Lying in Chinatown: How to play Chui Niu
Chui Niu or Da Hua Shai is a staple at Chinese karaoke bars and drinking parties. The game, called Liar’s Dice in English is all about lying and calling your opponents bluff. Learn how to play!
Coffee and work. Work and coffee. For millions, these are two inseparable ideas. We sip coffee while we work. Our coworkers display desktop kitsch to remind us of their dependency on caffeine. Our bosses even spend company money making sure the office brewing apparatus is well stocked. Coffee is oil for the hourly-wage machine. As a matter of fact, it is the second most important commodity in the modern world, right behind oil. We know that we work on coffee, but how does coffee work?
The bitter brown drink brewing on our countertops every morning goes through a variety of natural and artificial changes before it scalds our tongues. That process starts with a plant which could be any of 66 species in the Rubiaceae family. The variety Coffea arabica, from which 2/3rds of all coffee cups are brewed gloablly, yields quality coffee with considerable caffeine.
Coffee only works because of the natural compounds that develop in its fruit. Before the cherry is ripe, the bean lacks the proteins that would eventually give the drink its aroma and taste. These proteins will make up around 10% of coffee’s weight. Once ripe, the berry is notable for its thick cell walls made of cellulose, which help to pressure cook the compounds inside when roasted. These make up almost 50% of the weight of green coffee. The soluble carbohydrates like fructose and glucose in the bean help to thicken coffee’s texture, hold flavor in the brew, and stabilize foam. Importantly, the alkaloid caffeine makes up between 1-4% of dry coffee’s weight. Nevertheless, eating coffee cherries won’t help us meet our deadlines.
These compounds are not readily available to the groggy drinker. The berry envelops the useful bean in several layers: pericarp, mesocarp, mucilage, endocarp, and finally endosperm. In more common terms, there is a skin surrounding a pulp surrounding a membrane surrounding a parchment, surrounding a “silver skin.” Once the cherry is harvested, these must all be removed in succession to avoid rotting and to extract the potent pit. The cherries are pulped, dried, threshed and sometimes polished before being sorted and bagged as green coffee for roasting.
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Chui Niu or Da Hua Shai is a staple at Chinese karaoke bars and drinking parties. The game, called Liar’s Dice in English is all about lying and calling your opponents bluff. Learn how to play!
Rather than just getting drunk, many native Mexican peoples liked to cut their booze with other intoxicating substances. Among them, peyote, morning glory seeds, mushrooms, and even a poisonous toad. These additions could influence the fermentation of alcohol, but also heightened the religious experience of drinking.
Prohibition resulted from the Christian Temperance Movement trying to force others to stop drinking. In more ancient times, the opposite happened. The Christian Emperor Theodosius the Great accused certain Christian fringe groups who abstained from wine of heresy. For their abstinence, they were threatened with execution.
There is another moonshine in the United States of America. It hides on the island of Puerto Rico, where distillers make pitorro out of sugar cane and fruits. Port Morris Distillery in the Bronx brings this spirit to New York and keeps the tradition alive.
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