There’s murmuring about changing the beer style name “double India pale ale” to “San Diego pale ale.”
What a load of crap. I do hate the name “double IPA” though and insist upon calling the wonderfully bitter and robust drinks Imperial IPAs.
Bert's Pub?
Another chapter in the Yakima beer scene unfolds with plans to open a Bert’s Pub. The pub has no affiliation with the late, great beer-Moses.
Sadly, the pub is opening in the Glenwood Square location rather than the old train depot. The 98908 crowd has been tough to sell much on, but I hope the new venue does better than the two predecessors.
The proprietor, a Mr. Aaron Gamache, is a hop grower from the valley, and related to the cultivar of one of my favorite varietal, the Amarillo, which is a mutant that was found in the field. Gamache will be selling Coors at the pub, which Bert would have probably scoffed at, but Gamache does business with the brewer, so it makes some sense.
Portland Beers in Google Earth
I created a PDX Beer layer for Google Earth using data from my PDX beer shape file. Fun, but not as useful as Beermapping, which uses Google Maps.
Hello ^Again world!
I’ve lost the Rooftopbrew.com domain and moved to rooftopbrew.net. Damn registrar. Anyway, I’m also moving the domain from my iMac to a real host, so service should be – well – consistent. I’ll be updating the templates over the next couple weeks.
Experiencing Technical Difficulties
We’re experiencing some technical difficulties with rooftopbrew right now. Turns out my domain registrar didn’t notify me when my domain was going to expire and now they’re “holding” (ransoming) it for me before it goes on sale to the public unless I want to cough up $99. No thanks.
More later.
Beer and Bikes
I love beer. But I also love bikes. I’ve been trying to think of a cool synergy like when we did wheelies up and down grant street on cheap lager, but this is even cooler. (and safer)
Kegging and Cleaning
I haven’t kegged a beer since we moved in to the new place, and somewhat shamefully, I haven’t cleaned the keg of Pale that I brewed for the move-in weekend. Yes, that means I’ve had an empty keg sitting in the fridge for nearly 5 months. In my defense, I’ve only just recently started brewing, and there hasn’t been room to store the empty shells, so the fridge seemed like an ideal spot.
Sadly, because of the, uh, aging that the previous ale had done in the last several months, cleaning the kegs was a bit of work. First a scrub with warm water, then a good 20 minutes of soaking with PBW followed by a sanitization with iodophor before kegging the beers.
The squash ale finished at 1.012 and tasted spicy, which my wife assures me is good (I brewed it for her). The IPA also finished at 1.012 and I didn’t rack it to secondary like I normally do, but it has been resting nicely on the sun room floor (covered, of course) and has a really great British IPA flavor. It’s milder, due to it’s lower OG (1.048), and should be ready to drink this weekend. The squash ale is for Thanksgiving, so hands off!
Beer Label Photoshop
This shouldn’t be funny, but it is. Beer labels that would appeal to kids
Celebration arrives
Sierra Nevada’s Celebration has just hit shelves here in Portland. This is the winter seasonal I most look forward too. The hop bill changes every year and so far I think the 2005 rivals the 2003 recipe. 2004 was good, but not damn good.
Cask Festival Roundup
While I had a much smaller sampling that I’d hoped (I ended up helping 3 friends move this weekend and the cat got sick) I did manage to try 4 different cask ales. All were great and the perfect compliment to laborious work.
New Old Lompoc’s Monster Mash was smooth and excellent while Pelican’s Imperial Pelican Ale was surprisingly bright and hoppy for an imperial and since it was on firkin, I’m going to guess that it was dry hopped in the cask. I also had Mt. Hood’s Old Battleaxe 2004 barley wine which was very nice, but it wasn’t nearly as good as their oatmeal stout on cask.
Oddly enough, both tastings were held at smoking bars so the slightly more subtle aromas and flavors of the ales were even more difficult to pick out over the ambient air.