A Vayable Alternative and Some Beta on the Bliss...

So, life is good. My Salsa Vaya frameset is lolling languidly in the mitts of Morpheus, in a brown box in the belly of the best bike shop in the Washington Metropolitan Area, bar none, and dreaming of the day I give it legs and let it loose to roam. Soon, my darling...

In Boulder now, at Mountain Sun, enjoying one of their latest offerings, an imperial IPA called Hop Vivant. Tasty, hoppy, alcoholic, and the winner of the 2009 Alpha King Challenge (Pizza Port, a Cali brewery that can do absolutely no wrong when it comes to brewing IPAs, won the Challenge this year), it's held aloft before my beer-bleary eyes and prevented from puddling by a tiny 8-oz goblet that bangs the bill at $4.20 ("no happy hour"). Next up is Temperance (10-oz, goblet, $4.20), a Belgian-American IPA on the order of, I'm guessing (confirmed!), Flying Dog's surprisingly successful Raging Bitch. Boulder is a beer burg, and this fact, along with its proximity to a plethora of pulchritudinous peaks and its passion for pedal-powered transportation, makes it a very alluring destination when one finds oneself with too much time on the hands and just enough jack to pull it off. Highly recommended, if you can tolerate the hipsters and, worse, faux-hipsters (the chief distinguishing factor between the two being the latter's preference for freewheels and expensive—and hence inauthentic—urban clothing. Yeesh.). I've been sampling (sampling?...euphemism alert!) micros and plotting the peaks I plan to tackle in the coming week, weather permitting.

In the meantime, my Hop Cone-fusion Double IPA is in the primary, perking away and dreaming of the upcoming 5th Annual Bootlegger's Bliss. This beer-to-be derives its name from the fact that the hop additions I made to the wort were a random blend of Warrior, Amarillo, and Galena; the pellets pinched from their packets with neither thought nor concern about precise proportions beyond favoring the Warrior for the bittering stage. This mystery mixture, born of haste and helped along by the six beers I drank during a brewing process that concluded well after 1:00 a.m., Friday morning, was the inspiration for the "cone-fusion" part of the title. There, epic mystery solved.

Bliss-goers of the past should expect an email with details early next week. Until then.