Thursday, December 12, 2013

Pumpkin Homebrew Review

Well, its been a long while since I’ve done a beer review, but I had someone ask me to review their Pumpkin Ale Homebrew, so what the hell. One of L Bird’s co-workers’ husband has gotten pretty deep into homebrewing and presented me with two bottles of gold to review and well, who am I to turn down free beer.So here we go ….

adambeer

Appearance: From the minute I popped the crown on the bottle until the bottle was empty it foamed over. I actually had to quickly get it into my pint glass before I lost the whole bottle to foaming. So it is plenty carbonated. It was a light tan/brown in color and produced a ton of rocky head. It is pretty cloudy with visible sediment floating throughout, which is not necessarily a bad thing. When brewing with pumpkin it can produce a lot of sediment that stays suspended and is harder to remove. In the future if you wanted to clean it up, you could rack to a secondary carboy for 1-2 weeks for more settling before bottling but it is perfectly drinkable the way it is.

Aroma: It has a bit of hop aroma right up front, it is slightly citrusy which could be from the choice of hops. There is also hints of cinnamon and pumpkin, but overall it is clean and bright.

Taste: The hops continue to shine through at the start, it has that bitter hoppiness up front that gives way to a nice pumpkin flavor before the traditional ale flavors come through. I am not sure if he added any spices during the brewing but I can detect a faint spiciness maybe allspice or clove. There is a very slight lingering aftertaste that is reminiscent of bitter citrus peel/oil.

Overall: This is a good foray into pumpkin beers. It has enough pumpkin to be tasty but not so much as to be over the top. I also like the fact that it wasn’t over-spiced, a lot of commercial pumpkin beers try to be liquid pumpkin pie and they tend to go over the top on spice and I find that makes it cloying and makes for bad beer. It could be cleaned up a little by giving it a longer racking time and the after taste may be from leaving the bittering hops in the boil a little too long, but these are very minor faults. Overall, this is a good beer and I would drink a couple of them if I had the chance.

Good job, keep brewing and keep ‘em tippin’!

Thursday, December 5, 2013

3 Chocolate Rewards and a plan …

chocolate

Raising children is the most rewarding and the most exasperating thing I have ever done in my life. One minute you are so excited and happy with them, you look at their angelic faces and feel truly blessed. The next minute they are running around like a band of drunken midgets and you are trying to control your breathing before you turn into a screaming dictator that hands out martial punishment like its candy. Yeah, it’s been super stressful in my house lately, absolutely no one is sleeping, STILL. A Bird and Nat are both waking up 3 times a night on average.

Nat is cutting molars, I think, so she is pretty miserable while she is up and playing and even worse when she wakes up in the middle of the night. A Bird is having some anxiety issues over being alone. If L Bird or I walk out of the room, its “Dad, where are you going?” or “Can I come with you?” and if I go to the next room for too long she comes in to find me because she “got nervous”. This happens all through the day, at night it multiplies by 10. It seems she is constantly up because she heard a noise, she had a bad dream, her stomach hurt, she needed something, she can’t sleep anymore (even though its 11 PM or my favorite 2 AM) etc. Every night its one of those excuses and its definitely getting old. From talking to other parents at work and a quick Google search of “How can I keep my 6 year old in bed” (which by the way auto-populates itself after the number 6), it appears that this phenomenon is pretty common among all kids. It’s great to know that we are not alone, but it doesn’t help when L Bird or I are trying to keep our cool on trip number 3 back to A Bird’s bedroom at 3 AM.

So back to the ever helpful advice of people, both real and on the internets, they all say “keep calm, stay unemotional and bring the child back to her bed as many times as it takes and be consistent”. While that may be true who the hell is calm and unemotional at 3 AM when they are running on empty, but hey we’ll give it a shot. We are going on night 4 of that nonsense and we are all struggling to stay “unemotional” and not have a screaming/crying match that wakes the neighborhood. Another tactic is to offer a sticker or reward chart to keep them in bed. I’m not above bribing my kid if it means I can get a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, so we are trying that as well. We have told A Bird that if she doesn’t get up or even reduces her times of getting up in the night through the week she can pick out a prize at the end of the week. Sounds like a great plan until she gets up the same amount of times and then asks if she can still have a prize. When you tell  her NO, it turns into a super whiny, mega meltdown at 6 AM that wakes up Nat early which turns her into a super clingy whiny little bundle of joy for L Bird. I got to miss that this morning because I was already at work, but L bird wasn’t so lucky. She jumped on that grenade for me and I only got hit with tiny bits of shrapnel from her when she called me to vent.

This is such a hard thing to deal with because I can vividly remember lying in my bed terrified when the wind was blowing the tree branches into my window and making scratching noises. It only got worse when the lightning flashed and I saw the long shadows of the branches that looked just like arms coming to get me. I remember that terrified feeling of not wanting to be alone and running for my Mom. So I completely understand A Bird’s feelings and I do feel so bad for her, but I feel even worse when the whole next day I am irritable and snapping at her and everyone around me because I am tired and cranky. I hate being like this and I hate that she feels so scared, but something has to give.

So all of that brings me to “the plan”, my plan is the reward chart only modified. Like I said I am not against bribing my kid, however a week is like a lifetime to a 6 year old so I thought I would modify the reward for a little instant gratification. A Bird is a junk food hound, we are constantly “making deals”, like “if you have a banana or a yogurt you can have a piece of candy/cheetos/bbq chips (insert junk food here)”. Like all kids, she loves candy, especially Hershey bars, so my plan is to send her to bed with the thought if she stays in bed all night she can have 3 “bricks” of Hershey bar after her breakfast in the morning. Every time she gets up for anything other than the bathroom or emergencies she loses a “brick”. I am hoping that this instant reward strategy pays off, although I do feel slightly awful/guilty that I am treating my child like Pavlov’s dog and may possibly be training her to be a stress eater, but hey man Daddy needs some sleep.

Tonight, my plan goes into action, so hopefully the next time I post things will be so much better. They have to sleep sometime, right? And if not maybe I’ll get in touch with the TLC network about putting us on one of those odd family shows, with the subtitle “Teenagers that still sleep in their parents’ bed….” Wish me luck!

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