I was walking through the store on Monday and noticed that several breweries had already released their pumpkin ales. I’m always curious about them, but seldom pleased with the results of other breweries pumpkin ales. Usually I find them to have to much cinnamon or to be lackluster in other ways. Anyhow, I was primarily surprised to see them in August because I consider them a fall or October beer. I plan to brew a Pumpkin Ale soon, but it won’t be ready until early October. Will Christmas Ales start showing up around Halloween now?

In other news, and there is a lot of it, life has been interesting around here. We spent last week on Vacation in Grand Cayman. The local brewery has changed hands and is now called CayBrew and the beer has improved a bit. Unfortunately, they only offer a lager and although better than before it is still not quite as good as Red Stripe which is practically a local brew down there. I’m not sure if my two readers are aware, but a Hurricane just went through the Caribbean. Fortunately, we got off the island just in time, but it made the last couple of days of our vacation very tense.

While we were down there, the GFI outlet that our refrigerator is plugged into tripped and we lost all of the food in our fridge and freezer. Apparently the outlet is going bad. Fortunately, our neighbors are saints and cleaned up the worst of the mess and only left the less than smelly food for us to throw out. They noticed the problem when the melting popsicles pooled on the floor and I can only imagine how bad the smell of rotting food was. They said the once-frozen bag of shrimp was fizzing, which is never good.

And in the minor nuisance category, our Media Center is acting up and refuses to run with the Graphics Card installed. I tested the card in another system and it does not seem to be bad, so I am going to try all sorts of driver updates and such to see if I can fix it. I hate mysterious issues like this. Anyhow, we can watch TV on a Monitor and DVD’s through the Playstation, so we’ll get along okay until it is fixed.

I think that’s enough for now, I’ll update again when I get around to ordering brewing supplies, which should be soon.

- Chris

Actually, Silence is Golden and there has been a lot of that around here lately. Life has been busy lately. We haven’t had a free weekend in a month and that doesn’t look like it’s going to change for a while. The ‘Beer Makes you Wii’ party went well. We had plenty of beer, lots of sausages, and even a smoked pork shoulder that turned out reasonably well. Oh, and there was much video game playing.

Not much going on in the Brewery at the moment, we’ve reached our summer break. The Beerios is still maturing, hopefully it won’t be flat forever. I’m going to do some Wine Tasting in the Finger Lakes region soon, and I might be headed to the Ommegang Brewery as well, but the details are all up in the air. Anyhow, it should be fun.

We’ll resume brewing in August, so the site may be a little quiet until then. We still have plenty of beer to get us through the next couple of months.

- Chris

This week we eagerly opened a bottle of the Beerio which promised to be the best batch yet. Right away we noticed a problem– it is flat, very very flat. We brought the beer upstairs hoping that keeping it at a warm temperature would carbonate it. This has almost convinced me that having a keg system would be a good thing (but I stand by my assertion that it would decrease beer variety which would be sad– unless of course we built a bar with multiple taps and a HUGE multi mini-keg kegerator…..).

Now for the home improvement– the shelves we would place beer dishes on were sagging quite a bit. Enough that we stopped drying carboys on them and really putting any *real* weight on them. Today we started working on building a new workbench for next to the sink. This should not only provide the proper support for beer dishes but may also be used for storage of beer related items. Is it bad to have a hobby you alter your house for?

 – Cindy

We just got some new beer tasting glasses from my parents. Which is good because at the moment we have probably about a dozen kinds of beer (6 recent and somewhere near 6 in the Harley’s Special Reserve section) and drinking a whole one of each of the beers would be bad. And speaking of beer tasting– we have one coming up, email us for details.

Well, we finally brewed the summer WeissBier. We had planned to do it over a week ago but life got in the way. Oh well, it looks like it will still be ready in time for our ‘Beer Makes you Wii’ party, so that’s good.

In other news, it looks like I’m going to Germany soon. It’s a business trip, so I’ll get to drink plenty of beer, but I won’t have any time to see the sights.

On a sadder note, we lost our beloved bunny rabbit this weekend. Maybe we’ll name a beer after him. Our Lawn Mower and Vacuum cleaner seem to have succumbed to the whirlwind of bad karma this weekend as well. I’m going to try to fix them, but I think they are beyond repair. Hopefully the bad vibes didn’t infect the WeissBier.

Sorry for the Bullet Point update, but it was a rough weekend and I have a lot of work to get done this week before another busy weekend. More on that later.

- Chris