I’m officially knee-deep in vacation now. After SSWC08 I rocked up to Bend, Oregon where I’ve been for the last few days. It’s been a good couple days of eating, drinking, chilling and riding.

Well, mostly drinking and chilling.

Went for a ride with Steve yesterday. We headed up to Mt. Bachelor and ended up doing a sweet 37 mile loop around the mountain.

We were thinking of doing something a bit longer, but both of us were pretty beat, so we left it at that. I should also point out the picture below which illustrates two very important points:
1) I am getting pretty good at log rides
and
2) I have no fashion sense when it comes to picking bike apparel (and probably never will).

After yesterday’s shred, today was a rest day, so I took a tour of the Deschutes Brewery. I’ve done brewery tours in the past, but this was the first one that I’ve done since I started homebrewing. It gave a whole new element to the tour now that I knew what was actually going on during all the different steps.

One of the craziest parts was when we got to see the hop storage room. They get hops in 200lb bushels. It smelled awesome.

I was chatting with our tour guide about the hop shortage, and it seems that Deschutes is big enough that they have negotiated hop contracts out to 2011, so it doesn’t even phase them. I was talking with him about how hard it is for us to get hops, and how expensive they are for homebrewing, and so he pulled a cup out, and dipped me off a nice bunch of Sterling hops, fresh from the bushel.

This should last me a batch or two. 8.8% Alpha Acid. Awesome.