Third Place!

We won Third Place in one of our categories!! Check it out:

The stout and cider didn't place, but this was above and beyond our expectations. We brewed a 10-gallon batch (largest ever!) of Fat Wizard Wheat this weekend in celebration -- one 5-gallon batch with the standard German Wheat yeast (Wyeast 3333), and another 5-gallon batch with an American Wheat (Wyeast 1010) yeast. Yeast has a huge impact on flavor and style in beer -- the biggest, really, in comparison to the malts and hops -- so this change in yeast might make a big difference.

Our next big beer step would either be: a) getting a big fancy steel brewpot (our current one is actually an aluminum, 12-gallon lobster pot we bought in the "Spanish" section of the grocery store... not ideal) or b) a kegging set, which would reduce the amount of time we spend post-fermentation dramatically.

Onward and upward to bigger and better and more experimental batches!

Notes from New York

Don got flowers delivered to my office on my birthday

This is my leg

The East River on a very cold day

Tri-Borough Bridge

My nook

Top 10 2012

Top interesting things of the past year. Most of 2012 was universally awful for me, so these are certainly the highlights...

1. Hiked in one of America's most beautiful landscapes: Yosemite National Park
2. Started on my master's in Linguistics at a great grad school: CUNY Graduate Center
3. Got back into reading sci-fi and playing video games: The Mars trilogy, The Algebraist, Zelda: Skyward Sword, Mario Galaxy, Civilization 4
4. Became an actual, real-person editor: Oxford University Press
5. Attended the first two weddings of my friends and did some major U.S. traveling as a result: Salt Lake City, St. Louis, Finger Lakes, Rochester
6. Saw some baller live music: Crystal Castles, HEALTH, Beach House, Dirty Projectors, Dan Deacon
7. Owned (and subsequently witnessed the death of) a pet hedgehog... RIP Sax Russell
8.  Entered homemade beers into our first competition: Homebrew Alley 7 (results announced today!)
9. Hosted our second annual Penultimate Day of the Year Party (and subsequently established it as a yearly tradition)
10. Did a lot of thinking

It doesn't sound like an awful year, but something about August through December was hellish. I have been more stressed during these months than at any other point in my life, and for the first time have experienced a real, very intense "Am I doing the right things with my life?" moment. Life has been a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be.

The silver lining of what I realize is a very privileged-person struggle to be having ("oh no... my job as an editor at a prestigious publisher isn't what I thought it was going to be") is that I've developed a better sense of what I don't want in life, and have become more skilled at dealing with the non-structured pace of life outside of an educational institution. It's both difficult and exhiliarating to not have to answer to an advisor (though you do have to answer to a landlord); to make decisions and hope that they're OK; to try to enjoy life and not go broke. My only one universal dislike of this whole adult thing is not having enough vacation time.