Rough Draught

ELSEWHERE: Boiler Brewing Company

2018-03-02T10:51:00.000-08:00

If there’s one thing I like in a brewery, it’s fucking around. Like when brewers take a regular recipe and shove herbs in there, or some old fruit they forgot about, and age things in oak barrels with coffee grounds and wave lavender essence over it or some bullshit. It is the best. Give me a golden stout with banana peels and rubbed sage any day. Soak some toasted almonds and honey in a berliner, and call it Beez Nuts.

Anyway, we found a brewery on our last road trip called Boiler Brewing Company that is all over this shit. I was going to write a spotlight for it earlier, but then I didn’t, so I’m writing it now, because we finally opened a can we bought from this place. Also, it’s in Lincoln, Nebraska.

That’s right, Nebraska! The Cornhusker State. Inventor of Kool-Aid. Home of the largest woolly mammoth fossil and the world’s only fur trading museum. I definitely didn’t need to look any of those things up on Wikipedia.

We didn’t realize there was actual stuff to do in Lincoln, so we had only planned one overnight here. To be fair, when we checked into our single-queen-bed hotel room, the man at the front counter said “you must be here for the roller skating competition.” So, our hopes weren’t particularly high.

Nebraska, amirite? Panicked fingerguns.

Well, it now happens to house one of my favorite breweries. Someone from a different brewery stopped by after his shift, and if that’s not a good sign, I don’t know what is. Plus, we got to hang out with two middle-aged drunk guys and they didn’t say a single inappropriate thing! Winning all around.

There was a saison called Rubarbara Walters, and an imperial stout called Total Hottie, which was brewed with cinnamon and vanilla and habanero. Total Hottie is on tap again (this time brewed with chocolate instead of vanilla), and they are currently pouring a guava IPA, a blueberry orange gose with Himalayan sea salt, a coconut stout, a chocolate stout, a gose made with white grapes, an oatmeal stout with chocolate and peanut butter, a barrel-aged barleywine, an IIPA "dosed" with Ethiopian coffee beans, a chocolate orange gose... I mean, one of them is bound to work, right?

Anyway, we bought a can of their Coffee Berliner Weisse and drove it 1500 miles across country so we could enjoy it in Connecticut, and also so I could get my brother to make a screwed-up, confused face when he tried it. It tastes like the sweat off a sea captain’s back. 10/10.

also it was flat AS FUCK because we're idiots and waited too long to drink it

look at how fucking flat that is

SPOTLIGHT: Front Porch Brewing

2018-02-05T10:12:00.001-08:00

Exciting news: a friend of mine (read: I frequented the same bar so often that I developed a rapport with one of the bartenders) and his pals officially opened up a location for their company, Front Porch Brewing. It’s shiny and new! They had a grand opening! You can visit them, for realsies!

Okay, so they’re not exactly new. They had their opening on November 2nd and I’ve definitely been multiple times since then. Less than six months is still new-ish, right?

It was fucking packed for their opening, though, so good for them. And, honestly, the few times I’ve been back since it’s all been pretty busy, too. They started off with super weird hours - Monday, Friday and Sunday - but they expanded to Thursday and Saturday recently and they’re open far later than most breweries (Midnight! Sometimes past midnight!). Some kind of special license, I guess. They serve liquor, too, and offer whiskey tastings along with beer flights. Not sure why you would go to a brewery if you didn’t want to drink beer, but I’m sure some people drag along unwilling friends every now and then, so it’s nice to have options.

One of my favorite beers they have on tap right now is Crepuscular, which is listed as sour stout but is actually a dark wild ale? Can’t really seem to find a consensus on that, but it tastes good. Ego Death is a good one, too, a pale ale brewed with lime and vanilla, but I don’t think it’s on tap right now. You can get their Finger Guns sour IPA, though, as long as you ask them for it with actual finger guns.

Also, there’s a couple arcade games, an N64 with Mario Kart and Super Smash Brothers, a few shelves of board games, and this book:

Amaze-balls.

I haven’t seen a food truck outside yet, but honestly, no one is hurting for food. Last night we ordered a bunch of pizza while failing real hard at Mario Kart. Another couple had a huge plate of nachos they couldn’t finish. Some other people had sandwiches. GrubHub is a thing.

Last but not least, they’re having an event this Thursday where local bartenders make cocktails with the beers, and you get to vote on your favorites. Which sounds fan-fucking-tastic. 10/10.

Black Hog Brewing

2017-12-06T10:46:00.001-08:00

If you haven’t yet discovered the beauty of Groupon, you should get on it. You can spend money you don’t have on things you don’t need! Get a scuba diving license! Assemble a terrarium while drunk on wine! Laser away some nose hairs! The possibilities are endless.

No one is paying me to say these things, but gosh-darn it would be nice if they did.

So we bought a Groupon for Black Hog Brewing in Oxford, roughly sixteen years ago, and finally used it. It came with two pint glasses, two stickers, and a FUCKING 12 TASTER MUFFIN TIN TRAY OF BEER. They were out of a lot of stuff because of Thanksgiving (I guess a lot of people spend Thanksgiving at breweries? I’m not mad about it), but they still had good things. There was an Apple Ginga Ninja and a Nitro Coffee Milk Stout, which were our preferred beers of the bunch.

Fun fact: If you search for Black Hog on Facebook, the first result is a page entitled "Large Black Hogs For Sale." I guess they might have a Groupon for that, too, but I didn't check.

We also got Banh Mi Sandwiches from the food truck outside - Chief Brody’s, I think? They have a Facebook page, so check them out. I’m still not sure what Banh Mi is, but I can confirm that it is delicious. The internet tells me it’s some type of Vietnamese baguette. I got crispy pork skins on mine, and literally everything was pickled: pickled mango, pickled onions, pickled cucumber (pretty sure the rest of the world just calls those “pickles”). Anything that comes with crispy pork skins is an automatic 10/10.

It doesn't look like the Groupon still exists, but I’ve seen it pop up before, and in the meantime there are lots of other brewery Groupons to choose from. Thimble Island, Thomas Hooker, and Powder Hollow are all on there somewhere. Or, if you don’t need a thousand more pint glasses with brewery logos on them, you can just go directly to a brewery and drink the beer. They all have flights. Money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Go forth and drink!

Two Roads Brewing: 2 Events 2 Furious

2017-12-01T09:10:00.000-08:00

Recently I’ve decided to try my hand at yoga because I heard that it’s good for stuff, like being an adult, and not dying, and having the person behind you stare at your ass. Most of the time it’s uncomfortable, but sometimes you find events that are held at breweries and include complimentary beer. And in a competition between a regular yoga class, and a yoga class that includes alcohol, which do you think we would choose?

So me, the girlfriend, and the heterosexual wife Kym went to Two Roads Brewery in Stratford for some yoga (shout-out to Kym who bought us all yoga mats from Target). The class was run by Yoga Mobile Studio, which is really just one person, it looks like. For $20 we got a pre-yoga taster, an hour of yoga, and a full pint of beer afterwards. Normally a regular drop-in yoga class is $20 on its own, and I don’t remember any of those studios having complimentary beer, so this was a pretty good deal.

Naturally I spilled a beer taster all over my girlfriend’s yoga mat. But it’s cool, because the instructor’s assistant spilled one all over some guy behind us. Beer everywhere! Really helps accentuate the stench of unwashed people sweating all over each other and pushing their butts in the air.

We started with a five minute recorded meditation, which I’m sure would have been great if I could hear it, but it was not a prime set-up for that kind of thing. Outside of that, it was fine. The instructor didn’t take herself too seriously, and she gave us a number of challenging poses that no one could do, but I appreciated the challenge anyway. At the very least, watching everyone fall over ignited the schadenfreude of my cold, dead heart.

So if you’re into yoga or beer or schadenfreude, or masochism, check out Yoga Mobile Studio. Or check out Two Roads, and NEBCO, and Counter Weight, because they’ve all hosted this kind of thing at some point. There’s also Vino and Vinyasa somewhere, if you’re not really into beer. I don’t know why you would be here if you weren’t, but to each their own.

I didn’t take any pictures because it felt weird, so I took the picture from the Two Roads event post. Hope that’s cool.

This is also a picture from Two Roads, sorry guys

Two Roads also hosted the Connecticut Brewers Fest a little while ago, on November 6th. The girlfriend was in Boston being a loser, so I had to strong-arm my friend Dan to accompany me. That’s not true. I told him there would be beer, and he was immediately interested.

They gave us a fancy stemmed beer glass and Dan spent the whole time telling each brewery that he'd been there already. There was a maple bacon stout, and twenty-eight chocolate stouts of whatever variety, and some pumpkin things, and a tart cherry gose. Everything was delicious.

We only stayed for about an hour because we are 900 years old, but we got there early enough to stand in line waiting for the doors to open, because, as previously mentioned, we’re about 900 years old. And we got BUFFALO MEATBALL SUBS from the food truck outside. The fucking best. I don’t remember the food truck name and I didn’t take any pictures, so I can’t tout them properly. It was the worst reporting I’d ever done, but also I was busy drinking all the beer, so y’all will live.

Try This at Home: Thimble Island's Barrel-Aged Pumpkin Porter

2017-11-07T08:55:00.000-08:00

I don’t know what the actual ratings on this beer are, but I don’t care. It’s great. If you like barrel-aged shit but you don’t like getting punched repeatedly in the pie hole, this beer is for you. If you like fall-flavored pumpkin shenanigans but don’t want diabetes, this beer is also for you.* It’s toasty and lovely and tastes like warm blankets and crunchy leaves and campfires. Even from a can it was great, and people don’t shut up about how terrible beer tastes from a can. Screw ‘em. This beer is super drinkable and I didn’t get sick of it after the first glass.

that is not a real beer glass, sue me

On the same day we stopped by Thimble Island to pick up these bad boys, they had just tapped a keg of their Sweet and Spicy India Pale Ale. It was mainly spicy. Like, for real spicy. A little difficult to drink, but the flavor was good, and a lot of spicy beers don’t pack enough punch so I kind of appreciated it.

this beer will fight you

Anyway, the main event was the porter, which is technically called Maple Bourbon Barrel Aged Dark Pumpkin Porter, but that fucking sucks to say in conversation. It comes in a convenient four-pack handcuffed together by the impossible plastic can coverings of doom. If you can get it out, though, it's definitely worth it.

I haven’t figured out some special rating system for this shit yet. Out of five? Out of ten? Pass/Fail? This beer passes. It receives the Fall 2017 Seasonal Beer That Won’t Strip You Of Your Will To Live award.

*not a doctor, you might still get diabetes

3.5/5: Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks Dalton

2017-08-28T10:51:00.000-07:00

check out this hipster-ass photo I took

Synopsis:

Augustine, a brilliant, aging astronomer, is consumed by the stars. For years he has lived in remote outposts, studying the sky for evidence of how the universe began. At his latest posting, in a research center in the Arctic, news of a catastrophic event arrives. The scientists are forced to evacuate, but Augustine stubbornly refuses to abandon his work. Shortly after the others have gone, Augustine discovers a mysterious child, Iris, and realizes that the airwaves have gone silent. They are alone.

At the same time, Mission Specialist Sullivan is aboard the Aether on its return flight from Jupiter. The astronauts are the first human beings to delve this deep into space, and Sully has made peace with the sacrifices required of her: a daughter left behind, a marriage ended. So far the journey has been a success. But when Mission Control falls inexplicably silent, Sully and her crewmates are forced to wonder if they will ever get home.

As Augustine and Sully each face an uncertain future against forbidding yet beautiful landscapes, their stories gradually intertwine in a profound and unexpected conclusion. In crystalline prose, Good Morning, Midnight poses the most important questions: What endures at the end of the world? How do we make sense of our lives? Lily Brooks-Dalton’s captivating debut is a meditation on the power of love and the bravery of the human heart.

Overall, this book is full of big ideas and beautiful prose, which sometimes distract from what is lacking, but sometimes don’t. It feels like Brooks-Dalton started with a few ideas that she fucking loved, so she filled in all the characters and situations around the ideas, and developed the details as needed to fit. Because of that, some things strike me as pigeonholed, and others seem like they’re trying to fill a bunch of roles at the same time for no reason.

Augustine, for example, is a bit No Country For Old Men when we meet him, but in his self-reflection he’s some sort of sociopathic Casanova, wooing ladies all over the world. Iris shows up in Antarctica and he immediately takes up all sorts of fatherly gestures that he supposedly isn’t capable of. The first few chapters iterate how obsessed he is with stars and how he doesn’t think of anything else, but then in chapter five he’s a ham radio enthusiast. Sully can’t seem to recognize attraction or sexual tension, even though she’s been married and has a kid. Devi is described, far enough into the book that we should no longer be getting character descriptions, as having a “scary-keen insight,” just before stating her only line in the novel that contains any “scary-keen insight.” The angry Russian gets angrier under stress. The joker of the group becomes more sarcastic under stress. The machines-over-people engineer is suddenly brimming with emotional insights. Analytical people learn to love. It’s simultaneously trite and disjointed.

On the plus side, the ending is good. Even though you’ll guess it way ahead of time, the twist isn’t really the point. I like the fact that we never figure out what happened on Earth. I like that there’s no grand, unrealistic culmination of Sully and Harper’s budding romance, but that might be because I didn’t care about it in the first place. I like some of the prose and descriptions, particularly of landscapes, even though the sunsets and sunrises get a bit old after a while. There are solid bits of the novel that work, but the more you start thinking about it, the more everything seems to fall apart. So just... don’t think about it too much, I guess.

TL;DR : Earth hangs up the phone and an old astronomer wanders the Arctic while some peeps on a spaceship yell at each other. No one has a zombie plan.

Pros: prose (lol get it), ending
Cons: characters, details