October keeps rolling on. Soon enough, the big night will be here (it's next week!). Until then, I have a small handful of pumpkin and Halloween-inspired beverages to get to. Will I make it to all of them? We'll see. That's the scariest part of the season for me.

Tonight, however, we're visiting a variant of an old favorite: Schlafly's Pumpkin Ale. How does adding vanilla to a tried-and-true standby tweak the flavor? Let's dive in and find out.

This is one of those incredibly rare occurrences where the weather's bad enough that my employer shutters its offices for the day so its employees can stay home and safe. Right now, we're getting pummeled with freezing rain, which will last until this evening when it turns to snow. The power's still on--truth be told, I don't think we'll lose it (but we're covered with firewood and bottled water if we do).

After a lazy morning I'm now welcoming an equally lazy afternoon with a bottle of Wolf's Ridge's Dire Wolf Coffee Joy, which I'm sipping before a roaring blaze in our wood-burning stove. I'm so happy to be indoors right now.

Did y'all have a nice Valentine's Day? Michelle and I went out to dinner, came back, had a drink (beer for me, wine for her) and went to bed. It was uneventful, sure, but it was pretty much my ideal Friday night.


Well, we did all of the above while swinging by a bottle shop between dinner and coming home. The goal was to purchase her wine (which, if you read that first paragraph, you'll know was a successful in that endeavor), but I also was looking for a little something special to write about today: Listermann's Kris, a cheetah beer (it's pretty well documented on the blog and on my Twitter that I'm a big cheetah supporter). I was lucky enough to find it, packaged with its companion stout, Remus. So, today, I'm drinking them both and presenting my thoughts on them to you. Let's get to it.

This seems like it should be the perfect beer to cap off summer. Sure, right now it's in the upper 70s and cicadas are singing from the trees that surround our house. But, it's cloudy and a few trees in the woods next to my porch are turning orange for the fall. Summer is reaching its natural conclusion.


Now, considering the setting I've so carefully laid plain for you, look at the label of Silver Harbor's Kumbaya: a group of people huddled around a beach bonfire while the sun sets. Do you get what I'm saying? Now, let's crack into this to find out if Kumbaya is really the perfect beer to enjoy for the blog's farewell to summer.