Not the Hat You Were Looking For

Life is too short to drink delicious homebrew labeled crudely with only a Sharpie. It also looks a bit more classy if we give a bottle to a friend.  This beer is not new, but has entered the window where it is fully carbonated and drinkable and was, embarrassingly, one of three batches on the shelf without proper labels.  It's a clone of Magic Hat #9. So if someone asks us if it is Magic Hat, we can answer, "Nein."

It's supposed to be a rabbit puckering a bit (as the beer is an apricot sour) but my daughter thinks it looks like a skull, with the necklace as teeth. I need to brush up on my rabbit drawing skills.  Done in ink and gouache. All of our beer labels have a character wearing an eyepatch, a long-running inside joke from our first batch.

And on the bottles it looks nice and cheery.

Cheers!

Private Label

This is a bit of an inside joke, and a bad one at that, but I thought the little ratty came out cute so I am sharing him.  We enjoy drinking different beers and have recently started brewing our own.  We like the Belgian Piraat Ale (see the bottom picture), and just bottled our own version from a clone recipe.  My husband and BIL enjoy mispronouncing things and continued to call this the Pee-rat beer.  It's still two months before we can drink it, but as it was time to label these bottles, the mental connection stuck...

Nice Jug

I was getting my growler filled today at the Ice Harbor brewery, since I had to visit their homebrew store anyway.  Some kid (probably just 21) in the parking lot gives me the thumbs up and yells "Nice Jug!"

Good think I wasn't filling two of them, or he might have said, "Nice Jugs!" In which case I would have had to slap him.

He was totally correct- It is a nice jug.

Carved Bottle and Layout

I've been thinking about graphics for the bottle labels for our homebrew.  We drank the first batch without fear of mix-up, but ideally we'd like to make little stickers or something to identify what's inside as we continue to brew.  This is a little bottle stamp I worked on last night.  I"m teaching a kid's class on stamp making this summer at the local art gallery, so it felt good to dust off the tools.  I need to figure out a cheap way to secure or make 18 cutters - the class pack I'd planned on ordering has disappeared from the web store since I submitted my budget request.

I've also been working on the layout of a new bigger Celtic piece. I've got this round border penciled in. I think I will ink it before I go too much further, as all this pencil is very smudgy. I'm not too sure I like the two giant petals at the top and bottom, but small ones were in the way of the triangles I'd laid out in the background. Round borders are fun but much more tedious, since you have to draft the grid before you can draft the knot.  Oh well. I'm sure you'll see more of this later.

What I did on my summer vacation

 We went to Oregon! Land of Banana Slugs and good beer.  We tried many good brews from the numerous breweries we visited to the interesting imports we found at a Bosnian restaurant in Astoria.

 We took in the Bite of Portland Festival and tried one of the famous Voodoo Donuts. $0.75 worth of donut and $2 worth of cleverness and hype (our Zombie was a man-shaped jelly donut impaled by a pretzel.)  Again, much good beer and music to partake there.  Oh yeah, and you can't drive through Tillamook without stopping at the cheese factory.

 Did some kayaking with my son after leaving the girl with my Mum in Newport. We also did some geocaching along the coast and in Portland, where we hooked up with my friend Tasha.

 One of the few low points of the trip was to visit a "castle" that the Thomas Guide was kind enough to highlight.  We RedOTFL to see it doubled as a Senior Center.  And it wasn't very castle-like, in fact it was just a house. But it wasn't just any house, it was the "Flippin" House. Next door was a (less historic) friggin' house.

For those times we couldn't make up our minds we ordered one of everything - sampler style.