There hasn’t been a lot of posting here lately. So I’ll give a brief update for anyone that cares and then go back to obsessively hoarding beer and working on the ultimate Untappd badge available, “Type II Diabetes”. Okay but serious, lots has been happening lately so I thought a bulleted update would be fun.
- It’s getting cold up here in Vermont. This week has been quite nice but the orange leaves are falling away.
- Just spent 7 days in Seattle & Portland OR ticking beers and meeting trading partners. Brought home some good stuff and got 150 new reviews under my belt. I’m pretty sick of beer and then I got home and opened a Heady Topper and forgot about swearing off beer for a month!
- Haven’t traded much lately. Shifting my beer budget to Bruery / Crooked Stave beers and buying more local stuff. I can spend $50 at Hill Farmstead and drink very well. Why would I spend that $50 and send all of those to California for even comparable beers? So trading is sort of going away unless they’re a regular trading partner.
- The lack of beer hauls posts has been nice. I used to stress on getting all boxes in by the end of the month in time for beer hauls and now I don’t so that’s much easier. Plus my Flickr is full of beer photos and it just looks depressing.
- Homebrewing is going well. I haven’t tasted the sours that were brewed 6 weeks ago but honestly, I probably won’t start tasting them until it’s been 3 months. Opening up those bungs, risking extra bugs to get in there and introducing oxygen isn’t worth tasting a sour that’s too young.
- I finally started using Fermcap control for my imperial stout. It worked great! I used a blow off tube anyway since the gravity was over 1.100 but didn’t need it. I didn’t lose any beer to fermentation but the trub is pretty intense and I’ll lose more beer from the oak chips. We’ll see how this one turns out but obviously a high ABV stout can sit in the carboy / keg for a long time before I tap it.
- Oh and we had the floors refinished in my place. Their oak floors and were looking pretty bad. Moving the full size kegerator outside wasn’t easy nor was everything else I owned moving into storage but the floors like GREAT.
- I may do a blog post about northwest beer. You guys up there are doing great things but Holy Hell, you love your fresh hop beers.I’m sort of sick of fresh hop beers now as it was almost all that was on tap. Kind of ridiculous.
- Since our cold weather has held off, as for brewing, I’m thinking of doing a rebrew of my galaxy baryleywine and perhaps a rebrew of my coffee porter which, because I’m white trash, received a Venti of Starbucks espresso shots…like literally, I go into Starbucks and ask for 20 shots of espresso to be put into a venti cup and I pour that into the keg. It was a great beer but two college guys crashing at my house back when I rented it out to strangers drank all of it one weekend so I only got to have 1 glass of it.
So that’s the update for now. Oh and I’m probably going to take November and December off from drinking beer. I’ll drink at tastings for if people stay with me but daily drinking will be put on hold. Personal reasons but it should be a nice palate resetting and will help me save a bit more money as well.