get oblique
Ten years ago today, a good friend came over and we brewed a beer together. Felicitas was the first of many over the next several years. And by many , I mean 109 batches of homebrewed beers, ciders, and meads. Along the way I became a BJCP National judge, a Certified Cicerone, and got up on [ ]
As I continue to wax nostalgic for the days when I was brewing a lot (oh say twice a month?) the thought occurred to me to reflect on the beers that became my favorites. The ones I was most proud of, or else became in some way obsessed with. There were certainly quite a [ ]
Earlier this year, my friend Kyle organized a mead study group which was not unlike the 2017-2018 BJCP study group. 1 And while this study group did discuss aspects of mead judging, it was more like a tasting group than one focused on earning the BJCP Mead Judge endorsement. I don t mean this as a [ ]
While a more thorough re-telling of my homebrewing hiatus seems worthy of its own post someday, in the spirit of writing more and trying to keep that running log of my brewing adventures here (it s been a while!), I ve decided to summarize the brewing I ve managed to do since returning to Vermont in 2021. Huginn [ ]
To put it bluntly: I ve let this blog languish for the last couple of years. While topics had narrowed down to be almost exclusively about #homebrewing since about 2015 or so, my time in Washington and COVID and a few other things derailed just about everything for me. Writing for this thing was definitely not [ ]
I love you, Jess. (This post retroactively posted to be roughly the time we said our vows.)
In the week or so leading up to this Martin Luther King Jr. Day of 2024, it occurred to me that I had never read any of his full length works only essays, excerpts, and speech transcripts. I wanted to understand more about him and his legacy. I wanted to hear his message more [ ]
Part year-in-review, part brag sheet, part best things and stuff, part tap-the-microphone is this thing on? life support post for this, my much-neglected blog. It s been a few years since the last time I did one of these, and several of those were pretty hard years but now seemed like the perfect time to [ ]
At the age of 41, while living in Bellingham, WA, I decided to spend too much money on a mountain bike. It had been about 2 years since I d owned a bike, and (if I m being honest) probably about 10 years since I d done any riding. I was going through a tough time (pandemic + [ ]
You ve been sent on an assignment to ascertain the perfect cocktail pairing for a Rice Krispie Treat. You ve been to too many of these places already but what s one more? You repeat your now banal-seeming request: I ll have the house Rice Krispie Treat and whatever cocktail pairing you usually recommend. This particular bartender opens with [ ]
Went and spectated a new-to-me thing that was incredibly fun. Ever hear of cyclocross? It s a kind of bicycle racing that includes all sorts of variable terrain and obstacles and is just generally pretty intense. I d never heard of it before a few months ago when a long-time friend (and avid cyclist) pitched a long [ ]
In 2011, I created the Orin theme for this blog layering a bunch of then new-to-me CSS3 styles on top of the naked Starkers theme. It was a perfect combination for me: Starkers provided the barebones mark-up and the WordPress-flavored PHP and I got to do the rest . Fast-forward a year and I [ ]
Looking over my Untappd journal, I have two wheatwines: one before I d developed my palate, and another that was adulterated embellished with white chocolate. In other words: I ve never had one. But I ll be damned if I didn t want to try to make one. With my sights set on making a big beer , I brewed [ ]
No burying the lede here: we knew that moving cross-country would be hard, but the pandemic threw a wrinkle into the mix that resulted in the worst social isolation we ever experienced and it was simply too much to bear. Once we were free of any obligations keeping us on the West Coast, it just [ ]
Precisely why we decided to move back to Vermont from Washington is a story best reserved for a separate and more thoughtful blog post 1 but needless to say: I felt compelled to capture a few notes about my cross-country drive while the details were still (relatively) fresh in my mind. The preliminaries First, let [ ]
Just commemorating the moment. Dose â„– 1 of Moderna s COVID-19 vaccine went into my arm at 10:26am this morning.
It was cherry season in Washington, and our household had been eating the crap out of some Rainier cherries. When it occurred to me that I hadn t worked with whole cherries in a mead 1 before, there was only one thing to do. Fire up the ol mead making machine that is me, get a [ ]
Seems fitting that while we have a wildfire-smoke-hazy / practically opaque sky here in Seattle, that I should do the write-up for one of my clearest-ever beers a Munich Helles that I m calling Horst: Horst was the name of my German-born grandfather, and though my memories tell me that he was more of a [ ]
Wherein I had ingredients leftover from other brew days and (shrugs) the it ll be beer-ish philosophy takes over. Hoarder Intervention #4: Long-time readers may remember that Hoarder Intervention is the name that I stick on my brews that are just cobbled-together Frankenstein beers makeshift concoctions from the odds-and-ends leftover from other brew days, or [ ]
It s been 24 brew days since the last Prosody Project beer. All of 2019 went by without one and half of 2020. But when I heard that Yakima Valley Hops had Barbe Rouge for sale, I got nostalgic for a favorite back-home-in-the-802 beer: Burlington Beer s Barbe Rouge Single Hop IPA. There was no better [ ]