My Fifteenth Entry - Great Divide Brewing Co.'s Yeti Imperial Stout

I'm baaaack.

Not sure if there's anyone left in the room after my five month break, but sometimes the muse is there ... and then sometimes it goes on vacation for awhile.  If you're there, thanks for sticking with me.  If you're not, well, you're not.

Lots of stuff happened while I was gone.  As Mickey the Escaped Convict says to Pee-wee Herman towards the end of Pee-wee's Big Adventure, my summer was "action-packed!"

Let's review, shall we?

*    My daughter graduated from high school in Reliant Stadium with about six hundred other kids.  She and her boyfriend (who she's still dating long-distance) were radiant and I couldn't have been prouder.  You want a picture?  Nope - no family pictures on this blog. Hope you're not offended, but over the summer, I got religion again on family privacy. Speaking twice on social media will do that to a man, which may be why I walked away from the blog for awhile.  You can't be too careful.

In August, we moved her into college.  It was pretty cool - we schlepped a room full of stuff into an old-fashioned jail cell dorm room and dressed it up.  Before long, it was actually kind of livable, with rugs on the concrete floor, framed art on the walls, and a tension-rod curtain over her open closet.

When we were done, she couldn't have wanted us out of there more quickly.  And weirdly, my wife was ready to go too.  I kept waiting for the Hallmark moment - tears, hugs, the culmination of 18 years of child-rearing - but everyone was so tired, and so on edge from the various and sundry small irritations that come with this kind of move that we were ready to go.  And so we went.  And about 24 hours later, my wife started crying. I didn't cry for about another day after that.  My son . . . I don't know when he cried - he hasn't told me yet.  (Update: My son read this and assured me that he has not cried.  Yet.)

She's doing great at Anonymous U.  She joined a sorority, has made many new friends, and allegedly made good grades on her first round of tests.  The weird part about it for me is that she's there and we're here and it's alright.  We love her, we miss her, and we find we're doing a lot more mom-and-dad dinners and shows and stuff now that she's gone.  (If you're reading this, honey, skip the last part of that sentence. Daddy didn't mean it - it's just blog humor.)

*    I spoke at the Texas District and County Attorneys Association (TDCAA) Civil Law Seminar in May on the ethics of social media (killed), the State Bar of Texas's Suing and Defending Governmental Entities Government Law Boot Camp in July on open government (killed), the TDCAA Annual Meeting in September on ethics of social media (killed again), and the DA's Office later in September on HIPAA (tough room).  If you haven't gathered it from this, I kind of teach a lot - it must be some kind of pathological need to impress and be approved, or just a need to take a day off from work and hang out with smart people at legal conferences in nice hotels.  They keep asking, so I keep doing it.

The Boot Camp gig was kind of funny because I was scheduled to speak in Austin at 9:00 a.m., but I didn't want to miss my regular Tuesday night poker game.  So . . . I played until about 11:30, got in my car, and drove to Austin.  Arrived at the Sheridan in downtown Austin at about 2:30 and checked in. (BTW: I highly recommend checking into a hotel in the middle of night, at least once in your life: the desk clerk and the bellman were what you would expect at 2:30 a.m. - a little dodgy and a little punchy from sleep deprivation (or maybe that was me).)  The clerk told me that my room might be empty, or it might be occupied.  "I can't tell - the computer's sending me mixed signals," he said.

So he sent me up to the room at 2:45 a.m. with the bellguy, who knocked on the door and then let himself into the room while I waited in the hall.

You know what Darrell Royal once said about the forward pass?  "There are three things that could happen, two of which are bad."  The same could be said about walking into a hotel room at 2:45 in the morning, except the ratio is probably closer to nine things that could happen, eight of which are bad, seven of which involve angry, semi-clad hotel room occupants.

End result?  I lucked into the one good thing - the room turned out to be empty - so I got about five hours sleep and then spoke for one hour at 9:00 a.m. (and killed, as noted above).

Nice surprise: I won TDCAA's Civil Practitioner of the Year this year at the Civil Law Seminar. Nice plaque, really nice comments from people I hugely respect.  Thanks, TDCAA!

Fortunately, I only have one speaking gig left this year - open government at the TDCAA Elected Prosecutors' Conference in December.  It's a good gig because its a chance to impress my boss, who attends the conference.  As long as I kill - which I almost always do.


*    We travelled a lot this summer.  Went to Carmel twice - once to drop my son off at a golf camp there, and once to pick him up and vacation in Big Sur.  We whale-watched, drove around Monterey Bay, and enjoyed the best view on Earth.  This is not hyperbole - from the Hyatt Highlands in Carmel, where we stayed, here's the view.

(And this doesn't even capture thirty percent of the panoramic view of the Pacific Coast you get in person.  The blues, the rocks, the whitecaps, the endless horizon.  To give you a sense of what this view was worth, there was a property for sale across the street from the hotel about 150 feet below the view you see here.  1250 square feet - 2.5 million dollars. And if I could afford it, I'd be there right now.  That's how awesome that view was.)

We did not play Pebble Beach (my game is not worth $500 per round), but we lunched at the restaurant on the 18th green. After lunch, my son and I went down to the green to take a picture.

Nice, right?  It gets better.  While we're there, this guy asks my son to take a picture of him and his girlfriend.  Notice the fence in the foreground: that's the dividing line between the $500 a round golfers and the rest of us.  Strictly enforced - like, we'll kick you off the course, and out of town if you jump that ankle-high fence.  (I know this because they made me take my Pebble Beach souvenir hat off while dining inside the clubhouse.  It's that kind of place.)

As Josh sets up, the guy jumps the fence, dragging his girlfriend with him.  She's mortified, and the bystanders nearby are scandalized.  He then drops to a knee and asks her to marry him.  I look at Josh and he starts taking pictures.  I don't know if the pictures turned out - she said yes, the guy thanked Josh, and they disappeared into the nearby hotel - but it was pretty remarkable.

Me and a friend in Monterey.

The other thing that was really great: in Carmel in July, the high temperature was in the 70s.  Kind of the perfect place.  Of the various places I've been, it was the hardest to leave.

My first selfie, with some kid on the Monterey Peninsula. 

*   We also spent some time in Galveston with my family - it was a wonderful time, very relaxing - and Lisa and I went to New York for a quick weekend to see some shows on American Airlines' dime (they lost my luggage last year during my visit to Tokyo to see my brother and his family, and they gave me a travel voucher to compensate me - nice if you can get it).

But the second-best trip I took was to Las Vegas with some of my poker buddies to watch one of our crew play in a World Series of Poker event (and play some events ourselves). We stayed at the Rio - my buddies Bert, Wojo, Rick, and Bill - and I played cards from Wednesday through Saturday.  Did not cash in any of the tournaments - my best finish was 81st out of 796 in a deep-stack tournament - but I learned a great deal and came back to Houston a better player.  Since coming back, I've won two of my Tuesday tournaments and finished close to the money in several others.

I'm all in.

Plus, I got my Heisenberg on.  The cool thing about playing cards in Vegas is that you can be whoever you want to be. Here, I was trying on the Vegas lizard look.  It didn't work, but it was fun being someone else for awhile.

There's a rule about poker: however interesting you think your bad-beat story is . . . it's not.  So I won't regale you with the various and extremely boring ways my dominant hands got beat just as I was going to cash in the tournament.  If you want to hear those stories, you'll just have to ask me in person.

Rick and I also played the Wynn golf course - cheaper than Pebble Beach, and we had a caddy (first time for me).  Beautiful course, hot as hell.  I played lousy, but Rick was great company and I fully appreciated the weird dissonance of playing on lush grass in the middle of the Strip.  (Weird but true story: because his vision is quickly deteriorating, Steve Wynn himself does not play on his own course except to hit a few balls now and then down the first fairway.  Who knew that it's actually possible to be sympathetic for a billionaire?)

All told, a great trip - much love to my understanding wife, who let me go (and did not blink when I told her how much I'd lost).

*   Finally, we had some great visitors.  My Aunt Vicki and Uncle Bill visited from New York and helped me assemble a new gas grill (it didn't blow up, despite my best efforts).  I will return the favor next year - visiting, that is, not building cooking equipment.

I also got to hang out with two of my law school buddies here in Houston when they came to town for the LSU-Wisconsin game.  I took them to the Last Concert Cafe for lunch (they were impressed by the fact that the waiter brought me my regular meal without my ordering it), the Saint Arnold's brewery for a few tasty brews, and then to an Astros game.  As much as I love my friends here in Houston, it's special to reconnect with those guys.  It's like taking a time machine back to 1987 - easy and unconditional friendship based on sharing a really difficult but fulfilling experience. It's not like we were in the Army together, but the next closest thing I can think of.

I'm sure there some other stuff that we did this summer that I'm forgetting, but I reserve the right to supplement my briefing (this is an old appellate lawyer saw).  Suffice to say, this has been a great year, even if I let the blog languish for a little bit.

Sorry!
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This week's beer is the Great Divide Brewing Co.'s Yeti Imperial Stout.  Josh picked it out for me.

In fact, he's probably the reason I'm writing again.  He's the hardest kid in the world to impress, but after a dentist appointment today, we came home and he told me, out of the blue, "Dad, I read your blog today.  It's pretty good.  You should do more of it."

I was floored.

He went on: "I'm going to get a beer for you right now.  Get to work!"

I had thought about writing in the blog again when we went to Galveston this summer.  I brought three beers with me and planned on drinking them and writing about them while I relaxed in the beach house.  But it didn't happen.  In fact, I don't think I drank any beer at all that week - my sister mixed super-potent margaritas and left me in an alcoholic daze for much of the time as we played cards and built sand castles on the beach.

When we got back, I kept going out to the garage and looking at the 36 remaining beers. The number of beers left was kind of daunting, and I was beginning to worry that the beers were not going to be fresh (a legitimate concern that I promise to address in some future blog entry).  With so much going on in my life, I found it hard to set aside the time to write.

But when your hard-to-impress son tells you he likes what you write . . . that's a motivator.

So here's the story about this beer.  Great Divide Brewing Co. is a craft brewery based in Denver, Colorado,  celebrating its twenty-year anniversary this year.  They work out of a converted dairy processing plant and brew 9 year-round beers and 12 seasonals.  They brew with a green philosophy which I like and which is consistent, I think, with the craft brewery ethos.

I like the bottle - simple brown and tan colors, a profile of the mysterious Yeti in the foreground of the logo, and some pretty cool hype:

Yeti Imperial Stout is an onslaught of the senses.  It starts with big, roasty malt flavor that gives way to rich caramel and toffee notes.  YETI gets its bold hop character from an enormous quantity of American hops.  It weighs in at a hefty 75 IBUs.

What does "Imperial" signify?  It's short for Russian Imperial and good ol' Wikipedia tells us that it is "a strong dark beer or stout in the style that was brewed in the 18th century by Thrale's brewery in London, England for export to the court of Catherine II of Russia."  According to Beer Advocate, this is the "king of stouts" with "high alcohol by volume," "plenty of malt character," and "huge roasted, chocolate, and burnt malt flavors."


No kidding.  Yeti has an ABV of 9.5% - enough to give you that warm-all-over feeling as you imbibe.  It's a classic stout, dark chocolate with a nice caramelly finish, very smooth and drinkable.  Taking a long sniff in the pint glass, the roasted malts take over, along with an alcoholic vaporousness.

I liked it, and so do others: according to Great Divide's website, Yeti is Number 36 on Beer Advocate's Top 100 Beers on Earth list.  I'm sure that Catherine II would have liked it too.

Is it the best of the 50 beers?  Heck, it's been so long since I've written this blog, I don't even remember what the champ is.  So Yeti Imperial Stout - you take the belt!

As for me, am I back?  Yep, for as long as the muse is here and the beers are in the fridge. Thanks for your patience and welcome back!