Winter is upon us, my friends. No, the official first day of Winter isn’t until Dec 21, but the weather will not be told otherwise. (And who decided that winter started in late December anyway? Obviously someone from a temperate climate!) As I write this, I am looking at the snow falling gently from the sky – so beautiful, so likely to double my commute to work tomorrow, despite the fact that we should all be used to driving in the snow by now.
This is not our first snowfall this fall… or even this week! The snow started falling on Sunday night while I was making dinner with my siblings and enjoying the third beer from my Eighty-Eight Brewing advent calendar.
Boom! How is that for a segue, y’all?! But before we get into the big reveal, let me share the…
Day Three Clue
As you can see, the Day Three clue read “You’ll always be our favourite” and I assumed it was a reference to their beer Hammer Pants. Because… well… Hammer Pants. Who doesn’t have a special spot in their heart for these voluminous beauties?
Night Gallery (Hazy IPA)
I was wrong! Beer 3 was Night Gallery, a Hazy IPA and a definite favourite of mine. This is a beer I’ve bought for home numerous times. It is crazy drinkable, with a 5.5% ABV and a 44 IBU. A very good option to dip your toe into the world of IPAs, if you aren’t sure if they are your thing, I think.
The Night Gallery was a punk music venue in Calgary during the late 1980s until the early 2000s. (It was also a punk music venue before then, but it wasn’t called the Night Gallery yet, or so the internet tells me.) It was also an alternative art gallery, performance art space… and the spot where Tubby Dog got its start. How Calgarian! (For those interested, the space that was once the Night Gallery is now Ten Foot Henry.)
In retrospect, I should have looked up all of this information about the beer’s namesake earlier, so I could have shared all my knowledge with my siblings instead of vomiting it here. But you all care, right?
Instead, I minced garlic while my brother Bryan cooked chicken for this Garlic Chicken Pasta recipe. (Bryan is the master at cooking chicken and I have no idea what he does to make it turn out so well.) Rylee pulled a little stool up next to me and peppered me with questions about what I was doing and why. She finally declared that she didn’t like garlic.
Well, let me tell you – the pasta turned out amazingly, Rylee ate lots of it, and it paired perfectly with the Night Gallery. I didn’t even plan it!
