Thanks for the beers!

Thanksgiving is, without a doubt, my favorite holiday of the year. Good company, good food, plenty to be thankful for. This year I was thrilled to join some of my fellow Rutgers Graduate Geographers for a dinner on Tuesday evening in addition to my family's awesome celebration on Thursday.

On Tuesday, I had the sheer joy of eating stuffing for the first time in about seven years. I've been a vegetarian since then, and most stuffing is made using various meat stocks, etc. A fellow veggie did some label reading and discovered that Stovetop's pork stuffing mix is made without any sort of meat product! So making it without adding any sort of meat product means it's veggie friendly, and basically the highlight of my Tuesday. Also an integral part of the lovely evening hosted by Jennifer and Jeff: the beverages. Grad students need to relax sometimes. Jeff kindly shared with me a Lord Chesterfield (from Yuengling), which is basically like Yuengling lager plus hops. Definitely not the most impressive pale ale around, but definitely straightforward, enjoyable and generally awesome for its price.

On Thursday I traveled through the sleet and rain (sounds dramatic but really wasn't) to my uncle's house in northern NJ, where 25 people were gathered for a wonderful afternoon and evening. Aside from Thanksgiving, we were also celebrating my cousin Sean's recent engagement (congratulations!) with some bubbly, but there was also plenty of beer. I didn't actually have much (despite my uncle's knowledge of my efforts to constantly try new beers-- he's been saving some random ones for me in the past few weeks... I guess I'll have to visit him again soon since I didn't delve into those), but did try Brooklyn Brewery's Winter Ale. I thought it was pretty good, definitely a warm flavor, not too sweet or strong in any way. Got some hint of spice, somewhat akin to Sam Adam's Winter Lager but less sweet. It was nice.

I had Magic Hat's Circus Boy with dinner though. Old favorite. Very good. Love my hefeweizens.

Paul and I might be meeting up later because we're both in the same county right now. Perhaps we'll find a new beer to celebrate the imminent one year anniversary of this blog? But in the meantime:

Colleen: 331
Paul: 306 (though I know he has a partially written post saved... so that number does not reflect reality)