Brews you can use

I’ve been lazy.

In the last couple weeks, I finally got around to:

• Racking 10 gallons last fall’s cider into kegs, mostly to empty the carboys so I could:
• Get my latest two batches out of their (open) primary fermenters

which couldn’t have been timed better; I blew two kegs about a week later, and:

• Put 10 gallons of cider on tap

(here’s where the laziness gets really inexcusable)

• updated the mini-whiteboard over my taps so the taps are (gasp) labeled correctly. No more getting the mild from the double IPA tap.
• HTMLized the notes from my latest batch, and
• did the same for the other beers I’ve brewed this year. It’s not too many…
• updated the site.

The ciders are spectacular. One of them is naturally fermented, and has noticeable residual sweetness and great apple character. The other got some White Labs English Cider yeast, and came out a bit dryer. Because I procrastinated getting them into kegs, they got the benefit of extra aging, and I’ll be drinking them during this year’s cider season. Motivation!

The wine/mead/cider world is probably more suited to my available time and motivation — in general, beer can only be ignored for a month or so, but wines &c. can be, no need to be ignored for most of a year to get really good.

I think I’ll stick to beer though. Beer’s tasty, bottling’s fiddly, and mead on tap would be very, very dangerous.

Somehow, I missed this story earlier:

Boise’s blue field turns 20

I’m not a huge college football junkie (just a general football junkie), but practically fell in love with the blue turf after flipping channels to a Boise state home game a couple years ago. After a few [quarts of] beers, it was the most pleasingly surreal thing I could imagine watching. Now, I root for them every year to do well enough that ESPN, etc. picks up some of their home games.

Ahh, blue football…