Victory Hop Wallop - House on Fire Edition

We got off to a good start this weekend with the german beer tasting event + Christmas Schooner play at the History Theatre in St. Paul on Friday night.  The beer was great, my only complaint was that we only got 3 oz. of each!  The play was very well done, and at the end we got to meet one of the lead actors, a 15 yr old in Steve's wife's high school class. 

Holy shit.   I just had one of the scariest experiences of my life.  As I finished that last sentence, my fire alarms started blasting.  I headed into the kitchen to go check it out, thinking it probably wasn't anything.  Couldn't have been more wrong.  Black smoke was billowing into my kitchen from my garage, I opened the door and my entire garbage can was an inferno.  Last week, I got a cord of new firewood, which I had placed in the garage next to the garbage can - that was starting to flame up also.  I ran back to the living room, called 911, grabbed my dog Murphy and ran out the front door.  Murphy was totally oblivious, he thought we were playing a fun house-burning game and was frollicking around happily....he's a big R-tard. Anyway once outside, completely terrified, I didn't know what to do so I took my snow shovel and started chucking as much snow as I could onto the fire.  It actually helped, but was probably pretty stupid because I inhaled a decent amount of smoke.  A good samaritan ran up from the road and helped me drag the flaming melting garbage can out into the driveway, and right at that point the firetrucks arrived.  They doused my entire garage with water, put out the fire, house saved.  That fire was burning so quickly and so hot, and right next to an entire cord of fresh dry firewood, I could have easily lost the entire house tonight. 

The fire department asked me some questions, trying to figure out how the fire started.  Earlier today, I cleaned out my fireplace (had a fire last night during the big snow storm).  I scooped out all the ashes and put them in a plastic garbage bag, and put them in the trash thinking nothing of it - they felt cool!  Well apparently ashes can hold enough heat to start a fire for up to 2 weeks.  So that's what did it - those ashes probably ignited the fully loaded garbage can, and started the whole thing.  I'm very lucky - the fire alarm worked, the responders were lightning fast, and a great samaratin dropped everything to come help. 

As you probably thought from the post title, I was going to do a review of Victory Hop Wallop tonight, but I opened the 1 Hop Wallop I had left before the fire, and now it's been sitting out for a while, kinda warm, and I've got ash in my ears, nose, and mouth, so unfortunately it's not going to happen.  I promise to do a review of this beer in the future, because it's pretty good....

I don't think I'm going to have a fire in the fireplace tonight.