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Monday, August 22, 2011

Have baby, will travel!

I suppose I should have saved this title for later in September seeing we will be headed to Vermont but I just decided to go with it. This week Porter and I packed up the Little Buttercup (LBC) and headed over the bridge to Novare Res. They had a beer on that I wanted to try to we hit it up Thursday afternoon. Oxbow brewing is a new brewery out of New Castle, Maine. I had heard about it from the BBQ (Beer Belly BBQ) and was intrigued. The offering was a Farmhouse Pale. I was hoping for a bit of funk mixed in with some delicious pale brew. What I got was a pretty standard pale. It left me wanting more. I enjoyed it and would have it again but I just missed that funky-ness that the word Farmhouse evokes to me. I did notice that as it warmed a bit there were some more flavor notes that added depth to the beer. Out of 5 both Porter and I gave it a 3.5. Porter ordered a Victory Hop Devil. This is a beer I had had before but was somehow surprised by just how complex it tasted to me this time. Perhaps my pallet has matured so I can taste past the hops and taste the slightly sweet almost malty flavor. We both gave this beer a 4. LBC was drinking milk out of her glass bottle so we all cheersed and enjoyed our time. Novare is always a great place to head to.

Wednesday, August 17, 2011

A Baby, Beer & BBQ

I have been missing! A lot has changed in my life over the past year. The last post I wrote was for my husband’s birthday. After that point I jumped head first into preparing for a job that didn't pan out followed quickly by getting pregnant. At this point I figured a beer blog was kind of useless to write. To be honest my original thought was to live through Porter and just post about his adventures but.... I got major sick for 5 months. Being pregnant just wasn't my thing. (Being a mom is! It has been wonderful ever since she vacated my body.) Both beers and bbq made me feel quite ill. I never drank beer but the smell of it was just nasty. Every time Porter would drink a beer I felt like it smelled like a run down dirty cheap beer drenched bar. BBQ made me feel ill just by saying the words. Anything related to it was cause to be ill. Looking back now it is quite humorous. There is a country song that says "Drink a little drink, smoke a little smoke" anytime the song came on I had to change the channel quickly so I wouldn't hear that line cause smoke was too closely related to bbq's. Everything changed as soon as our little buttercup was born. All of a sudden I could say bbq and I was ready for my first beer. (As a side note I am nursing but 1. It is recommended to have a beer a day while feeding and 2. if you have more than one you can work around it) My first beer was Baby Tree by Pretty Things. (I thought it was appropriate.) In the past two months our little girls has become quite the traveler. We have gone to New Hampshire (to Portsmouth Brewing for beer), we have gone to Massachusetts (to the Ale House and Red Stone for beer), we have gone to Novare Res (for a meet the baby outing which happened to coincide with Smuttfest) and we are planning a trip to Vermont for my birthday to visit a few breweries over there. My plan for my daughter is to have her visit all of New England before she turns 1. We will be doing things in each state that are appropriate for someone her age but if there happens to be good beer there at the same time who can blame us for checking it out?
The major kick off for the re-opening for this blog was the 1st annual Southern Maine Beer Drinkers Club (SMBDC) camping meeting, a little thing I refer to as Camp Beer. For those not in the know, SMBDC is a group that gets together once a month to try beers based on a theme. This month’s theme was canned beer. There were a few violations to the theme but total we tried 47 different beers between Saturday night and Sunday morning. We also had a smoker there. We got wood for it (wood is very hard to find I have discovered after a lot of looking and only a little finding) at Beer Belly BBQ in Freeport (they have a facebook page; they also have a selection of craft beers that include a few pleasant surprises). In the near future I will put up my "recipe" for smoked nuts. They were so tasty. For more information on SMBDC (we are always looking for new members) check out the forum on Beer Advocate. Search for "SMBDC"
KatyToo
P.S. I promise the next post will be a bunch shorter.