|
|
|
$7 sixers and other IPAs
Thursday, September 23 2010
It was kind of hot yesterday and it was even hotter today. Our CSA pickup day had been moved out a day and it was my job to pick ip up. Squash season had mercifully ended, and now we were getting huge yellow onions and beets, as well as lots of small green peppers. Also, it seems our CSA's broccoli plants have a second wind. For next year it's looking like we can replicate every good thing our CSA has given us this year (but without all the squash) by just making our garden a little bigger and growing more lettuce, brassicas, and adding green beans.
As always when picking up the CSA vegetables, I stopped at the Midtown shopping area. I needed to pick up hardware with which to fix the Subaru's exhaust system (which, as I discovered the other day, has rotten flanges in one of its exhaust pipes, leading to excessive noise). I also stopped at Hannaford as part of my continued quest to find a perfect IPA here on the East Coast. I got a sixer of Hurricane Kitty (the most trusted brand in East Coast IPAs), but that's $12 right there, and the quality tends to vary a bit. Still, it's noticeably better than a $7 sixer of Tremont IPA, the only other IPA that Hannaford carries as six packs. Hannaford also carries single 22 ounce bottles of more exotic beers, including "Stone Ruination IPA" (which had disappointed me last week) and Smuttynose IPA, which I bought today. Sadly, the Smuttynose was even worse than Stone Ruination. Its flavor was depressingly simplistic for an IPA, consisting almost entirely of an unpleasant bitterness. On the East Coast, with the exception of really good batches of Hurricane Kitty, I've yet to find a beer as good as even an off-batch of McMenamin's IPA. Perhaps IPAs on the East Coast are just too far from the source of hops to be sufficiently fresh (a problem, Gretchen points out, similar to the one that plagues Guinness in places outside of Ireland).
This evening I made burritos just for myself, since Gretchen had leftover pasta. As an old married couple, we've really been enjoying Jeopardy since it returned from its unexpectedly-long summer hiatus. We'd been rooting for Roger Craig, the mole-shouldered gentleman who'd set a one-day winning record and ended up winning nearly a quarter of a million dollars, and were sad to see him defeated by Jelisa Castrodale a few days ago.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?100923 feedback
previous | next |
