Sunny and 75 in San Diego

by Jon Sullivan - 2019-10-31 - Stories

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Winter is coming. To everywhere other than San Diego.

As I see the weather turning into a frozen hellscape in places many friends and family live I'm once again shocked everyone doesn't just pack up and move here. Sure.... Rent is $2000/month for a poor to average 2 bedroom. Sure, we have a massive homeless problem. Sure, wildlife is largely limited to flies and spiders. Sure, few people here even know who Jerry Garcia was. Sure, no mountains. But also no massive volcanic calderas, due any day now, to destroy 10,000 square miles of everything.

We also don't have winter here. At all. It might rain a few days. In a really bad year it might get below 50 degrees at night. No mud, no slush, no frozen pipes/engines, no slipping on ice, no snow tires. We have one place to ice skate and it's literally right on the beach. There are exactly zero snow shovels within 60 miles. Just sayin.

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Now that the stupid "sober October" thing is over I'm enjoying my first cup of coffee in a long time. I use a vacuum/siphon coffee maker, which I love. Clean up is a bit more involved, and nothing about it is automated, but very much worth it in my humble opinion. More flavor and less bitter.

I know many will claim a french press is better, but that's not my experience at all. The plunger is always finicky. Unless you grind the beans very coarse you end up with gross sediment. Coarse grind = longer extraction = bitter coffee, making the design just incorrect. And I have the sense the brewing temp is way too low, with no way to control that.

The vacuum process allows extremely fine grinds with zero sediment. Extraction is fast and flexible. I like dark roasts with low bitterness, and vacuum is the only thing I've tried that does it well.

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2019 Beer Week starts tomorrow. I am already overwhelmed. Squeezing everything in just isn't possible. And the need to decide between 2-3 awesome events is maddening. There's also the problem of not driving drunk.

San Diego has three distinct brewery areas - San Marcos (an hour away), Mira Mesa (30 minutes away), and North Park (walk to everything). Getting an Uber to San Marcos or Mira Mesa is going to be pricey and you wouldn't want to be doing that back and forth much. So planning any Beer Week stuff there means spending the day in one of them.

I'm also worried that my plan of doing the "12 pubs, 12 pints" Golden Mile so close to not having a drink in months might kill me. And while doing something crazy like that had a certain charm when I was a massive alcoholic, is it even appropriate now?

Whatever..... Not doing it feels too much like giving up and surrendering to a sober lifestyle that I think would betray my general purpose in life.

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