cask days 2014 standouts

Welcome to Quebec!

I’d be remiss to go to a beer festival & not even chronicle the most delicious, interesting, and uh…questionable?? beers I sampled, so here goes! 

Cask Days was broken up by region – so each province had its own section, plus a section for some UK imports and this years featured US region:  California.  It was so funny to us to see all the Canadians going crazy over the California beers – they cost double the tokens and everything!!  Then again, if I didn’t live where I had constant access to Stone, Green Flash, Lagunitas, Ballast Point, etc., I probably would have done the same.  The cool thing was that a lot of the California breweries had modified their beers for the cask process – so it wasn’t just Stone IPA, it was “Stone IPA with raspberries and jasmine and etc., etc.”.  Kinda cool that us Americans did get a little surprises taste as well.  So, for posterity (and so I can remember when they finally start internationally distributing!!), a brief list of some of the notable tastes:

Ballast Point Brewing - Victory at Sea with Cacao Nibs & Ghost Pepper;
I actually tried this pre-Cask Days at BarVolo, but had it again on Saturday as well.  The cask notes on the tap list at BarVolo didn’t list, of all things, the ghost pepper part!?!  My dad ordered it accidentally (his intention had been to pick up Dieu du Ciel’s Peche Mortel, but he misread the numbers), but this baby was delicious.  The ghost peppers gave it some serious heat at the end, but the thick chocolate stout part of it was the perfect balance for the spice.  I’m a big fan of the chocolate/chipotle beer (Odd Side Ales’ Mayan Mocha Stout is one of my all-time favorites), but usually the spice is a little more muted.  I really liked just how dominant it was in the this one.

Monkish Brewing Company - Brown Habit W/ Thai Basil & Sriracha;

This was my, “I couldn’t drink a whole pint of that, but…” beer of the festival.  I’ve never had the original Brown Habit (although now I’d really like to), but this casked variation of it was amazing.  It literally tasted like drinking a glass of Pad Cashew – but despite how that sounds, it was NOT disgusting.  The basil and the sriracha worked perfectly with the malts to give it that Thai food feel (sans-spice), and in a way that created this weird delicious savory beer.  Sometimes I feel like the additions to cask beers are just too much (seventeen kinds of fruits/flowers/spices are SO not necessary – now it just tastes like I’m eating somebody’s fruit salad floral arrangement & I can’t pick out ANY individual flavors), but this was cask experimentation done 100% right.

Stone - Sublimely Self-Righteous with Spruce & Cherry;

All of Stone’s offerings were variations of their mainstays (Go-To IPA, Ruination, etc.) with about a thousand different mix-ins added when they were casked.  Like I said above, I think a lot of them were just too much (my first beer was the Stone IPA with Raspberry, Jasmine, Lime, Chili and Mango, and I honestly couldn’t pick out a single one of those flavors except raspberry on the nose and a tiny bit of soapy jasmine at the end – it was just a cloying sweet muddle interrupting my IPA), but this one was spot on perfect.  The especially cool thing was that I’m not honestly a huge fan of Sublimely Self-Righteous in and of itself – it’s not a BAD beer, I’m just not crazy about the black IPA style in general.  The piney, resin-y spruce flavor and the tart cherries worked just PERFECTLY together, though.  They really brought out the roasty, malty flavors in the beer in a way that just worked.  I feel like hops often get buried in the roasted flavors of black/dark/whatever IPAs, but the spruce helped to really make that flavor pop and the cherry just added this lovely finish.  I tried a friend’s glass of this one, and I definitely wanted seconds.

Brasserie Dieu du Ciel! - Isseki Nicho Special Amarillo;

A collaboration between Dieu du Ciel & Shiga Kougen in Japan.  I’ve been interested in black/dark/brown/etc. saisons lately, and I tend to like them a hair better than their IPA breathren, but this one is billed as a hybrid of a Belgian saison and an Imperial stout, and it accomplished this brilliantly.  Strong, but tart, but roasty, and Amarillo are one of my absolute favorite hop flavors, so it had that bit of spicy, piney finish to it that set it apart from its Mosaic brother.  Also I thought it was really cool to see single-hop varieties of something that WASN’T an IPA – interesting to see how hops affect the flavor in a beer that isn’t necessarily hop-central.

Les Trois Mousquetaires – Reserve de Noel 2013;

When my buddy Pav handed me his jar of this, he did so with the information that this was “Christmas in a glass.”  Billed as an “extra strong” red lager brewed with Christmas spices & balsam fir and French oak, I’ve also see it called a “Grand Cuvee” (and we know how I feel about cuvees….), and weighing in at 10.5%, this was most definitely Christmas in a glass.  It was warm and welcoming and spicy and made me want to curl up on my couch and watch the snow with slippers on and Christmas carols playing.  The spice blend was just beautiful – not too strong that it overpowered the malty background (which was interesting in and of itself – I read later that the beer was made with 100% Quebec malt, and the bill included pils, rye, wheat, oat, cara 160, and roasted buckwheat, the last of which I think REALLY made this beer go a step beyond what I expected) like some “holiday” ales.  Somebody find me a bottle of this for Christmas, please.

Townsite Brewing – Timewarp;

When I got the initial list of beers available at Cask Days, this one was my “I HAVE to try this weird sounding thing!” selection.  I have gathered from the Townsite wesbite that this beer is normally a standard wet hop, but what really grabbed me about it is that it was listed on the bill as a wet hop with SMOKED HOPS.  Not smoked malt, but smoked actual fresh hop cones (Applewood smoked, at that!).  I generally like smoked beers, but moreso things like smoked saisons than smoked darker beers (although I have had ones I’ve enjoyed before, as well…), and this sounded so bizarre I had to try it.  It basically tasted like liquid smoke, earthy and ashy and….not awful, but not something I wanted to keep drinking.  Completely different than a smoked malt taste – and not quite the same savory beer experience I had earlier with the Monkish beer.  I’m glad I tried it but I’m not sure it’s an experiment I’d want to repeat.

Weirdly enough, a large chunk of my favorites were in the first couple hours of tasting – maybe, just MAYBE, my senses became a little dulled, as the festival went on???? ;) What I can’t believe is that there are pretty much NO IPAs on my list!  Then again, that was another kind of cool thing about the festival – IPAs are notoriously not the first choice of beers to cask, so many of the most interesting choices were a lot different styles than I would normally go for.  I tried to get in a good sampling of a bunch of different styles from a bunch of different regions, and while I did have some good IPAs (Fat Tug by Driftwood stood out, as did Four Winds Brewing’s Protect Your Nect, and Cameron’s Brewing’s To Catch a Brettator [although that one had Brett in it as well, so not just a standard IPA], but in general, they weren’t the stars of the show.  I think the best IPA I had all weekend was actually from Thumb Coast in Port Huron (although I did buy a bottle of Witchshark at Bellwoods, so it can’t be said that Toronto isn’t IPA-friendly).

Overall I sampled  HUGE number of mostly delicious beers – I don’t think there was anything I found completely awful, and definitely nothing I didn’t finish.  The only (and most!) devastating thing about the festival was that outside of the California beers, it’s going to be awfully hard to get any of these back here in the states.  Guess I’m going to have to head back…

toronto cask days 2014!

Daddy-daughter day at the Cask Festival!

Having been home from the Motherland for two days now, I can say with confidence that I vastly prefer trolling for craft beer and shenanigans in my favorite city in the world to working in the automotive industry.

Last weekend was a blur (literally, given how much beer was consumed on Saturday) of friends, family, cask beer & the Great White North.  I was invited by my dearest Ottawa-based friends to come up for Toronto Cask Days – to which I took the opportunity to invite my pops, who is not only my best beer drinking buddy, but also a native Torontonian who hasn’t been to the city he grew up in for over a decade – and immediately RSVP’d a resounding YES.

We took off for the city Friday after work, but didn’t hit the Blue Water bridge without a quick stop at Michigan Brewery #93 on my list – formerly Quay Street, now known as Thumb Coast (much catchier, IMO).  I had optimistically mediocre expectations, but was actually really surprised by how GOOD their beer was!  We tried both the Hitch Hiker IPA (solid, malty) and the Wet Hopped on Quay (bitter but not grassy with a sweet kick at the end), and then because they were so good, had to sample the Expedition Coffee Stout as well (very roasty, lots of coffee, but drier than a lot of coffee stouts, which was a nice change).

Back on the road with raisin tea biscuits in hand, we made AWESOME time to Toronto, where we checked in to our hotel, tossed our stuff down and bee-lined for Bar Volo for some cask beer pre-gaming and charcuterie.  I ended up sampling Great Lakes & Amsterdamn’s collaboration, “Maverick & Gose” (chardonnay barrel-aged Gose), and Bellwoods’ “Skeleton Key” (13% ABV spiced stout – wow).  My favorite thing about Bar Volo is the atmosphere – I’m not even sure how to explain it, it’s dark and homey and has a really great sort of comfortable after-hours coffee shop feel to it.  My last time there was early 2013, so I was pleased to see it stood the stand of time well (although I missed the couch!).  Having finished our beers, we somewhat fuzzily headed back to the hotel (but not without stopping for some late night hole in the wall shawarma sandwiches)…

Maverick & Gose!

The BarVolo tap list - 90% perfect except where are all the hops??

Saturday morning we rolled out of bed early, packed in some hotel breakfast buffet, and then hit the hotel fitness center where I got in a quick workout (ran 1.5 miles, did a little bit of weight and core work, and then practiced some headstands), and then it was time to meet all our Ottawa Beer Blogger co. friends!  We shuttled out to Evergreen Brickworks (which was just an incredibly cool venue for an event like this – half outdoor & half indoor, bustling with music & people & beers, and this really awesome urban outdoorsy steel-wood-greenery kind of vibe) and handed over our tickets in exchange for some really cute Cask Days mason jars and 4 (HA) tokens to begin our adventure.

The cool thing about having such a big group was that we basically set up a meeting spot and then we’d all break, get a sample, come back and pass it along until everyone had tried everything – rinse & repeat.  Of course when you figure in how much beer that resulted in all of us drinking….

Love & lagers with my ones of my dearest Ottawa friends, Pav.

Inside the Evergreen Brickworks - don't ask me how I managed to get a picture with not one cask in it!

I plan to do a separate post on some of my favorites, some standouts, and some uh, “interesting” samples – this would get waaaaay too long otherwise.  I’m not sure how many beers we tried, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I thought it was probably up around 100.  So many, in fact, that my distinct memories of the evening AFTER the festival are trying to do pull-ups on the subway car, and passing out in my hotel bed and missing our evening English Pub reservations (oops…).

Surprisingly (or not – as except for a hourish reprieve to wake up, go get Thai food carryout and stuff our faces, we slept about 12 hours), I felt AWESOME the next morning & was all geared up to meet the group for breakfast, exchange beer presents (them from Ottawa and me from Michigan, obviously!), and part ways as they sadly had to leave to get back to Ottawa for the evening.

My dad and I took the opportunity of a bit extra time in Toronto to walk down to the Eaton Centre so I could have a mini shopping spree at Zara (I fell in love with the store when I was in the Czech Republic – and there still are none in the US except Chicago!) and wander through the Hockey Hall of Fame store.  From there, we decided to be really adventurous/optimistic and walk the 5ish kilometers to Glory Hole Donuts (cheesecake donut, I will dream about you), and then back to Bellwoods Brewery (I had a Farmageddon, which was good, but did not live up to my expectations – I was definitely spoiled by my first Bellwoods experience being Omerta & Witchshark).  At that point we waved the white flag and took the street car back to the hotel to begin our journey to Collingwood to see some family and, excitingly, discover a new brewery had opened only moments from my grandma’s condominium!

My Eaton Centre dream come true~

Roman Candle & Farmaggeddon at Bellwoods!

Canadians know how to do frites right - with herbs, vinegar, and mayo.

Wise words from downtown Toronto.

We’ve been going to Collingwood for about 15 years now, and it’s been crazy to see how it’s grown from a tiny one-Tim little ski/resort town into a still small but definitely growing little area.  They have a really spectacular farmer’s market now, one of the most delicious Thai restaurants I’ve ever been to, and now, North Winds Brewing.  Again, I was really surprised by how quality their beers were, especially since we were told they only opened in August!  We tried a flight, and in the spirit of the weekend thus far, decided to make some choices that deviated from the norm – along with the standard IPA & saison, we tried their lager (DELICIOUS) and their Oktoberfest (which had beets in it!) along with our burger & macaroni, and it was 5 stars all around.  We ended up stopping back the next day for some bottles, as well as to grab some jars of Pickl’d fare (mmmmmmmmmmm pickled beets & wax beans…).

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end, and Monday we spent the day in the car, heading back to the good old USA.  We made good time, ate more tea biscuits, and toasted our smashing weekend back at Thumb Coast with one more IPA and the fish and chips we missed out on having Saturday night.  I miss my dear Ottawa friends already, the city of Toronto, which I think will always be my favorite place on earth, and even sitting in a car watching wind turbines for miles and miles and miles with classic rock in the background talking beer shop with my papa.  Can’t wait for Cask Days 2015!

fall things i'm loving

Happy Friday!!

I've been at Chrysler training most of this week, so I've been able to take advantage of some "weird" work hours, get in some extra (morning!) workouts, and feeling overall pretty great.  Not to mention I started out the week by getting to spend two days with my college bestie and I'm getting ready to head up to Toronto next weekend - life is pretty great, and here are a few reasons why!

• Hockey's back!  My Detroit Red Wings are looking much improved over last year to start off the season, and there's really nothing like coming home from the gym, flopping over on the couch and watching an evening full of hockey games.  I remember when I was in college and I could stay up all night long I used to get NHL Center Ice every year and literally watch games from 7 pm until about 1 am every night.  I knew every player in the league and then some.  Now of course, I'm focusing a little more just on my beloved Wings (and my latent Toronto Maple Leafs soft spot) and cursing when the game goes to OT cause I just want to sleep, but I'm still pretty stoked to see the season kick off.  It also means much more time spent with my absolute best friend in the entire world going to games, making road trips to other cities and arenas, and coming up with an unreal number of stupid inside jokes.

Opening Night pretty tickets thanks to a pretty great coworker!

The BFF and I - home sweet home at last~

• Kitchen sink spaghetti squash bowls. My new go-to dinner of choice is a big bowl of roasted spaghetti squash with the entire contents of my fridge emptied into it and then heated up with a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese.  My favorite lately has been chunks of chicken thigh, sun-dried tomatoes, fresh oregano, French onion cheese and a handful of mushrooms and broccoli sprouts, but I've also been making them with chopped up pepperoni, and today I had one with swiss cheese, a bunch of cajun spices and some jumbo creole shrimp that was to dieeeeee for.

Pepperoni, mushrooms, chopped up haricots vert, sun-dried tomatoes & broccoli sprouts in this bowl! 

• Family style chicken dinners.  Two weeks ago it was the Dam Site & Legs Inn, this week I had the pleasure of introducing my Western Michigan friends to the glory that is Frankenmuth.  There is absolutely nothing like a good Frankenmuth family style chicken dinner & eating stollen, salads, cranberry relish, stuffing, and chicken until you're so full it hurts.  Plus walking around the quaint little towns that house places like the Bavarian Inn (by far my favorite, but next time I want to hit up Zehnder's - haven't been in years!!) is a joy in itself. 

My very favorite <3  I can't believe people live in Michigan and have never been to this delight!

Of course I had to also introduce the boys to the Christmas insanity that is Bronners - how cute are these science-themed ornaments??

Just lounging in the World's Largest Christmas Chair...what??

• Blue Hubbard squash.  The menu at Frankenmuth always involves one rotating seasonal vegetable - when we went it was clearly some sort of squash mash, but when I asked our (adorable!) waiter what type it was, he said blue hubbard, which I had never even heard of!!  I took one bite of it and I was IN LOVE.  It was sweet and buttery and nutty and a thousand percent perfect.  Luckily for me, the Bavarian Inn grows them out back & had a ton for sale at only 39 cents per pound!!  I ended up picking up the SMALLEST one I could find, which was 12 lbs (!!!!) and taking it home, where I conquered it, roasted it, mashed some with butter, froze some puree (with which I plan to eventually make "pumpkin" butter), and used some to make these Ooey Gooey Pumpkin Bars from Paleomg (just subbing blue hubbard for pumpkin, obviously - THE BEST EVER).  If you have never had this, you need it in your life. Right now. Go.

12 lbs of rock hard blue glory.

Gooey, squashy, chocolate chipp-y delights.

Frankenmuth chicken dinner also always comes with soft serve ice cream dessert - I usually go with the vanilla/orange sherbert swirl, but when I heard they had a pumpkin seasonal, and then that the pumpkin seasonal was made WITH THAT GLORIOUS SQUASH, I was done for. I didn't think I'd ever eat again after that meal, but I could have ate twenty of these.

• Barre classes.  My new workout du jour.  I've been interested in barre for a long time, trying out some classes here and there both at Nafas and at Xtend Barre Rochester (which I enjoyed!), but my home gym (Life Time Fitness) introduced a new format, LifeBarre, recently, and I am OBSESSED.  For the first time I love a "strength" class almost as much as my beloved dance fitness cardio.  I've found two instructors I absolutely love and I've been doing barre just about every other day - plus my little home studio is coming along quite nicely to where I'll be able to do these workouts at home very soon!!

• Lions football.  Every year I try to get into football (I'm a sports girl, but I lean hockey/baseball), and every year I kind of fail.  I LOVE live football, but I have a hard time getting into it on TV.  This year, though, I've been turning the Lions on as background noise on Sundays, and after going to last weekends epic come from behind victory that we had NO right to make, I think I'm becoming a football girl at last.  I can't wait to go again!!

My very first piece of Lions gear and a seriously incredible game was a great way to end last weekend - and to lose my voice.

We instagrammed this one and ended up featuring on the #onepride screen at the game. Famous!!

Tom paid like $25 for this horse head. Everyone around us LOVED it.  What....???

Not bad seats - although we were at the wrong end for the exciting finale.

• Siggi's yogurt. I cannot get enough of this stuff.  It's the perfect thickness, creaminess, it's not gross and overly sweet, but it's a little smoother than super tart Greek yogurt - I love taking a carton of this, mixing in my body weight in blueberries and homemade granola & topping it all off with a big scoop of my other favorite (guilty) obsession - seasonal Jif Whips.

• Podcasts.  I never used to care for podcasts in general & I never really got the appeal, but once I got a desk job that initially involved a lot of data entry (not...so much anymore). Obviously I couldn't get away with watching movies (although I DID used to "watch," aka listen to with my phone's screen upside down so you couldn't tell it was playing video, documentaries at my desk), so I started getting deep into the world of podcasts.  My current favorites are: Girls Gone WOD, Strange Brews, Balanced Bites, Serial, and Welcome to Night Vale, among a huge list of others.

• Stillwater Artisanal Ales Gose Gone Wild.  AKA a remix of Westbrooks Gose, AKA the beer that introduced me to, and got me obsessed with, Gose.  I got lucky enough to stumble on this mega rare bottle yesterday at 8 Degrees Plato while I was picking up some Michigan beer treats for my Canadian friends, and of course I had to snatch it up.  Can't WAIT to experience this one all over again.

 

• My new studio mirrors.  At last!!  Hardwood floors complete, mirrors up, now I only need my TV mounted to truly have the mini-home studio I've been dreaming off.  And they were only $60 each from Home Depot!!

Now I'm going to go eat another "pumpkin" bar, catch the rest of the Red Wings game, and get myself ready to head up to Toronto for Cask Days with my pops and my Ottawa besties tomorrow!!

what to do in upper lower michigan

Up North selfies with the Pappy the 25 cent forture reader.

Last weekend I made a quick pilgrimage up the mitten to spend a few days in Upper Lower Michigan with one of my dearest friends (from Dallas!), Cat.  When I was younger, my relatives (mostly great aunts and uncles) owned a fully-functioning farm (crops, livestock, hay-baling season, barns, a grainery, breakfasts of eggs from our own chickens, dinners of milk from our own cows, potatoes from our own fields, and hamburger ground up from our own cows, wood burning stoves & million year old beds you had to clean the dead hornet bodies off of before you could sleep) up in Cheboygan, MI, which we used to go spend weeks at a time at - something I didn't appreciate at all as a child, and now would kill to be able to experience as an adult (isn't that how it always goes?).

As a tiny kid I loved spending all day outside chasing barn cats & catching the tiny kittens under the idea that I could domesticate them & someday talk my mother into letting me bring one home.  As I got older, I graduated to begging my dad to take me golfing with him (AKA he golfed while I drove the cart and ate candy bars, and then we went and played some riveting mini-golf afterward) I remember being so bored by the farm as a kid that I literally brought my little 13" TV set and video game console up there so I could plug it in on the dusty couch in the "living room" & play Suikoden III all day long.  Seriously.  I could kick myself now - but to be fair, 16 year old me had no idea I'd one day be more obsessed with the idea of homesteading than with console gaming.

So I hadn't been up to Upper Lower Michigan for a number of years, and god knows when I ever planned on going again, until Cat revealed she was going to be in Michigan visiting her family who run the Dam Site Inn (shameless plug: this place is THE LITERAL BEST family style chicken dinner type restaurant I have ever been to in my life, and this is coming from someone who's been going to Frankenmuth, both Bavarian Inn & Zehnders, for just about as long as I've been alive), which is only about 20 minutes from my family's digs, and thus began a yearly tradition of Upper Lower Michigan excursions.

Extra lovely Polish family luncheon at Legs Inn.

In my church jeans (forgot to pack a pair that weren't oversized comfy travel pants...) overlooking the gorgeous Michigan coast.

Polish platter - veggies, three kinds of pierogi, kielbasa, sauerkraut, & golabki with the world's best sauce ever.

After a few visits we've sussed out our very favorite spots - we spent this past weekend revisiting all of them.  I haven't been up north during the fall in quite a while, and it's absolutely beautiful this time of year.  The leaves had all turned gorgeous shades of orange and bright red, and other than a dreary, rainy early Saturday, it was absolutely beautiful.  There isn't a lot to do up north except eat, but there were surprisingly few tourists, so we really got to experience the slow, easy pace of the area, indulging in a whole lot of whiskey sours, a bar simply called, "BAR," about a million fudge and popcorn samples, rice krispie treat tea, and homemade Dam Site noodles (thanks to the seriously awesome generosity and hospitality of the owners - thanks again for being amazing!).

My dream, since my first time at the Dam Site meeting everybody, has been to see it during all of its Halloween glory.  This year I finally got my wish.

Nothing is cooler than Pam's hundreds (literally) of super intricately carved pumpkins. I can't even fathom gutting all of these - or how many seeds you'd go through.

I love the wolves!!

The best breakfast in Pellston (or anywhere thereabouts).

My usual - 2 eggs over easy, 2 sausage patties, and 2 blueberry pancakes with fresh local maple syrup.  I judge diner blueberry pancakes by how blue the berries turn the batter, and these ones rank exceptionally high.

This is what cider mills in Upper Lower Michigan get up to......so cute!!

It's a huge shame that the family farm isn't up and running anymore (though we do still own the land & it is still standing, just non-operational), but we still have lots of family in the area, and trips up there are so relaxing.  Cat and I got away from our yearly trips for a little while because life got in the way, but after remembering everything there is to love about Upper Lower Michigan this year we're planning on remedying that.  (Plus, there's a new brewery in Harbor Springs that I haven't made it to yet!!)

beer science is cool

It’s almost my 1 year homebrewing anniversary!  I feel like our tiny little operation has come quite a long way from when we first started, with the most basic of starter equipment, brewing with just ever-so-slightly modified partial-mash kits, working through a rough patch of some weird sort of hybrid brew-in-bag + manual sparging deal where we could literally not get our final products up above the 5% alcohol marker, to now – finally able to produce a pretty solid beer & ready to move on to a fancy pants true all-grain sparging operation.

I feel like I will never stop learning & being amazed by all the million variables that can completely make, break, or change a brewing outcome.  Every time I listen to someone talk about their brewing experiences, or go to a lecture on the process, I come away with some new bit of info that I had no idea about.  Just last week I learned that the temperature of your wort can completely change a hydrometer reading – I never realized how important it was to chill before you take readings! I think that's part of the reason I love homebrewing so much - when I was in college, my favorite classes were always the ones I had literally no previous experience with, because it felt like I was learning something truly brand new (hello Japanese, Logic, & Music Theory).  Beer is the same way - be it the science of brewing itself, or just the cool random knowledge that comes with it.

Our last two completed beers (a Rye IPA with honey & peppercorns, and a wet hop harvest ale brewed with the fruits of my very own Cascade & Centennial hop plants) were pretty damn delicious, but let me tell you how fun it is to stand over your wort pouring measuring cups full of hot water through a bag of 15 lbs of grain for 90 minutes….not very.  So, we at long last bit the bullet & bought everything we needed build ourselves a sparge unit.  My dad & our brew buddy put together the prototype sparge shelving unit & away we went.

 

There’s still a lot of work to be done before we have a finished product – not to mention the learning curve of using it (we let the water through far too quickly – a 60 minute mash was done in about 20…needless to say, we had to do some fancy guess work from there to re-saturate the grain and try to get some more sugars out).  I also made my very own yeast starter!!

I designed the recipe we used on this one from scratch, taking a “robust” style porter and giving it a fall spin – we added a chopped up & roasted, caramelized pie pumpkins first to the sparge water to steep & then to the mash for a little Halloween flair, and then saturated the boil with farm fresh Michigan maple syrup.  I also added a crap ton of biscuit malt in the hopes that the end result would taste like a warm, cozy, fall breakfast - pumpkin spice waffles with syrup & a hint of coffee. (If I get even half of that I'll be happy).

Sometimes I think the entire reason we brew, though, is for the excuse to come up with incredible new things to grill while we do it – this time around we stuffed a 4 lb pork roast with chorizo, tomatoes, raisins & almonds and let it cook away for a couple hours….godly.  I mean, just look at that beauty - I didn't even mind eating it for days afterward.

home improvements

Can't get enough of them!

For some reason the “Spring Cleaning” bug has hit me and hit me hard………in October???  Suddenly I’ve become obsessed with home improvements & finally completing a lot of projects I’ve had in the works (or have been waffling around about actually getting started on). 

I decided over a year ago that I wanted to convert the second bedroom in my condo (I live in a 2 bedroom/2 bathroom loft condominium) into a mini-studio so that I could work out from home – both in hopes that this would give me a little bit of a push to do more strength & conditioning type exercises (which I never find myself motivated to do at the gym), and so that I’d have the ability to get in a workout, quick as it may be, on days that I can’t make it to the gym, or the weather is nasty, etc., etc.  I’ve been talking about it for probably two years now, but never had the time/motivation to really bring it to fruition until this past summer when I decided now was the time, no excuses.  That room had been functioning as my “junk room” – full of an old desk, boxes of holiday decorations and things I’d never gotten around to unpacking, my old sofa, a bunch of old electronics……needless to say, it took more than a little while to clean, organize, purge, and get it ready to move everything out and tear up the carpet.  Once all that was done though, it was a pretty simple task to rip everything apart….and then wait a month for the install.


The install itself took less than a half a day, though, and the results are a million percent beautiful!

The beginning of my beautiful new space <3

The close-up!

Got in my first home workout the other day - can't wait to have the mirrors & TV all set up as well!

I got my floors through Home Depot, (they sell the materials & contract out the work), and I am SO SO impressed.  I am considering the same flooring in my bedroom in the future, and I would 100% go with the same process.  The floors look GORGEOUS – I tested them out after my Kalamazoo trip left me feeling like I needed a little extra workout in my life Sunday night, they perform great & brighten up the whole room.  I just bought two big studio mirrors to mount & spent more than I care to admit on home gym equipment so I can recreate my beloved barre classes (new obsession!) at home, as well as picking up a TV mount for the wall.  Can’t wait for the whole thing to be finished at last!

I also had an slight closet incident a few weeks ago…………

I heard a huge banging noise followed by two cats booking it out of the bedroom....never a good sign.

He seems undaunted by the disaster...

Needless to say, rather than trying to remount the one tiny shelf that came with my condominium, I went out and bought a whole new Rubbermaid closet set, which I LOVE.  I have a tiny obsession with organizational things, so this was right up my alley, and I spent an entire morning restructuring my entire (way too large) wardrobe.

I admit I may need to do a little bit of purple-hearting before this closet collapses, too.

Also re-did my bedroom at last - still a bit of decorating to go, but it's leaps and bounds above where it was.

Next up……pulling out my summer garden & decorating for Halloween!!

(FYI……..neither Home Depot nor Rubbermaid in any way shape or form sponsors me or this post & all opinions are my own!)