Homebrewers Joshua Hubner and Mike Stein will make their pro debut at Smoke and Barrel in Adams Morgan. (Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post) For amateur brewers Joshua Hubner and Mike Stein of the DC Homebrewers club, it was their first taste of brewing on a professional level. And the public will get its first taste of their beer, the Wandering Belgian, on Wednesday at 5 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel in Adams Morgan.

For a while, the two have helped out on a volunteer basis at Lost Rhino Brewing Co. in Ashburn, “doing everything from milling grain to mashing in to checking temperatures to hop additions. . . the whole nine yards,” says Hubner. When they presented Lost Rhino’s co-owner and head brewer Favio Garcia with a homebrew recipe they’d perfected in their apartments, he helped them ramp it up to a 15-barrel batch.

Of all the stores that Casey Patten and David Mazza have opened, none has been more challenging than Taylor Charles Steak & Ice, the Philadelphia cheesesteak shop that will mark the partners’ first eatery outside their Taylor Gourmet brand.

Originally scheduled to open last December, Taylor Charles Steak & Ice has run into more obstacles than RGIII on his way to the end zone. The principal obstruction has been the physical building at 1320 H St. NE, which was in worse shape than either Patten or Mazza expected. The partners have had to rebuild a significant portion of the space — and, of course, keep resubmitting plans to the city for approval — which pushed back the opening date by a full year.

The guys now plan to launch Taylor Charles in the first week of December, Patten tells All We Can Eat.

“We’ll probably put 15 or 16 months into this whole thing,” says Patten, a Philly native. “We’ve never done anything like that.” He says he and Mazza didn’t even spend that much time opening the original Taylor Gourmet on H Street NE, which they built out themselves.

Can you imagine an old backyard smoker like this one in a national barbecue museum? (Jim Shahin for The Washington Post) Editor’s note: This is the second of a two-part series on the Barbecue Hall of Fame. You can read the first installment here.

Did you know that, in Wisconsin, tourists can visit a mustard museum? There’s a pizza museum in Philadelphia and a cocktail museum in — where else? — New Orleans. There are museums seemingly for every conceivable foodstuff, including, perhaps most famously, Dr. Pepper. That’s right, a museum for a soda pop.

You know what there isn’t? A barbecue museum.

A week and a half ago, the American Royal inducted three people into something it calls a Barbecue Hall of Fame. In any real sense — that is, a building or even, for that matter, a Web site — the thing doesn’t exist. Which, as I noted in this space last week, is probably just as well, since only one of the inductees merits the honor.

A Barbecue Hall of Fame seems like one of those “doh!” ideas. Obvious and simple. But it is deceptively complicated. The problem begins, as with everything in barbecue, with definition. (Just what is barbecue? That question will turn an ordinary man into a Talmudic scholar-meets-professional wrestler.) Yet it is important to have a clear sense of what, exactly, a Hall of Fame is, and what it is for.

You’re looking at the author of “Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry.” (Shannon Jensen) Cathy Barrow, a.k.a. Mrs Wheelbarrow, is on a roll.

The 55-year-old Washington cooking instructor and food blogger set her sights on becoming a food writer (for pay!) in 2012, after having co-created Charcutepalooza, the preceding Year of Meat in which Barrow devised monthly challenges in preserving and curing that ended with the winner, Peter Barrett of A Cook Blog, spending a fabulous, food-filled week in France.

Before long, Barrow’s byline was appearing in the Food section and in the New York Times’ Dining & Wine — both nice places to kick off a freelance career, with magazine opportunities on the horizon (see Garden and Gun’s Oct/Nov issue). Two of her recipes appear in “The Food52 Cookbook.” The Source executive chef Scott Drewno recently beat a path to her door for a private pickling and preserving tutorial.

Today, she shared the news with All We Can Eat that sometime in late 2014, W.W. Norton will publish “Mrs. Wheelbarrow’s Practical Pantry,” her very first cookbook.

If any “poll” is vulnerable to ma­nipu­la­tion, or outright fraud, it’s these food-and-drink surveys in which convenient stores, burger joints and restaurants ask you to “vote” for a candidate by ordering a specific dish or choosing the appropriately colored coffee container. I imagine operatives for well-funded PACs buying homeless people lunch, but only if they order, say, the Mexican Mitt-Loaf Bowl at California Tortilla.

These are the kind of polls that Vladi­mir Putin could love.

And yet: In a city obsessed with politics and elections, no straw poll goes ignored, no matter how frivolous. Which is why All We Can Eat checked the latest numbers on presidential polls taking place at local and national fueling stations. The results are after the jump.