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.

And here's a picture of Tomme Arthur himself, leaning against the wall.

He talked for about an hour and a half all about the Lost Abbey souring program and explained a lot about blending and what they look for while doing it. Their tasting panel is apparently only three people including him so they have to have great palates. The class itself was just awesome and Tomme was a really good presenter. Clear, concise, and even had a laugh for the guy who asked about carbonation problems. (For those that don't know, over the years Lost Abbey has had some problems with carbonation their bigger beers. In 2009, they missed on quite a few of the production runs.) Really, really glad I got to go to this class. Even ran into Tomme the next day at Bishop's Collar and he came out and talked to my wife and I and met Pax.