Maritime Love

For the past four years, my husband and I have hosted a winter celebration to that darkest of brews, stout.  Fairly ironic, given the fact that I had to give up gluten a couple years ago and can’t even drink the stuff.  But my husband can and he loves it!  So the idea is that everyone brings a few of their favorite stout brews to share.  We start collecting different types around 6 months out.  This year we decided to include stout’s cousin, porter to the roster, as well as the original viking beverage, mead (which we make at home).  We had some brews that we brought back from our trip to Iceland last fall, as well as some from local breweries and even some homemade oatmeal stout.

Always a lot of fun, Stoutfest inevitably turns into a Maritime kitchen party.  Everyone gathers in our little red kitchen, music is playing, people are chatting and trying the different brews.  At times you can’t even get through the kitchen to the dining room.

Every year, Joel builds a snow fort fire pit so that people that want to have a cigarette or cigar can have a place to hang out and keep warm.  Some years, there isn’t really enough snow to properly make one or the thing melts and collapses before the event.  This year, we definitely didn’t have any of those problems.  The problem this year was that we almost had too much snow.  We had piled the snow up by the garage and it was all the way to the roof line, over 6 ft deep and heavily compacted.  It was quite a job to clear it out and we had to call in help from several friends (thanks, guys!).  The final product, I think you’ll agree, was pretty impressive.  Here are some images from the night and a video of the final snow fort 2015 project.  Until next year!