7/25/09

This weekend was pretty tame (lame). My roommates and I are moving out of our apartment next weekend, so we were supposed to have a moving out/please consume or take away my extensive liquor cabinet party. I was interested in liquor for several months more than a year ago and accumulated a large collection of liquors and liqueurs I haven't been able to get rid of in all the time since. Long story short, not only did I hardly get rid of any of the liquor (the only person who took any home was a Mormon who recently left The Church), I actually wound up with an additional can of pineapple juice, several Bud Lites, and a Raspberry Smirnoff. Sigh...

Anyhow, I did have some beer. First up was a Julius Echter Hefe-Weiss (4.9% ABV, Hefeweizen). I liked this one a lot. I didn't pour it well, but it's definitely a heady beer, always a good sign in my opinion. I realize I really like these cloudy beers. and this one was really smooth with a lot of flavors.

I still had some of the old beers to finish up, so after that beer I had one of the Pyramid Apricots and then a Honey Brown. We then went down to the pool, so I brought the only two cans I had, the Modelos.

Like I said, this weekend was fairly boring, hopefully next weekend's adventures will be more my style.

Making up for Lost Time

Well I certainly drank this weekend. And the weekend isn't even over - it's fucking Saturday morning. Last night, I started the evening getting sushi with my girlfriend. At the restaurant we saw some people drinking beer from a beer tower in these adorably small glasses, which put the idea of drinking in my head. So I called up a few friends and invited them for a tame evening of a few beers and some Trivial Pursuit. I then popped open a beer: Paulaner Salvator (7.8% ABV; doppelbock). This has actually been my least favorite of the Paulaners. I didn't taste all of the flavors purported to be in the beer.

It wasn't bad though - I just couldn't really taste a bunch of interesting flavors. Next, I downed another of those Honey Browns we bought last weekend (gotta drink 'em sometime).

We proceeded on to Sherlock's, where I tried to order a Shock Top Wheat Beer, but, as always, the beer I want to order is the one of which they are out. Supply and demand, le sigh...

I ordered their "seasonal Paulaner", which I have determined to be the same kind I got at Fox and Hound the other weekend.

After these I was finally tipsy enough to tell one guy he gave off a bisexual air. Of course he adamantly denied any leanings at first, but soon he admitted he had made out with a dude before. Then he out and out lied about it to his friend Joe McHomophobe across the table who hadn't quite heard him. "Dude, you'd better not be gay, we've been streaking together before!"
"No, of course I'm not!"
"Well, did you just say you've kissed a guy?"
"No, no, never! Ugh, gross, man, of course not!" Hah.

Moving along, I ordered a Smithwicks on tap to see if it did indeed taste better on tap than bottled. I think it did, I think it did.

By the next beer, the waitress was flirting with me a little bit I think. She rubbed her finger up and down my shoulder four times (four times!) and leaned in to ask if she could get me another beer. Well I clearly couldn't stop drinking at that point, so I ordered the only other beer I hadn't ever had before, a Boddington's Pub Ale (4.7% ABV; English Pale Ale). The kind that looks like this in a can. I was probably a bit too drunk at this point to really say how this beer was. I certainly don't remember it being remarkable either way. Be right back, gotta go get food.

Ugh, I just had some delightfully horrible food that is going to prompt me to finally start the blog I care most about: my restaurant blog.

Anyway, after the Boddington's, I asked the waitress if she could think of a beer I could try that I haven't had yet, and she suggested the seasonal Samuel Adams they have right now. At this point, I probably wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between a wheat beer and an imperial stout, so I have no idea how that one was. Oh! and right before I ordered it, one of the dudes from our table had bought the table shots of "vegas bombs" (obviously from the name and taste some red bull concoction, but I have no idea what the other indgredient(s) might have been). He actually meandered his way through the throngs of people through 3 or 4 rooms ana a few staircases and doors to find us outside on the patio to deliver these shots to us (Caleb and me, that is). I don't know why he would go to the trouble - maybe he thought my questioning of his sexuality was somehow flirting.

I wanted to play darts and went over to the dart boards but didn't know from where to get the darts. Some guy took the opportunity to get the darts from the bartender and then offer to play with me, which I did for about 10 seconds before making friends with the 4 guys playing darts next to us and totally abandoning that dude. One guy lectured Caleb and me about the dangers of smoking (he was a total health nut) but relented when I explained I smoke about 3 cigarettes a week all on the one night a week I drink (on average). I don't really know how it came up, but one of the guys ended up confessing that, while he is at least 80% "totally straight", he has some bicuriosity and was interested in Caleb. I told him I could set up a totally safe, easy, situation for him to test the waters with Caleb (and I hope to pursue this because the idea just tickles me). Oh and this guys also told me that he's a chiropractor and wants to try to fix my knees. He said he'd take me out for sushi and fix my knees and we could set the thing up with Caleb then...maybe he's looking for a threesome, now that I think about it...

So, probably thanks to that damned shot of liquor, I ended up feeling queasy on the ride home, to the point that my friends stopped at a gas station for me to try (in vain) to throw up in the sink. When I got home (at about 2:45 am), I didn't want to bother my girlfriend, so (and I don't really remember this part, but I've pieced it together from glimpses of memory as well as my girlfriend's account) I got the good barfing bowl from the cupboard and then inexplicably cleared off the long black table in the living room and lied down on it with the bowl next to me on the ground. There's a perfectly good couch right next to that table, so I'm not sure what my reasoning was. My girlfriend found me akimbo on the coffee table at 6 am, then asked if I might not be more comfortable in bed. I said yes, then got up and lied down on the couch. I woke up in my bed this morning, though. Look at the note my girlfriend left me so I wouldn't wake up with bad, paranoid hungover thoughts that she might be pissed at me for getting piss ass drunk:


Isn't she sweet? :)

Slow weekend for Beer

I actually only had one beer this whole weekend. See what ha' happened was, my girlfriend's co-worker Chasidy was celebrating her birthday at On the Border (before going off to the club, of course), and she invited me to be her date. Well, I figured there would be a lot of black women there, so I was nervous because black women intimidate me. Therefore, I decided I definitely needed a beer beforehand. My girlfriend had wanted to try Dundee's Original Honey Brown Lager(American Amber/Red Lager, 4.5% ABV), so we bought a 6-pack. I didn't really have high hopes for it as for one thing, it's a lager and for another, a 6-pack costs only 6 dollars. Unfortunately, it's just never going to be a great beer for a dollar a bottle. As you can see, there was almost no head at all. It's pretty much just a cheap lager with a bit of a honey taste. Certainly not horrible, and I'd take them over Bud Lite.

Anyway, at OTB I had a regular margarita and a sangria margarita and had a great time, but this is a beer blog!

The rest of the weekend I was starting my period and bloated, so I didn't feel like drinking beer. Especially when I have a selection of other...treats at my disposal :D Well, until next weekend!

Independence Day

Well, the 4th of July and Saturday night have come and gone, which of course means I drank a whole bunch of alcohol again. I started the evening out at a park with some friends and, after a delicious Jimmy John's vegetarian "unwich", I opened the last of a 6-pack of Smithwick's (4.5% ABV, Irish Red Ale) I bought a few weeks ago.
It's pretty good, but it's definitely better on tap than from a bottle. I think you'd say that drinkability is high but complexity is low...something like that. Anyway, next on the agenda was Pyramid's Audacious Apricot Ale (5.1% ABV, fruit/vegetable beer), of which I had purchased a 6-pack.
I sincerely wish this beer could've been purchased by the bottle so I wouldn't have had to endure so many of these. This is one of those quirky beers, one of which is fun to drink. It tastes exactly like apricot, with a beer aftertaste. Having one of these bottles around is great because everyone around you will want to take a sip and say shit like, "Mmm! It really does taste like apricots!" and then either, "ew and then it has a bad aftertaste," if she's not a beer drinker, or, "Ah, and then it has a good aftertaste," if he's a beer drinker who is trying to sound like he has sophisticated taste but really doesn't. Anyway, the point is that it seems to me that this is generic "meh" ale with apricot flavored syrup poured in.

I had 2 of these at the park (bringing my beer total to 3 and my CLBV* count to 3.5). Then my girlfriend wanted me to go swimming with her and some friends. I ended up walking about 3 miles in flip flops while having to pee really badly (3 beers!) trying to make it to my girlfriend. At first, there were complications with the directions, so I had to double back, after about a 1/4 of a mile, to re-ask for directions. Then, it turned out that all entrances to the park were blocked, so I walked another two and a half miles to where I could find her parked. Anyway, after getting home, peeing, and eating the last 3 bites of her Jack-in-the-box something or other, I attempted to have another audacious apricot thing, as did she. I only got half way through mine, then put it in the mini-fridge (as if I'm going to want to drink the rest of it in a few days?), and asked if we could stop at the beer store on the way to the pool.

I always forget that I have to have cans at apartment pools because they all have no glass policies. That shit severely limits my choices. Besides the domestic, lite swill, it came down to Modelo, Tecate or those big Fosters cans (I couldn't find a good enough picture to convey the size of the kind they were selling). I'll try the Fosters one day, but I'm always afraid that they'll just get way too warm before I can make my way through them, and I'm just not at the level of beer connoisseur where I can appreciate utterly warm beer for all it's worth. So I wound up with a 6-pack of Modelo Especial (4.4% ABV Mexican pilsner).
It just kind of tasted generic to me, but I was tipsy and swimming. The dude at the counter told me beer salt was a good idea, so I had some of that with my Modelos, but I accidentally bought the lemon/lime kind instead of regular. Oh well. I ended up drinking...probably 3 of these and playing water volleyball and football with some friends and their 2 kids.

Then I had more Jack-in-the-Box, took 2 ibuprofen, and passed out watching a DVD of Designing Women. Happy 4th!


*Coor's Light by volume is how I keep track of how much beer I've had. That is, until I'm too drunk to do that kind of math and just keep drinking. It's just a conversion into how many 4.2% beers I've had.