A Poorly Written Journal of Home Brewing, Bike Messenger Nonsense, and My Two Slightly Interesting Housemates
Anne and I passed some sort of relationship mile stone over the holidays. Not as big as deciding to raise chickens together but still significant. For Thanksgiving Anne went to Colorado to see my family, eat, get drunk, and shoot guns. For Christmas I went to Utah to see her family, eat, not get drunk, snowshoe, sled, and make fun of Mormons. It all worked out so well a think we’ll do it again next year.
Click the photo to see the rest of the set.
I’m sure it is hard enough to build a Long Haul when you have tubing cut to spec. Who ever built this did it with parts of old bikes and crap that must have been lying around their yard. Pure genius.
I slacked off a lot over the holidays. I was coasting on the glory of our Xmas porter which was a big hit. Claire and I had 10 gallons of punk house ale racked and in carboys. Also Claire and Cliffy had several carboys of grape wine and cider bubbling away. But the holidays ended and the ale started looking a little funky. Claire wanted to bottle it and I kept putting it off. Finally I gave in after some pointed threats to my safety. Claire claimed she could punch me in a place that will make me crap my pants. When we finally went to bottle the ale it was true that it did look really gross. But when we tasted it it was delish. Not to mention that the hydrometer rang it up at 10.5% abv! The Punk House ale is a Belgian farmhouse ale fermented for 3 months with a new Wyeast saison strain and also spiced with cardamon and orange peels then bottle fermented.
So thats the old news. The new news is pretty good too. Claire figures her basement hovers around 50 degres all winter and we could do lagers down there as a very seasonal project (Brew Club does everything very traditionally ie simple equipment, slightly dirty, and with as small an outlay of cash as possible. I think old Belgian farmers would really like us). Right now there’s 10 gallons of some micro brew clone I can’t remember the name of down in dark. Tomorrow we’re doing another 10 gallons of pre-prohibition lager with the first ones yeast mother and our home grown mystery hops. They should both be ready to drink by early summer or whenever it gets too warm to lager them in the basement. Whichever comes first.
The future looks good also. We’re brewing up some Thunderblured for both the Westside Invite and the NACCC in Chicago. R Kelly has us making 20 gallons for the Rickreal Open and Eric at Stumptown Printers has us for another 20 for his wedding. The Brew Tower of Power is still coming together as Thud finds time. Hopefully we will get to do some of these bigger batches on it in early summer.
Claire and I are happy to do special batches for our friends. We just need a month or more warning. We bill you for just the ingredients and we keg it, deliver it, set it up, and help you drink it. What a deal!
Bike Messenger Prom: 2 Tickets 2 Paradise
Originally uploaded by sweetpeabicycles
“Holy shit! Check out my strapless dress!”
-Claire
Originally uploaded by i5prof
Anne was blogged again a couple of weeks ago. Is blogged a word? You should read the comments. Talk about self esteam building.
So this lady tied her goat off on a tree in front of the Starbucks at Pioneer Square. Meagan wanted her picture with it and I obliged. I put this photo on my bag and now a couple of times a day I have to explain why this isn’t the strangest thing I’ve ever seen working downtown. Actually I can’t think off anything weirder off hand. I’m going to pull the veteran card right now. I have been working on the street so long now that I don’t know any more what the weirdest thing I’ve seen is anymore. It all kind of runs together. Still I am going to tag this one Meagan Queen of Messengers.
So Anne and I headed off to Colorado. I have an Aunt Amy and Uncle Lyndon that run a ranch out there. Aside from the booze, guns, and Cousin Kiffen it would have been a total Norman Rockwell painting. The reality is that this Thanksgiving set the bar so high for holidays that from now on that I may just have to set off for Deer Trail for Flag Day and Arbor Day too. Switch to the Flickr and you might get a better idea.
Oh dear friends I had nearly forgotten about you. But no worry as Red Headed Stranger says “There’s more old drunks than old doctors so let’s have another round!”.
I didn’t know what the Oxford English Dictionary was until Anne explained it to me. This should be obvious from my writing. Claire however has lusted over this massive dictionary for some time. So through a strange series of events she got her tiny hands on the latest copy. After she finished sleeping with it and finally built it a shelf she gave it a coming out party. These are some of the pictures from that party. I still haven’t looked up anything in it. I think my vocabulary might be so limited that I don’t know of any words I don’t know the meaning of.
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