Three Beautiful Things 09/26/14: Lease Signed, The Pleasures of Dickens, Old Line Has Sour Ales!

1.  The Deke and I now have an apartment in Greenbelt, Maryland.  We have no furnishings, but we have an apartment.  We'll get to work on the stocking and the furnishing this weekend and we'll have a bit more to put in it when the moving truck arrives.  I'll hope that maybe we'll be somewhat settled in over the next week.

2.  I took the train to Greenbelt and figured out which bus goes from Greenbelt station to our apartment complex and spent a lot of time reading Great Expectations and I'm hooked.  The opening chapters are set in a marsh near a churchyard and involve two escaped convicts and no one I've ever read evokes the damp, dark, chill of a December marsh and the futile efforts of the human body to ward off the cold like Dickens.  In addition, no one can create a quick character, whether an escaped convict or a dopey uncle or a child beating sister or a pompous church clerk like Dickens.  

3.  With the signing of the lease under our belts, the Deke and I, upon Pete the lease guy's recommendation, went to Beltsville to Old Line Fine Wine, a former Circuit City building converted into a warehouse style store for bottles and cans of wine, beer, and spirits and a bistro with a seventeen tap taplist and pretty good food.  I enjoyed a 18th Anniversary Imperial IPA from Stone and a hoppy wheat -- maybe from Boulevard.  Great stuff.  We enjoyed the feta cheese caramelized onion flatbread, hot wings, and brussel sprouts fried in apple sesame sauce.

My highlight, though, was buying a bomber of Weyerbacher's Riserva, an American Wild Ale, or as I like to think of them, a sour ale, and this one was brewed with pureed raspberries and aged in oak barrels.  I've had a strong hankering for sour beer ever since I left Eugene.  The one sour I had a few weeks ago in Old Town Alexandria helped, and bringing this beer home and drinking part of the bottle was hugely satisfying.  Final note:  I am alone in our household in my love of sours -- so I did not have the pleasure of sharing the bottle or of enjoying the deep pleasures of sour ale with anyone else.....