Bakersfield, you're all right

Ride 6 miles in 100 degree heat and a blistering hot wind to get to Lengthwise Brewing's pub, but it was flat and fast, with courteous drivers, and nice (if under-utilized) river trail. Yeah, this beer is gonna go down just fine.

Sacramento TOMORROW!

Beer can porn?

Or, in the somewhat crass way it's said in the bar industry about empty kegs, dead soldiers?

For the sharp-eyed (or just ultra-critical) in the readership, no, I didn't drink the Coors. Except one, which I had to shotgun after I lost a silly bet that, surprise surprise, I can't remember what it was.

When buying beer for this, I tried really hard to get the more easily recyclable and much more regularly recycled aluminum cans, though I confess that a few glass bottles were harmed in the making of the fence.

878 IBU

In advance of teaching a homebrewing class next month, I need to do an extract with speciality grain brew to remember how to do i. (Really, to make sure I've re-assembled all of the needed equipment from around the Atlanta metro area.)

It's gonna be a classic "garbage pail" IPA, based on the hops I have in the freezer. Some of which date to 2007. And a five pound bag of extra light DME I've been carting around since 2008.

Hope this is good enough for you hopheads.

Cleveland!

Looking forward to a lovely vegan lunch at MELT Bar and Grilled in Cleveland.

And OH, MY GOD, what perfect timing with the music: Don't Let's Start, on the eponymous album They Might Be Giants, is playing overhead. This is the song I played essentially nonstop, on repeat, on my first CD player while writing my Div III, a long, long time ago. I can still reminder how that music used to make me smile.

I have this special love for the Rust Belt. I can't explain it without being cliche. I'll try briefly: for the most part, it's so real, so friendly, so genuine. Yeah. It's like that.

BAY AREA! food porn, beer porn, coffee porn, protest porn

As many of you know, I was in the bay area last week for quality time with, in alphabetical order, A, E, W*, and K.

*See this post for a reminder of who W is. 

 
A and I started the process of moving he and R into their awesome new apartment. Location hint: it's near this landmark business.

We got the most important task done first: fully stocking the fridge with all of the essentials.

I did some cooking in A's current apartment. This was for pasta. Yay for tempeh! (And they had this delicious salt and lime and chili powder spice mix.)

Artichoke hearts. 

Asparagus. 

And WHOA, WHAT THE HELL ARE THOSE?!? Are those... ONIONS?!? Yes, folks, that's right: A had ONIONS IN HIS FRIDGE! So I used them. They were delicious.

Here are the assembled cooked ingredients: I put the DELICIOUS ONIONS in the middle in a separate bowl. Yeah, I'm a good friend like that.

 Walking through downtown Oakland, got a little protest action. Yay Oakland!

On my second to last day in town, I helped K with some prep for a party he was doing. This is the prep for spring rolls for 30. (I did everything but the mango, while he did stuff with meat.) 

Here is a photo of how the spring rolls turned out after K finished them for the party. Yay spring rolls!

And this is with W at Saturn Cafe in Berkeley. It wasn't amazing, but it was pretty tasty, especially on a cold, rainy day. 

A and I had coffee at Sight Glass in SOMA at before he dropped me off at the BART to go to the airport. Again, the espresso wasn't that incredible, but it was good, totally serviceable; the space, on the other hand is gorgeous, and full of beautiful people. With very tight jeans. And fixies. And Macbooks. And "service dogs".

Binging

Even though this post is about alcohol, the binge here seems to be my blog posting today: this is #4 and counting, and I'm still going through photos.

Yep, it's all feast or famine here at dangr-us thoughts World HQ.

New Years eve in San Francisco, outside Johnny Foley's. No, I didn't go in.

And this is about 9am on January 2, in the elevator down to the Civic Center BART station (hey, I had an enormous suitcase, okay?) No, that yellow liquid on the floor isn't Sierra Nevada Celebration. Stay classy, San Francisco.

Colorado beer, food porn, etc.

The important stuff, of course.

Our Colorado vacation included visits to four new breweries, as well as a return visit to an old friend, Wynkoop, and the previously posted Trinity Brewing Company in Colorado Springs.

San Luis Valley Brewing Company, Alamosa:

Denver Beer Company:

Strange Brewing Company, Denver, before:

Strange Brewing Company, Denver, after:

Tasty beer, and tasty food:

A terrible picture showing the incredibly tasty vegan buffalo wings, and a fun vegan poutine, at City O' City, Denver (sister restaurant to the always lovely Watercourse, where we had breakfast yesterday before flying out):

Unfortunately, they seriously upscaled City O' City and jacked up the prices. I'll still keep going for the wings, but it's a big disappointment.


We also did a fair bit of our own cooking when the hotel rooms provided for it. This is a pasta with fresh broccoli, green peppers, and fake chicken from Gardein. Tasty. The Full Sail Wassail and bourbon were nice too, since it was COLD. Like, really, seriously cold. -4 before windchill, with stiff winds.


This is at Root Down in Denver, which is fancy and somewhat spendy, but has some great happy hour specials (pdf), and all vegan items clearly marked on the menu. Vegans should make sure when they order the sweet potato fries (right) to get a dipping sauce other than the "Curry Lime Dunk" which has sour cream in it. Boo. The portobello slider (top) was tasty but a little too sweet, while the Edamame Hummus with fried wonton chips (left) was RIDICULOUSLY good.


This is a semi-artistic rendering of our drinks, including the $3 happy hour draft, Odell's Isolation Ale. J's Rosemary-Lavender Lemonade (left) was actually $2 more!


Root Down has these super cool "smart" toilets: after you do your business, you wash your hands in the sink on top, then it uses the gray water as the next flush. The only problem is that the temperature of the sink water is cold (granted, it's December in Denver) but it seems like this could easily be fixed by just plumbing it with warmer water.

And, since no good food porn post would be truly complete without: ONIONS! Before flying out, we knocked out a bunch of tofu and onions to make wraps:
Yes, it was a bit of a risk, since the last two times J and I have taken wraps through the ATL south security checkpoint, it has resulted in false positives for bomb residue. It didn't happen this time.

Incidentally, that's a Thomas Hardy 2005 in the wine glass in the background of the photo.

Okay, with all this blogging about food, maybe I should go buy some so we can have dinner tonight. Just food, though: here in Atlanta, we remain in the dark ages until January 1, 2012.

Denver Beer Company

Solid. Just, solid. The basic pale ale, Bunny Trail Pale Ale, is one of the best I've had in a long time.

Denver Beer Company

New favorite brewpub

At least in the top five: Trinity Brewing Company in Colorado Springs. Exciting beers, great people, shitty location, and some of the best vegan buffalo wings I've ever had.

Don't worry, A2, we're going to go update the vegan wings competition today at City O' City. We'll toast you!

OK:

Syracuse has its charms. The Erie Canal Museum is actually excellent. Small, but well done.

And right across the street is  J Ryan's , and excellent beer bar with a lovely outdoor patio. Sure, the interstate looms overhead, but it's pretty cool to drink a beer on what literally used to be the Erie Canal.

All the better that that beer is a $4 cask Middle Ages Druid Fluid Barleywine. Say whaaaat? Better get my cheap beer in before I get to NYC tomorrow.

 Middle Ages Druid Fluid Barleywine 

Room service

Let me start by saying that I NEVER, EVER get room service. Literally: I'm pretty sure that in all the hotels I've stayed in, I've never actually ordered room service before.

But here at our:
ridiculously fancy hotel (this is the saltwater "Private Sunset Beach" lounging pool complete with a fake sand beach) J got a $25 gift card for her elite status, for use only for room service or the spa.

Not one to pass up mostly free beer (they were $9 each), I was quite pleased to see these three options on the room service menu. (See? Told you it's a fancy hotel. Thanks for paying your taxes: they're hard at work!)

Not the prettiest pour ever, nor a proper glass, but when Marriott is paying, I'm drinking.

Oh, and this is just a random shot of a happy hour Lava Flow from earlier in the day.

2011

I was inspired while reading this post on a blog I like to consider the year ahead.

Notably, the post is a fun read if you're any kind of a cyclist: this guy is a seriously obsessed gearhead cyclist. From what I can tell just from this post, he and his wife own about nine bikes between them. That would be one more than J and I owned at our peak in Alaska, but several of those were kids bikes from when we were fostering. He loves the high-tech expensive stuff, which I'm somewhat ambivalent about (like dyno hubs) but it's fun to read someone else's considered opinions even when I would never buy the stuff.

Anyway, on to 2011: some ideas, some plans, and some hopes for what I might do.

VERY LIKELY OR DEFINITE

• Continue my legal work with activist communities, including (already planned) trips to West Virginia, Nevada, and Columbus, GA.
  
• Do at least one lengthy bike tour: already have one in the planning stages from Atlanta to Richmond, Virginia, then on to West Virginia. And I'd love to do Adventure Cycling's Underground Railroad Bicycle Route, but I don't know if this is the year. More possible is the C&O Canal Towpath.
  
• Participate again in the Courage Classic. Fundraising appeal coming soon!
  
• Have a vacation with J. We're thinking about something outdoor rather than tourist travel. Maybe Colorado, maybe Alaska. See below.
  
• Continue and improve my short story writing. (Interested? You should be. Many of you are characters.)
  
• Some mountain biking. I've got that fancy new mountain bike, so I need to use it. Probably both some local stuff in Atlanta (which has some surprisingly fun trails intown) and also some in the mountains of north Georgia.
  

KINDA LIKELY

• Get better with linux, really dig in to my ubuntu installations, and understand more of what is going on under the hood. A, are you listening? I might want boot camp. I'll provide the beer.
• Speaking of beer, get back to regular homebrewing. As delicious as it is to have Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and Westy 12 and Hebrew Bittersweet Lenny's RIPA on tap, I'd like to have some of my own on tap again.
  
• And speaking some more of beer: every time I'm in a beer store with any kind of a legitimate selection (which gives me a pass on most of West Virginia) not buy a beer I've already had if there is something reasonably interesting to buy instead (or at least in addition to.) Notice the multiple qualifications. This is something I've been working on for the last couple years.
  

NOT VERY LIKELY BUT FUN POSSIBILITIES

• Hike the Chilkoot Trail. I definitely want to do this sometime, and Skagway is truly my favorite small Alaska town, but I'm just not sure it's feasible to have it on the agenda for this year.
• Get rid of our car, and go car-less, again. Primarily this is unlikely because we'd take an absolute bath on the value of the car: we tried to sell it in Alaska, with no luck, where people genuinely need 4x4, unlike Atlanta. As it is, we leave it parked for an average of 26 or 27 days every month. We'll continue working on this.
  

Island time

Here's the view from our hotel room window:

Yes, life is good. I'm going to spend much of the day exploring happy hours in Waikiki.

Since I'm five hours earlier than EST, I'm streaming one of my old public radio stations: KSKA. I was amused to hear the temperature forecast and current temp rundown for various locations in Anchoragua, none of them above 5 degrees fahrenheit, and 15 degrees below zero for East Anchorage. It's currently 81 in Honolulu.

Wonder how it is in the F-B-X... oh, -25! Maybe my friends are too busy huddled by the heater to e-mail or respond to text. Oh, btw, know that if any of you ever do text me, I have a new number I need you to use for texting (yay for google voice!) Email me for details.

GB edit

..

Kegerators

Kegerators are great, but they do need to occasionally be cleaned:

Those are actually just footprints from the bottoms of kegs, and the CO2 cylinder. (I used to have beautiful stainless cylinders, but had to exchange them for crappy steel ones at the shitass Airgas which is the only place reasonably close to me.)

Traveling extensively makes finding time for brewing tough, so, currently pouring: Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout and He'Brew Bittersweet Lenny's R.I.P.A.. Life is good! Dear Readers: come and get some!

Welllllll, yeah.

Image upload fixed. Here is the correct image:

And here is the previous upload:


To paraphrase someone I detest, but who said some pretty funny/useful shit, you don't go to a hotel room with the beer that you want, you go to a hotel room with the beer that you have .

And this is, by far, the best beer brewed in Egypt. Yikes.

Aswan tomorrow, which will be a relief after Luxor, the Hassle Capital of the Known Universe.

View from the hotel window

That's the Sydney Opera House in the left of the image, and the Royal Botanic  Gardens on the right. Now if we could just get that pesky building out of the way!

Unfortunately, I'm about to check out of the lovely view, to go to a hotel that is less than a third the price.

Sydney for three more days, then Melbourne for two, then back to the real world (and far cheaper, mostly better, beer.)

My Big Fun Denver Day

Yesterday after the walking tour detailed in my last post, I realized there was a Rockies day game. Baseball is basically the only major sport I like, and I have a soft spot for Rockies games, having spent many a day sitting in the $4 Rockpile bleacher seats studying for the Colorado bar exam. (They used to be $3.)

So I grabbed a burrito and hotfooted it to Coors Field, only to stand in line for about a half hour to buy a ticket. I got inside to an unusually good seat for me, since the Rockpile was sold out:


and slathered myself with sunscreen, and immediately began to get irritated with the moron sitting two seats over, who couldn't shut his mouth the entire game. He was immensely entertaining to himself, and laughed at almost all of his own comments. He carried on a running monologue with all of the players, and butchered the names he didn't know how to pronounce. (Jackass somehow managed to make De La Rosa sound like an Italian name: dee-le-rozza.) He loudly yelled that he could pitch a strike better than De La Rosa. He poo-poohed 93mph fastballs. Jackass was in his late 50s or early 60s, and had more hair on the tops of his hands than most people have on their entire body. His father was sitting next to him, and even he tried to shush him throughout the game: "Tom, c'mon, just watch the game." Jackass Tom was having none of it.

There was a seven or eight year old kid on the other side of me who several times threw peanuts and peanut shells over the railing (where people were sitting below.) His idiot mother-figure was several seats away, occupied with two other kids who pretty clearly didn't give a shit about the baseball game. I hissed "QUIT THROWING PEANUTS" at him, and after shooting me a slightly scared but calculating look, he did indeed quit throwing peanuts. I don't think he was particularly scared of me, but it's a strange thing to have an adult who is a stranger tell you what to do, and he probably worried I'd narc him out to his mom. Which I gladly would have.

By the fifth inning, I couldn't deal with Jackass Tom and Throwing Peanut Kid anymore, so I moved down to the main concourse to stand in the shade and watch the game from practically field level:

It was a pretty meh game, with the Rockies never coming back from the 5-0 the Mets established in the first few innings. I left in the bottom of the 8th to beat the crowd, and watched the last bits on TV at Falling Rock Taphouse a block south. I had a powerful thirst for beer, since even in one of the five best beer cities in the country, the beer selection at Coors Field (go figure) is horrid:

It's a terrible picture, but basically the best option are the mediocre and overmarketed Fat Tire and Guinness, and it plummets from there.

Falling Rock has an amazing tap list, but it gets spendy fast, so after one I headed over to Wynkoop Brewing for happy hour ($3 imperial pints!) I was on a roll now, so I walked over to Great Divide for the 4 o'clock brewery tour and had a delicious Old Yeti Imperial Stout made with coffee beans.

A little full from beer, I wandered back to the hotel, and swam for about an hour in the great pool. I also took advantage of the decent jacuzzi, and the fantastic sauna. The steam room was entirely too hot, even for me.

Today is my last full day here, with more walking (maybe a trip to the REI flagship store to buy cycling shorts), more swimming, jacuzzi, and sauna, and more fantastic beer on the docket.

I have a ridiculously good life.

Back from DC

And happy to be sleeping in my own bed tonight. It was a good, fun trip, though I didn't get enough sleep. A very quick summary, and then I need to change out my bike tires back to road slicks to better take advantage of the great weather right now in Atlanta.

The Smithsonian Museum of American History was pretty great, especially the amazingly powerful Sing for Freedom at the Woolworth Lunch Counter. I found Julia Child's Kitchen entertaining, especially how it showed her "do as I say, not as I do" approach to things like knives (she was a self-proclaimed knife freak, and said she had to have every knife she laid eyes on, yet she preached that cooks only need three knives (a chef's knife, a bread knife, and a paring knife.) Incidentally, with my new Kyocera ceramic chef's knife. which is plenty sharp enough to slice crusty bread and tomatoes, I'm almost of the opinion that it's about the only knife I need. But I digress.

On the other hand, the Library of Congress was kind of mediocre: not that much to see, and lots of annoying people in a relatively small space.

The "sidewalks" of Falls Church, where we were staying (not my first choice, but I had hotel points, and W and I make a lot of noise when we're hanging out, so putting friends out wasn't a nice option), were largely unmaintained and treacherous as hell, though they were improving by today.

The beer selection at Birch and Barley was indeed pretty great, but quite expensive, and it filled up with a whole lotta douchery on Saturday evening, so it's not some place I'd likely go often if I lived in DC.

Now I'm just glad to be back home and able to cook for myself again. Speaking of, how 'bout a little FOOD PORN? Actually, I think I'll hold it for another post, since it warrants a fairly lengthy story. Stay tuned!

BEER

To make myself feel better after that last post, let's talk about BEER! I blew the keg of the Sherwood Forest the other day, and then shortly thereafter, the keg of Sam Winter blew, too. I blame this in part on the party for 20 we had, and in significant part on how damn good the Sherwood Forest was. Not to pat myself on the back too hard, but it was off the charts good. I actually considered bottling four to six bottles for competition, but didn't even want to part with that much.

Fortunately, Mittelschmerz is starting to drink quite nicely, and in a lovely surprise, the local liquor store had 1/6 barrels of Hennepin Farmhouse from Brewery Ommegang in stock. So I spent an hour or so doing kegerator maintenance, including cleaning all of the lines and faucets, and the Hennepin is tasting lovely.

Come visit us to get some! Special limited time offer: all visitors get unlimited Hennepin and Mittelschmerz, while supplies last. Cannot be combined with other offers. Cash value 1/20 of $0.01. Contact offeror for additional details, terms and conditions.