2003-10-14

Contain your excitement – I am back. Toronto was much fun, thank you for asking. The brewery tour was delightfully impromptu: our ad hoc tour guide was the counter clerk, who gave the four of us a comprehensive précis of the brewing process involving much kicking of giant metal canisters and a disconcertingly frequent (and hopefully non-literal) use of the word “crap”. “…Then the mash and crap gets transferred to this big tank [clang], and, uh, then it sits there for, like…four weeks? [clang] or so? and ferments. Then we filter out all the sediment and crap, in these tanks over here. [clang]” Downright inspiring, the whole thing. Especially the jokes about having a bunch of Mexicans chained to the bottling machine.

Behold! Mecca.

The Amsterdam brewery is a tiny little place – I don’t know how those few intrepid souls manage to produce so very much delicious beer, but from my heart to theirs, THANK YOU, OH THANK YOU – but they’ve somehow managed to squeeze a pub into the bowels of the building. Bless them. The tour concludes with a truly breathtaking spectrum of beer samples, so:

Those cups may look small, but six of them will go a long way towards making you, say, grab your friends’ breasts in public. Or so I hear. Ahem. Anyway, here are a few pictures of my sexy sexy friends and me, before our decorum fled the scene like an escaped Mexican bottle-capper.

And, if you care, there are a few more pictures over in my photos section, which you will find in the navigation bar on the left. Or, if you’re lazy motherfuckers, here. Enjoy.