Advent Beer #21: Perlenzauber IPA by Privatbrauerei H. Egerer

December 21, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Today, I have good news and I have bad news.

The good news is that I was feeling like I was using my Sweetwater pint glasses too frequently, and for my own satisfaction of variety, I wanted to mix things up. I have a bunch of other glasses in another cabinet, so I went to swap out some of the Sweetwater pints that I’ve felt were being repeated too much. In doing so, I unearthed the absolute best, most appropriate glass that I should have been using throughout this entire journey, but simply neglected to remember that I had it.

This baby das boot easily holds 16 ounces, which makes it perfect in the sense that I can pour each day’s entire can into it without having to reload later on. Plus it has that whole German tradition of drinking out of a boot thing going on, which is why this would’ve been perfect had I been using it from the start, but I just forgot about it. At least for the final four days, I can make sure to be drinking my German biers from my German boot.

The bad news is that on the day in which I can start using my boot, the beer of the day is an IPA. After twenty days, I was beginning to wonder if Deutschland even did IPAs since I hadn’t encountered any after this long, and I was quite satisfied with that assessment too. Unfortunately, like a turd in the pool, an IPA decided to float to the surface, on day #21.

In addition, it’s also another encore from a particular brewer, since beer #9 was also from the same company, as indicative of the can design featuring an image of a woman presumably drowning outside of a porthole because I can’t think of any other scenario where another human being would be visible outside of a porthole, unless they were scuba diving or drowning, and the woman isn’t wearing any scuba gear nor does she have a fin which would make her an underwater breathing mermaid.

But yeah, it’s an IPA, and I winced like OJ Simpson in court when I discovered this. Regardless, I made it this far drinking every drop of every beer, and there’s no point in throwing in the towel now, even if there was a shitty IPA in my path. I poured it into my boot, disappointed that this would be the first thing to use my boot on, but hoping that the Germans do an IPA better than all the shitty ‘Murican hipsters who release a litany of shitty signature IPAs.

To the credit of Perlenzauber, or whatever the brewery is called, as far as IPAs go, this wasn’t turrible. It actually had a fairly decent initial flavor, that staved off the vast majority of the bitter piss flavor at the end of most other IPAs, and I actually found it to be remotely drinkable as far as IPAs were concerned. That is, as long as the beer were at its coldest. As the time clicked away as mythical wife and I were catching up on The Mandalorian, as the beer got warmer, the more it turned back into IPA piss water, and by the time I got to the bottom of the boot, and the bubble had popped, I was struggling to finish it, and just kind of bottoms upped it, just to finish the job.

In spite of the not-quite negative first impressions, it’s still an IPA at the end of the day, and I simply don’t favor them. The fact that it’s not dead last is a credit to the initial flavor notes that I did like, and makes me really try and remember just how bad the three underneath it really were to have been denigrated as worse than an IPA.

The funniest thing to me is that in spite of the fact that I didn’t hate this completely, the snobs at BeerAdvocate apparently have hated the shit out of this beer, in as equally new to them taste tests. Clearly, my rubric for beer preferences are way off of the masses on the internet, but whatever.

Hopefully, tomorrow is back to another lager, or better yet another dunkel to pour into my boot, because today really was kind of a mulligan, and I’m hoping that the final three beers will be some good ones to close out this magical boozy journey with.

Current Rankings:

Jubilation Suds (#18)
Bären Weisse (#16)
First Coral (#2)
Kirta (#5)
Turbo Prop (#6)
Schwarze Tinte (#13)
Perlenzauber (#9)
Loncium Vienna Style Lager (#12)
Märzenbier (#20)
Jubiläumsbier 333 (#7)
Zwönitzer Steinbier (#4)
Alpen Stoff (#17)
Erl Hell (#19)
Grandl (#11)
Altbairisch Hell (#15)
Hell (#1)
Tannen Hell (#8)
Perlenzauber IPA (#21)
Tradition (#10)
Hallertauer Hopfen-Cuvee (#14)
Käuzle (#3)

New Father Brogging, #030

December 21, 2020January 25, 2021 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Take whatever I’ve said was the worst thing about new parenting, and throw it out the window. Because the 9-month sleep regression has been the worst thing to have ever happened. Seriously, I’m pretty sure I just had the worst night as a new parent last night, as my daughter woke up at 8:30 pm, 9:40 pm, 12:30 am, and then at 2:20 am, not going back down until around 3:30 am. Needless to say, my longest stretch of contiguous sleep was three hours, as my alarm went off at 6:30, in preparation for the workday.

Seriously though, this takes the case for the worst experience in new parenthood so far, because it’s not like sleep regressions of prior periods where her awake windows just changed, but she would ultimately still actually go to sleep; no, this particular sleep regression is where she sleeps at her usual times, and sleeps for a little bit, it’s just that she wakes up in the middle of the night, wide awake as a Karen on speed, and will not go back to sleep, and repeatedly stands up against the railing and screams, no matter how many times I reset her on her back and try to soothe her to sleep.

When she was still a newborn, waking up in the middle of the night was expected and mostly on our terms, as we set alarms to go off in order to wake and keep her on her feeding schedule, but right now, we have no idea whether or not a night is going to be zero wake ups, one, two, three or even four times waking up, wailing and needing some intervention. I can go into her room, calm her down and set her back on her side or back, but often times I’m one foot out the door before she goes ballistic, and I’m left feeling so shot, so beaten and just so frustrated with everything that I have a hard time thinking straight, most of the time in which I’m pretty sure I’m not.

Without question, this has been the worst part of new parenting yet. I know that title is only as secure as the next worst thing about new parenting to come around, but this one feels especially nasty, and it’s put me in this exhausted state of being where I don’t look forward to the evenings anymore, when I might get an hour or three of some time to myself to do me shit, but lately all that’s been encroached upon by an ornery and crying baby most of the time.

And nothing I do, or mythical wife does, is seeming to work during this regression. No amount of soothing, keeping company or even picking up and rocking gets her to sleep or stay asleep, and it’s only a matter of time before she’s screaming bloody murder and I’m left feeling like a failure clown of a parent who can’t even keep his kid under control. I’ve never lost my cool or felt so defeated and frustrated as I’d ever felt during the last nine months, and I know I’m far from the only parent to have ever endured this, but I can say without any hesitation nothing so far has been as demoralizing as the nine-month sleep regression.

Although seldom do I want time to speed up while I’m with my daughter, I sure as heck wouldn’t mind if I could just skip ahead to when this regression period is over, and I can actually get some slightly below-average but at least still six hours of sleep, just once. I’d take explosive diapers and getting clawed by baby nails repeatedly, over this particular sleep regression, any day of the week, because at least I can still have some predictable down time to decompress and get some actual rest from time to time and not feel like a zombie as a result.

Frankly, I feel like this is a fraction of the words I had swirling in my head between the hours of 2 and 3 am last night of an unhinged and exhausted new parent, and I don’t feel like this is really conveying the frustration and rage I was feeling, not at my daughter, but at the horrors of the situation that is the nine-month sleep regression. Obviously I know that I’m not the only parent to ever endure this, but damn does it suck, and at least I can provide a more accurate and honest reaction to the concept, versus all the clinically sociological explanations of it found all over the internet that make it sound like a minor inconvenience that just needs to be patient through a little while over.

Seriously, this has been the worst part of new parenting, hands down. The genocidal thoughts that were going through my head throughout the evening that wouldn’t end aren’t even close to being expounded upon by my exhausted words of frustration captured here in my brog.

They just want to axe the mailman some questions

December 21, 2020December 23, 2020 ~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t have a lot to say about this as much as I just wanted to relay this story about how there was some mailman out in Kentucky who came across some dogs, one of which was holding an axe, and how metal it must’ve been to have seen a dog carrying around, a fucking axe.

I love how the dog is just looking at the, presumably the mailman who snapped this picture, because nothing would inspire intimidation than a dog that looks like a German Shepard which are already intimidating breeds, but also carrying an axe.

It’s almost like a Final Fantasy random encounter where the devs take ordinary creatures like bears or bulls, but then arbitrarily slap on armor or weapons as if creatures like those weren’t already powerhouses to begin with. A German Shepard with an axe is like giving a weapon to a champion martial artist.

Anyway, the picture says everything, and is entertaining all the same. I should train my big dog to carry around a hatchet or a katana around as her favorite toy, so she can wander around outside with a weapon and potentially scare off would-be property casers.