Looking over my Untappd journal, I have two wheatwines: one before I’d developed my palate, and another that was adulterated embellished with white chocolate. In other words: I’ve never had one. But I’ll be damned if I didn’t want to try to make one. With my sights set on making a “big beer”, I brewed Lazy Rabbit as a glorified starter for this one and then went “small batch” style to make Indolent Rabbit Rex:
No burying the lede here: we knew that moving cross-country would be hard, but the pandemic threw a wrinkle into the mix that resulted in the worst social isolation we ever experienced and it was simply too much to bear. Once we were free of any obligations keeping us on the West Coast, it just didn’t make sense to stay.
That’s the short version anyway. I wrote two other versions of this before I hit publish on this one: one was much shorter1 and didn’t do justice to the experience; the other was much longer but zig-zagged between too many competing stories.2 This one still feels too long but it was also the longest two years of my life.
Precisely why we decided to move back to Vermont from Washington is a story best reserved for a separate and more thoughtful blog post1 but needless to say: I felt compelled to capture a few notes about my cross-country drive while the details were still (relatively) fresh in my mind.
Twenty years ago today — on a Friday the 13th — we got married.
Just commemorating the moment. Dose № 1 of Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine went into my arm at 10:26am this morning.
It was cherry season in Washington, and our household had been eating the crap out of some Rainier cherries. When it occurred to me that I hadn’t worked with whole cherries in a mead1 before, there was only one thing to do. Fire up the ol’ mead making machine that is me, get a few pounds of fruit, and make an as-inspired-by version of Psychopomp and call it First Avenue Crow.2
Seems fitting that while we have a wildfire-smoke-hazy / practically opaque sky here in Seattle, that I should do the write-up for one of my clearest-ever beers — a Munich Helles that I’m calling Horst:
Wherein I had ingredients leftover from other brew days and (shrugs) the “it’ll be beer-ish” philosophy takes over. Hoarder Intervention #4:
It’s been 24 brew days since the last Prosody Project beer. All of 2019 went by without one — and half of 2020. But when I heard that Yakima Valley Hops had Barbe Rouge for sale, I got nostalgic for a favorite back-home-in-the-802 beer: Burlington Beer’s Barbe Rouge Single Hop IPA. There was no better time to dust off the ol’ recipe and fire things up for Prosody (Barbe Rouge):
It was time to make more ginger mead. Even with Groennfell and Havoc shipping to Washington state now… there’s just something about having a pint of your own homebrewed stuff, right? Thus, the sixth batch of Evil Clone.
