A New Keg and Potato Bacon Jalepeno Soup

It's been a little cool today- high 50's and only a little sun this morning.
We ran out of beer last night...bummer! We usually go through about a 'pony' or quarter keg of a local brew every other month or so. We tend to gravitate towards either robust IPAs or Brown or Red Ales...we like some bite with our brew, so to speak. Probably the same reason I drink a French roast or Italian roast coffee.
So, today, we had an errand to run. We headed over to The Creamery/Klamath Basin Brewery. It's a very cool building was an actual creamery back in the day. It's been converted to a great local brewery and also a casual restaurant/pub.
The menu featured a "Potato Bacon Jalepeno Soup" that sounded perfect on a cool day like today. Unfortunately, they RAN OUT when we wanted to order a bowl. Argh. So after picking up a pony keg of Crystal Springs IPA we headed home, and I came up with a pretty yummy recipe for my own soup.

 Since I still have a pretty full bag of huge, beautiful jalepenos and another quarter bag of small red, yellow and orange peppers, I decided to just roast them along with some onion chunks. The jalepenos are leftover from the pig turds we smoked yesterday- cheese and sausage stuffed jalepenos wrapped in bacon and smoked at 250 for 1.5 hours- incredibly good!
While the peppers were roasting, I diced 4 slices of bacon and rendered the fat.

When the bacon was crispy, I used a slotted spoon to remove the crispy bits and left the fat in the pan.
When the peppers were done, I peeled, stemmed and seeded the peppers and tossed them into the bacon fat, along with the roasted onions and 3 smashed cloves of garlic, and 3 chopped stalks of celery. I let this cook until the veggies were tender. Then I added about 3 1/2 cups of peeled and diced red potatoes and let it cook for a few minutes.

After a couple of minutes, I added 4 cups of chicken broth. I always have chicken broth in the freezer, so I warmed it up while everything else was cooking. I brought this to a boil, then lowered the heat to let the potato-veggie mixture cook. 

When the potatoes were tender, I used my immersion blender to make a smooth mixture. I added one cup of half and half to the mix and blended again for a couple of minutes. I added some salt after tasting, and then, it was done!

OK, there isn't a picture of the soup, topped with bacon and a little cheddar cheese. I forgot to take a picture and we gobbled it down so quickly that I had to take a picture before I put the rest of the soup in the fridge for lunch/dinner tomorrow :)
Smoking hot, but not burning...just spicy and tasty!