Sunday, November 14, 2010

99 bottles of beer on the wall

It's not that we've been running low on beer recently, but we found out that New Glarus Brewing Co. released its newest seasonal and "unplugged" beers, so we took a trip up to Wisconsin to stock up.

New Glarus Brewing is our favorite brand of beer: they are a craft brew operation in New Glarus, Wisconsin, which we got a chance to visit in our anniversary weekend in October. It's only available in Wisconsin, but that's not totally bad news, because it makes the beer kind of special. Plus, we're not far away.

The beer schedule is somewhat strange, but you can see it for yourself online. They have year-round beers, seasonal beers, and "unplugged" beers, which are a surprise until immediately before their release. We've tried almost all the beers for this year, and I knew that we'd like the last few: Back Forty, Coffee Stout (Dave) and Apple Ale (me).

We called ahead and found a grocery store that had an epic stock of all of the above - plus some others to keep us in beer. You can see from the photo below that we now have something like four cases of New Glarus beer, in addition to the two large bottles I'm holding (the Belgian Red and Raspberry Tart - both fruit beers) and the two bottles of Golden Ale we purchased direct from New Glarus in October.


I think we're good for the winter. We're going to need some dedicated beer shelves in the basement of our new townhome! Oh, and in the foreground of the bottles, you can also see some raspberry vodka I made by soaking Valley Orchard raspberries in Smirnoff vodka for two months. Mmmm.

After our Kenosha beer-buying extravaganza, we went to the Brat Stop for some brats and brews. The Bears game was on, and it was kind of fun to watch it there, with everyone's screaming and horn-blowing. The food was excellent; we're going to have to stop there more often when we're in Kenosha.

Now we're home, and I'm probably going to make roasted potatoes and salad for dinner, but I'm going to try that Apple Ale and then have a dessert of Wisconsin ice cream. (I forgot to mention that part earlier: we got two gallons.) It was an excellent afternoon, and now for some movies and crochet. I love living near Wisconsin.

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