a week in Missoula and weekend with family

After chilling with the skate pros, the next day there was a weekly event downtown by the river in Missoula with some live music, food, and of course fine brew. So after a hard days work I found myself a half block from my hotel, chillin’ in the perfect weather with a beer, listening to live music, eating good food, and hanging next to the river watching kayakers and surfers on the Clark Fork at Brennan’s Wave. Life wasn’t bad.

My parents and sister came in over the weekend. We found good food and beer at Restaurant Vero. Checked out a dead rich woman’s antique collection and gardens, went to the Newseum which was actually about worth the $20 admission, and checked out the Folklife Festival.

MOBASH demo

As I hang in Montana I found out that there is an Independent Trucks tour going on throughout the US and they are in Missoula this day. My client site in Missoula is a bit outside of the small town and near the Big Sky Brewery (see previous Big Sky! post). So as usual I stopped by the brewery on my way back in to town for a few samples. I sipped my first taste around 5:00 and suddenly remembered about the skate park demo I read about in the Missoulian news paper this morning. So off I ran. The demo was pretty informal. By the time I got there things were settling down. Most my pics are of locals.

http://picasaweb.google.com/SlickSlopeSurfer/MOBASHDemo2008

Big Sky!

I'm lucky enough to visit Montana for work on occasion and the lowly populated state does have some fine brew. Missoula, large to MT but small to the rest of the world, has quite a few fine breweries. One of my favorites is Big Sky. Moose Drool is da bomb.

It so happens that my client is located quite close to the new Big Sky Brewery. Its convenient to stop by the taphouse on the way back from the office. This time they happened to have a special version of the Scape Goat pale ale which was dry hopped... Super Scape Goat. It was yum. Its not sold outside of the brewery and it was going fast. I called a friend in town with a fridge (cuz my hotel room doesn't have one) to see if they'd be interested in me storing a growler in their fridge but no answer. And then 10 minutes later the beer was all gone.

But I tried their IPA again for the first time in awhile and damn! I thought the server gave me a second dry hopped Scape Goat. That would have been quite nice of her considering you are only allowed one sample of the rare beer. So my third tasting I asked for the IPA again... and it tasted the same! That IPA is damn good, and better than the special Super Scape Goat. The server told me it was also dry hopped. I'll be drinking lots of the IPA in future visits.

UPDATE: On Wednesday the Big Sky IPA tasted just as good, but today it tasted more like a regular IPA and less of the fresh hop taste. New batch?

UPDATE: So on my next trip to Missoula I confirmed that it tasted just as good as it did the first time. Its interesting how your palate changes depending on things like other food and drink.

I'm going overboard

You will not even come close to the cost of beer in my fridge at the moment. Just try to guess. I've gone way overboard the last few weekends. If you add a couple hundred to your guess you might come close. Where is my cool dry beer cellar?

And I since you will never guess correctly cuz you can't see all the beer or you don't care enough to ask me I'll go ahead and tell you.

Over 40,000 pennies. And it will all taste so good! Lots of Dogfish Head and Allagash 750ml bottles of course. And the case of Harvest Ale didn't help.

I'm thinking I need to document my current beer stock with a running list. That way I'd have a historic reference and could refer to it (via my phone) when perusing for more. :P

Cairo Wine & Liquor‎

I happen to be sipping some Red & White tonight. "You're drinking your last bottle of Red & White that were hoarding after its been sold out of the stores???" says the one or two of you that are familiar with my beer stock. No, of course not. I went to a downtown DC liquor store and picked up a few bottles!

My local Dogfish Head rep, Devin, sent out an email saying he was going to highlight a beer store each month or so and the first one was Cairo Liquor. He said they have a full range of Dogfish Head beers including a few I was having trouble finding at the time. So I was all excited to go seek out some more hard to find favorites such as Red & White. It took a few weeks for me to get there so I was thinking I might be out of luck on the rarer selections.

So today is the day I found some time to go. And holy crap this place is your typical downtown corner liquor store. Except with sweet beer! I didn't pay any attention to the wine but my guess is you won't find any sommeliers in there. They had quite the german beer selection. Lots of good belgium ones too. And it took some searching but I found the two Dogfish Head that I sought. There were at least a half dozen 750ml bottles of Red & White. And three 4-packs of Burton Baton. I took about half their stock of each.

Mmmmm yum. Get yourself a bottle of wine, some Mad Dog, a fifth, and some craft brew all in one stop!

Firefox Download Day

Mozilla wants you to help set a Guinness World Record and download the new version of Firefox today. Firefox 3 was just released and they are attempting to set a world record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. I've been using the beta version and I dig it. Click on the image below to check it out.

CSC Invitational and Dragon Boat Festival

There was a professional road bike race and a dragon boat race today. I hit the CSC Invitational first and took way too many pics. It was very cool to see them whip around the corners of the short loop. After a couple hours the breakaway of 14 lapped the peloton. I got some good videos. Normally I watch the slide show with about a 6 or 7 second interval but I took all these as continuous shots so you might want to try 2 or 3 seconds. And I’ll put the videos up front so you don’t have to dig through all 200 or so.

http://picasaweb.google.com/SlickSlopeSurfer/CSCInvitational2008


Then on the waterfront near Georgetown there were was the annual Dragon Boat Festival. It was my first time and I didn’t know what exactly to expect. They are all in identical boats with a drummer keeping rhythm up front and a guy acting as rudder in the back. They did this all day Saturday and Sunday. We caught the last hour on Sunday.

http://picasaweb.google.com/SlickSlopeSurfer/DragonBoatFestival2008