Disclaimer: this is going to be a very, very long post.
Friday I got the camera lens on my Evo fixed, so I can finally take clear pictures again. Take a peek…
Before: my copy of Halo (which arrived a day late, by the way…way to go, Amazon) looking quite hazy.
After: tasty chocolate covered strawberries that a vendor dropped off, thus kicking off my favorite part of the year, when customers send us tasty treats for the holidays.
I’ve run into some problems with my phone before (like dropping it on my friend’s deck) and I’ve really come to appreciate having a Sprint store around town that will do warranty and off-warranty work on the phone instead of making me surrender the phone to send it in. This time the lens replacement was somehow covered by insurance, which made me pretty happy.
Friday night I went with a couple of friends to the International Beer and Wine Festival. Over 250 exhibitor booths, all providing samples of wine, beer, and tasty, tasty food.
Trips like these remind me that I need to spend more time in GR. Preferably on dates. So many good restaurants and so much good food!
You purchased tickets to get your wine and beer and food, and once you left, the tickets were useless, which means that we had to use what we got by 10pm. This was what was left at 9:40. What followed was a lot of tasty Brewery Vivant pours.
My initial plans to go out after that were thwarted by exhaustion brought on from an extremely busy week, and I wound up back on my friend’s couch for a surprisingly restful sleep. Saturday we went to a bar and watched the MSU game, and then after that I made my first trip out to Siciliano’s and started down the path of a homebrewer.
I picked up a pair of carboys and some airlocks (the honey for the mead had already been acquired) and watched my friends geek out in the yeast cooler.
Afterwards we went back to my friend’s place for some homebrewed beer from the converted keg-fridge, which I may have failed to pour correctly. I did eventually figure it out.
From GR, I went on to Grand Haven to celebrate one of my friends moving into his bachelor pad. I had plans to get him a decent six-pack of beer to christen the fridge, but we wound up at Meijer at 11:30 at night, and since their selection of cold beer leaves something to be desired…
That’s right. A 30-pack of PBR. Don’t judge.
Sunday, I went to a brew fest in Grand Rapids (for those of you keeping count at home, that’s the fourth time out to GR in four days) and had some of the best food yet. I also made mead, but more on that in a minute…
First off, I had a bit of a problem getting out there. My phone loves routing me down 28th Street any time I want to head into, or near, Grand Rapids, and for the second time I was headed to a brew fest I found myself expecting road where there was no road.
There were Mexican vanilla jello shots with peach schnapps, which looked and handled a lot like cheese:
There was panchetta, which is cured raw pork. It was kind of like eating cold thick-cut bacon, and very, very delicious:
There were more of Delski’s Jalapeno Cheddar brats and hot and spicy “Pig Sweat” (barbecue sauce, only better):
But what really stole the show were a new addition: jalapenos stuffed with cream cheese and pulled pork, then wrapped in bacon. Because we don’t settle for plain old Jalapeno poppers.
When we first got there, there was no power in the neighborhood because a squirrel decided to check out the transformer at the top of one of the power poles. Consumers was out quickly enough to get the power back on, but we stopped for a moment to toast the toasty squirrel.
Two of my friends got some beautifully crafted all-wooden mash paddles (you can, I’m not kidding, follow one of them on Twitter), which they christened today:
And I made mead.
I first got introduced to mead a couple of years ago, and I’ve been in love with the stuff ever since. My friend’s vanilla bourbon mead remains one of my favorite drinks to this day. If you’ve never had mead, think of white wine, and then add some honey and other tasty flavors to it. Mead pours a lot like Moscato, but it’s not nearly as syrupy sweet unless you make it that way. I went with a batch of mead because it’s pretty easy and relatively quick to put together, and it’s something that is apparently relatively idiot-proof. The only downside is that it will be a year before I’m sampling any, but since I barely had a place in my apartment for a 6.5 gallon carboy, I’ll probably need the time to make room for the bottles I’ll eventually put it in. Or I’ll just move. The carboy fits surprisingly well in the car:
The soccer game today could have gone better (we lost 8-1) but you can’t have it all…
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