Present number one:
About a week prior Pat was looking around on the Rogue website and noticed that they were to be releasing a very special brew in honor of Rogue Brewmaster John Maier's 15,000th brew. There were only 1,515 bottles that went in to production, and each was to be signed by the Brewmaster and sent off with a certificate of authenticity. Obviously being a huge collector, Pat had to get his hands on as many as he could. We spent the beginning of last week online for about an hour at the time of release trying to get our hands on one (or two, since it was limit two per customer). We each ended up with two, and now have four, one of which has since been opened. Delicious by the way. Fortunate for Pat the two he ordered arrived on his birthday! So that was present number one.
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| [[ special rogue bottle. ]] |
Present number two, my gift:
About a month ago, Pat was in Phoenix Arizona training for work, and I took advantage of that time alone to purchase his birthday present. I had thought of it randomly a few weeks earlier and was super excited to get him something amazing since he got me a longboard last year for mine. After work one day I went in to The Brew Station, which is a local brewing supply store and walked out with everything he needed to start home brewing on his own!! Unfortunately the amount of items and sizes of everything was somewhat problematic and I had a really hard time trying to figure out where to hide it all! I finally came up with the idea of the guest bathroom shower, which we never use ourselves. I put all of the items in there, layered some towels on top, wrote a threatening "no peeking" note, closed the curtain, crossed my fingers, and called it good. I was on pins and needles the entire time leading up to his birthday that he would find my not so little surprise. BUT lucky for me, I actually pulled it off.
Thursday (8/16) when I got home from work I couldn't wait anymore and made him wear a birthday hat, wrote him a little scavenger hunt like note as to where he could find his gift, and presented him with the only portion I decided to actually wrap, which was a the book included with the kit called "How To Brew". To my surprise (and delight *evil laugh*) the clues totally stumped him and it took him forever to figure it all out! YES! Eventually he solved my riddle and was super excited when he discovered what he was looking at! Yay! I did good this year. Real good.
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| [[ pat and his presents! ]] |
Later that night we went to Les Caves, which is a "fancy" beer bar (more or less) in town. Since Pat is passionate about all things beer, this one was a no brainer. We had some friends come meet us, and then ended up back at our house for the rest of the night celebrating with one of our special Rogue bottles.
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| [[ les caves. ]] |
THEN
Friday after work we headed to Brasada to spend the weekend, and went to the Bend Brew Festival on Saturday, which was a ton of fun. I prefer Bend's version over Portland because it is WAY less crowded, cleaner, they don't run out of beer or toilet paper in the portopoties, AND the venue is awesome. We tried so much stuff, I don't even remember. One brewery I am really interested right now is Gilgamesh which is based out of Salem, although that could be partially because our buddy Tony has been working with them a bit. I wish I would have taken more pictures!!! BLAST! I was too scared to bring my Nikon based on how Portland's Brew Fest is, but as it turnes out it would have been totally fine... next year.
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| [[ bend brew fest '12. ]] |
It was a very happy brew filled birthday to Pat.
