April Showers Bring May Goat Races

Rain, rain go away, I can't swim the breaststroke another day. Or any other stroke for that matter. Friday brought some biblical style rain down in my travels and by the time the Incubus crowd was a gathering that night at the Fox, I was still at home getting dried out. But then the rain took a break and instead of the Fox, we drove over the rising river and into the woods to Tom's place for a bite to eat and a couple of brews. It was a Blue Point Brewery promo with a cask of Hoptical Illusion. I am not a huge fun of any of their beers per say, but I always like their stuff when it is cask condition. So I wasn't disappointed with this. The Illusion is a beer I could drink several of on a handpump, and a couple out of a firkin. On tap, nada, zilch. Seems a lot of other people feel the same way. It wasn't much longer before the royal couple of Douglasville stopped in for their nightly drinking binge. After some very important shooting of the shit, which included the happy couple saying they probably wouldn't show up on Saturday afternoon at TJ's, we went our merry ways.



Saturday afternoon brought Mr. Steve and myself to the main line empire of TJ's. The bar area was surprising quiet for 3:30, except for Jack Curtin's bff, Woody Chandler. What can one say about the man who eventually sat at the bar and signed all the Ale Street News copies on his by-line. I think I just said it all. We started off with the Bear Republic Racer 5 on the Handpump which was quite nice. We weren't even half done when guess who shows up? Those crazy kids from Douglasville. You just can't keep us suburban hicks down for long. That led us to our next choice, an Allagash Interlude. Can we just come out and say it now? Allagash is one of the top ten breweries in the USA. Nuff said. By now the bar area was starting to fill up with some mighty fine folks, like West Chester's very own, the Hollands. We then enjoyed a small snack and I had a Hoppin Frog Mean Manalishi, which was actually pretty mean. It tasted like it had around 12% instead of the 8% it had.

So, Mr. Steve and I paid our bill and said our goodbyes and jumped into the Rubeomobile and headed back to the cozy confines of suburbia to get ready for our Portland/Seattle planning meeting. Another fine day in the books if I have to say so myself.