Nick and I try to use the traditional/modern anniversary gift categories as not so much guidelines but as inspiration for our anniversary gifts to one another. Sometimes it's very literal, such as when Nick gave me a beautiful custom wooden jewelry chest for our fifth anniversary (traditonal gift = wood). This year, with the bizarre category of "candy/iron," we got creative. Nick visited one of our favorite jewelry stores in La Jolla and spotted some beautiful ancient glass pieces that I had drooled over on a previous visit. The glass is over 2,000 years old and has a pale blue-green tint to it that changes with the light (but it's not irridescent or shiny). But the real kicker: the reason for its special color? Iron deposits in the glass. This is a picture of the necklace from Gili Anna's website (I love the chain, too!! It modernizes the piece.) - there is a weird gold hue to the metal in the picture, but it's just very shiny silver in person.
I decided to go with the "candy" theme - appropriate, I thought, given Nick's sweet tooth. Teeth. All of them. Every cavity-filled one. A box of chocolates seemed too fleeting ... so I thought it'd be nice to make the gift last by doing a gourmet chocolates-of-the-month club. And after reading endless reviews and asking around, I settled on the cleverly named www.chocolatemonthclub.com. Imagine my pleasure when I found out that the chocolate-of-the-month club is affiliated with a microbrew beer-of-the-month club! (And a cheese-of-the-month club, and a cigar-of-the-month club) And you can rotate among the clubs each month however you want! For any of you who know Nick, you'll understand how a microbrew-of-the-month club would satisfy his sweet tooth *almost* as well as actual sweets. Just as you would know that a cheese-of-the-month club would be better than anything else in the world to ME (but we'll leave that for another time ...) So my gift to him was an alternating chocolate-and-beer-of-the-month from now until we leave San Diego. Well, we got our first beer shipment last month and just got around to opening it up tonight!
Our delivery featured two small breweries, with two kinds of beer from each. The Atwater Block Brewing Company, formerly Stoney Creek, is located in downtown Detroit, and our two selected brews were a true American (pre-Prohibition style) Pilsner and a Vanilla Java Porter that was heavy on the Java!
The other brewery is the Lakefront Brewing Company out of Milwaukee. I had to laugh at the story behind it - two brothers, a chemical engineer and a police officer, got the "brew bug" and with a healthy dose of sibling rivalry they became rather accomplished home brewers. They went into business together and started a string of firsts in microbrewing: they bottled the first fruit-based beer since Prohibition, introduced the first American-made organic beer, and even created a gluten-free brew so that everyone, including Celiac sufferers, can enjoy good beer.
The Lakefront White is a beer I'm excited to try since it took Silver at the World Beer Championship. As did the Eastside Dark. We haven't cracked these open yet, but I expect good things!
Later this month Nick should get his second chocolate delivery - and maybe he will enjoy it with the Vanilla Java Porter and the Eastside Dark =)
3 comments:
Oh my little nerds..., oops, I mean romantics...
Awesome! That's the same beer of the month club we've been in for a few years! I originally purchased a year's subscription as a graduation gift for Ben when he got his Master's degree, but we've enjoyed it so much that we've kept it coming!!! (Side note: I actually was not a fan of the vanilla java porter.) We love the day when that box arrives! The newsletter is always funny yet informative, and we've grown to love Murl's column!!! Hope you enjoy your subscription as much as we have!!! :)
Amy, the fact that you chose the same one reinforces my opinion that it must be the best one out there! We weren't that excited about the Java Porter either ... but we still drank 'em! =)
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