Great lunch at Mark's house and prospects for the week

So today I was invited over for lunch at Hive account@exyle's house as his girlfriend (wife, really) Hive account@bkdbkd cooked a real classic Brazilian dish: Vaca Atolada or a "Mired Cow" translating directly. It gets this name because it's short ribs cooked on a very thick sauce together with cassava chunks. Needless to say the dish was fantastic and check out how good it looked on my plate:

After eating till we dropped we had some fun playing Aliennation, an RPG style shooter which showed a lot of potential for co-op sessions during the bbq season, which is coming soooooon I remind you. The game is fast and responsive, although manual aiming takes some getting used to, and I could totally be engaged on it for hours. It took us a fairly decent amount of time to clear just the first level. Really nice game!

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Now... On to Brewing!

As you know, I set myself a target of brewing the Brewdog Old World Imperial Russian Stout as my next brew, but I came to realize that right now this would be a very expensive brew to make - around 60 euros in material cost - and I took a look in my goody bag and noticed that I still have around 3+ kilos of Pils and Pale Ale malts just sitting there, not to mention 4 different IPA hops in my fridge doing nothing - Willamette, Mosaic, Cascade and Amarillo, you lazy hops!!

Now, I don't wanna be wasteful, and since I don't have a particular recipe in mind which will use this combination of ingredients, I decided that I shall freehand the next batch of around 15 liters with these items at hand. I'm gonna use Beersmith 2 this week to find a nice combination of everything and hopefully I will come out with a nice IPA/APA recipe in the end. This shouldn't be too hard and it will be good to finally use these hops that I've had in my fridge for the last six months, I don't want them to lose their precious aromas.

Stay tuned for the recipe this week and I'm gonna try to get Hive account@exyle involved again on the brew since it was a lot of fun having a bit of help from that giant of a person the last time around.

Cheers!