The Tasting

"People keep looking over here - I think it's cool."

Thus spoke a very tipsy Joe to his DD wife at last night's Golden Rail beer tasting.

The Golden Rail is a great little beer bar that I wish were within walking distance of the house, rather than 25 minutes by car. It has a fantabulous selection of NY brews and nationally recognized craft beers, as well as normal bar items. Just about every month, Brian (proprietor and generally great guy) opens up the bar for a tasting. Unfortunately, they're on Thursdays, so let's just say it makes the Fridays tough. We've been to the porter/stout tasting, seasonal brews, Belgian...and last night was Oktoberfest. The beers we sampled:

Otter Creek Octoberfest (ale)
Harpoon ("")
Hofbrau Munchen
Beck's
Stoudt's Fest
Hacker-Pschorr
The Kaiser - draught
Ayinger - draught
Brooklyn - draught
Erdinger Weisse-Fest

All in all, very tasty. I didn't take notes, because I was knitting Joe's 2nd Sock! I figured I needed to get that up and running - we have a lot of events this weekend that would go well with sock knitting. And the *whole* evening, as I sampled beer and worked on the sock, I kept getting weird looks. Not like I was bad or rude (normally I don't like knitting in a forum where someone is giving a lecture to a small group, but HELLO - this was a bar. With drunk people. Who babbled during the talk. Knitting was the least offensive thing I could have done). They kept looking at me like I'd stepped out of another dimension. What is this thing you are doing and what does it mean? Again, I'm in a very blue-collar area of NY at a very blue-collar bar. So there you go.

But what was so funny is that my VERY tipsy husband kind of took it like a badge of honor. "Honey - you're so cool - you're knitting in a bar. And you look hot!" I do so love my husband.