Beer and Baseball

A long time ago (sometime after college but before I met Andy) my brother Micah gave me a beer homebrewing kit for a present. I can’t even remember where I was living at the time, but I remember being fairly transient and thinking that I didn’t have an appropriate place to ferment beer at the time…so the kit got stored in Mom & Dad’s garage (or equivalent) for years and I never ended up trying it. But recently Andy and I have been inspired by some very tasty homebrew made by friends and family to try our hand at brewing beer. Unfortunately many of the pieces of the original kit I got from Micah seemed to have disappeared, so $100 or so later, we were back in business. The ad in the Northern Brewers catalog where we purchased the new kit declared, “If you can make Mac n’ Cheese, you can brew your own beer!” Ok, then. Let’s do it!

Of course, it wasn’t quite as easy as Mac n’ Cheese… we weren’t sure how to get started so we bribed our friend Kyle to come over and show us the ropes. Five hours of sterilization, boiling, and funneling later, and we have a “wort” (I think) that is fermenting in a big jug in our basement. It will be interesting to see if we get something potable out of that brown stuff in the jug! Once we added the two varieties of hops to our “beginner” irish red, the whole house certainly started to smell like a brewery. Aiden came upstairs and said “Eeww, what is that smell?”… His friend Finn is clearly used to that smell at his home, as he made no comment. We’ll have a full report in about 6 weeks!

Besides brewing beer, we also enjoyed the rare occurrence of warm temperatures and sunshine this weekend. We spent lots of time on our new deck, getting a taste of what it will be like lounging out there this summer, and also went to a Dartmouth College baseball game. The Dartmouth games are free, with real stadium seating, hotdogs, popcorn and some decent baseball talent too, so that makes them a great alternative to spending hundreds of dollars and four + hours on a bus to go to an actual Sox game, especially with kids in tow. If the kids have a fit in the second inning, so be it. Just leave. No harm done. As it was, there was no fit, but Aiden, Ben, Molly and Finn did need to get out of the stadium after a few innings to go run around on the Astroturf of another ballfield. They had as much fun playing their own wacko version of baseball as they did watching the real game. From the look of things, Molly and Aiden have a lot to learn before t-ball season starts in a few weeks!