Peekskill Brewery

I recently discovered that the Peekskill Brewery was kind of, sort of, on the way up to my wife's home town in western Massachusetts. When I say on the way up, I mean it was less than a 30 minute detour out of the way and didn't require crossing the George Washington Bridge. After a slightly disastrous detour to go to DeCicco's a couple years ago where we ended up slightly lost in NYC, my wife has some issues with me suggesting random stops. However, the map directions seemed pretty straightforward so she agreed. Plus, Pax's cousin Linnea had been to a brewery at a little over 5 weeks old, so he really knew he had to get to one when he was younger. It just wouldn't have been respectable if she went to one at an earlier age than him.

After a slightly harrowing drive on streets winding around a mountain, we ended up in the town of Peekskill and then the brewery. It's not terribly obvious that you've arrived but eventually you'll notice the writing on the side of the building like we did. The actual entrance to the building is actually past the first parking lot which we didn't realize. I'm guessing the main parking lot gets full but for lunch on a Saturday it wasn't so bad. But, we parked in the first lot and just walked around to the front, it wasn't like it was far.

Hangar 24 Hammerhead

Hammerhead is yet another beer sent to me by my very generous San Diego buddy. I'm always up for trying new bourbon barrel stuff so it's great when he sends me things like this. The base is a huge barleywine, coming in at 14%. Don't mind the fact that I drank all of it by myself because my wife can't handle things like this. She's a wuss, I know.

This is actually the first beer purely from Hangar 24 I've had. Sure, I had the Ichigo Highway, but that was a collab with The Bruery. Spicy alcohol nose with oak, caramel, and vanilla. You know you're getting bourbon and some heat from this right from the start. The body was on the thicker side but not syrupy which was good. Flavors were a mix of caramel, cherry, vanilla, and very rich bourbon followed by a decent amount of heat. Not unpleasantly alcoholic, but totally ever present. Eric described it as "boozy but tasty" which I feel describes it really well. I managed to drink the whole thing by myself without help so take that as a positive recommendation.

Haven't gone away yet

Disregarding my anemic post count for June, I'm still interested in writing this blog. It's been a lot of fun over the years and I've met a ton of people because of it. With Pax being here, though, it's been a tough transition in the morning from having around an hour to do stuff to having like fifteen minutes and being tired while doing it. I'm still going to try to post stuff but things will almost definitely still be random and lackluster until he goes to day care in August and Jo goes back to work. We'll see, though, maybe I'll finally get a schedule together and it will get better. Pigs may fly, too, you never know.

In the mean time, here's a couple pictures from the class I took at Tria over Philly Beer Week with Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey.

That's all the beers we got to try during the class. The two on the left were full, blended sours and were Duck Duck Gooze and Cable Car, left to right. Amazing beers with Cable Car being the better of the two to me. The former is being re-released later this year but Cable Car is basically only available on site at Toronado in San Francisco or San Diego so it's hard to get to say the least. I'm definitely interested in trying it again though and will try to get a bottle when I'm in San Francisco again. The others on the mat are barrel samples which were totally still, aka, uncarbonated. Amazing to get to try the different barrel flavors before they were blended. Some were almost undrinkable which shows how much of an effect blending has on turning out something good. Just a neat experience that you get very rarely.