I convinced my kids to ride their bikes to school today, which was going quite well until we picked up speed and realized just how damn cold it is in the mornings now. Their little hands were pink, stinging ice cubes.
“Is this frostbite?” my daughter asked.
I shook my head no. “But maybe don’t tell mom we rode without gloves.”
It made me realize that summer is in fact over and I need to get myself in a different frame of mind. I need to put the paddleboard in the back of the garage and get my mountain bike tuned up. I need to think about camping trips during peak fall color. Also, I need to put gloves on my kids before 7am bike rides.
The only problem is I’m not ready to give up summer just yet, which is why I forced the kids to ride their bikes to school while wearing shorts when it was 50 degrees, and it’s why I’ll be drinking these two beers all weekend.
Fullsteam is one of my favorite Southern breweries. The Durham-based team has been on the forefront of this “plow to pint” thing for years, sourcing ingredients from local farms long before it became trendy in the craft beer scene. They even get their customers in on the action, buying ingredients that customers forage and putting the goods in small batch beers. These beers here, Humidity and PayCheck, are year-round offerings, but they’re built for hot summer days. Humidity is a hop-forward pale ale brewed with local, malted triticale. I didn’t know what the hell triticale was, so I looked it up. It’s a fancy wheat/rye hybrid, so the beer takes on an almost creamy quality beneath all of the hop goodness. PayCheck, on the other hand, is a straight forward Pilsner that uses local barley and corn. It’s crisp, easy drinking, and has a hint of corn sweetness.
I’m going to drink them both while wearing a Hawaiian shirt and listening to Jack Johnson or Sublime while sitting in the sun this weekend, stubbornly refusing to give up summer. Maybe I’ll even make my kids play in the sprinkler in the front yard. And I’m gonna do that again and again, until the leaves start to fall or my kids get frostbite. Whichever comes first.
