Unlucky at cards

...lucky in beer?

Last night's debut of the F&H hospitality suite as a poker venue was a critical success, if not a financial one. Aside from the tragic unavailability of Geordie Ale due to pipelining issues, a good time was had by all. I for one lost my shirt by starting out with an ill-advised high dollar first hand, but Tommy (who was filling in for Greg thanks to Northwest Airlines) managed to squeeze out a little profit.

The big winner on the night was the 090601 Coldwater 420, which was the hit of the engagement. (I was drinking the Half Wit, which both described and explained my performance in the game.) The Half Wit has mellowed a little in the week since kegging and it's much smoother than it was over the Fourth.

There are a couple of lessons to be learned from all this. First, as the wise man once said, if you can't figure out who the sucker is at the poker table, it's you. Second, and perhaps of more relevance to the subject of this blog, the beer gets better with time. I have to recognize that while the purpose of Fork and Hay is to provide something to drink, it needs to be something worth drinking, and if that means I need to leave it to age another week or two before tapping I need to plan that into the schedule and build up a buffer of WIP inventory to suit. It could mean that I need to move on up to ten gallon batches for some formulations.