Tonight, I arrived home to find the first of my Beer of the Month club shipments, which was a gift. I had completely forgotten about it, so it was a pleasant surpise.

I tore open the box, and found inside 3 each of the following:

• Choc Beer Company's Basement Batch Pale Ale
• Matt Brewing Company's Saranac India Pale Ale
• Kulmbacher Brauerei's Pilsner
• Kulmbacher Brauerei's Eisbock

Here's the wonderful thing about getting a shipment of beer in January: it's cold and ready to drink. Except for the Eisbock, which probably needs to be "cool" rather than warm.

After quickly taking inventory and a quick picture, it took me no time to crack open a Basement Batch. Choc Brewery has an interesting history, beginning in 1903 with an Italian immigrant and was wrought with legal issues (and a prison term) clear up until 1980, because brewpubs were illegal.

As far as pale ales go (and I have to say, my experience is limited - I'm a tripel / quad sorta guy), this isn't too bad. Naturally, I'm going to compare to my hometown Boulevard Pale Ale. While this is quite similar, it has a nicer head which is retained longer, leaving nice rings in the glass, and is a bit cloudier. The beer has a nice blend of maltiness and hops - with just enough bitter. It's fairly dry, and the newsletter suggests slight hints of fruit, nuttiness, and peppery spice, but I find you have to really search for it.

I do find that if you aerate it some in your mouth, the bouqet completely changes, and again, the fruit, nuts, and pepper do not come out to me at all. Rather, the beer mellows quite a bit. The finish, however, is the same.

The aroma of the beer is the same as any pale ale is to me. A bit sour, with a grassy / hoppy aroma.

Keep in mind this is my first attempt at any sort of beer review. Bear with me as I improve!

 UPDATE: I just came to discover that Choc is just "down the road" from me in Tulsa. Considering the size of the company, and that they are essentially a part of a restaurant that has taken off on it's own, I will have to keep an eye on them. :)

Oh woot! you know I love you, but please buy some new servers / optimize your code.

Last week, the house on our family farm came down. A few generations of Taylors went through there. The house was about 130ish years old.

It's sad to see it gone, and I'm not going to ramble on about it. Here are some pictures.

 More...

Never thought I'd be saying this, but I had to work on a classic ASP app earlier this week.

The owner of a datacenter I do business with called, and he had a client in desperate need of help getting a SSO app working. He sent me the code, and right away I saw the problem. Lots of application locking, and non-sensical code. To make matters worse, it needed to encrypt a querystring, pass off to a .jsp page on another server, and do some talking back and forth.

But my favorite part was this code comment:

'Initial creation.  For whoever has to support this when
'                           I am gone, I apologize if this is crummy/hacked code. 
'                           This is my first foray into .NET, and the goal was
'                           "get it working".

Classic ASP is .NET now, hmm?

It should come as no surprise this was written by a java developer.

This weekend, my friend Jason and I spent some time at the shooting range, including teaching my wife how to shoot. You should see her handle a .45!

Jason also spends some time hunting wild boar in Oklahoma, and was nice enough to bring some wild boar sausage over to our house. As I pondered what to do with it, it became quite clear that I could only compliment such a noble beast with more pork. A quick scan of the fridge yielded some pork tenderloin and bacon. Perfect.

Step 1. Butterly pork loin.

Step 2. Mix bread stuffing and wild boar sausage.

Step 3. Stuff and roll.

Step 4. Wrap in bacon.

Step 5. On to the Big Green Egg!

Step 6. Beers.

Step 7. Slice into heaven.

The "boarconloin" is on the left in these photos. The smaller loin on the right was stuffed with bread stuffing, cream cheese, and apples. It was also very tasty.