It has been so long since I've blogged!
4 months...
That's what happens when the semester starts and you have to teach 6 classes per semester.  The fun and the beers don't stop (because how will you survive??) but the blogging about it comes to an halt.  So many papers to grade....makes you kind of hate reading and writing at all.

So what has happened since July 31?  Let's run through some beer related events.

The red ale of my first home-brew came out.  I don't necessarily say came out well. It was, well, a first draft.  It was a bit sweet and caramely, as we intended, but we brewed it in the mid-July heat. And, in San Diego, that means no air-conditioning. Controlling the temperature was a disaster and while it didn't come out flawed, I definitely got some odd yeast flavors.  We dry hopped it like crazy, and that led to some cool flavors, but in the end, it just wasn't quite right. Many of our friends tried it, and didn't hate it, and I counted that as a success.

So, that was August?  I home-brewed again with my friend Heidi, who works as Amplified Ale Works. We did a copycat recipe of Amplified's Doc Marzen, called Men are from Marzen, and since she has way more experience and quite the effective set up, it came out great!  We lagered it for almost 3 months, and it came out right in time for holiday-season-festive-fest. I still have bottles of this in my fridge and everyone that tries it really likes it.  SUCCESS!  That's what experience will get ya.

In the meantime (while the Marzen was lagering), my boyfriend and I went to Denver for #gabf2016. It was amazing. It was our second time to the Great American Beer Fest, the largest beer festival in the US, and the most intense 3 days of my beer geek year. Last year, we were newbies, so we made sure to man the table for every session, go out after each session to the craft beer hubs, and generally spend the entirety of the 3 days in or near the convention center. Denver is awesome, I think...last year we never left the downtown core.  This year, we felt a little more confident. Besides being blindsided by rain (RAIN?!  come on, we're from San Diego. Does not compute) we hit some awesome craft beer spots while GABF was in session to avoid the crowd (loved Falling Rock and Freshcraft) and hit up a couple out-of-the-way spots in the morning or late after sessions.  Hogshead brewery was a highlight. All cask beers, all the time.  I'm no connoisseur of cask beers, but I liked everything put in front of me. We also visited Our Mutual Friend and Stem Cidery, both of which had great brews on tap and great environments.  I could easily move to Denver and find a place that feels like home.

And then....and then....we won gold.  It was amazing.  We were chilling, up in the nosebleeds, watching the awards ceremony. I was sitting on the end of the row, kind of apart from the rest of the Ocelot Brewing crew, so I wasn't sure which categories we were entered in and when they were coming up. Then, while I was skimming through some emails, I hear "Gold....Sunnyside Dweller...Ocelot....."AGHHHHHHHHHHH!  I heard a variety of expletives and exclamations.  We were all aflutter.  Sweaters were grabbed and discarded, they scurried down to the stage cheering and hugging the whole way. It was awesome. It was so cool for Adrien's hard work to get recognized in from of that HUGE of a crowd. Crazy.  We left the ceremony on cloud nine, floated through the next floor session which was the home brewers so it went by in a flash, and re-convened to head out to a celebratory dinner and drinks. We ended up back at Our Mutual Friend and drank beers with the crew until it was time to catch out 11 pm flight back to SD.

After GABF, I took a little break from beer.  Not long, because the week after GABF was San Diego beer week, an epic beer festival in and of itself.

Which catches us up to early November. It was time to brew again. I still hadn't tasted the Men are from Marzen, but we had finished off the red ale (aptly named We'll Figure It Out Later) and I was itching to put something cool together again.

That brew day is a story by itself and I'll tackle that in the next blog.