Overdue Housekeeping

August 30, 2011 Phil 5 Comments

Catching up on a backlog of scrap-paper 'Diary' entries — One of many catch-up sessions...

It’s been an absurdly long time since I last posted, and for several reasons — ranging widely from the rather-lovely to the tooth-pullingly-annoying. Time, certainly, for a bit of a catch-up (in the Hello-Again / Long Time No See sense) before the proper catch-up can start to happen in the other sense.

I’ve had a bit of rethink, also, about the peculiar post-dating regime that I’ve used here since I started — where the date of the actual pen-and-paper Diary entry would be used for the date of the blog post, no matter when it was actually / eventually uploaded. That plan was born out of my primary thought that the Beer Diary webthing would be an handy online version of the physical document. But I’ve often wanted to write more ‘topical’ stuff — and frequently resorted to shoe-horning it into the discussion of whatever-was-next in the book¹ — and then the podcasts came along as well and things just got unwieldy and strange and headachy. The sampling-writing-posting calendar mismatches were a common source of puzzled questions, and on one memorable occasion caused the surreal situation where some geniunely-lovely praise was accompanied by a charmingly-outraged ‘How on Earth haven’t we seen this before? He’s been blogging for seven years!’, when I’d only been going a few months.

Another catch-up session for 'Diary' entries stuck on coasters — Another catch-up session...

So nice timing, really; with the podcasts in-between seasons² and a lack of activity for a while, I can change gears and change the plan. Posts will just get whatever date they get when I with the Big Blue Publish Button, and historical Diary entries that get uploaded — and I do plan to keep going through them, steadily — will just be labelled obviously-enough. As one last fit of oddness (of that kind, others will remain), I’m going to arbitrarily give this post the time-travelling date³ of my birthday last year so that it stands out in the Archive like the gear-change it is, and since the Diary has its origins as a particuarly-awesome present.

I’ve been distracted of late, but keeping this blog has been a massively rewarding experience and I’m delighted to feel a bit of momentum behind getting back into it. I recently left my long-running job at the Malthouse, and have had a bit of time to figure out What’s Next. (Embarrassingly-much of which was taken up by ‘Do I really want to revise the post-dating scheme on my website?’; I’m a chronic over-thinker.) Securing more time to write is key, and I’m also lucky enough with the timing that I get to go to The Great Australasian Beer Spectapular in Melbourne next weekend which will doubtless give me yet more of a prod and plenty to ramble about. So yes: Hello again. Nice to see you after so long.

1: Or, on one or two occasions, actually choosing which beer to drink and diarise based largely on its ability to furnish an excuse to write about something in particular.
2: I do have two episodes ‘in the bank’, as it were, and will endeavour to get them up before I go away for the weekend — not least because the theme of ‘s02e02’ is also my destination: Australia.
3: I’m actually writing this in the small hours of Monday, 7 May 2012. While drinking tea and listening to The Three EPs by The Beta Band, since you ask.

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast episode 9: 2011 Year in Review

June 27, 2011 Phil 6 Comments

Hardly rushing in to things, we here present our 2011 Year in Review, recorded mid-February and published in the first few days of March. The Oscars for 2011 releases only happened this week, after all, and we don’t have their kind of budget — or Billy Crystal. Instead, we took vague inspiration from the “Golden Pints” lists that popped up around New Year’s, and take the chance to look back on the year past to pick out some themes and some favourites.

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast episode 9: 2011 Year in Review →

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast episode 8: Strong Beer

June 27, 2011 Phil 6 Comments

My profuse apologies for the inadvertent summer hiatus. Inspired by the impending holidays — impending, that is, when we recorded — we have a little bit of a ramble about Strong Beer (partially also to balance the ledger after our Midstrength Beer episode). There are a lot of ways to be a strong beer, and equally-many reasons to enjoy one. And then there’s a fair amount of silliness in the field, too. But the point remains: there’s a beer for every occasion that might otherwise bring wine or whisky to the front of your mind.

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast episode 8: Strong Beer →

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast episode 7: At the Masons Arms with Kieran Haslett-Moore

June 26, 2011 Phil 3 Comments

After a Garage Project beer at Hashigo, George and I ventured out to the quiet outer suburbs to join Kieran Haslett-Moore in his in-house pub, the Masons Arms. Over a few of his beers (accompanied by a platter of delicious things he’d largely also made himself), we talked about the many roads to being a satisfied beer geek, pondered the idiosyncrasies of the Wellington craft beer scene and the wider industry at large. Towards the end, we picked up on the topic George and I had talked about last time, and discussed a few weirdnesses of beer award shows.

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast episode 7: At the Masons Arms with Kieran Haslett-Moore →

Actual Diary entries

Liberty / Mike’s ‘Taranaki Pale Ale’

June 25, 2011 Phil Leave a comment

If it weren’t for that Firestone, we’d have just had ourselves a three-peat of Liberty beers here in my Diary. Unlike the others, though, this has Liberty’s Joseph Wood in Collaboration Mode. It’s an emerging trend in the local scene, and Joe’s one of the keenest participants, it seems — he worked with Yeastie Boys for their ‘Warrior’ and ‘Monster’ beers, was part of the hophead ‘Four Horseman of the Hopocalypse’ supergroup (with Hallertau’s Steve Plowman and Epic’s Luke Nicholas and Kelly Ryan), and joined in with the NZ Craft Beer TV ‘Mash Up’ project. Hell, he’s even said he’s keen to collaborate with me, in what could be the greatest-ever excuse for a summer roadtrip. In a sense — in, I pause to stress, a positive sense — he’s something of our industry’s Timbaland, in that regard.¹

So here we are with a Taranaki Team Up; New Plymouth’s Liberty and Urenui’s ‘Mike’s’ / White Cliffs. Fortunately for all concerned, they brewed this one at the latter, which has nearly ten times the capacity of the former. Because if this had been overly-scarce, things could’ve easily gotten all Mad Max as us beer geeks squabbled over the dregs. It was a crowd-pleasing thing of oomph and deliciousness, loaded with that kind of enthusiastic fruit-bowl boistrousness that we’ve come to love 8 Wired’s ‘Hopwired’ IPA for. The comparisons to that really are inescapable and rather strong, but — just as I said with the also-striking resemblance between Three Boys’ Oyster Stout and Emerson’s Southern Clam Stout — you’d be very hard-pressed indeed to find something more worth emulating. TPA has popped up a few times since, and seems to have slightly drifted towards the ‘healthy bronze’ end of the colour palette, rather than its initial ‘luminous gold’.² But it continues to be great fun, continues to be somewhat-dangerously-drinkable (given its heft), and will hopefully make a few more appearances over the summer.

As my notes lament, I was meant to be bartending at Matariki (speaking, as I was quite-recently, of beer festivals), but some administrative snafu best left forgotten meant that I’d just be doing my regular gig that day. My pint of TPA helped compensate very nicely indeed — not least because it (and the batch-to-batch Hud-to-Hud comparison that Stu from Yeastie Boys had arranged for a few of us geeks to celebrate the second edition of the equally-boozy ‘Hud-a-wa”), put an uncharacteristically-cheerful shine into the start of my work-day, bless it.

Verbatim: Liberty / Mike’s Taranaki Pale Ale 25/6/11 7.1% on tap @ HZ, after Hud-to-Hud batch trial with Stu, Martin, Tim, Amy, Shannon & Annika. Another improm[p]tu geek con. They’re all off to Matariki, and I was meant to be. Sadface. So a pint + a pie before work. Hazy, pale peach. All the big-crazy fruit salad, a la Hopwired. Fruitier than a row of tents, says Martin. It’s like Emerson’s Southern Clam after Three Boys Oyster; name one token more worth emulating.

Liberty / Mike's 'Taranaki Pale Ale', tap badge

1: If I hadn’t already compared one of his beers, the staggeringly awesome ‘Never Go Back’, itself to Samuel L. Jackson, that’d be even more apposite and more obviously-positive. There was a time, which probably just coincided with me watching more movies, where he just seemed to be in everything, and awesome in everything — stealing the show in tiny little bit parts like right at the end of Out of Sight. The man’s been in over a hundred films, for God’s sake; Wikipedia feels obliged to put his ‘Filmography’ on its own page, and just look how many cram into each year.
2: My photo doesn’t quite do it justice. Perhaps because of the lighting in Hashigo, or perhaps because mine was from fairly far down the keg (if I remember rightly), and things can get extra-hazy with hop-loaded goodness — just like they did with my ‘Taranaki Session Beer’, coincidentally enough. Alice Galletly had a similar problem, lamenting that her plastic-on-a-picnic drinkware didn’t do it justice. But just check out Kevin McLellan’s photo — Alice and I ain’t lyin’; that stuff was gorgeous.

Uploaded, at last: 4 December 2011

Actual Diary entries

Firestone Walker ‘Velvet Merlin’

June 24, 2011 Phil 2 Comments

Karma is a bitch, sometimes. One day, I upload a podcast in which I make a flippant reference to wishing that trench foot isn’t lost from the world — I’m not even sure why I did; these things just ramble out of my brain, sometimes — and the very next day, I’m faced with a metric crapload of kegs to shuffle around in the chiller when I’m wearing my worn-out leaky hiking boots (rather than my ass-kicking hefty steel-toed factory-worker boots — which are also wearing out, truth be told). It didn’t get genuinely horrific, but it was conspicuously less fun than Kegtris usually is.

But — in yet another of those instances wherein the universe finds a way to reassert the relevance of a Diary entry, no matter how inexcusably belated — some of kegs in that swag were Firestone Walker’s ‘Double Barrel’ Ale, a beer which I’ve liked for ages, and am dead keen to have on tap. All the Firestone beers I’ve had so far have been charming, in their own ways. And this thing was an absolute delight to have as a guest for a little while. As you may be able to see on the awesomely ostentatious and typically-American tap handle, it’s another oatmeal stout, and I (to reiterate) bloody loves oatmeal stout, I do. This was the first to be tapped of a swag of American imports that we had stacked in the fridge, and its awesomeness and the sheer delightful silliness of that stonking-great handle proved a brilliant tease for the four more that were destined to go on together on the Fourth of July.

It was, to my no-surprise-at-all, just glorious. Positioned in a very pleasant middle-ground between the very-light likes of Little Creatures’ one-off oatmeal stout and enjoyably-worrying heavyweights such as Liberty’s ‘Never Go Back’, it’s smooth and silky and decadent without feeling overly or guilt-inducingly so. Nothing leaps out of my memory (or my notes) to really distinguish it from others of its kind, other than its nicely-built goodness. But that’s a fine and lovely thing, just to be doing what you do do well in an un-flashy and self-assured way. This does that.

Basically the only thing even remotely wrong with it is the name. There’s nothing inherently wrong about it — slightly obscure or bizarre as it might be, it does kinda work: “velvet” is certainly a word that anyone who makes this beer should feel entirely free to use, and “Merlin” is the nickname of their Brewmaster, Matt Brynildson. The tragedy is that is was once called Velvet Merkin. And that’s a whole bunch funnier. “Merkin” is seriously close to being an inherently funny word, and is well worth looking up if you’re not entirely sure what it means or why it might’ve been the name for this thing. I have — as you might have picked from the fairly-liberal swearing or from the short-form rants on the topic — a proudly defiant anything-goes approach to the English language and just hate to see people needlessly flinch from “bad words”. It’s the name of a beer, for fuck’s sake; you have to be legally an adult to buy it anyway, and this is such a gloriously outmoded word that it’s hard to imagine anyone clever enough to know it being simultaneously wowserish enough to have it give them the vapors and make them need a lie-down. But they self-censoringly changed the name when it graduated from being a one-off project, and that’s just kinda sad.

Just like oatmeal stout, swearing (and “bad language” more broadly) is one of the joys of life. Both take skill and timing, both are nourishing to body and mind, and both are capable of shocking and delighting — in turns or at once. Mister Fry is definitely with me on the swearing, and I can’t help but assume he’d be partial to a bloody-marvellous oatmeal stout, too. He just seems the type, don’t you think?

Verbatim: Firestone Walker ‘Velvet Merlin’ Oatmeal Stout 24/6/11 5.5% on tap @ MH, with the glorious tap handle. Revising my July Four plan, but I’ll still jump in while it’s here. Ari Sr. shouted us a round! Loving the oatmeal stout these days. This is nicely placed on the number line between the Creatures and the Liberty. Smooth + light + lovely. Some silk sheets, but not too many. All very well put together, nothing seems to upstage obviously.

Belatedly uploaded: 29 November 2011

Podcast episodes

Beer Diary Podcast episode 6: Beer Awards and Festivals

June 21, 2011 Phil 18 Comments

Back again for Episode VI — and please do excuse the Rugby World Cup and other related delays in the posting — George and I had a bit of a Beervana 2011 debrief and ponder. He wasn’t able to make the festival itself, but I had a great afternoon and offer some thoughts (almost entirely positive, which is rare for me) on the changes in direction that the festival took this year.

We also have a bit of ramble about the related Beer Awards, where the critical circuits of my brain get a bit more a workout. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement, here; I’d love to see greater clarity, more-interesting categories / awards — and, crucially, a bit of gate-keeping to prevent breweries gaming the system by entering beers in categories that go against their own marketing just for the sake of increased odds of winning. It’s a controversial subject, and we do return to it a bit in the next episode, so consider this Part One of a longer discussion — and jump in below, in the comments.

Continue reading Beer Diary Podcast episode 6: Beer Awards and Festivals →

Actual Diary entries

Liberty ‘Taranaki Session Beer’

June 21, 2011 Phil 3 Comments

Just like anything worth doing is worth doing well — a hat-trick of great big black beers, all three of which are weird and wonderful in their own ways, just to pick an example entirely at random — so too is any pattern worth keeping at all equally worth smashing to pieces. So here’s me, leaping off my big boozy plateau into a delightful little mountain stream of midstrength loveliness — and writing up my second Liberty beer in a row, which helps make up for their relative absence from here (as against how often they were mentioned in the podcasts, and in person).

And I do bang on about session beer a lot, I suppose. Certainly more than Normal People. I first had this around about the time we recorded our podcast episode dedicated to mistrength beer, but it unaccountably goes unmentioned. Making up for that, as I put this post together, I’ve finally gotten around to adding a “Sessionable” tag, which will hopefully continue to attract a steady sequence of delicious pints of beer. Also, I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that I can now describe something other than my beloved Hallertau ‘Minimus’ itself as being broadly “in the Minimus mold”. The comparisons really are inescapable, what with this being a hoppy golden ale / very-pale pale ale and in the same booze-bracket as its friend from further North.

Hallertau have taken to slightly-tweaking Minimus in response to changing seasons / ingredients / random dice rolls / shifting whims / whatever / all of the above, and its ‘Winter’ incarnation had just hit the taps at work the night before. On blearily blinking into the unforgiving daylight the next morning — because it was morning, you understand, not because of over-indulgence: I was, after all, drinking Minimus — I somehow managed to read and comprehend a message on my phone to the effect that NZ Beer Blog’s Martin and Yeastie Boys’ Stu were having a beer at Hashigo and suggesting that I should join in. When I also read, on the Twitters, that they’d just tapped a keg of Taranaki Session Beer and that 8 Wired’s Søren was also on his way in for a pint, the thought of an Accidental Beer Nerd Convention was irresistable. And so off into this frequently-awful overlit thing you all call “daytime” I ventured.¹

And well done, all of you that made my uncharacteristically-early start so worth-while. That beer was delicious, deserving of high praise even if I wasn’t such a weirdo about my midstrengthables, and the company was bloody marvellous. If anything, TSB was a touch sweeter than the Winter Edition of Minimus, and Liberty’s Joe had apparently tried some clever trick (the details of which were not entirely over my head at the time, but which have long since turned to mist and evaporated from my brainpan) with his water chemistry to help get around the basically-inevitable problem of the slight ‘gap’ in the palate that happens when you dip back down to this kind of weight. Even if you happened, at the time, not to care about the bonus of Something Sessionable, this is glorious.

It must be said, also, that if you can make a big-ass imperial stout and one of these with equal grace, then you’re doing very well indeed. After a few conversations back and forth, Joe floated the idea of me heading up to the ‘Naki to join in a Liberty Brew Day and maybe doing a ‘collaboration’ (ludicrously one-sided as it’d be, with me playing Second Assistant Who Tries Not To Break Things). Given the range encompassed by this thing and the one right-before it in the Diary, I’m rather deliriously spoilt for choice. (But I do have a few ideas…)

I’m glad I got the physical Diary in the shot, too. It’s been a while since it made an appearance, and I think I lined it up behind my pint after Stu commented that the thing-itself was rather surprisingly smaller than he’d assumed, after seeing its scans on here. My handwriting, just by the way, is tiny — when I started school, there was some horrible mental collision between those oddly-hugely-lined exercise books they make you use and the regular-random-notepaper my Dad let me scrawl in at home. It permanently broke my sense of appropriate scale for the handwritten word, accidentally turning me into a very effecient indeed user of paper. Even two-hour law school lectures wouldn’t see me use more than both sides of a single sheet of A4.

Verbatim: Liberty Brewing ‘Taranaki Session Beer’ 21/6/11 3.7% on tap @ HZ. Mini beer nerd convention by accident, with Martin + Stu + Søren. Towards the end of the keg, hazy barley-sugar orange. After (Winter) Minimus returned to MH last night. What a turnaround after the last three! This is similarly-pitched loveliness, maybe a little sweeter with slightly-less of that inevitable palate-gap, perhaps.

1: Anyone who bothers to check metadata would discover that my photo is timestamped at slightly-before 2pm. Which you might not think is “the morning”. But you have to remember Warren Ellis’^a rule: if I’ve been awake for less than two hours, then it’s morning, no matter what the goddamn clock says.
— a: I mean the author, not the musician.

Originally posted: 22 November 2011

Actual Diary entries

Liberty ‘Never Go Back’

June 20, 2011 Phil 1 Comment

And so here my notes complete a hat-trick¹ of ten-per-cent-plus black-and-glorious monster beers. It happened entirely by accident — presumably helped by the contemporaneous feeling that Winter Was Coming — and now also occasions one of those nice coincidences that seem to happen (as I mentioned last time) when I’m this far behind with my rambling-uploadings: as I sat down after work to start putting this post together, I had two other oatmeal stouts. The first was a glass of the absurdly-delicious Ballast Point ‘Sea Monster’ we have on tap at work at the moment, and the second, firmly in the the spirit of “bugger it, let’s give these guys (yet) another chance,” was Stoke’s new one. Given my prior history with their beers (and no other real intervening changes on trying them several times since that almost-infamous Diary entry), I can relatively-cheerfully report that Stoke ‘Bomber’ was largely faultless, but it just wasn’t the sort of liquid luxury that I love in my oatmeal stouts — and I bloody loves oatmeal stout, I do.

But enough about those; they’ll get their own posts soon enough.²

I’ve been regularly praising the beers from Liberty in the podcasts — I often forget to prepare a list in the few days before recording, and Joseph Wood’s beers float readily to the top of my brain when George asks for a suggestion. Up until right now, the only one to appear on here was the Amarillo-hop version of his West Coast Blonde, which I had at Hashigo way back in February, on their genius-and-generous Fundraiser Night. Since then, bottles — bloody-great-big lovely 750ml bottles with that cute newfangled re-sealable plastic enclosure-thing — have been popping up fairly regularly, although the batch sizes are still very small indeed. I had a way-too-enjoyable time, back in May, when I inherited the remains of a some-of-everything tasting session that included a few experimental beers and plenty that have since shown up as ‘proper’ releases. It was a broad range, with interestingness and goodness present in sufficient quantities that I was delighted to be in possession of what were basically just dregs, and it featured some perilously-strong beers; I wound up very cheerfully drunk.³

‘Never Go Back’ is a suitably-dramatic way for Liberty to return here, certainly, and I freakin’ adore it. It’s got a peculiar Samuel L. Jackson quality about it — you know, like how Emerson’s Oatmeal Stout was all Barry White — that makes you just want to use the word motherfucker in an endearing and complimentary way. A big-ass glass of pure blackness, it smells like some kind of overclocked, rocket-fueled Hershey’s chocolate syrup and is ridiculously smooth. The word “velvet” is not remotely out of place, in the label blurb. Compared against something like 8 Wired’s ‘iStout’, I’d say it wasn’t as confrontingly bitter and punchy — by which I don’t mean anything inherently positive or negative, they’re just different; that side of iStout is very well integrated into the whole and is probably a massive part of what makes the iStout Float such a delight. And maybe that’s partly also down to all NGB’s gorgeous oatmeal smoothness, which makes such a big beer worryingly and brilliantly and perhaps-unexpectedly drinkable. The image that came straight to my mind — a mind that supervenes on a brain that had had more than one beer in the >10% bracket, remember — was of wearing silk pyjamas and leaping into a bed adorned with silk sheets… then finding yourself in a heap on the floor on the far side of the room after skipping frictionlessly off the surface. Never Go Back does something like that; it’s so velvety that it’s surprisingly easy, given its massiveness. Well that, and it could easily leave you in a heap on the floor, too.

But you’d be a happy heap. And that’s what counts.

Verbatim: Liberty ‘Never Go Back’ Imperial Oat Stout 20/6/11 10.6% — what a plateau! 750ml ÷ 3 with Tim & Amy. So big and lovely. Boozy, for sure. Fumey chocolate syrup. Powdery cocoa feel to it. Would make excellent stout floats. Definitely velvety, so much so that the body is oddly easy; it’s the silk pjs / silk sheets problem.

Liberty Brewing samplers — My collection of Liberty Tasting Session Dregs

1: Possessed, as I am, of little-to-no sporting ability, such metaphors are likely rarer-than-average in my ramblings. But I like that one a lot — and used it for my three-peat^a of Hashigo Diary Entries that concluded with Coronado’s ‘Islander’ IPA — largely because, just as I hoped when I first heard it in my awkward teenage cricket-playing days, the original story involves an actual hat.
— a: Not wanting to overuse “hat-trick”, I went with “three-peat” there, instead, just vaguely remembering it from American sports commentary. But then I looked it up. And it turns out that it’s trademarked for commercial uses by some former basketball coach. So, once again: fuck trademark abuse, really. That’s insane. It’s a totally natural and obvious way to bend our beloved English language. Even the many and mongrel authors of the Wikipedia managed to assembled a metric boatload of ‘prior art’. The law graduate in me (buried deep, I assure you; don’t worry), just got a little bit angrier.
2: Given a generous interpretation of “soon enough”, at least. Maybe one on Geological or Cosmological timescales.
3: Just to be clear, the adverb “very” here modifies both the “cheerfully” and the “drunk”.

Originally posted: 7 November 2011

Actual Diary entries

Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary Black Barleywine

June 20, 2011 Phil 6 Comments

Well now. It has been a while. Again. The value of t has graduated to the triple digits and is going to need a serious hammering to get back to a civilised size. So: roll sleeves up, make sandwich, brew tea, forget about tea, grab beer, roll sleeves back down because it’s actually kinda chilly, remember about tea, curse bad memory, and back to it.¹

I’ve long been a sucker for an Occasion Beer, and brewery anniversaries are a great excuse to try something new and celebrate what you’re all about. They’re results aren’t always spectacular; Tuatara basically phoned it in with their ‘X’ ale, if you ask me (although this year’s XI was a massive improvement on pitch, execution and all fronts — it’ll show up a little later in the Diary). But at the other end of the naff-awesome spectrum is 8 Wired, who knocked the ball out of the park and pretty much brewed the Platonic Form of the Anniversary Beer with their masterful ‘Batch 18’. Sierra Nevada, facing their unquestionably-milestonish 30th birthday, undertook a project of suitable size and scope, and which also nicely demonstrated their (relative) Elder Statesman status in the craft brewing business and the getting-shit-done capacity that that entails.

For a few years, they’d brewed an ‘Anniversary Ale’ for their birthday, basically a variant-edition of the Cascade-heavy pale ale that made them famous — and basically made “American Pale Ale” into a thing at all. With the big three-oh coming up, and since they were never only all about the pale ale, they broadened the scope of the Birthday Project to include multiple brews, in several styles, made in collaboration with all sorts of industry notables. Two of the series made it as far as us: an ‘Imperial Helles’ (a genuinely-interesting embiggened lager that managed to build something relaxed and worthy where a superficially-similar thing like Crown ‘Ambassador’ instead almost drowns in its own wank — I had mine on my 31st birthday, which seemed appropriate enough), and this.

It’s a glorious big-in-every-direction kind of thing; huge and boozy and rich and many-layered. Weighty and thick, it had a peculiar combination of sweetness and savory smokiness that made it like some Mad Science hybrid of birthday cake and birthday steak. My notes inevitably don’t do it any justice; this is another Distracted Diary Entry — not to the point where I had to take a do-over the next day, as I did with after the Random Ragtime Band Incident — since my friends Aran (that’s him in the red hoodie, attempting / succeeding at a photobomb) and Maeve were in town before heading off to pack up one house, move into another, then pop over to Italy to get married. As you do.

Freakishly, just as I finally type this up way too late, they were in the bar again tonight for the first time since. These things happen alarmingly often: Rex Attitude’s second batch appeared just as my tardy notes appeared online, and the same thing happened, if I remember rightly, with Hop Zombie. My slackness does have a weird way of keeping me relevant, somehow (in peculiar senses, at least), but I should take the time to promise (but not guarantee) that I am trying to trim it down…

Verbatim: Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary Black Barleywine 20/6/11 10.2% ÷ 3 w/ George & Aran (Maeve is driving) George had the Moa R.I.S. before this, fittingly. He says its more Marvin Gaye than Barry White, and Aran has it as coffee made with slightly-too-hot water, slightly sweet-smoky, which suits the BBQ-esque pizza. Cheap licorice, says Aran. The taste v flavouring problem. Licorice kiss ice cream, he says. Ah, distracted notes. Never do justice.

1: That is an accurate sequence for the moment preceding sitting down to write this evening. A full accounting of the process would also include breaks / interruptions along the lines of: read news, clean kitchen, play Bastion, go grocery shopping, watch Futurama, and then remember about the tea (again) and brew another pot. If there was a procrastination event at the Olympics, I’d have a collection of shiny medals by now — if I ever got around to signing up.

Originally / eventually posted: 5 November 2011

Tastings and ramblings and whatnot