NYC: First Day Reviews

So, this is the first installment blog of my New York trip (which was "awesome", if I haven't said so before).
My first day was technically covered in this earlier blog entry, sans the beer reviews. We picked up 3 six-packs that evening...
Brooklyn Pennant Ale '55
Pretty much a simple ale, mild in flavour all around. A pretty easy drinking beer.... I couldn't find much to comment on. Theres nothing really wrong with it, but its also not very interesting. At least it has some flavour though.

Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA
Fairly yellow in colour (yes, I said coloUr...). I get a fairly mild almost woody hop aroma. Medium carbonation. It has a slightly grassy hop flavour and medium "plus" bitterness... not TOO bitter like many IPAs out there these days, but noticeable. Smooth and not biting bitterness in the aftertaste too. The beer has plenty of malt flavour too, which is very well balanced. I really liked this beer, I have to say their continual hopping over the length of the boil technique does create a distinct hop bitterness/flavour/aroma profile. I wish I was able to try the 90 minute. I grabbed a six pack to take back home.

Sierra Navada Stout:
Unfortunately the six pack of this we got seemed a little old to me. I got the oxidized flavour out of it, but sometimes the good thing about a nice stout is that the roast flavour in it can mask it. I still liked it, but I don't think I'd give it a fair review off an old bottle. It whent VERY well with a chocolate cake a friend had made... :)

On to day 2.... cheers!

New York, city of Awesome

Well, I'm back today from New York city. I had such a great time, which may be evident in the fact that I only added one blog the entire time I was there.

The only thing that I can really say about New York right now that it is just awesome... I'm quite tired and can't articulate any more than that right now. There is just so much to see and do there. I was only there seven days, and I feel as if I was gone a couple of weeks.

I'm sure my opinion of the city was helped by the fact I had a friend living in midtown Manhattan to stay with. In addition, she had lots of excellent friends that I got to know very quickly. By the end of the week, it felt like I already lived there... and living there is tempting. But I think I may just like visiting (and I'm sure my hosts would get tired of a non-rent-paying lump on their couch after awhile).

So, for the next couple of days my plan is to write about my experiences of a day or two per post, along with the beer reviews I did that day.
Speaking of beer, here is a list of the beers I got my hands on while in NYC:
(the *** denotes my picks as best beers of the trip)

Bottles / other draught:
Brooklyn Pennant Ale '55
Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA
Sierra Navada Stout
Yuengling Lager
Dogfish Head Raison d'etre (spelling??)
Anchor Liberty Ale
Arrogant Bastart Ale
Leffe Bruin
Spaten Oktoberfest

Heartland Brewpub, Union Square:

• Apricot Ale (seasonal)
• Some amber coloured ale, the server forgot which one it was and I couldn't place it (seasonal)
• Smiling Pumpkin Ale (seasonal)
• Cornhusker Lager
• Harvest Wheat
• IPA
• Red Rooster
• Farmer Jon's Oatmeal Stout
• Empire Ale
• Imperial IPA***
• Matrimony Saison

Zum Schneider (East 7th st at Ave C)
An awesome german beer bar...

• Weihnstephaner Hefeweizen (on tap!!)
• Schneider Wiesse
  
• Spaten Dopplebock
• Schlenkeria Racuchbier Marzen (bottle)

Peter's Waterfront Alehouse (Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn Heights)

• Brooklyn Blast
• Magic Hat Fat Angel
• Chelsea Hop Angel

Sixpoint Craft Ales (Brooklyn)
I stopped in to visit these guys for about half an afternoon and had a great time, I'll expand more in the blog post later, but they are quite small and make some AWESOME beers. They gave me a few sample bottles to take home too.

• Sweet Action Cream Ale
• Brownstone Ale***
• Got a tast of their first lager that should be out in a few months.
  

The GingerMan (East 36th St between 5th & Park)
I almost died when I saw the beer selection at this place. Too bad I was getting tired of beer at the end of the week!

• Sixpoint Bengali Tiger Cask Ale
• Belhaven Scottish Ale
• Sixpoint Brownstone*** (again, because it was such a good beer!)
• Victory Old Horizontal Barleywine***
• Rock Art Ridge Runner Barley Wine

Holy crap thats a lot of beer. I didn't bring back as much as I thought I would, but I didn't want to lug it around with me anyway.

Unfortunately I left my digital camera on ISO setting 400 while I was taking pictures, and a lot of them have turned out very grainy and crappy. Plus I didn't take a lot of pictures to begin with. So that makes me a little sad.... but I guess I'll just have to go back.

All in all... like I said, it was awesome. I had such a good time and I'm glad I went. Now stay in tune for my stories and reviews this week (as I won't have anything else very interesting to write about, I will stretch this NY thing for all the posts I can get out of it ;)

Cheers!

NYC Day Zero

Well, this was a long day. My plane left from Edmonton at 00:30 in the morning. I had a middle seat between two people, on the emergency exit row... which means that your seat doesn't recline. Somehow I actually managed to sleep a little bit, but not well.
I changed planes in Toronto, which was actually quite an efficient process as it turns out. In 45 minutes I was driven by bus from one terminal to another, picked up my bag, went through US customs, checked through security again, and made it to my gate 10 minutes before my plane was boarding. All at 6:00 am Toronto time. Better than I expected.

My plane arrived at Newark, NJ on time... I was a little worried about finding my way to my friend's place in Manhattan. But, not for long. There was a big ad for bus service to Grand Central (amongst other places) right by the baggage carosel. $14 US, not too bad. From Grand Central it was an easy hop on the 6 subway to 23rd st, then a short walk to my friend's place at 2nd ave & 24th st. I didn't even have to check a map the entire trip in. Actually, after I bought my metro card, I managed to help another tourist with the subway system map. Its fairly easy once you get it.

I arrived at my friend's place at about 10:30ish. Immediately I was being shoved out the door to go to central park to meet with a group of friends of hers. I was tired... but oh well. Central Park is quite awesome... I played frisbee in the big open grass area on the south side. I felt... like I was in NYC. We walked around the park a bit, then went home... I basically passed out for 3 hours sleeping after that, as I was quite tired.

Following that the evening consisted of a lot of beer drinking until 3:30 am... My reviews of the american craft beer consumed will appear in my next blog entry... for now, I sleep. I also met a friend of my friend's from Brooklyn, and she'll show me around there this week. Thats great, as otherwise I probably wouldn't even know what to do with myself in Brooklyn.

Cheers!

New York City

Well, tomorrow I'm off to NYC for a week. I'll keep notes on beers & breweries and post what I find!
Who knows... maybe this will be a beer blog again after a month or so of laziness :)

Cheers!

New York Trip!

Yep, so it looks like I'm going to NY for a week, Sept 16-24. I plan to visit some friends, see the sights, but most importantly, try some beers!!
I'm staying right near the Bellevue medical centre, in Manhattan. I plan on visiting the Brooklyn brewery and Sixpoint Ales in Brooklyn, as well as the Heartland Brewery Union Square (just a few blocks away!) and Chelsea Brewing brew pubs. I've emailed all of them, hopefully they are nice enough to want to have me in for a brewing chat & a pint or three. I think I'd like to bring down some samples of beer from my brewery if I can, we'll see. I definately plan on bringing back lots of beer myself (more than the 24 allowed... but I'll pay the excise tax on them no prob).

Theres a few beer pubs I plan on checking out too... The Ginger Man, Gramercy Tavern, and St. Andrew's Pub. They're all somewhat close to where I'm staying and are highly rated on Beeradvocate.

So, that means I'll have brewery/beer reviews to post while I'm there/when I get back. It'll be a beer blog again!

I welcome any New York travel suggestions!
Cheers!

New York?

Well, I was thinking I should cross New York off my list of places to go. In two weeks I have a week off... and I can get a return flight from here in Edmonton for $615 total by flying through Vancouver or something. I have a friend in New York to stay with in Manhattan, which helps. I just need to find a list of awesome breweries to visit!

Ok, I'm all excited now... more to come later.

Cheers
B

Just a Post

Ug, sorry to the like 5 people who check my blog that I haven't been updating lately... I've been busy...lazy...etc. Unfortunately I've been grabbed by the Lost season 2 bug. It started on saturday... my roomate and I watched the first 8 episodes of season 2 straight through. We've averaged 2 a night since then, and as you can imagine at ~42 minutes per episode you don't get a lot of other things done.

Coming up soon here I plan on having a beer tasting night, I'll hopefully record my reviews of each beer and post them here.

As for other beer news-stuff... hm. I've been drinking a lot of coffee these days instead of beer. I really like coffee... like sometimes more than beer. A nice heavy dark roast or a dbl shot of expresso. I guess I just like stuff with flavour. I went a little crazy last week though when I was programming the scripts below... I had to solve a problem so I went to my local coffee house and had an expresso... then 3 more coffees. To say the least, I felt HIGH afterwards. It was crazy.

Maybe I should start a coffee blog... or at least brew an expresso stout :)
Cheers

Importing iTunes stats into Amarok, Part II

So, after all that work to import my iTunes stats to Amarok I found a bug... iTunes was lazy about keeping the casing on filenames synced with the casing in its database (as windows is case insensitive, afterall). Anyway, that caused some trouble but I fixed it with a new script. Both my old script and the new script to fix the casing bug are posted on a page here. Check them out, and enjoy!


Cheers!

Importing iTunes Statistics into amaroK

So I finally have a nice gentoo system up and running. Of course, I love my music, and I also love my statistics on my music. Seems that nobody had actually written a full script for importing iTunes info into amaroK (which is a pretty awesome media player that runs on Linux). So anyway, I found this link on the amarok forums, and decided to expand on it. I haven't done any programming for like 2 years, and I'm a brewer not a programmer really, so if the programming sucks... well too bad, it still worked (for me...)

Here is a link to the script I created: http://www.jobeus.net/~brian/convert_itunes.txt (rename from txt to pl... obviously)

This script will

• Import user ratings from iTunes
  
• Import play counts from iTunes
  
• Create a percentage score for the tracks based on user rating and play count
• Import date added to iTunes
• Import date last played on iTunes

All that is needed is an exported XML file from iTunes.
So yeah, I'm glad I got this working... enjoy... if anybody else even needs it (I imagine it will be used).
Cheers!

Two Quick Notes

One... when you take your contacts out and are as blind as I am, make sure you find your glasses first, as you may otherwise end up looking for them for a long time.
Two... when you go to the store, buy something to snack on like cookies or crackers.
Thats all thats on my mind right now.

Gentoo Install, Day 1

Ya, so maybe this week my blog
won't be as much of a beer blog as a life blog.
But whatever... I don't really blog that much
about beer anymore it seems. Although I am
drinking a Maudite from Unibroue, which is
owned by Sleeman, which was just bought out by
Sapporo of Japan, where John Sleeman sold all
of his shares, rendering Sleeman as a Canadian brewery to be forfit.
Its all corporate, dorks with MBAs run the big breweries just like any
other company, to make money. Don't expect good beer. That costs too much to produce. I hope Unibroue remains unchanged though.


ANYWAY, so I started installing Gentoo Linux on my computer today. I've done this many a time before...
but that was about 2 years ago. A few glitches, but nothing too bad. I figure that I'm already on
'emerge gnome' which should take all night to compile, so thats a good sign.

For those of you not aware, Gentoo is my favorite Linux distro where you compile pretty much everything
from scratch specifically for your computer to be optimized. Speed gain? Yes, in theory.
Its certainly for the more advanced user though, and there were a few times today where I had to rack my brains for the command I needed.
Oh well. I think this is going ok. If I get pissed off tomorrow for whatever reason I can always just go back to my windows install... btw, I'm posting this with the lynx text browser... as gnome isn't installed yet ;)
cheers!

Week Off!

I awoke this morning to find myself in the back seat of my car, still wearing my suit, with the cufflink on my french-cuffed dress shirt digging into my face. Ahhh yes, I was at a wedding last night, and rather than pay > $30 for a cab, and certainly being responsible enough to not drive home, I had curled up into the back seat and passed out. It was now 6:45 am, and people were arriving at the golf course to get their golf day started. I vaguely recall waking up in the middle of the night to turn on my car to get the heater going, as it was rather cold, and hearing a standup routine from Lewis Black on the radio. Its a good thing I didn't fall asleep with my motor running, as I certainly would have run out of gas.

ANYWAY, the wedding was fun, of course... for those of you who were there I'll make sure to send out pictures.

Week Off
For the first time in... well, a long time I have a week off from work. I'm not going anywhere, just staying around Edmonton. But I do have a list of things I want to get done:
-Do the dishes before my roomate kills me
-Remove Windows and Install Gentoo linux on my desktop... more on this later.
-Paint my room
-Finish reading the at least one of the 3 books I have on the go right now
-Clean my place
-Explore the trails of the river valley by bike
-Look into getting a dishwasher installed into my place

We'll see how much I'll actually get done...
Cheers