Earlier this year, my friend Kyle organized a mead study group which was not unlike the 2017-2018 BJCP study group. 1 And while this study group did discuss aspects of mead judging, it was more like a tasting group than one focused on earning the BJCP Mead Judge endorsement. I don’t mean this as a […]
While a more thorough re-telling of my homebrewing hiatus seems worthy of its own post someday, in the spirit of writing more and trying to keep that running log of my brewing adventures here (it’s been a while!), I’ve decided to summarize the brewing I’ve managed to do since returning to Vermont in 2021.
Part year-in-review, part brag sheet, part best things and stuff, part tap-the-microphone “is this thing on?” life support post for this, my much-neglected blog. It’s been a few years since the last time I did one of these, and several of those were pretty hard years — but now seemed like the perfect time to […]
At the age of 41, while living in Bellingham, WA, I decided to “spend too much money” on a mountain bike. It had been about 2 years since I’d owned a bike, and (if I’m being honest) probably about 10 years since I’d done any riding. I was going through a tough time (pandemic + […]
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 […]
Precisely why we decided to move back to Vermont from Washington is a story best reserved for a separate and more thoughtful blog post 1 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. Slight callback to the […]
Seventeen years in Vermont. My tasting notes don’t go back far enough to give me a beer for every year. But between my memories and the notes that I do have, there’s enough to work with to give it a 10 list.
When I brewed Vicious H-Bomb, it was just to satisfy two things: H.’s lament that he should have a beer named after him; and My desire to experiment with some Belgian yeast. In other words, I never intended to enter it into competition but… when the Fair rolled around and I heard there was a […]
My eleventh homebrew is a slight variation on my ninth. In that vein Honestatis (Mk. II) is the first recipe I liked enough to make a second time:
I got a little braggy about this on Twitter earlier this year… 1 Our little solar project is doing pretty well. 4376.89 kW/h total yield. Thank you, @suncommon pic.twitter.com/ewezOB8LDj — Rob Friesel (@founddrama) June 6, 2015 It’s probably worth pointing out that, in this image, I had miscalculated the kWh values. A quirk of R […]