Friday’s (first) beer was “Anderson Valley’s Hop Ottin’ IPA”:http://www.avbc.com/beers/ipa.html, a doubly hoppy and cloudy beer that went well with the sunny evening. I was surprised at how cloudy it was, I was expecting to find yeast still in it but there wasn’t any.
Mark and Lee are still in Seattle after celebrating “Lee’s birthday in Vancouver”:http://troyandgay.com/blog/2008/05/18/vancouver-3/ so we had them and Eric over for dinner tonight. We had crab cakes, salmon dip, a leg of lamb, a mango salad, cheesecake for dessert and wine, of course. All the food was made by Gay (I barbecued the lamb, though) and all was very good.
I saw this site several days ago and keep remembering it. “Christopher Huet”:http://www.christophehuet.com/ does some amazing art. Some of it I like, some it scares me. I really like this one, though:
He even did the music on the site, which is also very good.
See the video on Flickr (or click photo above). She likes to crawl up it and in bare feet she can climb almost all the way up it until it gets more steep.
A new word she’s learned is “Up” that she uses when she wants to be picked up, helped up onto something or out of her highchair. But she says “Bup”. The bottom of the slide is too high for her to get on it (fortunately), so she stands at the bottom, looks at you and says “Bup”.
Today was brewing day… I brewed an Imperial Stout. That’s grains steeping before boiling for an hour. I even watched Havana while Gay napped while I was brewing. That’s quality time with my daughter.
“This beer”:http://www.dogfish.com/brewings/Limited_Edition_Beers/Raison_DExtra/19/index.htm was sitting in the fridge for a couple weeks, I was reluctant to try it because I generally don’t like beers with weird ingredients (I’m talking about you Belgium!) and it’s a brown ale and I have yet to find a brown ale I like. It’s also brewed with raisins and maple sugar so I assumed it’d be cloyingly sweet. But it wasn’t… it was definitely sweet, but very well-balanced. And it was especially good in today’s sun after mowing the lawn. Unfortunately, I only had one bottle to drink.
Belgian beer company InBev NV is “offering to buy Anheuser-Busch”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aNVBWD26Kq3w&refer=home. I hope they do, because I would love the irony of all the ‘mericans swilling Bud Light supporting a European company, based in a country that speaks a form of French (sacrebleu!), and they wouldn’t even know it. SABMiller, another European company, already owns Miller beer and MolsonCoors is not entirely American anymore. So with Anheuser-Busch, the last of the big three, no longer an American company we can finally say that American beers don’t suck.
We left Vancouver Sunday and drove a couple hours north to Whistler. It’s a beautiful drive through the mountains and along the water. The highway was littered with spans of construction making the highway wider for the 2010 winter Olympics.
