One of the best ideas Michael had for “wedding stuff” was making a Wedding Celebration Ale. I made printed the labels.
It was the first all grain batch, and I believe it was his first one with Belgian ale yeast. In preliminary tastings, Michael said it came out a bit sweet. We handed out the beer at our wedding, with the beerstill needing a week of fermenting, we were pretty confident that it came out well.
Yeah, pretty confident.
So we tried the beer this week. Wow! It’s good! Still pretty light (needs better gravity), but the taste was good! It wasn’t as home-brewy as some of the previous batches had been, I think the all grain bit is really the key, even if it’s so much more work.
Speaking of food, my boss got me the sweetest gift for my wedding (we received a lot of cool/amazing gifts for our wedding, but this isn’t a “look at the loot we scored!” post, I just needed to share the penguins!):
They’re made with Belgian Chocolate and inside each hollow penguin (they came as a pair) there were little chocolate penguins. It’s very good chocolate. Mmmm chocolate penguins.
Friday I went with a co-worker to get a manicure during lunch. I hadn’t been to Breathe Nail Spa in Lansdale since January (just haven’t wanted to devote the time to it, I was doing my nails myself), and they surprised me with their continued dedication to taking time when they do your nails AND they added the nice bonus of a short hot rock massage while your nails are drying. It was a nice treat, the work week felt so long, it’s so hard coming back from such a fantastic vacation.
Saturday was mostly spent cleaning up leaves in our yard. We were expecting a delivery of 2 cords of firewood (which is a lot of wood) and were planning on spending most of the afternoon stacking it, but when the contractor delivering it showed up he only had a quarter of a cord. Apparently they had a lot of deliveries, one of their trucks broke down, and they were backed up, they promised to deliver the rest on Sunday morning. At least we had firewood for a relaxing Saturday night. After the leaves were cleaned up neither of us felt like cooking, and we headed out to Victory for some pizza and beer. We also picked up the Victory Brewing Experience DVD and a Golden Monkey shirt (for me!).
So Sunday morning we got some more wood delivered, and had a significant amount put away by 11 when the contractor showed up again to drop off more – he even gave us slightly more than 2 cords because it took so long. I’m very pleased with the quality of the wood this time, the last place we got wood from wasn’t nearly as high quality. We finally had all cords piled up around 3 this afternoon.
I’m tired :) But we’re now relaxing in front of the fireplace, it’s so nice.