The big event this past week was a much anticipated IPA Beer Taste Test. We invited some beer-drinking friends over to help us taste, evaluate, and pick the winning beers. Everyone brought their kids, so this doubled as a mega-playdate.
Here's Kale all dressed up waiting for his company to arrive. Both my boys are well-known for sitting in the drive-way for long periods of time waiting for cars to show up. If I let them, they'd be out there 12+ consecutive hours. Luckily, I'm quite persuasive, and always promise to give them the 30-minute heads up that arrival time is coming....
Matt and I may have gone a bit overboard with the concept, as we ended up with 16 different beers to try. We poured 2 ounce tasters for each participant, split into 2 rounds. With lots of snacks served in between. (This would be essential to making it through the night.)
Everyone started out with a hunger for beer. But we quickly learned that taste-testing is much harder than it appears to be. Something about the switching of the beers back and forth, made all of us alcohol light-weights. I'm a long-time IPA drinker, and can handle quite a few ounces. But the over-analysis of the flavors, along with the dizzying effect of new taste and smell sensations, meant I couldn't get anywhere near finishing my samples. Seemed we all had a similar experience. I've learned that polishing off 12 ounces of a single beer is much easier than polishing off 12 ounces of 6 different beers. Who would of thunk it!
A shot of the kids, having just as much fun as the parents:
Yes, I had a group of 4-year-olds and a 2-year old paint UNSUPERVISED in my living room. This is one risk you take at a beer-tasting...obviously!
Holy smokes Kale is a white boy!!
In any case, it was an eye-opening exercise. I discovered that some of my "old staples" were in fact quite disgusting. And I discovered some new favorites that are really quite delicious.
Here is how it played out:
Beers I though I liked that scored LOW: Stone, New Belgium's Rampant
New beers that scored HIGH: Eddyline Brewing's Crank Yanker, Odd13's Code Name Super Fan, Firestone's Union Jack, and Firestone's Luponic Distortion.
In other news, both boys went in for their annual physical exams. Both are doing great! Sage is above average in height (75th percentile) and weight (90th percentile). While Kale is slightly below average on both. (40-45th percentile). Sage is super strong in language. While Kale dominates in gross motor skills. To each their own!
The whole family went together. We turned it into quite an adventure, complete with group flu shots and celebratory Dairy Queen.
Sage is getting so excited for Halloween. All decorations are out. The house is full-blown festive. And while I thought it was a little premature Sage begged to make a spider web. Not wanting to fight a day-long battle over a fake web, I obliged. I grabbed an old tree root from the yard and we strung some web around it. In addition to all the fake toy spiders living in the web, there's a good chance we've got some real ones too. My mom would LOVE that!
Sunday was a gorgeous day. (Actually the whole weekend was). So we took this opportunity to get out the swimming pool one last time.
And finally, some updates on a couple recipes:
1) Home-made "quick 30-minute" pasta sauce:
2) Slow-cooker black-bean soup:
I roasted the veggies before tossing them in the cooker with broth and beans...
3) Tortellini tomato asparagus salad
Until next week... Ta ta for now!
