Tag: beer festival

Weekly Update: October 14th, 2019

Long time, no write! I’ve been delinquent in my duties for a long time, but let me get this one out so I can go on with my life.

Knife Skills

I started off September right: with knives! Sadly all they let me knife was some vegetables, because this was a culinary knife skills class at the local technical school. You might have been forgiven for thinking otherwise, considering it was taught by a certain Sue Brassard — a local chef, bearing no resemblance to the Shadowvale game owner. That Sue, as I joked, knows lots about knifing unsuspecting PCs, but she doesn’t usually advertise her skills.

Anyway, it was a very educational evening! We started with holding the knife, knife honing vs. sharpening, and some easy cuts, like chiffonade and mince. Then we moved onto the more difficult stuff — fine dice, brunoise, and fine brunoise, rendering some poor carrots into “carrot confetti”, as not-that-Sue called it. We ended with more reasonably-sized dices, as well as specific approaches to slicing onions and shallots.

All in all? I was surprised how well I did. I feel like a lot of the things we talked about — how honing is not the same as sharpening, how you should hold your fingers on your off-hand to push the food into the knife, how to do a chiffonade, how to peel garlic — I’ve learned from cooking shows. (Maybe the original Good Eats?) I also have a small amount of professional kitchen experience, from when I was working at the Adirondak Loj and had to sub in as prep cook.

And when it came time to do the difficult cuts, I was actually pretty decent at them. I couldn’t produce brunoise cuts at speed, certainly, but my table-mate kept expressing astonishment that I was managing to — slowly — create 1/8″ cubes of carrot.

My biggest struggle, as ever, was onions. I seem to be really, really sensitive to their volatile oils. At home I have kitchen goggles just for this, as I’ve learned none of the other ridiculous remedies work. (Yes, even that one you’re thinking of right now. I’ve tried them all). At the class? Not so much. Not-that-Sue kept trying to convince me that sticking my head in the freezer would help, and I eventually gave in. It did help that one time, but I think that had more to do with getting away from the onion.

  • From chiffonade to fine brunoise: my handiwork

River Styx Brewing Company

Recently Matt and I visited a local brewery, River Styx Brewing, located in Fitchburg, MA. You might recall that we liked their offerings at the Nashua River Brewer’s Festival, so it was only a matter of time until we made it there in person!

We sampled a flight of their offerings, and ended up coming home with three “crowlers.” That was a new term to me — it’s basically a 32oz pop-top can. In some ways I like that better than growlers, since the beer will stay fresh much longer while closed… but it also means you have to drink it all in one sitting, once you’ve opened it.

The crowlers were:

  • Hypnos, God of Sleep, a lavender chocolate Imperial double stout. I can’t stop raving about how good this is — and I don’t even favor stouts! Both the lavender and the chocolate come through exceptionally well, and I was surprised how well that floral note paired with the richness of the stout.
  • Morpheus: Hawaiian P.O.G, a sour ale featuring passionfruit, orange, and guava (hence the name). This is similar to the one they had at the Fitchburg festival, but this one hadn’t been aged on candy. Was not as fruity as I would have hoped, but still imminently drinkable.
  • Nectar of Aristaeus: Berry Smoothie. This was a milkshake IPA made with “hundreds of pounds” of berries. The fruit did quite a lot to mellow our the bitterness of the hops.

They also had Thanatos — which we’d sampled at the festival — on tap, but it was unavailable in crowlers. I’m told they sometimes sell it in cans, so here’s hoping!

  • The flight we ordered…
  • … and the full menu.

The Big E

I finally got to The Big E this year — the Eastern States Exposition, basically a state fair for all of New England. (Thus fulfilling another goal on my 101 Goals in 1,001 Days list!) They offer a “$6 after 5” admission deal on weekdays, so I took a half day on a random Wednesday and met EB in West Springfield.

One of the interesting things about the fair is that lots of local people rent out their driveways for parking, often for much cheaper than the official fair parking. I ended up paying $5 to park on the lawn of some really sweet people on York Street, who invited me to sit on their deck and have a beer. (I declined).

Once inside, EB showed me around the various state pavilions. In the CT pavilion, they were shucking oysters and giving them away for free, so I had one of the best oysters I’ve ever had. I did some early Christmas shopping and bought some ice cider in the Vermont house, ate some apple cider donuts in the MA pavilion, and took a picture with a bear in the NH house.

We also visited Storrowtown, the 19th century village they’ve recreated, looked at baby goats in one of the agricultural barns, and ate a famous eclair from the 4H building and admired the cross-stitch work there.

Oh, and I ate a late dinner of poutine on the midway, which was possibly one of the less exciting things I could eat there. (But still delicious).

It was fantastic, and I just wish I could have visited for longer! I barely scratched the surface of everything there is to do there.

Nothing says New Hampshire like marrying a bear with sunglasses.

Bathroom Renovations

… are done! I’m absolutely thrilled with how everything turned out. I haven’t yet taken a bath in my new tub, but I am looking forward to doing so!

  • Mirror hasn’t been installed in this picture, but it has since been!
  • Showing off the lovely tile work in the shower
  • … and the shower niche.
  • More of the countertop and sink.

ESO

I’ve been playing a lot of ESO lately, and I wrote about my impressions of the latest expansion.

I’ve been doing more stuff lately with Feline Good Meowporium, the trade guild I’m in. I really enjoy the trial group they run on Tuesdays and Sundays, even though I can’t always join. I haven’t been able to heal much, because there are two dedicated healers who always scoop those roles up, but I’m enjoying dpsing with Falanu again. Last week we did normal Cloudrest+2, and veteran Hel Ra Citadel. The latter was a first for me, and now I have that Ra Kotu bust for my house.

Speaking of housing, I am working on an overly ambitious design for FGM’s Halloween housing contest. How overly ambitious? Well, let’s just say it involved buying a house that cost one million gold, and printing out maze designs. The deadline to enter is October 21st, and I have to be done by October 28th — we’ll see if I can pull something together in that time…

Reading

I’ve started a bunch of books, but haven’t finished many lately.

I’m currently reading Black Powder War, the third in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which so far is interesting, but far too easy to put down. I’m entertained that once again my choice of SFF reading has taken me to an alternate-history Istanbul 😉

In search of some, ahem, adult literature, I found myself reading Lidiya Foxglove’s Queen of the Sun Palace series, a spicy m/f fantasy romance with an interesting power exchange dynamic, which lists as inspiration both Sleeping Beauty and the life of Marie Antoinette. I thought was fun, at least, and very much My Thing, but it has some unusually hostile reviews on Goodreads and Amazon, so I figure it’s not everybody’s cuppa. Anyway, I just finished the second book, and I know just enough about the real life Marie Antoinette and the French Revolution to wonder how this can possibly end well…

Matt and I have also been working our way slowly through the Audible Original performance of Treasure Island, which is fantastic, featuring the voices of Daniel Mays and Catherine Tate, among others.

I’ve also been picking at S.T. Joshi’s biography of Lovecraft, which I had apparently read a chunk of before? I didn’t remember how much Joshi forces his opinions on the text, but wow, he sure does. I usually agree with his conclusions, but sometimes he says things like “Lovecraft thought all poetry after Yeats is crap, and I agree,” and I have to kind of side-eye the both of them.

Watching

As I’ve written about on Facebook, I decided to dive headfirst into the wide, wild world of (the new-ish) Doctor Who. Previous to this, the only thing I’d seen of it was the famous “Five Doctors” episode of the original show.

This all started with a craving for more David Tennant, after enjoying him so much as Crowley in the Good Omens series. I asked my friends if I could start watching with his 10th Doctor, and the answer was mostly, “yes, but you might as well watch the 13 episodes of Christopher Eccleston first.”

So I started watching from the (new) series one, and found, to my surprise, that I liked many of the episodes. After years of railing against the popularity of this series, it actually quite entertained me! Though, as I said on Facebook, I feel it’s best when it’s a human interest story, and doesn’t delve too much into the science — because let’s be real, there’s not much science behind an alien with thirteen lives who travels through time in a sentient blue deus ex machina.

The best part of this has been watching in tandem with EB, sharing our snarky comments over Messenger. She’s a big fan of the series, and she’s going through a tough time right now, so it’s been a great way to connect with her at a distance, while getting additional info on the show. I post most of our best exchanges on FB, but here is one that still makes me giggle, shared during “The Empty Child,” i.e. gas mask aliens during the Blitz plus introduction of Jack Harkness episode.

“Captain Jack apparently pilots a rave.”

Now we’re on to the Tennant series, i.e. my original reason for watching, and I’m liking him quite a lot! I’ve heard it’s pretty normal to imprint on your first Doctor, so I’ll probably always have a soft spot for Eccleston, but on the whole I found the adjustment to Tennant pretty easy. It helps that he’s nice to look at 😉

The other thing I’ve been watching lately, in keeping with the season, is Vincent Price films. We have a selection that we own that we watched every year (House of the Long Shadows, The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Madhouse, the episode of The Muppet Show that Price was on, etc), but we also check each year to see if Netflix/Amazon have any new offerings. That was how we ended up watching The Cry of the Banshee, which… I do not recommend. There is a whole lot of rape and women screaming, not mention losing their shirts for absolutely no reason.

Last night, in keeping with this theme, I re-watched Dragonwyck with my friend Jess. You might recall I reviewed this one when I first watched it. Jess made an interesting observation about the length of the shots in this 1940s movie — modern movies rarely have shots longer than 7 seconds, but this movie often lingers for 30 seconds or more. Fascinating!

Larp

I continue to PC Shadowvale and NPC Madrigal 3.

Matt recently took up a role as staff on Mad3, which means he’s going to be busy with that, although my role should stay about the same.

I have to start thinking about what game I want to play after Shadowvale ends, which is closer than I realized — only five events remain! My most likely candidate is Cottington Woods 2, probably with some variation on the character I had meant to play in the first campaign: Galina, a witch and herbalist loosely inspired by Baba Yaga. I’m not nearly as invested in being a healer in my next game, though, so I’ll have to figure out how to do that within the witch header.

On the freeform/interactive literature front, I’ll be heading to Mythic Consequences in the UK in November, and the weekend-long game Tutankhamun: Evil Under the Egyptian Sun in Retford, UK, in February 2020. I’ll also be returning to Intercon this year, and actually just proposed a game! (Not my own: The Drinklings, a Nordic-ish game that I played at Consequences last year).

That said, Matt and I have decided to skip Consequences in 2020 (and probably the 2021 weekend-long game), just due to how expensive the bathroom renovation has been.

And that’s all I have to say for now! Not exactly bite-sized, but this is what happens when I don’t post for a while.

Weekly Update: August 6, 2019

Where has the summer gone? I can hardly believe it’s already August. So let’s see what I’ve been doing in the past week…

Yet another beer festival

Matt and I went to the Johnny Appleseed Craft Beer Festival this past Saturday, on the Leominster, MA common. Yes, this is the second beer fest I’ve been to in the past month. It’s been a very boozy month for us, I guess!

This one was built on a bit of a different model than the Fitchburg festival. It was $30 (advance) or $35 (at the door) to get in, but once you were in, all samples were included in the cost. Like the Nashua River festival, they gave you a commemorative sample glass — I’m going to be drowning in these if I keep going to beer festivals. Unlike the Fitchburg festival, they actually gave you a sample size, at least at first. (As the event went on, the pours kept getting bigger and bigger, as if some of the brewers were saying “fuck it, I don’t want to have to carry all this beer home”).

The breweries present varied quite a bit from the last event, and included a lot of bigger breweries. (Samuel Adams, for example, as well as Harpoon and Magic Hat). That said, the total number of brewers seemed higher, so there were still a good number of small places represented. I also saw some overlap with the Fitchburg festival, such as New City, Wachusett, and Carlson Orchards.

I also was surprised — when I arrived a little after the opening time of 3pm — that there was a line around the block to get in, even for folks who had purchased ahead of time (like us). Understandable, because they needed to check everyone’s ID. It did move relatively fast, notwithstanding my impatience 🙂

Here are some of the hits of the festival for us:

  • Wicked Weed Brewing from Asheville, NC had two session sours we liked, Watermelon Dragonfruit Burst and a Passionfruit Lychee Burst. Matt felt the watermelon was a little too “Jolly Ranchers”-y for his taste, though.
  • Golden Road Brewing out of Los Angeles had a “cart” series of flavored wheat ales. We sampled Melon Cart and Mango Cart, and decided Melon was the better of the two, with a pleasant melon flavor to it. The mango flavor sadly did not come through nearly as well.
  • The Mass Bev stall was pouring a selection from Rising Tide Brewery (Portland, ME), including a gose called Pisces that I quite liked.
  • Four Phantoms (Easthampton, MA) was pouring Baroness, what they described as a “brut saison.” It drank very much like a sour — not all that surprising, the brewer told us, since saisons are also traditionally made with wild yeast. This was probably Matt’s favorite of the whole festival.
  • Rhinegeist, out of Cincinnati, had an unusual selection of ciders and beers, which we sampled all of. I seem to recall the cider was Swizzle, a lemongrass and ginger cider; for beers, there was Nitro Cobbstopper (a peach cobbler ale), and a fruity IPA which I absolute cannot recall — it might have had pineapple? They were all enjoyable.
  • Groennfell Meadery (Colchester, VT) was, understandably, a hit with me! I sampled them all; they were all slightly drier than I was used to, but still very easy-drinking. My favorite was a sour cherry mead, Psychopomp, which was actually from the (related) Havoc Meads — and they even have the recipe for it on the Groennfell webpage!
    (Actually, the website has a ton of mead-making resources… there was a long gap in writing this while I explored their site).
  • Carlson Orchards (Harvard, MA) was pouring their own hard cider as well as their Shandy Stand, which was scrumptiously lemon-y. I may need to get some of that when I go there for peach picking in September.
  • 3cross Fermentation Coop (soon to be in Worcester, MA) offered Mumbaicycle, a chai-based stout, which was pretty good even though I don’t much like stouts.
  • Bantam Cider (Somerville, MA) had some excellent ciders, included a hopped cider (it might have been Mighty Mammoth?) that worked out really well.
  • Clown Shoes (Boston, MA) had their Coconut Sombrero, which is best described as a “non-sweet Almond Joy flavor in a stout.”
  • At Newburyport Brewing‘s stall (Newburyport, MA), we tried the Maritime Lager and Plum Island Belgian White. Pretty bog standard varieties, no flavorings, but they both stood out for the amount of nutty malt flavor that came through.

Of course after that excursion in the land of all-inclusive booze, we were a biiiiit tipsy. It was also nearly dinner time, and we were in downtown Leominster, so the logical choice was to hit up Mezcal for dinner! No margaritas were had, though 😉

Wachusett Mountain

On Sunday morning, Matt and I hiked Wachusett Mountain (or Mount Wachusett, take your pick) with Matt in the Hat and Tegan K. (Both of whom I hadn’t seen in FOREVAAAR). The goal here was to knock “hike a mountain” off my 101 goals in 1001 days list.

Wachusett Mountain, at 2,005′, is the “highest peak in Massachusetts east of the Connecticut River,” which is a lot of qualifiers. It’s also one of those mountains that you can drive to the top of. But, most importantly, it’s pretty dang close to me, about a thirty minute drive.

The first challenge was getting there, since Apple Maps wanted to take us to some point up the summit road, rather than the visitor center where we were supposed to meet. But we did get parked ($5 day pass) and underway shortly after 10am.

While all of us are healthy adults in decent shape, none of us hike mountains all that often, so we decided not to take the steepest trail to the summit. We opted to follow the Bicentennial Trail, which circles the base of the mountain in a clockwise direction, to the Mountain House Trail, which ascends to the summit. It appeared on the map to be a less steep grade than both the Pine Hill Trail and the Loop Trail. Possibly that was deceiving, however! I am reminded that east of the Mississippi, we think switchbacks are for pussies, and that the best path to the summit is straight up the side of the mountain.

Along the route we saw red chanterelles, raspberries, chokecherry, hemp dogbane, yarrow, knotweed, and tons and tons of beeches and hemlocks. We also heard the songs of red-eyed (or possibly blue-headed) vireos, and a hermit thrush. (That I even know that is thanks to Matt in the Hat, the designated “bird guy” in our circle of friends). In the process I learned about iNaturalist, a species identification app, which I’m keen to play around with!

We reached the summit around noon, amidst a light shower of rain. Despite the weather, we lingered for a bit at the fire tower, eating some food, taking photos, and spotting various landmarks in different directions. (You can just barely make out the skyline of Boston in the distance!) There was a display about old-growth forests at the summit, which made me wish we had tried the Old Indian Trail on the north side of the mountain, which goes through the largest section of old growth forest — you guessed it — “in Massachusetts east of the Connecticut River.”

Sweaty Lise at the Mount Wachusett summit
Sweaty Lise at the Mount Wachusett summit

We descended via the steep Pine Hill Trail, which lands you on the Bicentennial Trail nearly at the trailhead. It’s hard to judge going in reverse, but it felt about as steep as the Mountain House Trail, so we may have gone out of way for nothing? Definitely was hard on the knees going down, though, and I could feel my calf muscles trembling when I stopped to rest.

All in all, it was a lovely trip with lovely people, and now I’ve got an itch to do hike more mountains in the area. Maybe try that ascent from the other side of Wachusett? Or Mount Watatic? In all my abundant free time, of course.

Meadwatch, update three

Remember the batch of mead that seemed not to be fermenting after three days? Well, two weeks passed with no signs of fermentation. I decided at that point to pull out a sample and measure specific gravity, which would at least tell me if fermentation was active.

So, fermentation is active. The specific gravity has decreased from 1.109 to 1.041, which is trending in the right direction. It’s not quite where it should be after two weeks, though, so it’s definitely going slowly. Obviously the fermentation never produced enough CO2 to fill the fermenter and displace the vodka in the airlock, probably because it was less than a gallon of mead in a two-gallon plastic bucket (which may or may not have had an airtight seal). Also, when I adjusted the recipe from 5 gallons to one gallon, I reduced the quantity of yeast from 2 packets to 1, which may not be helping.

Regardless, I racked it into a 1-gallon glass carboy, where active fermentation was readily apparent in the airlock. It’s still slow — one bubble every 18 seconds, as of this morning. But it’s happening, at least. This one will sit until it clears, and/or until fermentation has stopped completely and/or until I get really impatient. We shall see.

I am debating if I want to put on another quick mead, and/or try out a recipe from the Big Book of Mead Recipes. There’s an Autumn Spiced Cyser that I think would be lovely with the dark wildflower honey I got from the farmer’s market. That probably wouldn’t be ready until Autumn 2020, though, given this book is full of recipes that say things like “age for 1-3 years” or “bulk age until mead is clear enough to read through”).

This book also uses a lot of additives that I’m not super familiar with working with, like sodium metabisulfite, which is common enough in wine-making, but less common in beer, which is kind of my touchstone for this hobby. Unfortunately you can’t really buy small batches of most of these supplies, so there’s an investment aspect, too, as well as buying a scale fine-grained enough to measure out “0.38 grams of GoFerm” or whatnot.

I certainly have plenty of materials to make all manner of quick meads, though… gotta do something with this half finished 3-gallon jug of orange blossom honey and these giant bags of herbs.

Alsoalso, there’s something to be said about waiting until I can make a proper 5 gallon batch of mead again. Which… won’t be until I have a working bathtub again — more on that in a moment.

Finally, I’ve determined never to buy brewing supplies through Amazon again, because the vast majority of the stuff I’ve gotten has been total junk. An inaccurate thermometer, an autosiphon that won’t siphon, a fermenting pail that isn’t airtight, etc.

Bathroom Renovations

The bathroom renovation has begun on time! Early even — the demo crew was knocking at my door at 7:45am on Monday. Here’s some pics from mid-demolition:

  • Sink, closet, and vanity are gone!
  • I am so glad to be rid of this ugly blue bathtub

Demolition is now complete, and we should be hearing from the plumbers soon. So far, everything is continuing apace *crosses fingers*.

Podcast Recommendation of the Week

Hey, I can’t leave you without at least one new podcast 😉 This week I’m keen on Noble Blood, a brand-new podcast about history’s most interesting royals and nobles. The second episode was on Charles II, who is of course one of the Stuarts, those disaster royals I find so deeply fascinating. In addition to discussing how Charles II compromised his way onto the throne, it also talked about the English Civil War, Charles I (possibly my all-time-favorite disaster royal), and Montrose (possibly my all time favorite 15-minute folk song about a disaster noble).

So, basically, I’m in love with this podcast.