Happy Mothers Day

Lets first start this off with doing a big shout out to all the mothers out there. We wouldn’t be here without them. (Quite literally.) So we here at The Beer Thrillers acknowledge and congratulate all the mothers – we know its not easy. (Ask my mom, she would gladly tell you horror stories of raising…. not me of course, my sister. I was an angel. Perfect child. Clearly the favorite. My sister on the other hand…. *shivers*.)

Every year around this time my grandmother’s peony bush blooms out front. So I cut off some of the flowers, and cut off some similar flowers (this year I cut a few branches of the dogwood and some azalea flowers) and took them out to grammy’s grave. Peonies bloom around early – middle of May and don’t last super long, but have wonderful beautiful flowers and a great aroma. You can read more on them here at Wikipedia: Peony. (Quick fun fact: The peony is named after Paeon [also spelled Paean], a student of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing. In Greek mythology, when Asclepius became jealous of his pupil, Zeus saved Paeon from the wrath of Asclepius by turning him into the peony flower.)

Yesterday we celebrated Mothers Day at my parents house and I brought my girls over. As per tradition whenever we all get together, we typically play some form of board game or card game. The girls love Organ Attack so we played that with my mom.

Organ Attack was created by the writer of The Awkward Yeti, Nick Seluk. I reviewed one of his comic books here: Book Review: The Heart and Brain (The Awkard Yeti) (by Nick Seluk). The card game is fun, and gets my daughters all in a fiery mood fighting each other to remove and eliminate their organs. It is a fun game, that does help the girls learn a little bit about anatomy (like what diseases target what organs, what the organs do, etc.). There is some awkward moments though, like giving my mom cancer – something that she has survived three different forms. But in true champion and warrior form, we turn it all into jokes and my mom laughs, especially when she got to play the Medicine card on it and remove it. She even joked that it was easier than chemotherapy again.

All in all, mothers day was a lot of fun (well technically Mothers Day Eve, but it was our mothers day). Can’t beat a day spent with family, playing games, delivering flowers, little things like this in life is what’s nice. Like Kurt Vonnegut would say quoting his uncle (Bernard Vonnegut): “If this isn’t nice, what is?”

Boneshire Brew Works

Anyone familiar with the blog knows that Boneshire Brew Works is my local go to brewery. Its about four minutes from home and all but within walking distance. (Rubber Soul is another, also within walking distance.) Needless to say we have covered many beer reviews by them: Sunburst, Pigtoberfest, Dillston, Harrishire, Fall Hippo, Blue Hippo, AuZealand 2.0, Tried and True (Mango), Caucus Race 6.0, The Hog, Long Tongue Liar, Pandemic Pils, Iscariot, Road Less Traveled, Good Walk Spoiled, S’Mores, LazaRIS, and reviewed the flight of Shire variants; we’ve also covered them in various news articles: Boneshire Brew Works Celebrates 5th Anniversary, Pigtoberfest 2021, Boneshire Brew Works Expands With Second Location, Boneshire Brew Works Celebrates 3 Years, Brewery Hopping – 12.27.19, and Breweries around Harrisburg Area (2019).

Soooo….. yea….. I would say we’ve covered quite a few of their brews here on the blog.

And all for good reason – they make some really wonderful beers. Grace (this beer) included. So when I heard they were releasing a special barrel aged beer – and that it was named Grace – I couldn’t slap my money down fast enough for this beaut. It was first released for sale for us mug club members, and then went on sale to the public after that. It was 20$ for the bottle.

From Untappd – Boneshire Brew Works is a microbrewery from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. They have 189 unique beers. They have 41,401 ratings with a global average rating of 3.84 (as of 5.8.22). Their Untappd description reads: “Welcome to Boneshire Brew Works. We are located in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on Derry Street. Soon you will be able to have our beer and sodas throughout Central Pennsylvania, as they are already flowing in our tasting room. Follow us for updates on beer releases, events, and brewery happenings through your favorite social media site.”

Beer Review

Beer: Grace
Brewery: Boneshire Brew Works
Style: Wild Ale – American
ABV: 7.5% / 6%
IBU: No IBU
Untappd Description: We brewed this beer several years ago and put it to sleep in American Chardonnay barrels with 2 strains of Brettanomyces. This beer is very complex with orange marmalade, subtle coriander spice, dry oakiness, heavy Brett funk and slight sourness.

This is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful beer. Lovely in appearance, aroma, taste, everything, it just nails it. As per always with my beer reviews, I do it in the order of – appearance, aroma, taste. (Or at least I try to remember to do it that way. No guarantees.) [But have no fears, for this review I am.]

Starting off with the appearance – like I said, its beautiful. Its got a light reddish golden like hue. It has a very striking resemblance to some wines of the lighter scale. its fluorescent in a way, and completely clear. No sediment, no floaties, no deposits. Nice carbonation, slight small head that retains for a fair bit.

Aroma is an interesting mix of wine, Belgian, saison, and a mixture of other notes. Notes of the coriander spice, the grape, the oak, and lots of the chardonnay, gives off the heavy wine like impressions, but the coriander spice and the Brett aroma also gives off strong Belgian and Wilde Ale / Saison impressions as well; making this a wonderfully complex beer.

This is a deliciously tart, mildly puckering, wine like beer, designed for a classier age (not like those blasters they use in uncivilized times). It is a gorgeous looking beer, looks very wine like, and has just a wonderful appearance straight from the bottle to the glass, and undoing wax sealed bottles is always fun. (Really, there’s gotta be an easy way to unseal waxed and sealed bottles, but I haven’t found it yet.) The carbonation on this was nice, and the overall appearance is a medley of wine and Belgian styles, so I dig that. The bottle says its 6% ABV, but the Untappd listing for it says its 7.5%. This has a very complex overall taste to it. Its got a lot of wine attributes and tastes; you get a heavy dosage of oak, grape, Brett, funk, tart, with a dryness, and then you get some subtle notes of coriander spice, orange and orange marmalade, The tartness and dryness to the beer really holds it up well and keeps the medley of different flavors in a very nice sipping beer; this is a perfect dinner beer to share with someone over a nice course meal. This isn’t mean to be a sessionable or poundable beer that you have with your buddies while watching the Phillies blow another game or something similar, this is meant to be a lovely dinner beer, with candlelight, nice music, steak, mashed potatoes, garlic green beans, etc. Thats what makes it so enjoyable too, knowing the work and craftsmanship that went into this beer, making it such a delicious, well rounded beer, adds to the overall enjoyment of the beer itself; knowing that it was worked on hard, that it was barrel aged, that time was spent on this beer, all adds to its overall quality and flavor. Its the small enjoyable things like this – knowing that someone cares about their work and craft – that makes the moments and beer like this so much better. All in all, the flavors work so well, the aroma is lovely, the appearance of the beer is wonderful, and everything about this beer is just great.

My Untappd Rating: ****.5
Global Average Untappd Rating: 3.95 (as of 5.8.22)

Grandma’s and Mothers

Its so nice to get to celebrate Mothers Day and thank my mom for all she has done for me, for my girls, for my sister, and as a teacher all she has done for everyone else. My Grandma (Grammy) Grace was just as much a mother figure helping raise me as I grew up, and so was my Great Grandma – Florence Speck. All three of these women are / and were – such tough as nails ladies, who never gave up. My great grandma passed away at 99, after a long fight of dementia and alzheimers, my mom has survived several fights against cancer.

Its a nice nod to my Grammy that I got to do a beer review with a beer with her name. I think she would have been tickled pink by that. I got to do one for my Great Grandma as well – Florence by Hill Farmstead. I know she would have laughed about that, she loved stealing my dad’s beers when he still lived at home with them and going to college.

So let me just say one last time – Happy Mothers Day to all the moms out there who are doing such a wonderful job.

Thanks For Reading

Thanks for reading everyone. I know this was a bit of a longer winded review, but nice thing is you can always just scroll by my extra crap and get right to the beer review if you’d like. I tend to meander, my apologies for that. I do enjoy everyone indulging me though on all that, especially a beer like this.

I hope you enjoyed the review, and if you have any comments, questions, or anything else, let me know in the comments or contact us through the contact page or e-mail us at thebeerthrillers@gmail.com. We love to hear from you all!

Thanks for reading, Happy Mothers Day, and cheers everyone!

-B. Kline

As always, thank you everyone for reading! Leave your likes, comments, suggestions, questions, etc, in the comments section. Or use the Feedback – Contact Us – page, and we’ll get right back to you! You can also reach out to us at our direct e-mail address: thebeerthrillers@gmail.com

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The Awkward Yeti

The Awkward Yeti by Nick Seluk is a popular cartoon strip, primarily online. There has been book collections and other specials, but unlike Peanuts or The Far Side or Wizard of Id, etc; The Awkward Yeti has been primarily online.

You can find The Awkward Yeti online at – The Awkward Yeti – Nick Seluk. It is a relatively wholesome comic strip that details the body organs; brain, heart, stomach, liver, gall bladder, lungs, fat, tongue, etc. in humorous circumstances with their owner (or on their own).

Heart and Brain

Particularly, I enjoy the back and forth between heart and brain. The childish, youthful, fun filled antics of the heart versus the cold, calculating, analyzing, realistic brain. Or the neurotic parts of the brain versus the ‘forget it’ portions of the heart. And thats where this collection of comic strips shine through.

Review

As per GoodReads, the summary reads:

From paying taxes and getting up for work to dancing with kittens and starting a band, readers everywhere will relate to the ongoing struggle between Heart and Brain.

Heart and Brain: An Awkward Yeti Collection illustrates the relationship between the sensible Brain and its emotionally driven counterpart, the Heart.

Boasting more than one million pageviews per month, TheAwkwardYeti.com has become a webcomic staple since its creation in 2012.

Heart and Brain – GoodReads Page

My two favorite characters from the series – Brain and Heart. Their polar opposites but both compliment the other in ways thats only possible due to WHO they are (well, WHAT they represent anyway). This might be my favorite yet of the three books.

Nearly each panel is both funny, and sentimental and/or intelligent and witty/wry. Not all are huge ‘guffaws’ or “lol”, but nearly all are chuckles or a smirk inducing joke, with the added weight of the sentimentality or intelligence behind the panel due to the characters (brain and heart) involved.

I think the great thing about the characters of heart and brain, is how much it gets to the “heart and soul” of us. (See what I did there?) It gets right down to what makes us (as humans) tick. And it embodies our neuroses, our depressions, our ticks, our reasons, and our thoughts. It gets to how sometimes we’re flighty and want to run around in a sunflower field full of butterflies, and sometimes, we need to tamper that with doing our taxes or figuring out our budget for the coming weeks. Nick writes as someone who knows depression and anxiety, and it makes the characters relatable for those of us who also have these symptoms and see ourselves in the characters.

We see ourselves awake at night, thinking about something we did or said thirteen years ago. Or someone worried and paranoid or anxious about a test / promotion / etc. The best thing about the strip is its relateability. There is a few other compilations, as well as much of his stuff online. I fully suggest checking all of Nick Seluk’s other works out as well, especially the other Awkward Yeti works.

My GoodReads Rating: ****
My LibraryThing Rating: ****
Global GoodReads Rating: 4.33 (as of 7.24.21)

Be sure to check out our other book reviews, as well as check out our beer reviews, brewery reviews, brewery news, and much more here on the blog!

Cheers!

-B. Kline

Thank you for visiting our blog. Please make sure to follow, bookmark, subscribe, and make sure to comment and leave feedback and like the blog posts you read. It will help us to better tailor the blog to you, the readers, likes and make this a better blog for everyone.

Please be sure to follow us on our social media accounts – Facebook, Facebook Group, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Influence. Please be sure to also follow, like, subscribe to the blog here itself to keep updated. We love to hear from you guys, so be sure to leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Ok…. first off…. let me begin by getting something off my chest: in no uncertain terms F^#& Lanternflies! Straight up. From whatever demonic level of Dante’s hell they came from, they can head right back there. F&*!& them. Hard.

Deep breath.

Sigh.

Deep breath.

Sigh.

1…. 2….. 3….. 4….. Serenity Now.

Ok. Better, lets move on!

This review is one of irony / juxtaposition / bad coincidence / happenstance / or some other kind of term that I’m lacking the knowledge of or remembering that could aptly fit. Not really in a pleasant or good way either unfortunately. This is part of the ‘recognization’ issue of psychology (to some degree). Where, once you buy a Yellow Truck (lets say)… you suddenly start to notice every other Yellow Truck on the road, where before you never noticed them, and you now start to think they are everywhere.

But, given that these little buggers are an infestation, it goes a bit above that. Or a bit beyond that. They are definitely now everywhere in the area. Unfortunately. And detrimentally so too. So its no surprise that I’ve now begun to “see them all over the place”, sadly. I will be doing an article soon on spotted lanternflies, and ways to spot them, get rid of them, kill them, and report them. So be sure to look out for that soon.

Wednesday I had gotten the EO (early out) from work, stopped at the Hershey Public Library to pick up some books (said books in picture above) and around 2:30 sat down to enjoy a nice cold adult beverage while reading. Deciding to crack my last remaining ‘Unicorns Stomping Lanternflies’ that I had picked up from our Reading Trip back on my birthday.

Used my new Brew Barons glass I had gotten from the Brew Barons app (review forthcoming), and sat and read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between The World and Me” and Fight Club 3 by Chuck Palahniuk.

Here, I will do the review, after the beer review, stay tuned for why I say its (sadly) ironic / coincidental / unfortunate juxtaposition / or some other term that is currently alluding me but is on the tip of my tongue (I believe its a French term similar to deja vu). (I think you probably have an idea of what I’m getting at though).

Beer: Unicorns Stomping Lanternflies
Brewery: Saucony Creek Brewing Company
Style: IPA – New England
ABV: 7.5%
IBU: None
Untappd Description: The return of Unicorns Stomping Lanterflies – crushable NEIPA with a blend of hops giving a sunny citrus shine and subtle soft sweetness brings a perfect pint of bug slaying delight.

Color is a nice yellow to golden hazy hue. It has everything that looks just like an IPA (New England variant) should have. Beautiful golden, hazy look it; a nice foamy rich creamy white head to it; dispersed bubbles, varying sizes, everything a well crafted beer should have. It looks like a beer you want to drink…. so why… not … drink it?

Lets get to the aroma before we dive in… act like we’re actually beer connoisseurs and not just drunkards or something. This smells juicy, it smells citrusy, smells slightly mango, but lots of juicy citrus hop notes. This smells like a beer you want to drink… so… why not…. drink it?

Ok… lets drink it. DAMN. This is crushable. This is juice and delicious and easy to quench a thirst. A four pack of this goes down super quick (I can give testament to that). Its perfect sipping, or quick drinking, or just a fun beer to enjoy. Great sitting out, reading and enjoying a beautiful day, or… for slaying stupid dumb lanternflies. It is a juicy New England IPA, through and through, very heavy citrus notes, heavy mango notes, heavy hop juice, but no hop bite (typical for a New England IPA). Some notes of pine, but very mellow, a little bit of grassyness (or should I just say grass? or does that make people think of weed?), some Earthy tones, and notes, but mostly, this is just a well rounded hoppy juicy drinkable / crushable brew. Its a 7.5%, which isn’t extreme, but higher than some IPAs people might be used to, though in the Harrisburg – Hershey Central PA area, it’s the same as Perpetual IPA (though with Perpetual IPA’s hop bite, I think its easier to take notice of the ABV than in a juicy New England IPA like this). They didn’t have this on tap when we were there at the Franklin Station brewery, but we did pick these up in cans, and out of can its wonderful. I imagine its just as delicious on tap.

My Untappd Rating: ****
Global Untappd Rating: 3.95 (as of 10.2.20)

Ok… now… moving past the review, to why I was saying its coincidental (in a bad way), the very next day, Thursday morning, 10.1.20 I came outside, and saw a dead lanternfly in a my rain barrel’s top (it has a closed container and then a top to collect some water in a puddle type thing for if you wish to keep a plant there), my rain barrel is right next to my grape vines, and when I looked at them… they were crawling with the little buggers everywhere. I leapt into action! I took pictures, I charted them and reported them to the Department of Agriculture, and I killed all of them that I saw. Shoes, lighters, everything. Burned them, swatted them, smashed them, stamped them. I was the Unicorn of Death reigning hellfire and brimstone upon these evil buggers.

I ended up cutting my grape vine back (something you should do every year, but this year I did it a bit more severely than I normally do), due to them. Luckily, in my front yard, where I keep my two hop arbors, I saw no lanternflies on my hops or the arbors, or just in the yard area. This is only about 20-30 feet from the grape vine where I found the lanternflies.

Here’s some pictures of my grape vine, and my smashing of said lanternflies:

For lunch before hiking I stopped at Troegs Craft Brewery in Hershey. While there enjoying a flight (Impending Descent, Master of Pumpkins, Hop Harvest, and Hop Cyclone), myself and the one server / waiter killed about four or five of them. Shawn Funk, a member of the Central PA Whalerz who works for Troegs said that the construction by the train tracks (located behind the brewery) has roused them up and brought them towards the brewery.

I spent Thursday hiking Swatara State Park, heading to Bordner’s Cabin on Bear Hole Trail, and seeing the trickling waterfall. While there, they had paperwork in quite a few places about lanternflies. On the trail, I only found two of them at one spot, and promptly stepped on both (they also were both dead already it appears). A few days before this, at the Casino in Grantville I saw a few in the parking lot as well. So they are definitely in the Dauphin County area. I have heard lots of reports that Lebanon County is completely swarmed with them. So be on the lookout!

Report any find you find (dead or alive) to the Department of Agriculture. Kill and smash and kill and smash all you see…. oh, and did I say, kill and smash? Do it. Kill. And. Smash. All. All. ALL. Of. Them.

I will most likely be putting up an article about Spotted Lanternflies in the near future, so be on the lookout for that, and certainly be on the lookout for them! Evil, destructive buggers!

In the meantime, go have a cold delicious beer, and cheers!

-B. Kline