World Cup Fire Drill Fishing Excursion
The tournament of Stop Drop and Roll is finally over!
So we’ve been catching the games online, and it’s been…. hard to stay focused on anything else. It’s been exciting. Some serious craziness and unexpected excitement and disappointment. Especially watching countries like Croatia and Belgium take all the big extravagant high-profile teams to task and make them work for their fame.
As usual a certain amount of dramatic effect (diving) has been plied by some teams and it’s absolutely infuriating and cringe-inducing (Roger’s hockey-playing self wants to scream at these guys and make soccer full-contact, that’ll show ’em). How players expect to be taken seriously when they flop on the ground like freshly landed fish is beyond us. How they keep their fame being floppy-fish makes no sense. When KFC even bases an advertising campaign on your flopping, you should reconsider your methods in life.
Beer news, and some basic thoughts on our mission
We’ve lined up three brews for inspection and licensing: Hoppy Alpaca IPA, Darth Lager (Lager Oscuro) (insert lightsaber whooshing here), and the Just One Mora Blonde (Rubia con Mora).
We’re pretty happy with them. Room for improvement sure, but all in all very happy to enjoy and happy to see others enjoy them as well. We can brew them consistently pretty much every time. We’re getting ever closer to getting that license and Roger cooked up some fresh batches for lab testing that will be ready in the next two weeks for submission. Then of course the paperwork, inspection photos, all kinds of other crap we probably don’t even know about yet because hey why not throw in another wrench?
We’ve been tackling a few other oddball beer ideas as well. Mostly for our own sake as our own harshest critics but also to gauge interest and spread the word we’re here, we try to make good beer, and that “beer” doesn’t need to fit “rules”, especially sour yellow fizzy water. Even something as simple as hazy beer vs non-hazy beer. Just because a beer is hazy doesn’t mean it’s a bad beer. (i.e. Wheat beers, IPAs, plenty of other styles can be hazy or not and they’re perfectly fine). That logic applies in many instances just fill in the blanks.
Just because a beer is ______ doesn’t mean it’s a bad beer.
But when the only beer you’ve ever known is this clear yellow fizz, what is this weird new crap?
There’s lots of presumptions we’re trying to help tackle in the world of beer in a place that is slowly discovering the wonderful variety available. Simply making different things in different ways and making them tasty and enjoyable is a step towards a greater understanding of how versatile the brewing world can be. Slowly but surely the options will be more than just, black, red, or yellow. Back around new years we even made a beer “hopped” so to speak with no hops at all
Completely hop-less.
It was weird, brightly coloured, and actually surprisingly tasty. First sip: admittedly strange. Second sip: damn fine. Always go on your second sip.
We don’t care much for the rules of a particular style as laid out by style guides. We cook something up, let it ferment, see how it tastes. If we like it great, if not we work to improve. We’re not regimented academics about it, toss stuff in and see how it turns out.
Not to say there isn’t validity to said rule book, there’s a huge history and a ridiculous amount of work behind all of the styles as they exist which have inspired much of what we do. But to follow said guidelines to the letter mitigates the creativity that brewing allows for and beer itself predates the Bavarian Purity Laws by about what….. a few thousand years or so?
Our golden rule is simple: Make it tasty. All else is secondary.
It’s never been our goal to make the best example of something else. We brew what we like and the options are endless. If someone won’t try it for some reason like it being cloudy or red instead of yellow, if it’s different from what they’re used to, then they’re missing out.
For those willing try something new, welcome friend, we’ll pour you a glass.
We’ve cooked up a lightly-hopped weird dry ale with a nutty raisin flavour and gorgeous orangey-brown colour and a nearly bone-dry aftertaste. There’s some changes we can make but even as is we’re loving it as our game-day-watching-world-cup-beer. Just want to bump the alcohol up from 4% to 5%+.
The big gun lately has been a rehash of a dry-hopped ginger wheat beer Roger made a couple years back in very small quantities for a friends wedding. It turned out a little different as every recipe seems to, from it’s Canadian counterpart but equally enjoyable. It’s what we carried in a thermos/hydroflask thing through a 12km run through Cuicocha this past weekend to enjoy at the finish line (and some during the route). More on that later. No regrets.
Right now the nutty orange-brown beer is simply known as “Experimental Ale” and the wheat is “Max Bastard” after it’s 6%+ alcohol content and Max our big bastard of a cat who really really likes being a bastard.
All in all they require some tweaks to make them different enough from other beers for our liking but even the existing recipes are just fine for us and our own enjoyment. We might be greedy and keep it all to ourselves. Unless some folks out there grab some before we’ve enjoyed it all of course.
Malena took a brewing workshop
Yep, this already seems like it was months ago. The fact that Roger isn’t bilingual yet means when people ask questions about our brew, Malena’s job title turns into “Translator”. Because the brewing process has lots of steps and specific tools and equipment, Malena decided to take a workshop to become more well versed in talking about our process more fluidly in Spanish. It was worth it, as it was a refresher and was nice to get a lot of brewing terminology in Spanish.
It was actually pretty far south from Quito, somewhere called “Valle de los Chillos” (Valley of the screams). So we ended up making a weekend out of it. When looking for a pub one night we discovered a brewery called Brobarnia. The brewer is from the Ukraine, and damn it was a good beer. On our way back home we passed through Quito and met up with some friends who are also beer lovers and got to experience “Los 3 Monjes” brewpub which was nice. They do Belgium style beers so it was a nice change from the styles we drink or make ourselves.
Back in stretchy action
Malena has been taking weekly yoga sessions at the Ami Cine theatre location where they have facilities for all kinds of events. We caught Wonder Woman there in their cozy little theatre recently and it was great. Also while enjoying that ginger wheat beer.
Jams go with everything
So if you are Malena that is a true statement. Otherwise, no we are not talking about delicious fruit jelly spread, we are talking about music jams. After yoga class one day, Malena got invited to a birthday gathering. It reminded Malena of the days she would throw parties at her apartment on King street. Empty space with just chairs to sit on, passing around a bottle of booze, beer and some snacks. Then came a woman with a bunch of toy instruments including a xylophone, melodica, triangle, bongo and a few different types of maracas. The crowd ranging from 4 – 50+ years old was involved, all jamming together and that was pretty awesome.
We also found out there are jam sessions at our favourite bar in town, Fauno every so often. We got to experience one last Saturday, although we couldn’t stay long since we were thinking we should get a good nights sleep before doing a 12km run.
Brew Punch, now with more beer
We recently acquired a punching bag. Yep. Packed and ready to knock the crap out of. Roger hung the wall bracket out along the wall, did some chin-ups on it to make sure it won’t give out, and we now have a full fledged beater bag to kick the hell out of. Great for those days we really need to knock the crap out of something.
Construction…. so sooo close
Windows and doors, we gots ’em!! Finally. After all this time, negotiating, waiting for work to get done. We have all windows and doors on the hostel installed. A bit more glass, and another giant item marked off the to-do list!! Now there’s ….everything else still to do of course but this is still a victory none the less. One single door took almost 6 weeks for the carpenter to finish. We won’t go into details but suffice it to say we’re not happy about the time wasted, but very happy to finally have that door.
As we fumble ever forward, we’ve also got a new facebook page up where Roger will be updating with beers available and new experiments in the works:
www.facebook.com/athenahomebrew
And of course status updates as we get ever closer to finishing the hostel, that elusive beer license, and just finally being properly operational!
And some random photos:
