some stuff i forgot...

I literally type this post two weekends ago and......never posted it. Please, explain how I survive daily.

ANYWAY I have things to talk about like school and malthouses & brewery tours but if I let this post never see the light of day I don't get to show off my barrel, SO.

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After two straight holiday weeks and two straight 4-day holiday weekends, only having two days off last week was an incredibly cruel jolt back in to the reality of the 5-day work week.  Also for the first time in a while I didn’t have much in the way of actual plans, which meant almost the whole weekend was devoted to working out and brewing beer…….could be worse.

Friday night was the annual Men of Zumba event at CC+ - when I first started really hitting the gym hard about 5 years ago, after I made the switch from my small local gym with not much more than a smattering of cardio machines & a weight room to the grand (and pricey) wonderland of Life Time, it was dance cardio classes that really hooked me.  I still enjoy them (I’ve migrated from straight up ‘zumba’ style classes to more hip hop type classes, which if you would have told me I’d be doing about 10 years ago I would have laughed in your face), even though I’ve mostly moved on, but a lot of my favorite instructors participate in this every year, so it’s fun to support.  Unfortunately the more I get out of the scene, the less familiar I am with the local instructors, and the more time I spent desperately trying to catch on to their routines while only being able to see about 50% of what was going on on the stage…but it was still a good, sweaty time.  Props to CC+ for managing the insane amount of people, too – at one point I turned around and the place was packed to the gills, all the way back on to the carpet behind the dance floor!

I also got a surprise delivery from my friend Kirsten in Minnesota – fresh, pesticide-free black spruce tips to add to my next brew, and (almost even more exciting), some Caribou beans!

Saturday I crawled out of bed, hit a boot camp class at my gym, came home to shower & headed back out almost immediately to White Lotus Yoga Studio for their new location’s grand opening.  I was really hoping to check out an aerial yoga class, but unfortunately they were all full, so I popped in to a vinyasa flow since I was already there, & signed up to do some flying next Sunday.  I’d been to the studio for Friday community classes at the old location, but the new one is soooooooo nice and bright and airy!  Solid job, ladies.

Next up: barrel curing!  Back in November a friend picked up a discarded Journeyman Distillery whiskey barrel for me from his homebrew shop (after doing a little investigating – it used to house Silver Cross whiskey, which sounds delightful).  I’ve been scheming a brew to put in it for quite a while now, and finally settled on an eggnog porter that I’ll be brewing next weekend, but it’s been sitting empty for so long that I wanted to go through the curing/sanitizing process even though it’s only held liquor so far.  Luckily my parents’ house, with its much larger laundry room and unused bathtub, was on the way home.

My darling <3

Curing away in a strange environment...

I can’t believe how much char came out of this thing – or how good EVERYTHING smelled. Damn, son.  A week of curing + some sanitizing and she’ll be ready to go!

Prepping for a new batch meant I also had to move along some of my current fermentation projects, so Sunday was a beer transfer day – I have two batches going right now, a Belgian golden strong that I racked over a slurry of almond extract & brandy-soaked dried fruits (blueberries, apricots & golden raisins) to try and conjure up a stollen bread flavor (fruitcake beer is SO last Christmas!), and a standard American IPA that I wanted to pull off a couple gallons to play with (I ended up adding a juniper berry tea).  Both of them came along nicely throughout primary fermentation – the Belgian has a perfect yeasty golden ale flavor and it hit all my projected numbers almost perfectly.  I was shooting for an 8.4% ABV, nailed my original gravity, and after primary it was sitting around 8.9% - bonus!

Beer ingredients looking pretty vile.

Amidst all the transferring I also took down all my Christmas decorations and got in a little extra fitness aka, “I bet you I can totally squat this tree.” (Spoiler alert: it was actually really light and I was kind of disappointed by how easily the whole thing went down).  Apparently the fitness theme of the day was “cold,” though – I tried to meet some bootcamp friends for a nice hour of hot vinyasa in the morning, but the heat at the gym was busted so it was a little more like slightly chilly vinyasa. Still managed to work up a sweat by the end, but hooooooly wow was it hard to find some zen for those first few minutes.

Disappointingly easy, but don't ask me how the attempts at pistols went.

Luckily I warmed up with some Paleomg spaghetti squash pizza casserole once all was said and done – an extra big batch with heaps of ground beef, spinach and mushrooms.  It might only look pretty when it’s fresh out of the oven, but damn is it good (and thank god for that, because with this big of a batch I’m going to be eating it all week long).

hello 2016

2016 started with epic shrimp tacos and about four days of binge-watching World Junior Hockey (RIP tiny Slovakian hopes and dreams), which was not at all a bad time (I also can’t stop playing Undertale either; RIP my productivity).

I did a resolutions/goals post last year, and it actually did a pretty good job of grounding me to a lot of habits & behaviors that made the year a pretty damn solid one.  I’m not sure I have quite as much of a list of specific goals going into 2016, because I’ve decided in lieu of setting goals, I’m just going to make some shit happen, and that shit is:

• I’m going back to school!  I enrolled in a brewing & distillation technology program beginning Winter semester (next Wednesday!), and I’m mega stoked.  I hemmed and hawed about it for a while because while I’ve missed formal education terribly since I graduated from Western, really, am I positive I’m going to use a 24-credit certificate in brewing? Do I know for sure that I’m going to parlay that into a useful experience? Should I spend money on something so unrelated to the career I’m actually in?  But from the second I heard about it, a part of me strangely knew I was going to do it. I’ve seen a lot of brewing/fermentation programs pop up, but the thing I really like about this one is that it’s completely doable for someone in a position like mine (AKA not some full undergrad degree that requires selling my soul to a college), and it’s not JUST brewing – it touches on everything related to owning/operating a brewery, from the actual science behind beer, to brewhouse operations & equipment, to stuff like cellaring and marketing.  AND I’M STOKED, did I say that?

• I’m doing some new programming at my gym – I’ve been involved in some small group boot camp training for a couple months now, which I LOVE (probably because it feeds in to both my love of competition & being held individually accountable), but I’ve started working a little harder on monitoring progress. One of my huge goals for 2016 is to be able to hit some benchmarks & track a LOT more about where I am vs where I’ve been.  We’re starting off the year with monthly fitness tests and a 90-day challenge that I’ve done a couple times, but haven’t taken REALLY seriously since I first joined Life Time.  This time around I’m throwing down for real. 20% body fat, huge lifts & lots of being upside-down, here I come.  (ALSO a thing I’m considering: yoga teacher training.)

• I’m going to travel all the fuck over the place.  The only thing I really have set in stone right now is New York in March (Rangers game, arena #12, what what!), but I went on a slew of pretty big and totally amazing trips in 2015 and I’m going to be extremely disappointed if I don’t keep that up.  I forgot how much I love discovery.  At LEAST one other NHL arena & hopefully a whole shit ton of breweries.

I would also like to train myself to stop pretending to be too busy to do things like take the goddamn cats to the vet while somehow finding the time in between work and the gym to go to Target & buy eleven thousand pounds of unnecessary trail mix, but that’s another story.

AND ON THAT NOTE, happy 2016, babes!

michigan winter beer festival 2015 (aka: "i've never heard anyone say 'butterfly' with such anguish")

Greetings from Day 4 of an attempt to detoxify myself from the wildly absurd amount of alcohol I imbibed over the course of this past weekend.  I was a straight up tour de force of craft beer consumption and I regret none of it except the way my body felt midway through a 75 minute hot yoga session the other night.

Last weekend was Michigan Winter Beer Festival in Grand Rapids – and since my nearest and dearest college beer snob friends still live on the west side, it was basically a given that we’d be going, so when my Christmas present from them was a ticket & a membership to the Michigan Brewer’s Guild, I was zero percent shocked.

I’ve been to the Summer Beer Festival about four years running now, and it’s always a lovely experience – you romp through a really lovely green park in downtown Ypsilanti, it’s in the middle of the summer, so you can wear sundresses and stick your feet in the river and take drunk recovery naps in the grass all afternoon.  This is NOT that.  This is brutal Michigan cold (thank god for the sun) in a parking lot full of slushy snow that soaks through your ill-advised cable knit definitely not waterproof boots and numbs your fingers to the point that you forgo Untapping your beer selections after about stop #2.  This is spilling your sampler glasses because you’re bouncing up and down trying to regain feeling in your limbs.  Fortunately, this is also high gravity beer lover’s paradise filled with a whole lot of barrel aged glory that makes a bit of a dent in warming you up.

I rang in the weekend at my buddy Tom’s with ALL THE SHAWARMA and sampling a slew of beers he’d saved up for my arrival, including but not limited to a coveted bottle of Dino S’Mores – (it’s everything you hope and dream it will be) – before heading up to Grand Rapids to round out our party and get Festival day started off right at Brewery Vivant’s Brewer’s Breakfast.  Vivant’s always been one of my favorite breweries because it’s in a building that used to be an old church, so it’s full of vaulted ceilings, ornate wood beams, and stained glass windows.  Plus they make a MEAN farmhouse/sour/ beer.  For breakfast we all picked out a different option so that we could share – I went with a red-wine barrel aged saison with brett and the crispy breaded chicken and cheddar-bacon waffles with an herbed cream sauce and maple syrup and I definitely won the breakfast lottery on that one.  We also made out on an exciting limited can release that sold out before we even paid our bills….

From our friends in New Holland......my favorite liquor to kick off the night.

The newest in Bell's planet series - maybe the best brown I've ever had.

ALL THE SHAWARMA KING.

At last, my precious nightcap.

Brewer's breakfast at Vivant!

Second best chicken & waffles I've ever had

The festival itself was, as expected, seriously chilly, but a good time – full of bearded dudes with carb necklaces (my favorite by far this year was the guy who upped his game from pretzels/bagels to a necklace of English muffins [??? Don’t you toast those???], and one I saw that was straight up Samoas and beef jerky sticks) and semi-frozen tap lines. I’d made a pretty solid list beforehand of brews I DEFINITELY wanted to try…..and I hit maybe half of those.  Still, there were quite a few standouts:

• Gravel Bottom – Jonny Applebottom [rye whiskey barrel aged apple butter brown ale].  Never in my life did I think something barrel aged or something brown would be one of my very favorites, but this was SOLID. Perfect amount of sweet and tart and crisp and liquor – I could have drank dangerous quantities of that.  (Side note #1 – the RISin Dead [maple bourbon barrel aged Russian imperial stout] was a very close second here, and Side note #2 – I’d say Gravel Bottom was probably the brewery I was most impressed with overall for having never heard about previously.)

• Brewery Vivant – Fat Paczki [Belgian inspired ale with prunes & powdered sugar]. Brewed for Fat Tuesday, it’d be easy to dismiss this as just another kitsch beer (Rogue Voodoo donut beers anyody?), but this is actually really great. Drinkable, like a nice, dark, fruity Belgian, but a little lighter. Upset I missed out on the can release.

• Harmony – Capricorn [chocolate donut absinthe stout]. At one point during the day I met up with my lovely friend Kristine, who I had met for the first time in Colorado & who I had bonded with immediately over our shared experiences traveling to Prague, which of course entails drinking massive quantities of absinthe.  We toasted the lovely memory of Praha while drinking this beer, which, while I deign to say was “good,” definitely did taste exactly as advertised.  (To be fair to Harmony – we also tried the Fee D’Hiver [Belgian dark strong with sugar plums] and I was really impressed/pleased with that one…)

• One Well Brewing – Xalapa [jalapeno blonde].  Yet another style I wouldn’t expect to see show up on my own highlight list, but One Well did something really cool here – they used a very mild jalapeno to flavor the beer itself, & then offered raw jalapenos that you could add on your own to hit the spice level you desired. Pretty neat, and pretty strangely tasty.

• Perrin – No Rules [maple bourbon aged Vietnamese porter]. If I’m being honest, I don’t know what on earth a “Vietnamese” porter is, but it tastes friggin awesome.  We actually got this twice.

• Pigeon Hill - Oatmeal Crème Pie.  I’ve had various types of ambers and browns that tried to go for “oatmeal cookie,” with varying levels of success, but this one nailed the sweet spot right in between “delicious disgusting overly processed sandwich cookie” and “that one really creamy cinnamon shot you had twelve of before you realized it was a really bad choice.”  Awesome.

• Tapistry – Reactor [dry-hopped American IPA]. I had quite a few good Tapistry beers, but the thing that stood out about this one was that it was EXACTLY what I want in an American IPA. Crisp, a little green, nice hop bitterness……the sophisticated beer drinker’s lawnmower beer (and I mean that in the best possible way).

• Stormcloud – Red Wine Barrel Aged Fun Guvn’r [Belgian black IPA aged in red wine barrels]. I love hops. I love bitter things. I love Belgians. If I had to drink wine it would be a dry red with lots of roasty dark fruit flavors.  This was the first beer I had all day and damn if it didn’t set the tone.  Kind of wish I’d tried the straight up regular Fun Guvn’r just to compare.

• The Livery – A toss up between Maillot Rouge [oak aged sour biere de garde with raspberries] and St. Valentine’s Day Massacre [wild ale aged on blood oranges]. The first was the sour fruity delicacy I dreamed of all day, and the second was its sparkly, drier, less approachable best friend.

• Witch’s Hat – Bourbon Barrel Cherry Cordial Night Fury [imperial stout]. I mean….damn. Already a good beer, but now it’s syrupy and liquor-y and like a malty, roasty chocolate covered cherry melting in my mouth.  I wanted to never stop drinking this.  I’m still dreaming about this beer.

My Space Team <3 <3

Xalapa!

Met this lady in Colorado, reunited in Michigan.

Long lost beer running buddies.

Stella's Lounge in GR - good food, good beer, good arcade games - and also a ton of skeleton stencils.

Basically the coolest ceilings I've ever seen.

My poached eggs were a little cold, but they were covered in habanero hollandaise, so win some lose some.

All we could manage to imbibe at Osgoode's after the Saturday binge.

After all that…………………………………the obvious choice was to dump our things off at the hotel, change into dry socks, and head out to downtown GR for disgustingly big slices of spinach stuffed pizza, arcade games, and a growler of Anderson Blood Orange Gose from Hopcat, which we proceeded to drink until we passed out in front of some cooking show.

Sunday was mostly full of driving back to the real world – but not before hitting up the bloody mary bar/brunch menu at Stella’s Lounge (my salmon-y eggs benedict was all right, but the breakfast pot pie stole the show…..), and a quick flight at Osgoode’s – MI brewery #96!