Monthly Archive for January, 2007

Slow Start

Published
by
DT
on January 30, 2007
in Beer, Bikes, Dirt, Life, Road and Tech
. 2 Comments

Well it’s been a slow start to the new year on the blog. Some people blog religiously, several times a day, and well, I’m just not one of those people. There’s enough fluffy crap out there that you don’t need to read mine on top of it all…

The weather finally turned cold here. We still get the occasional 65 degree day, but for the most part we are sitting in the 20-30’s lately. We got our first snow a couple of weeks ago. There was about 1.5 inches of snow with 0.5 inches of ice on top. Virgin tracks were laid at Colt’s Neck with Gary, no pictures were taken…we had too much fun riding. The same weekend, our household survived the norovirus and put on a little wine tasting featuring VA wines.

I’ve been hitting the path again with Spearmint. We made a Wednesday night ride with Hatley out to the Brickskeller. There we listened to Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing in Portland, ME and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing in Sonoma, CA, talk about Belgian beers, professional brewing, and their travels together. We had the opportunity to taste 10 great Belgians, with a surprise tasting of J.W. Lees on cask at the end, not that anybody needed that by the end, ha. A good time was had by all. It really drove home how much I like the sour Brett character in Belgian beers. Let’s see…if I brew one now I could probably be drinking it by Fall.

I’m enjoying our new Subaru Outback that we bought just before the new year. It’s nice being able to put the whole bike right into the back without having to figure out how I’m going to fit it in. Need to get a hitch mount so I can have the bikes outside and have a little more room inside when traveling, but other than that the wagon is pretty much ready to go from stock. I always though I needed something a little bigger than the Passat, considering how much I do outside, but a big boxy SUV and it’s poor gas mileage and high price of ownership never sounded appealing. The wagon has all the room of an SUV, easily as much clearance as half of the SUVs out there, and still manages about 24-26 mpg - that’s what I’m actually getting, not what comes on the sticker… I’m probably getting about 40 miles or so less per tank than I did with the Passat, so I’m happy about that. Oh, and the dog freakin loves the thing. The wagon is also the first car my wife and I have had that came with leather and all the fancy pants climate control/heat seaters and whatnot…pretty cool. It performed flawlessly in the snow/ice, which is a lot more than I can say for half of the crackheads who were driving. Just a little tip…while your 18 ton 4 wheel drive behemoth will do just fine in the snow, it doesn’t matter how many wheel drive you have when you’re sliding down the ice. In other words, if you’re a crappy driver without 4 wheel drive, don’t think it’s going to make you any better…as evident by the 14 SUV pile ups off the Toll Road.

In the tech dept. we got some fun new stuff. Check out Portable Apps and grab the Firefox portable. They’ve tweaked Firefox to fit on a memory stick. I’m using it on a 128 MB stick and Firefox with all the extensions is only about 30 MB…java on the other hand was almost 60 MB and isn’t exactly portable. The nice thing about portable Firefox is that nothing gets written to the computer…at all. So no logs, cache, cookies, etc. When you pull the stick out of the computer, there’s pretty much zero trace. Not to mention it also makes keeping track of your newsreading super easy, since it can always be with you, no matter what computer you’re on.

Aight, back to paying the bills and dreaming of a brewery with singletrack out the back door…

DT

007…2

Published
by
DT
on January 5, 2007
in Beer, Bikes, Life and Road
. 0 Comments

So it’s a new year, not real exciting.  Life is still busy, work is still work, and the weather around here is still completely wack.  I haven’t managed to get on the bike too much lately with the holidays and all.  We spent Christmas up in Maine and the following weekend down at Ocean City, MD.   But this weekend I’ll be able to get out for a ride, a road ride due to the weather, but a ride all the same.  Kristin is up in NYC this weekend (Happy Birthday Kim!) and I have a rare nothing planned weekend.  So a bike ride is in order, as well as brewing up my first attempt at a Belgian Dark Strong Ale.  I made a yeast starter Thursday night, stepped it up again tonight, and if all goes well it should more than double the amount of yeast cells I pitch.

Finished off the Damn Devil Double IPA already.  That was the highest alcohol beer I’ve ever brewed (13%), yet it was the fastest keg to blow.  My Centennial IPA will probably be next to kick, but I don’t expect the Bourbon Vanilla Imperial Porter to last much longer either.  Fortunately, I have a few things that are ready to be kegged.  A second rendition of my Imperial Stout, this time I added a little more hops in the boil, twice the amount of dry hops, and it’s sitting in the secondary right now on oak chips!  Can’t wait to see what an Old Rasputin would taste like if it were oaked.  I’ve also got a Milk Stout that’s done fermenting, also known as a sweet stout.  It’s kind of like Guinness, only you add lactose, which is an unfermentable sugar to sweeten it up a little.

The only other beer I have in mind, other than the Belgian Dark Strong, is a little joint IPA project with some of the local hopheads.  Right now the plan is to do a Pliny the Elder clone, which I just have a feeling is going to turn out great.

In other news, tomorrow I’m meeting with some people from MORE.  I’ll be stepping down from the Trail Boss position to let somebody with a little more fire and passion have a go.  Liz Notter will be taking over the position, the same Liz Notter that got the Ride Like A Girl rides underway in addition to taking over the Cabin John trail liaison position…yea she is one busy woman.  Good luck Liz!

DT