First Day of Spring?

I was supposed to go to a party tonight. It was hosted by some beer judges I met last month, and it was supposed to be a spring beer tasting, with an emphasis on seasonals.



I was so looking forward to it: whenever I get invited to parties, it always seems like the party is being held when I've got the girls (I have them three weekends a month, and since most people host parties on the weekend, the invitations I end up accepting are for kid-friendly parties that never seem to be beer tastings).





I had my own contributions to bring along, too. A bottle of Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale and a bottle of the Saison with Brettanomyces, both marvelous additions to the Boulevard Smokestack Series.



Steven Pauwels, he's as humble a guy as you'll ever meet, but he is a genius. A genius with a crew of very talented brewers and a pilot brewery that until recently made all of Boulevard's beers. Boulevard Wheat may pay the bills, but the Smokestack beers are art.




Even in my delusional days of thinking I'd turn pro and open a brewery, I never imagined a micro that could get away with making three different Saison type beers. They're expensive and not popular, not even popular compared to Pale Ale, Stout and other staples of the craft brewing movement.



Anyway, it's the first day of spring, and I load my precious champagne bottles of beer into the car and start to head that way. 'That way' being near my work, around a 30 mile trip each way. There's ankle-deep snow in my driveway and it's still coming down.



But I asked Facebook if the roads were good and everybody seemed to think they were fine so I sallied forth.

I got on the highway at the southern Gardner Exit. By the time I got to the northern one, I had chickened out. The roads were as bad as they get, and as I exited the interstate to come home I noticed that there were emergency vehicles attending to a car that had turned turtle down on I-35 and another set of rollers up on the bridge above it. I had to take a detour on the way home because the viaduct was blocked by yet another wreck.



My plans earlier in the day had been to host a little party, a pizza party. The guest (who lives in Canada and was here on vacation) had begged off because of the roads, go figure. I guess Canadians backing out of driving is the first clue that, no matter what your Facebook friends think, the roads aren't navigable.

Pizza and beer, not a bad consolation prize. I made a baby portobello & anchovy with mozzarella and one with onions caramelized with fresh rosemary and dried fenugreek, baby portobello, and bacon with Feta and mozzarella.

And I opened Tank 7, a fruity, phenolic, fairly aggressively hopped Biere de Garde. Well, they call it a 'farmhouse ale,' which is a fairly broad category that encompasses Saison and Biere de Garde, but at 8% alcohol and this well hopped, it would score in the high 40s (out of 50) if entered as 16D. Or it might do well as 16C even though it's too big. Sometimes being too big for style gets by judges, especially in a long flight, when palates are jaded.



Anyway, Tank 7 is a great accompaniment to pizza. And both make about as good an accompaniment to a blizzard on the first day of Spring as I guess you could get.