It's been a while

So it's been a long while since I posted. And I was going through my photos I have done a lot in the past 5 weeks. Lets start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. At the end of February we had to bottle our saison ale blend that we had brewed. It was no longer green which was good.

And we got a fancy new auto siphon to help with bottling. This thing was amazing and I am so mad for not having spent the whopping $15 dollars before. I will never gravity siphon again, ever.

Then we got to brewing another batch of beer. It was a rose cheeked blonde ale that we brewed our 2nd time ever brewing and had loved. We figured why not use up some rose hips and buds.

Once the mash was going on that we capped our bottles of saison ale blend.

Then we got ready to drink the triple that was now ready for drinking. It poured beautifully.

The rose beer looked awesome going into the fermenting vessel.

Also we had a hydrometer so we could test how strong the beer we were making was.

We went to bed thinking our rose beer would be so awesome in a few weeks. Here is what it looked like a day later.

We messed up and it all pumped itself out of the fermenting vessel. Lesson learned, you can put the tube in too far. Then good news happened the next day. I got into my dream grad school!!!

I took the next day off work to enjoy myself. Alicia and I finally made it to Birreria.

It was amazing. I had Calabrona a witbeer on cask. I could have drank it all day long.

Alicia had a sour raspberry called Rubus by Birra del Borgo. Later we found the bottles at Buy Rite which was super exciting!

That weekend we made a beer can chicken. We don't actually use a beer can. We use a little mason jar. And this time we used our jalapeno saison as the beer.

The chicken was rubbed down with a Siracha butter rub. Look how nice it looks coming out of the oven.

It was all kinds of amazing goodness.

Then on Friday we went to see Jim Jeffries. We had some beers before at Beer Authority since we had to be in Times Square. We like the Dogfish coasters with holes cut in them.

We had some fun with that. And yet we were nowhere near as drunk as Jim Jeffries or the assholes sitting behind us.

The next day we thought it would be warm enough to grill before we went to the Devils game. It got chilly and Albert didn't have a hoodie so he put on my robe to finish grilling.

Then we went to our first Devils game of the season. We learned that the beer stands no longer take cards. next time we will be prepared with more cash.

Later we were beer shopping and we found White Monkey. We LOVE Golden Monkey so we thought aging it in Chardonnay barrels would be a good thing. It wasn't. We hated it. We threw it out without finishing it. And I never ever have done that with a beer from Victory. I love their beers. I drank my whole sampler at the brewery with a smile on my face.

There was a Mexico vs USA soccer game. Albert supplied some nice local beer.

And After the US tied Mexico Albert tried to fall asleep in the chair. It was way past our bedtime because the game didn't start until 9:30.

Last weekend we volunteered at the NYC Craft Beer Festival Spring Seasonals. Alicia worked at the Brooklyn Booth.

I worked at the Victory Booth.

Our reward for pouring beer was attending the next session for free. So we saved $65 a person and made some new friends. It was awesome. Now I will blog about our table projects. We bought a new coffee table at the crate and barrel outlet. The table was originally $400 marked down to $37. We needed to refinish it. So first we started by turning our old table into a chalkboard table for playing cards outside. We got a lovely shade of yellow paint for 50 cents because someone else didn't like it. We mixed in the grout.

Alicia painted it and bam we have a yellow chalkboard table!

So now we got to Laura and Alicia redo a table. We started by applying a stripper.

After hours of scraping we got to this. We got cold and so the table came inside.

We stopped to make some greek chicken for dinner. I am including this picture because I realized in 5 weeks of photos this is the only photo of me other than the hockey game. I swear I am at all these events.

 Later we got a power sander to keep working on the table. Yellow table is pulled inside because of rain.

Alicia sanded.

And sanded.

Until the table looked this awesome.

Now we have bought stain and are ready to tackle gel stain this weekend. On a side note at some point in these five weeks we decided to make our own tortilla chips. Alicia prepped the tortillas.

They baked up awesome.

And then we made a basic salsa and had an delicious snack.

Also another fun thing we did was go to the Mets game yesterday. The sun was out.

And we had a great time, the stadium was pretty empty and we had seats in the sun. I must say it is weird to wear a coat to a baseball game. We went this early in the season because Alicia always likes to see her Padres play when they are in town.