MASHOUT  2011

Still  Offending  People  After  All  These  Beers


It was a beautiful sunny day when I arrived early Thursday afternoon. There were already a bunch of CRABS and CSI hooligans soiling the pristine mountain with their presence, setting the stage for yet another environmental assault that would take a year for Nature to recover from. Some of them got roped into planting irises, making sure that this would be not only an environmental assault, but also a gay one.

I went over to the Homebrewers Alley (aka Camp du Saison) campsite and enjoyed a few beers, including Jason's incredible sour cherry oude bruin, which ended up being my favorite beer of the entire weekend.

We walked to the NoVA HomeBrew campsite. NoVA participated in the Bucca Brewing Challenge, put forth by BURP member and MASHOUT founder Ralph Bucca. The challenge was to brew a beer on site and consume it during the weekend. The NoVA beer was brewed inside a watermelon. They had several beers on tap, both kegged and firkinned. We sampled them all.

The grains were...
...in a mesh bag.
The beer was served Saturday.

These guys know how to prepare for any fitting-related emergency.

The CRABS dinner consisted of tacos, chili and other stuff that would eventually make its way to the port-o-potties. The tacos were so hot that someone commented, "It's all fun and games until someone loses a sphincter."

Grover was in fine form, as this video shows. He passed out by 8 PM but was up less than 2 hours later to entertain us, turning what had been a beautiful evening into the Night of the Red Demon.

General mayhem ensued, including drinking, jokes, drinking, jenga, and drinking. In the wee hours I learned an important camping lesson: when sleeping in a dark tent, never put your pee jug next to your water jug.

Friday morning I went to the Rocky Gap Lodge for a shave and a shower, then came back for breakfast, which featured CRABS's usual blend of fat and trans fat.

Keg Row already had about 20 kegs, which would expand to 40 by Saturday. It also had a couple of walking sticks copulating above one of them. Talk about getting wood.

The weather was great as we spent the day drinking and eating. CRABS's "Mini Keg Row" featured several kegs and would have 12 by Saturday. Kudos to Art for his wonderful peach ale.

The third annual Sour Hour, hosted by Homebrewers Alley, was a rousing success as dozens of campers sampled a plethora of sour and/or funky beers. There was so much Brettanomyces that someone commented, "My liver has a pellicle." The selections included:

  1. Jason's cabernet lambic
  2. Kevin's sour Three Lions clone
  3. Ben's blueberry gueuze
  4. Jason's sour cherry oude bruin
  5. Jason's Belgian pale ale
  6. Paul L.'s saison
  7. Jason's sour triple
  8. Victory Helios
  9. Jason's chardonnay saison
  10. Jason's sour cherry saison
  11. Hanssen's Cassis
  12. Flying Dog's experimental sour porter
  13. Jason's saison d'lupulin
  14. someone's root beer with Brettanomyces
  15. Ben's saison
  16. Ben's raspberry/strawberry gueuze
  17. Liefman's Cuvee Brut

Afterward I walked down to the poker tent, where a bunch of guys spend the better part of MASHOUT playing poker every year. They always bring great beer. I tried several of what they had. Meanwhile I missed Fry-day, where CRABS folks fried wild mushrooms, hushpuppies, pickles (2 versions), steak bites, dragon eggs (peppers in pork), tofu (served with kimchee), jerked chicken, apples wrapped in bacon, and peaches. The fried Kool-Aid didn't turn out well, and Trevor spent the evening with red hands.

Immediately after Fry-day was Firkin Friday. There was a firkin of Alan's ordinary bitter, and Duclaw tapped a firkin of ... well, I'll let Jim tell you about it:

After that things were a bit hazy. I vaguely remember someone sticking something on my shorts. (Note that I said on, not in.) Then someone took my camera to snap this lovely photo.

We got about an hour of rain, which didn't dampen our fun one bit as we huddled under community tents and enjoyed the usual drinking, groping and sodomy. When the rain ended and the sun went down (heh heh, I said "went down"), Dominic's band Black Falls played three sets of "door-blowin' blues" down at the barn. Scores of people danced, and everyone had a great time except those whose shirts Rob tried to pull off.

We spent the remainder of the night being our usual offensive selves, except red-handed Trevor, who became Angry Trevor. Brisket was being served at the Heavy Seas campsite so I availed myself of that. We partook of many beers at Keg Row. It's amazing the ideas you come up with when you've been drinking. For example, there were several kids at MASHOUT this year (apparently their parents never met us), and someone suggested kid-friendly activities for next year's event, like a wood chipper Slip n' Slide. Also, near Keg Row there was a setup with five taps. One was a gose, which was spelled "göse". The umlaut over the 'o' elicited the comment, "Any beer with an umlaut is a Nazi fuckin' beer," so someone wrote a reassuring message next to it:

Back at CRABS Hill folks played guitars and a ukelele and sang songs such as "A Baby Ate My Dingo."

Saturday morning brought lots of fog. And a few hangovers. Jen and I went to Rocky Gap Lodge to shower. Her lovely husband Jeff preferred to stay at camp and stink. Breakfast featured another healthy dose of fat, as well as more eggs than all the Kardashians' ovaries combined. Then a bunch of us went to shoot wrist rockets. Okay, get your mind out of the gutter. Wrist rockets are slingshots. First we drank some cans of Sly Fox Lager, then we set the empty cans up and shot marbles and BBs at them. It turns out that we only needed one can because our shots were about as accurate as I am hitting a toilet in the dark after 8 beers. We even missed most of the helium balloons that Art released, which are now probably choking dolphins. Jim said that when I shot I looked like I was taking a dump. Little did he know that I was.

Note Grover's happy salutation.

Afterward the homos played poker while the heteros drank at Keg Row. Someone found an old Bush/Cheney campaign sign in the woods and put it in front of one of the jockey boxes.

Oh, remember those two brown walking sticks that were doing the nasty? Well, I found a green one. It was the only wood I got all weekend.

The annual Big Beer Tasting and Food Pairing drew the largest crowd ever - about 70 people. A big thanks to Joel, Ty, Jeff and Kevin for cooking and organizing the food. We had:

  1. Smuttynose Old Brown Dog Ale paired with vegetable samosas with chutney and tamarind
  2. Flying Dog Double Dog paired with curry
  3. CRABS's 2007 Russian imperial stout paired with gulab jamun
  4. Chris S.'s IPA paired with reuben
  5. Drie Fonteinen Oude Geuze paired with brownies with cherry topping
  6. Renaissance Brewing Stonecutter Scotch Ale paired with smoked trout
  7. Sierra Nevada 30th Anniversary
  8. Black Diamond Peak XV Imperial Porter
  9. Kelly's Westvleteren 12 clone
  10. Buck's "dandelion shine" moonshine
  11. St. Bernardus Abt 12
  12. 2005 Duclaw Devil's Milk
  13. Val Dieu Grand Cru
  14. Unibroue Quatre Centiem (Quebec's 400th anniversary beer)
  15. Allagash Curieux
  16. Joel's Orval clone
  17. Ben's saison
  18. Jay's "blacker than prison cock" Russian imperial stout
  19. Ben's gueuze
  20. Ben's Flanders red
  21. Ben's "bloody piss" strawberry/raspberry gueuze
Grover gets wood.
So does Pops.
The obligatory fake(?) dog poop.

Someone brought a bottle of skunked Corona, which Grover drank some of and had this reaction. Apparently it tasted like a skunk with VD. Afterward I went to the Queen City Homebrew Club campsite and sampled some Dogfish Head beers. Then I went over to the poker tent. They had bottles of six vintages of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot, 2006 through 2011, and we tasted each of them in order. 2006 had notes of plum, hops and alcohol. 2007 and 2008 were hoppy, malty and clean. 2009 and 2010 leaned more toward malt. 2011 was more balanced.

Before...
...and after.

Back on CRABS Hill, Joel managed to break a chair. In his defense, it was not the only chair to break that weekend.

Then several of us did a beer tasting featuring:

  1. 2009 Goose Island Bourbon County Stout
  2. 2007 Sierra Nevada Bigfoot
  3. 2005 Thomas Hardy
  4. Dogfish Head My Antonia
  5. Jolly Pumpkin Special Brown Ale
  6. Jeff's Thomas Hardy clone
  7. Old Schoolhouse Brewery Imperial Stout
  8. Cigar City Bolita
  9. 2004 Thomas Hardy
  10. Duclaw X2 Imperial Wit
  11. Jim's 14-year-old homebrew (barleywine or old ale)

We missed the group MASHOUT photo, which was just as well. I mean, would you want us in any of your photos?

We were also late for the annual Saturday Night Feast, but there was still plenty of food left. There was no corn this year, which was unfortunate because we weren't able to play CRABS's special version of cornhole.

The night started out pleasant enough. Pops and others played music near the campfire, while up on CRABS Hill I told jokes so bad that they cleared the area faster than one of Jim's farts.

Then something happened, an event so shocking, so vile, so pukemaking that I am hesitant to report it, but being a diligent journalist I must. Ten guys - who are barely tolerable to look at in the first place - decided to take their shirts off. Yes, you read that right. They exposed their pasty white torsos to the unsuspecting public. They then formed their own Gay Pride Parade and went about molesting campers at their campsites, going so far as to borrow someone's tiki torches and march around singing Detachable Penis. There's a fine line between a group and a mob, and these freaks certainly crossed it. Note that yours truly did not remove his shirt; anyone who would do that at a venerated event such as MASHOUT is just a disgusting, classless goober. Down at the campfire a bunch of these half-naked flesh blobs sang Bohemian Rhapsody, making this the gayest MASHOUT ever. In fact, it was so gay that even Big Gay Ron, who normally spends MASHOUT sans shirt, kept his on. But being gay is no crime. As Grover put it, "Gay is the new straight."

The great weather continued all night into Sunday, when we packed up our stuff. Some of us had brunch down by the campfire. It was a beautiful morning except for Grover's cries of "My ass is still bleeding!" Being the last CRABS member to leave, I had to pick up the stray items that other CRABSters left behind: seven used condoms, a pink dildo, and a deflated inflatable midget. If anyone knows who these belong to, please let me know. Oh wait, that last item is mine.

Some memorable quotes from the weekend: