Gordie Hound and the Mystery Box...

Greg (aka Cheesey) isn't always this much
taller than his beautiful wife, April, but I
know for a fact, he's not usually allowed
to wear full hockey equipment in their
house. So normally, she's a little closer
than just barely reaching his shoulder.

Because it's the day after Christmas, let's start this one off with a heart-warming story - The Tale Of Gordie Hound. That is not to be confused with the tail of Gordie Hound, which I'll wager was wagging plenty yesterday.

To set the stage, I will have to transport you to a lovely suburban enclave called Grosse Pointe Farms in Michigan, a tree-lined slice of Americana just outside Detroit.

The following story has a lot of heart to it because at the core of it all is my beautiful friend, April Cheesewright, who has a heart the size of the great outdoors. She is also the beloved wife of my high school buddy, Greg, aka Cheesey, also known for having a pretty big heart.

April was watching the Detroit FOX-2 News at the beginning of December when the story of Pluto came on. You see, Pluto was a Florida mixed-breed six-month-old puppy who was left abandoned after Hurricane Irma ripped through the state just weeks earlier. One day before Pluto was to be put down, he got rescued by the Detroit Happy Days Dogs and Cats Rescue team. And then the call went out on the news: Was anyone willing to rescue this runt-of-the-litter but love-filled puppy? Well, yeah, like I said, April was watching. So the two set down to the rescue shelter and happily interviewed to be Pluto's parents with 20 other willing families.

Cheesey gives Gordie some loving as he settled quickly
to his new home. Cheesey often takes him to work and
as President and CEO of Computech Corporation, it
turns out he's allowed to do exactly that. As for me, I
drink my coffee out of a Computech mug every day!

To the surprise of absolutely no one who grew up with Greg, the Cheesewrights were chosen. Just weeks before Christmas. But you know what? April was interviewed by so many media outlets that I'll let her tell the story now.

"For some reason, the look in his sad eyes and that sweet face just melted my heart. From the minute he got into the car, it's like he knew he was going to a forever home," April told mnn.com. "He was calm and snuggled right into my husband's lap and fell asleep so peacefully."

But while Pluto is a great name if you're a Disney dog or perhaps the Lord of the Underworld, it's not a very Cheesewright name. Hence, Pluto was rechristened as Gordie Hound, a tribute to Detroit Red Wing fan Greg's all-time favourite player.

But news of the adoption spread quickly on all media outlets! In fact, if you plug Gordie Hound into the Twitter search engine, dozens of links to the story and countless more "Congratulations" and "Thank you" comments pop up. It seems Gordie and his new parents were trending news, especially when the story first came out.

From one friend to another, here's my main man, Drunk Polkaroo, with
his Nickel Brook Mystery Pack on You-Tube about a week ago. It has
a light-ABV stout, a session New England IPA, a New England IPA
and a dry-hopped sour. So you know, the New England IPA is Beer C
and I am pretty insistent that you vote for it online. VERY insistent!!!

And given that it is the festive season, April couldn't help but add: "We feel as though Gordie is a gift to us. For whatever reason, the three of us are meant to be together."

Aww, so sweet. As the Cheesewrights played host to both me and my son back in the Summer, allow me to assure you that Gordie is now in a house that virtually overflows with love. I can't decide if it's the puppy or the Cheesewrights that win this story. Both, I would guess. And that's our heart-warming Christmas story to open this. I'm not crying... shut up, you're crying! You big baby.

Another key component to Christmas, as we all know, are gifts... or boxes that are wrapped in colourful paper to preserve their mystery until opened. Mystery packages, you might even call them...

For the purposes of securing sufficient votes for Beer
C in the Nickel Brook Mystery Pack, I borrowed the
speech made by Liam Neeson in the movie "Taken."
I suspect it will be more than enough to sway you all.

We all unwrapped these mystery packages today and then were wondering what the hell to do with all that wrapping paper. You could follow the example of my brother and me as children when we threw so much wrapping paper into the fireplace all at once one Christmas that we nearly started a chimney fire. Or you could not be idiots. The choice is up to you. And since we couldn't understand the problem as children, noting to our alarmed parents that fire already goes up the chimney so what's the difference... well, allow me to explain. Smoke is meant to go up a chimney to direct it out of your home. Fire is not. You see, chimney fires run so hot that it will likely do structural damage to your chimney and possibly ignite flammable parts of your house. I know that now. My brother nearly killed us all. (See how I stepped away from the whole nasty incident? Pretty smooth, eh?)

Well, there's another Mystery Pack that's on fire around here at the moment and it came courtesy of our good friends at Nickel Brook Brewing. They recently released a four-pack of mystery cans with only descriptions of each. No names, nada. Well, I suppose there are names: Beer A, B, C and D.

To all those voting, I hope you Can Clearly C the Choice is
obvious! You C, onCe you try all four, the differenCe Can be
easily determined as whiCh is the best of the paCk. I mean,
you are welCome to piCk what you want. I'm not trying to
influenCe you one way or the other. No, you Can deCide!

The names match the exact progression of my marks from the beginning to the end of high school. So I get it, Nickel Brook, as alcohol was heavily involved towards the end of my high school years, as well.

The premise of the Mystery Pack is that you try four different unknown beers and then vote online for the one you want to see added to their regular line-up. Simple enough, eh? Also a clever bit of marketing.

So let's go through them. Beer A is a 4.5% stout; Beer B at 4.5% is a New England-Style Session IPA; Beer C at 6% is a full-blown New England-Style IPA and Beer D is a 4% Dry-Hopped Sour, something of a specialty coming out of the Funk Labs at Nickel Brook this past year.

So, we're gonna skip Beer A for reasons you'll see below and start with Beer B - the session IPA. First of all, I am not sure why they are called "Session IPAs" when their ABV drops below 5%. Doesn't that just make them a nicely-hopped pale ale? The India portion has been removed! I mean, I'm no brewer but that has never made sense to me.

Has Nickel Brook already released Beer A to the
public, calling it Cheeky Bastard Stout? (Love
the label, by the way.) But this new stout just
landed at my Beer Store last week and, well, I
can't help but notice the similarities between
these two beers. Tis a remarkable thing indeed.

But they make the beer, not me, so I suppose they can call it what they wish. Even though it's a pale ale.

Okay, Beer B, the session, ahem, IPA, is a nice, light brew with some beautiful citrus on the nose and tongue, as well as the cloudiness we've come to associate with New England-style beers. This is your hockey beer right here. Not only will you make it to the end of the Maple Leafs game drinking this, you'll also be awake to see Auston Matthews chosen as the first star of the game. Even though this won't win the online polling, I do hope they release this as it's one of the few funky, hazy pale ales (yes, I said it!) I've had.

We're gonna skip Beer C, again you'll see why soon, and go directly to Beer D, the dry-hopped sour. At first, I thought, hey, just like their dry-hopped Gose, Duplicitous. But no, this was different. Because it is a Gose, Duplicitous has that salty edge. This didn't. Now the problem with having a sour in the Mystery Pack is that Nickel Brook's Funk Lab made so many good ones this year, including a wide array of different Uber Berliner Weisses in the Summer, that yet another sour is met with, well, indifference. It was good, tart, a bit thin but meh. I suspect the brewery already knows this will be the lowest in the polling.

Okay, full circle now and back to Beer A. When I was in the Nickel Brook Retail Shop, picking up this pack for myself and friends, I looked at the package with the beer descriptions and asked my main retail man, Robbie, "It says the stout is 4.5%, same as your Half Bastard Stout. Is it actually Half Bastard?"

Robbie said no. "It's similar, of course, because of the style but you could consider this a tweaked version." Fair enough. But then something odd happened. With our last Nickel Brook delivery mid-week before Christmas, their driver, Different Robbie, brought a new Nickel Brook product to put in our can coolers - their Cheeky Bastard Stout, which (hey, now) also clocks in at 4.5%.

I've run out of Mystery Pack photos so here's
my brew buddy, Tony Cox, whom my Beer Bro
Glenn had to concede was "the sexiest cellar-
man in Ontario" after his cellar-man Trevor
fled the Province to avoid Glenn's advances.
Also, Tony hates this photo so I like to use it.

Anyone else's Spider-Senses tingling? Or am I the only one here with those senses? (I had to eat a lot of spiders for this power, you know. Like thousands.)

Now I drank the two more than a week apart so unfortunately, I couldn't do side-by-side comparisons. But from my memory, yeah, pretty close to the same, if not identical. I love a low-ABV stout, mostly because the others I buy are in the 8%-10% zone. Nice to have a Winter Warmer that doesn't leave you flat on your ass. Nice tweaks of coffee and chocolate, thinner bodied but still tasty - both of them. But why would Nickel Brook include a (possibly) now-released beer in the Mystery Pack?

Well, that brings us to Beer C. I think they wanted to release Beer A (and also believe they now already have) because they knew there was no way it was gonna beat Beer C. Because this New England-Style is the muthah-fargin' bomb! It's a style that has been the Big Story of 2017 and as Nickel Brook only has one IPA on the market, my much-beloved Head Stock, I think they really wanted a hazy, fuzzy New England counter-part on the shelves beside it. So they brewed this guaranteed winner. Bursting with tropical fruit, the 6% zinger has that full body, hazy, crazy thickness to it that means this should come out easily as the Pack's Champion.

However, I noticed not everyone on Twitter agreed with me and had the audacity to select one of the other three.

Another Christmas at the Redmond household where
chimney fires are all the rage because my brother and
I think throwing ALL the wrapping paper at once
into the fireplace is both fun and cool. It is neither...

To that end, I have appropriated actor Liam Neeson's speech from the movie, Taken, and adjusted it to address my concerns. Now because the movie was about his kidnapped daughter, I will have to alter parts of it. My adjustments will be in brackets.

"I don't know who you are (beyond your Twitter handles.) I don't know what you want. If you are looking (to vote anything but Beer C), I can tell you (that you leave me little choice.) What I do have is a particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you (vote for Beer C), that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you and I will (pile more snow on your driveway with a dump truck.)" Yeah, the last little bit is actually about killing them which seems a bit extreme for a beer popularity contest. But the extra snow on the driveway? Yeah, that might kill them right there.

Okay, off to Las Vegas on December 29 so the Best of 2017 will run a little early over the next two days. But since I missed my former co-worker Marie's birthday on Christmas, I will say this to her! Sorry, it's the Manger Kid's birthday first. What a sucky birthday you have! Okay, guys and dolls, back tomorrow but for now, that's it, that's all and I am outta here. Until then, I remain...