Ho ho holidays

Excuses, excuses, excuses. I’ve been busy over the past few weeks. Here’s a brief re-cap:

12/14 — I got to tour the inner workings of Target Field. In a beer-related twist, we learned they have these keg rooms located throughout the bowels of the building and big thick conglomerates of tap lines that lead floors above to thirsty baseball fans above that will never relive 1987 or 1991 again. Hahaha that was mean… but true.

12/21 — Instead of giving my employees chocolates or candy canes or gift certificates to Caribou coffee, I gave them a bottle of homebrew. Most of them got the rest of my Wet Dog pale ale from the backyard hop harvest this fall. A few others received my Rabid IBA I did in March.

12/24 — My wife made an amazing lobster for Christmas Eve. Went great with the last bottle of Frosty Dog kölsch I brewed in April.

12/26 through 12/29 — The wife and I headed up to Lutsen with two other couples. Brought a bunch of homebrew along, which was ok for the first night but promptly froze outside on the deck afterward. The pale ale actually did ok once re-thawed (though contained the telltale flakes in solution) but the pumpkin rye beer (Cujo Spice v 2.0) SU-UUUUKED afterwards. Honestly I didn’t love it prior to cryo-stasis but it wasn’t this bad before. I poured it out. Don’t do that very often. The higher alcohol beers like Rabid, Chasseur and Snot actually didn’t really freeze and tasted about the same the next day.

Duluth!

Oh, I should also mention I pulled off the beer-braised chicken recipe I tried out a few weeks ago with honors for the crew up north. Glad I practiced ahead of time.

Happy new year!