Pic(k) of the Week: Happy Celebration 2020.

I began this damnable year with a beer. Let me end it likewise but with a celebration for a better year, next.

Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale
— Sierra Nevada Brewing Company
Chico, California / Mills River, North Carolina.

The brewery released the beer in mid-October 2020 for the winter season. My particular bottle —which I purchased and sampled (uhh, drank) on Christmas Eve, 24 December 2020— the brewery had packaged on 16 October.

From the bottle's label:

Fresh hop ¹ IPA.
6.8% alcohol-by-volume.
We first brewed Celebration IPA in the winter of 1981. Each year, we use only the first fresh hops of the growing season to create this complex and robust ale. Layered pine and citrus hop aromas balance delicately against rich malt sweetness to shape this bold, wintertime classic.

From me:

Bright hops, citrusy and piney, chased by an off-dry biscuity middle and a white pepper finish. Two months after bottling, the hop aroma might have been a bit diminished but not the overall hop presence and not the firm malt backbone. Indeed a holiday celebration.

And, so, to all my readers: Linksmų Kalėdų tau ir tavo! (On the off chance you're not fluent in Lithuanian, that's "Happy Christmas to you and yours!") ²

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Pic(k) of the Week: The fisherman

The sights of the city cannot be seen, and
Its sounds only faint, as
The fisherman wades.

A great blue heron, shallow in Postal Pond, deep in the woods of Legacy Park, in the city of Decatur, Georgia, USA, on 15 December 2020.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Poetry, in repose

The gardens of our lives
Were our Family and the Arts.
We live on -
While our precious legacies
Continue to bloom and flourish.

This small bronze sculpture —of a young girl reading a book— sits atop a small stone pedestal in Cator Woolford Gardens, just east of Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

The poem above is carved into the open pages of the book. The sculpture itself is named Poetry. A plaque below reads: "Dedicated on June 12, 2002, in loving memory of [sisters] Isabelle Woolford Kennedy and Charlotte Woolford Crawley." The artist is Teena Marie Stern (of whom I've found little information).

A peaceful moment. 10 December 2020.

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Pic(k) of the Week: Delirium trashed!

Just as Pabst Brewing continues to milk a blue ribbon it once received for its beer at a long-ago competition, the Huyge Brewery —located near Ghent, Belgium— touts its Delirium Tremens as the "best beer in the world" for one accolade it received in one competition in 2008.

The beer, named for symptoms brought on by alcohol withdrawal, is, fittingly, a strong beer, containing 9% alcohol. More importantly, how does the beer taste?

In his 2005 book, The Great Beers of Belgium, the late, great beer sage Michael Jackson described Delerium Tremens as:

Very bright [golden]. It has a dense head; a very fruity (greengage? gooseberry?) bouquet; a sweetish palate; and a lot of warming alcohol in an abrupt finish.

I didn't pose that empty beer can, by the way. It was already there, emptied of its contents, sitting on the picnic table, as I and the dog walked by on our morning constitutional. There must have been quite the beer party the day before.

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