Thursday August 6th, 2015 was IPA Day. Also commonly referred to as National IPA Day or International IPA Day, Craft Beer says

IPA Day is opportunity for all breweries, bloggers, businesses and consumers to connect and share their love of craft beer.

Bars and breweries around Houston and the world set to celebrating.

Saint Arnold Brewery, being a true member of the Houston community, loves artcars.  Owner/Co-Founder Brock Wagner calls the annual Art Car Parade his favorite event in Houston. The brewery has used artcars as an advertising tool since the beginning. They have created or consigned 15 cars to date. The most recent is a fabulous 1959 Cadillac painted by Robyn Sanders.

For the recent IPA Day Saint Arnold toured a variety of local bars with collections of their cars in three different groups. The reason behind the tour was their new beer: Art Car IPA. At each bar they were offering “buy the beer, keep the glass” with both a street graffiti style logo created by local artist GONZO247 for the new beer and a new Elissa IPA logo with stylized ship’s wheel.

Their dancing card filled so quickly that Saint Arnold extended their Art Car IPA debutante to Friday evening as well. It was then that I found time to walk to one of my local purveyors of food and drink to try out the new brew. Not coincidentally perhaps, I ran into some friends and local art car (and scooter) artists.

Art scooterist Gay Barlow said, “I’m an Elissa fan. This tastes a little lighter.” The new beer is a deceptively refreshing beer, hiding the 7.2% alcohol well. Compared to their other IPA offerings (Elissa and Endeavor Double IPA) it has less malt helping it feel lighter. Lots of fruit and citrus flavors abound, but there is not too much lingering bitterness (with a reported 55 IBU).

We met Allison King, one of Saint Arnold’s local sales representatives. The sales reps often use the art cars as business cars, and she was one of the group trekking them about to different bars. She informed us that the beer isn’t generally available yet, but will be this fall in cans (after the Oktoberfest and before the Spring Bock) from their recently added canning line.

It will be available in a limited release on tap, lingering in area bars after this special Art Car Day draft-only release.

So, I’ve been meaning to make some jam and the cheap strawberries littering the aisles of the supermarkets made me finally do it.  The honey I used (in place of some of the sugar) was more expensive than the fruit.  Granulated sugar would have been considerably cheaper.

I enjoy reading Food In Jars and I was eyeing her Strawberry Vanilla jam recipe, and based mine on that.

First I had to look up macerated strawberries.  Once I figured out what that meant, I got to it. Cut up the strawberries in small pieces, cover them in powdered sugar and put them in the fridge.  You don’t have to be delicate. Smashing them into the jar with a wooden spoon is encouraged.  I removed most of the white interior pith – later reading leads me to believe that might be discouraged.

My strawberries were slightly underripe though fully red.  I didn’t use the whole container I bought, just filled up a quart mason jar.  It started with the juice a little under half way up the jar.  It ended almost to the top after a few hours.

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Wikipedia tells me, …

March 2, 1836 – Texas Revolution: At a convention inWashington-on-the-Brazos, the Mexican state of Texasadopted a declaration of independence from Mexico, establishing the Republic of Texas.