7pm Headware

The temperatures really dropped this weekend and I saw just a tiny bit of snow, which always makes me a little wistful. It doesn’t snow much in Portland and sometimes I miss that, because it always snowed plenty, every winter I knew growing up in Spokane. The snow is all gone now, only the cold remains and I have bundled up to come down for my weekly.

A buddy is already here: turns out he was hanging out with a mutual friend who had to leave suddenly, abandoning his hat (pictured below.) We are now holding it for ransom, in hopes that we will get whiskey.

Who needs money? Whiskey. Whiskey will be better than money, when the CHUD’s come, my friend.

In the middle of everything, a man compliments my hat: turns out he’s a Hat Guy; has one for different seasons and occasions. That’s pretty wild to me because I have been wearing only one style of hat for decades now and I know: I am not to be a headware philandrist. He’s visiting from Yakima for a tax conference in Lake Oswego and tells me about how he acquired his summer hat: in Spokane, on his way to Silverwood and suddenly it’s a very small world.

I’ve chosen Goodlife‘s Scottish Heart, a wee heavy. I’m not sure how I feel about it; the beer feels a little young for a wee heavy: lighter than I’d expect in the body. But the roasted maple flavors are there; this beer is not flawed, by any means. I think I just have some specific criteria when it comes to wee heavies, now. I blame Alesmith for skewing my impressions.

Still, I like it enough that I’d try some of Goodlife’s other beers. Maybe this isn’t the style they specialize in. I’ve been told by a fellow OBC member that I should never trust a beer from a brewery in its first year and certainly Goodlife seems like a rookie. A solid rookie but just not quite ready for the big show.

Maybe I just need to go to Bend for a weekend. So many breweries are opening up there, I imagine that a lost weekend would be easy to fill in that city. I wonder if it snows there?