Oh boy. This is “bad”.

(Note the “scare quotes” around “bad” up there…)I woke up kind of late this morning, which is probably just as well as I think I really needed the sleep before I load up the car with stuff from the old house and make the ~1600 mile (about 2575km or 83.45 picoparsecs) return journey. As a bribe to myself for making this trip, there are two places I had been considering stopping for a bit on the way back. One of those two is New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado. In order to do this, though, I obviously need to arrange to be going through Fort Collins (around 8-9 hours from here) while they’re open. The thing is, there’s really not much point in stopping from my perspective unless they happen to have what I’m really interested in – their not-always-available limited-release “La Folie” (link from the image goes to the page describing it) and possibly their seasonal “Frambozen“. Last time I went by it appeared they always had some La Folie on tap at the tasting counter but not in bottles for take-out.

It turns out New Belgium is open on Saturday until 6pm. And they have both La Folie and Frambozen in bottles there right now.

The other possible stop is Lava Hot Springs, Idaho, where I find it very enjoyable to lounge in the hot springs amid all the snow. However, they open at 9am, so even if I get up really early to make it to Fort Collins before New Belgium closes, I can’t spend any time in the hot springs until 9am anyway, so I’d never make it from the Hot Springs to Fort Collins on the same day. I could, of course, lounge at the hot spring today and then hit Fort Collins tomorrow morning, stopping somewhere between Central Wyoming and Fort Collins tonight, but that could mean the return journey spanning three days rather than two.

However, the weather on this side of Idaho and Wyoming looks most passable today especially later in the afternoon when the roads have been cleared off well, and it looks like getting across the bad wind and snow on the Eastern side of the Wyoming may be safer and better tomorrow morning rather than today.

So, basically, the entire Universe (or at least that portion of it in charge of weather for this region of the country) is obviously telling me that I should take my time loading up and getting out of town, and then go ahead and stop at Lava Hot Springs for a little while to relax before continuing on to somewhere around Rawlins or so, and then resume in the morning which should just coincidentally put me going through Fort Collins in the Late-Morning to Early Afternoon time frame, when New Belgium Brewing is open.

I mean, I don’t want to stop and enjoy myself. Really, I want to be a good boy and drive back in the quickest, most efficient way possible, but who am I to thwart what is the Obvious Will of the Universe? (Supernaturalism makes some of the best excuses…)

In other news, I did manage to fix the Stupid Mistake™ in my little “Where Was I?” application for Asterisk, so now not only do the location updates happen but also the conversion of the associated voice update to MP3 for listening now happens automagically as well. I also fixed the hard time-limit, so updates shouldn’t cut off at 30 seconds like the one from Fort Collins did on the 24th. If you keep an eye on the page and everything goes well for me, you may catch an update from Lava Hot Springs later in the day. If you are especially bored (or are being paid by a Secret Government Agency or Vast International Conspiracy or Santa Claus to spy on me) I will try to do an update from there while sitting on the steps in view of the East Webcam. If so, I’ll be the tiny figure waving at the camera from the steps. If you happen to be watching at the right time, you might catch me there to gaze upon my magnificent pixellated spiffitude. Just don’t look directly at it or you may go blind…

Naturally, a live update from New Belgium Brewing Company is planned for tomorrow as well. After I return I can work on making my little application more interesting (embedded audio player, nicer presentation, maybe an embedded map, ability to come back later and attach related pictures…) and masssaged into a condition that wouldn’t be too embarassing to let others use. This “live neogeographical netcasting” thing is too much fun to keep just to myself. (I wonder how hard it would be to interface this with the Laconica microblogging system?…)

Further bulletins as events warrant…

Where Was I?: “I’m going to have a place like this someday…”

Brewery building for the New Belgium Brewing Company in Fort Collins, CO

Quality Assurance lab at New Belgium Brewing Company, as seen through the 'employees only' door.Incidentally, did you know it’s a long way from southeastern Idaho to southeastern Texas? I made the drive last week, and I’ll be making the drive back as soon as I can get some things FINALLY done around here. On the upside, it’s kind of a fun, if long, drive other than Wyoming’s tendency towards having ridiculously high winds and roads paved with what appears to be a mixture of wet ice and motor oil. I made it down here though, but I’ve already been delayed about a week due to some issues getting inspection arranged on the home we’re trying to buy out here. But you didn’t come here to read me whining about that, did you?

On the way down, I did manage to stop at one of the two Colorado breweries mentioned in the “Wildbrews” book. New Belgium Brewing Company just happened to be only a couple of blocks away from my route through Fort Collins, so I took the opportunity to stop by and check them out.

If you’re familiar with them at all, it’s probably for their “Fat Tire” amber ale which I have seen in stores around the country, but I didn’t care about that. What I cared about is that they actually let their microbiologist (and, it turns out, their other employees too) play, and they have experimental “sour” beers in the same general style as Belgian lambics. Pictured at left is their famous one – “La Folie” (“the folly”). Well, the label on the tap for it, anyway. I’m not certain if cultures other than the standard canned strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae are used in the initial ferment, but they then move the brew over to barrels that were previously used to age wine, and which no doubt contain a variety of traces of live lactic acid bacteria, other yeasts, and the like (their website also suggests they directly inoculate the beer with lactic acid bacteria as well). The brew sits in the barrel for up to 3 years. The result is nicely carbonated, and tastes almost sweet to me due to the pleasant tartness of the lactic acid. This particular brew is mentioned in the book. Seeing my obvious enthusiasm for the style, I was also allowed to taste a more recent concoction. “Eric’s Ale” was a lighter sour brew made with peaches which I absolutely loved. I really wish they’d had it in bottles for me to buy, but neither it nor “La Folie” were available in portable form, as far as I could tell. Guess I’ll just have to make my own. Once I finally manage to sit in one place long enough to try, dangit.

It was the Belgian Lambic-style ales that convinced me that I really do like beer after all, so long as it isn’t mass-market commercial swill (“Bladderwash”, as Leon Kania, author of “The Alaskan Bootlegger’s Bible” calls it) nor too strongly hops-flavored.

I did taste their “1554” ale – a “black ale” style that they were able to date back to at least 1554 while doing research on the style in Belgium, and several others whose names I don’t recall at the moment. One brew whose name I don’t remember was spiced with Yerba Mate – a caffeine-containing South American herb also found in Celestial Seasoning’s “Morning Thunder tea. (Ethanol is nice and all, but methylxanthines are my favorite…).

And, no, I didn’t forget their names because of drunkenness. When I say “taste” I mean I had a sip or two of each variety I sampled. They had these nifty little glasses like miniature brandy snifters for tasting. I’ll need to get me a set of those one of these days.

An unrelated bit of spiffiness about the brewery is that they seem to run the place as “green” as possible. They even go so far as to subject their brewing wastes to bacterial fermentation to produce methane, which they use to heat their water. How cool is that?

On a final, still unrelated note: there’s evidently been a fad of people selling things on eBay that have shiny surfaces, such as metal teapots. The trick is to take the picture of the item while naked, and standing such that one’s reflection is just visible in the picture of the item that appears on eBay. You know those classical shiny aluminum “Airstream” camping trailers? They had one out in the parking lot.

Photograph of New Belgium Brewing Company's 'Airstream' trailer.

Wait…I don’t see myself in that at all. Dagnabbit, standing in that freezing cold wind with everyone staring at me was a waste of time, wasn’t it…

The other “wild brew” place in Colorado is the Bristol Brewing Company in Colorado Springs. Unfortunately, the only indication I can find of their “wild” brews is a “sour beers” class they did as part of their recent “beer college” series, and a “Skull ‘n Bones” (evidently what they were calling their sour-beer series) T-shirt. As there is also no mention of brewery tours, I did send an email off to the person who appeared to be the contact for such questions, but I’ve yet to hear back. I’d love to stop by on the trip back, but the route will add a couple of hours to the overall trip. This would be well worth it if they’re doing tours, or still doing “sour” beers, or if I could even spend a few minutes chatting with their microbiologist. If not, though, I’ll just have to get on with working on it all myself.

Oh, yes, and the place in Austin that I previously mentioned was called “The Bitter End”…and it ended. Apparently a fire destroyed part of it, and now its being demolished to make way for a massive chain-hotel building. How sad.

The tasting counter and beer cooler inside the New Belgium brewery.