take grain from the skyfarms surrounding our station, malt, kiln, mash, and sparge it. We then copper and boil the resulting wort with the unique combinations of hops, sugars, and herbs that give each of our beers their unique flavor.

When we receive your order, the selected wort is transferred to one of our Puncheon-class fermenter-tankers, along with the appropriate yeast culture, and the Puncheon is dispatched to you. The transfer orbit of the Puncheon is carefully computed to allow for the necessary weeks or months of fermentation and conditioning under thrust gravity, in order to reach you at the moment of peak flavor. Once the beer is finally racked, wood conditioning or other late-stage refinements can be imparted in the Puncheon’s final tank.

When the Puncheon reaches your station, you offload the beer by fluid transfer, either directly into your own cask tanks or for local bottling or kegging (facilities and resale licenses for either of these can be leased from us). The yeast residue remaining in the fermenter can be returned to us with the Puncheon, or retained for local use for a nominal fee. We request that you refuel the Puncheon for its return voyage as part of your payment schedule.

(Note: All of our beers are naturally carbonic. As such, you should be prepared to accept the listed associated CO2 release into your local life-support capacity. We also recommend that they be served only in non-microgravity areas and that drinkers remain in these areas for the stated effervescence interval to prevent discomfort.)

Available for immediate shipment, in the Pádíäz System, are our Callaneth’s Finest, Starlight Irdesh, Miról Lambic, Three-Axis Pale Ale, Red Rocket Red, Singularity Stout, and Oúrghaz’s Heavy, each available in 25-barrel, 50-barrel, 100-barrel, and 300-barrel shipments. We will, of course, be happy to produce any of our other beers for you given sufficient lead time.

I have enclosed for your further information more details of our beers, along with full details of technical requirements and other necessities, and payment information for a variety of order sizes and schedules.

On behalf of all of us here at the Ballistic Brewery, we hope to be able to offer you a drink soon!

Talan Kellis, Brewmaster’s Second,

for and on behalf of

Ballistic Brewery, ICC

Home on Lagrange

It was understood relatively early in Project Redblossom that Talentar would become a major food-exporting planet as the ecopoesis continued. As the major geophysical stages were completed, the planet warmed, water was introduced, and the microbiome became established, it became time to introduce macroscopic flora, among the earliest of which called for by the ecopoesis plan were grasses to bind the regolith dunes.

It did not escape the ecotects’ attention that the grass family included a variety of commercially-viable flora, most obviously the widely used grains landesh and irdesh, and that incorporating these into the ecopoesis plan would help to render it self-sustaining in more ways than one. Thus, an extensive agricultural industry rapidly grew up around the early colonies, especially those located in the lowlands of Kirinal Planum, exporting vast quantities of bread, beer, and raw grain to the system’s expanding population of drifts and orbital habitats – aided in this by the relative shallowness of Talentar’s gravity well as compared to Eliéra’s, and Talentar’s possession of the system’s first orbital elevator. The ecotects required that part of the payment for these goods be made in nitrogenous and other organic waste collected from the habitats, which became feedstock to their dirt farming programs and thus in turn expanded Talentar’s fertile regions; a virtuous cycle.

Unanticipated was what followed. Commercial grains, being insufficient in themselves for a stable ecological tier, were by no means the only grasses spreading on Talentar. Forty-seven years after the initiation of this program, a ranchers’ consortium from the Iniositac-Variasotec Commonwealth, observing the spread of common grasses in less desirable regions of the planet, obtained title to one of the largest contiguous areas of this “Talentarian prairie”. A year later, they introduced the first Rieltelir-adapt quebérúr, modified Eliéran cattle capable of breathing the low-oxygen, high-dioxide atmosphere, shaggier and better able to live in cold conditions, the dung from whose grazing in turn helped expand these prairie regions. While the export of quebérúr meat was much lower in volume than grain exports, it was much higher value due to the near-impossibility at that time of producing such anywhere else in the system with a relatively shallow well, and several fortunes were made in this new business.

And to this day, the Carbon-Carbon Grill at Suléyn Dome still serves the best non-vat quebérúr steak in the Lumenna-Súnáris System.

Talentar Blossoming: the Early Years,
Vallis Muetry-ith-Miritar

The Age of Flavor

Rejoice, my fellow canids, for the Age of Flavor has come!

While it has taken a few years, ranchers and meatwrights across the Empire are finally beginning to sell the meat they produce in a manner appropriate for those of us blessed with our sense of smell.  While a few of our cousins may be able to discern a few of the subtleties of flavor found between naturally raised meat and vatmeat, to us, that distinction is as clear as night and day.

And now, those differences can be savored.  Following on from last month’s article on spicing up the blandness of much vatmeat, Vhúfkarr Rúägh begins a new series in this month’s issue taking us through the subtleties of today’s luxury meat market for the discerning nose; from the distinctive herbal tang of the hasérúr ranches of the Selenarian plains, the almost metallic notes from the Azikhan high valleys, the sweet overtones of the vine-fed animals of Palar and Istalyn, to the subtle nuttiness of a Veranthyr woodsbred.  Over the next year, learn how to find and procure these and a dozen other varieties of hasérgalrás raised especially for this market, and how to prepare them to best bring out their flavor.

Relatedly, our alcohol correspondent (Evell Cerron-ith-Cerron) discusses the new trend in microbrewing with a range of unsedimented, extra-yeasty dark beers appearing to suit the canine palate, and with Vhúfkarr makes some suggestions on how to coordinate them with your choice of meat.

Also in this month’s issue: a selection of recipes for Phílae handfish, how to cook with, rather than in, microgravity, and a guide to best matching spices across the Empire’s six most popular metabolic biochemistries.

Until next month, good hunting!

– editorial page, Calenmot issue of A Taste of Taste magazine


(Much as I hate to play Mr. Disclaimer here – dogs, and other canids, who haven’t been removed from Earth as ancient wolves, spent thousands upon thousands of years evolving separately, been domesticated by another species entirely, been selectively bred, genetically engineered, uplifted to sophoncy, and then genetically engineered again can’t metabolize alcohol, and are in fact poisoned by it.  So while the dar-bandal of the Empire may, thanks to their artificially enhanced livers, enjoy a nice thick stout with their steak – don’t give your dog a beer, m’kay?)