1. I'd made a ground beef soup a few days ago that was too watery and didn't have strong taste. I bought a pound of ground beef and some bacon, among other things, at the store. I fried several slices of chopped bacon and the pound of ground beef in the Dutch oven and, in a separate pan, I fried a chopped onion in leftover bacon grease. I seasoned the beef and bacon with Montreal steak seasoning and oregano and red pepper flakes, added to new batch of sauteed onions, and poured the watery soup over the mix. It was a brand new soup, thicker, more flavorful, heartier; I succeeded in rescuing the watery soup.
2. Back when I was a grad student, I would reread a piece of literature because I had to write a paper on it and I was required to work out some kind of meaning of the piece. I'm reading James Joyce's collection of short stories, Dubliners. I reread the first two stories, "The Sisters" and "An Encounter" about three times, not because I was going to write a paper, but because the stories intrigued me and I wanted to absorb the details more deeply and let the stories get inside me more than they would with a single reading. The stories are at once simple -- on the surface of them, not a lot happens -- and opaque -- much that seems important in the stories goes unsaid. Both stories feature young narrators and in neither story can the youngsters rely on the broken adults in an eroding world for much of anything outside of pieties, didactic teachings, boredom, impotence, warped perspectives, and spiritual disillusion and illness.
3. Shawn's two employees had to spend the day in Missoula today, unexpectedly, so Shawn was on his own. He worked hard. During Shawn's shift, a package arrived. When I lifted it off the porch, I knew what it was: the beer that Adrienne had told the Deke that her fiance, Josh, would be sending arrived. I put the cans in the fridge and, by the time Shawn was finished, the beer was chilled so the Deke got out three of our small flight glasses.
She cracked open a pint can of porter from Fairfield, NJ's Magnify Brewing, a beer that is part of their Ice Cream Novelties series, this one with orange and vanilla. It was an awesome beer, like drinking a very mildly flavored, not sickly sweet, orange creamsicle infused with coffee and a hint of vanilla. None of us had tasted a beer quite like it.
We were ready to try another. I was concerned that the taste of the Ice Cream Novelty Porter would linger so strongly in my mouth that I wouldn't have such a good experience with the next beer, but I was wrong. We loved the Weight and Measures Double IPA, a hazy and grapefruit forward juice grenade with generous flavor and a mildly euphoric, again, generous alcohol content. This beer is an ingenious collaboration between Counterweight Brewing of Hamden, CT and Industrial Arts Brewing of Garnerville, NY.
We'd each drunk ten ounces of beer with fairly high alcohol content, and reasoned ourselves to the conclusion that we were good for one more splitting of one more pint between the three of us.
The last beer was our favorite -- and we loved them all.
It was brewed in Williamston, MI (where the Deke's stepmother, Phyllis lives) by Old Nation Brewing Company and it's a part of their New Orthodox IPA series.
It, too, is a Double IPA called Boss Tweed and its new orthodoxy, I suppose, was its haziness and its juicy flavor and satisfying mouth feel. Boss Tweed was citrusy, but whereas Weights and Measures was grapefruit-y, Boss Tweed was orange-y and, for all of us, thrilling. We couldn't stop praising it.
These three beers reminded the Deke and me, in a major way, how much we enjoyed the beers we drank when we lived back east and these three beers were, I think, better than any I had drunk back there. I loved how I was transported in memory from our dining table in Kellogg back to Barracks Row in D.C. and a joint called Eat-Bar where I ordered a glass of Singlecut Brewery's Double IPA called Softly Spoken Magic Spells and a Double IPA I ordered at Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan, E. Pluribus Lupulin 4: Citrea from Gun Hill Brewing in the Bronx. I also thought of another New York brewed 2IPA I loved at Jimmy's No. 43 (now closed) in the East Village, whose name I didn't write down at the time. I loved those beers, and, as is so often the case with local beers, part of their allure is that they aren't available in any widespread way, so, when I drink one, I relish every drop.
The really good new is that we drank three of the beers Josh mailed us, but four more remain for a future tasting.
I love drinking beer five ounces at a time, especially when the beer is pretty high octane. Three five ounce pours left me feeling happy about the variety of flavors I experienced and didn't impair me. I had no problem preparing tonight's dinner of butter lemon baked tilapia and grilled romaine lettuce (not harvested in Yuma, AZ).
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