Every once in a while, I like to get together with my friends and drink a nice bottle or two. It started with my friend Simon and I drinking a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label and it went so well we decided that we would continue the tradition.
By all accounts, Shiner beer shouldn't have made it this long. The Spoetzl Brewery ferments its brew in a one-stoplight town that's not on the way to anywhere, and much larger regional brewers long ago succumbed to consolidation and the muscle of national brewers.
FINEST quality west country produce, top local chefs and some very tasty weather were the ingredients for another hugely successful Bridport Food Festival at the weekend.
Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond was today accused of "snoozing on his watch" over the announcement that drinks giant Diageo is to shed 900 jobs.
Months after it first kicked off, Angelo & Maxie's Thursday night craft beer tasting hosted by Fresh Beer Inc.'s Chris Montelius is still going strong.
An early entry for tomorrow's version of The Session as I am preparing to go on a special assignment. The Session is a monthly mass blog-in where folks around the globe face the same beery question and come up with a vast range of answers. The question this time as posed by Beer by Bart is actually pretty practical:
If you see the words “travel” and “beer” and instead of your best tourist sagas you think of work or logistics, we want to know your tips and strategies on the road. (Perhaps for getting prized bottles home.)
Tips? You want tips? Here are my best trip tips for the beer shopping wanderer:
Travel with large numbers of non-drinkers and plan to stay over 48 hours out of Canada. That way you get all their duty free.
Travel with kids. Lots of them. No one thinks you are a weirdo beer nerd if you show up with the kids. And the kids serve as a great excuse for an early exit if the beers or the staff are just not that interesting.
Keep all your receipts, declare what you and be prepared to pay your taxes to the customs officers. Half the time they wave you through. Sometimes it works out like the time I had a load of Michigan brews and, when I declared I had 72 beer, the guy in the booth said "Oh, like three cases of Bud? Go on though." I likely had about $150 bucks in taxes payable on the Belgians and micros in the back of the van.
Bring blankets. Even though you are going to openly declare the goods you are packing, you need to protect them from sudden temperature change. I wrap all the cases of beer with beach blankets to help them keep from any wild swings.
Study up to plan your purchases. The BeerAdvocate's Beer Fly is a great resource for up to date information about what lays along your travel route. Another resource are regional guides like those written by Andy Crouch or Lew Bryson in my neck of the woods.
Finally, let people know you are coming ahead of time and what you might want. I find many good shops are quite willing to bring in good stuff if they know you will buy it. And a brewery may also hold back a special bottle or two if they know you are coming through town and you have emailed a special request. You never know.
That's a good starting point. The best thing about being early is you get to provide all the obvious answers. I'll be interested to see what better tricks others think of now that they have to think harder about it than I did. And I was so positive. I didn't mention that really interesting post by Mr. Delia today entitled "Why I’m Finished With Beer Dinners" at all. Not once.
Bartenders in Utah threw open their doors Wednesday as the state ditched a 40-year-old requirement that customers fill out an application, pay a fee and become a member of a private club before setting foot in a bar.
We got on the bus for Bad Waldsee, and the driver said our DING ticket is no good on the BODO lines, and he charged us another twelve euro for that 1½-hour ride.
Having missed the bus at Bad Waldsee, we walked a mile or so to the Mühlbergstüble and had a tasty Steinacher beer. The Mühlbergstüble is a nice bar that's probably lots of fun when it's busy, but we were the only people in the place at 4:00pm.
We walked back to the train station just in time to see our train pull out. Just as well, since we didn't have tickets. We waited 50 minutes in the rain for the next train, nursing Choo's injured hand all the while. (I'll let her post those details.) We arrived in Biberach at 6:10pm, and nobody ever asked us for the tickets we bought.
Just like last time, I can't get the hotel's internet connection to work with my machine nor on Paris', so there might be some delays in posting my notes.
Choo and I got on a bus headed for Ehingen. Near the end of the trip, the driver asked why we were going there, and I told him we needed to change to a different bus to go to Zwiefaltendorf. He asked which bus, then what time it was scheduled to leave, which happened to be in about two minutes. He started hollering at the car in front of us to "Geh! Geh!", and he pointed us at the bus we needed, and we made the change just in time.
The bus made a turn by a sign saying it was only two kilometers to Zwiefaltendorf, so I figured we'd want the next stop and pushed the button. The next stop, however, was Datthausen Kapelle, about a kilometer short of Zwiefaltendorf, so we walked the rest of the way. Funny thing: about halfway there, the bus had made its u-turn and passed us going the other way. The driver looked amusingly confused.
Blank's Brauerei, Zwiefaltendorf
They are friendly people at Blank's, and the beers were good, and so was the food. The senior Herr Blank allowed us to walk around his 130-hectoliter (111-barrel) brewhouse and distillery, and he seemed quite interested in the American brewing scene.
Our next target was nearby Zwiefalter Klosterbräu. The bus would have taken nearly an hour to get us there — if we hadn't already missed it anyway — so Choo decided we should walk. Five kilometers. Along a highway. In the rain. Bad idea immediately after lunch and beers. My stomach reacted like it did in København, but much less violently.
We did manage to get there in the end.
Zwiefalter Klosterbräu, Zwiefalten
Zwiefalter Klosterbräu is a fairly big brewery with a fairly big Gaststätte attached. We didn't eat there, but we did manage a few of their beers.
We waited most of an hour for the bus to Biberach via Riedlingen, and got back to the hotel just after 6:00pm. I still can't get the wireless internet to connect.
JOHNNIE Walker whisky bottle labels will need to be changed after parent company Diageo announced an overhaul that will see the closure of its last operation in the brand's home town of Kilmarnock.
Absolut Vodka has launched a wicked iPhone application . It is called A Drinkspiration and it incorporates GPS, live trend forecasting, sharing with Twitter and Facebook.
"It smells like the granary when it's filled." I think that is what I was told but it makes sense.
It pours - imagine - rather deep brownish and has a rich mocha froth and foam. The nose in delightful. Fig and chocolate, milk and bread crust. Like a rich child's breakfast in 1710. The mouth expands with both smooth and whisky sharp. Not Lowland, Campbelltown. Barely a "hodge yer whisht" from the land of my forefathers off the far eastern side of Arran. An amazing swishy mouthful of softness, grain, roast and shadow of burn. Batch 17 in the Paradox series. "Awfy braw" were Oor Wullie asked.
BAers don't do subtle. The lips tingle from the water of life.
Full Sail Brewing has a lot of things to celebrate this July. Our nation's independence, Oregon Craft Beer Month, and, most significantly for them, celebrating their own independence. On July 2, they celebrate their tenth anniversary as an employee - owned brewery.
Where else but Florida could a place like Jimbo's exist? It's a Miami bait shack - emphasis on "shack" - a few kilometres from downtown but with an isolated island feel and a diverse mix of customers.
Look, I am up for any good trademark versus copyright hissy handbags brawl as the next guy... but wouldn't you think someone might have checked against the name as part of the set up? Especially if you are going to charge admission and then suggest that you get to control all context, as in:
...you automatically grant (or warrant that the owner of such rights has expressly granted) to... a royalty-free, non-exclusive, perpetual and irrevocable worldwide right and license to use, reproduce, modify, publish and distribute such materials or incorporate such materials into any form or technology now known or later developed, and you waive any moral rights you may have in having the material altered or changed in a manner not agreeable to you.
Have beer blog data and forum posts become such hot commodities that gathering content in this sort of manner will lead to anything? The moral rights clause is interesting. "Moral rights?" you say. "What are those?" As those clever folks at wikipedia note "moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work published anonymously or pseudonymously, and the right to the integrity of the work." So if you waive attribution, it means your words might be presented as someone else's. If that were to occur, well, who would know who was the real clever person?
It's a jungle out there, kids, I tell ya. Even in Web 2.0. Do we need two connoisseurs? Or even one for that matter? I wonder if there are any hidden meanings in the inter-linguistic borrowing, as there is with aficionado with its contextual awareness of the abiding tragedy inherent in the object of desire. Maybe the sound "connoisseur" has a rude meaning in another language. I've never been able to hear someone call the publican "guv'nor" in a British 1940s movie since I worked in Poland.
The real question might be this: how many on-line beer forums do you really need? One of the BC's might be the best of all but the other real question, if you turn it around, might be what would your one favorite beer forum look like?
You came, you saw and you seem to have voted. The Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery chain was the winner of our little informal poll. With 18% of the votes, they easily defeated the second place spot which was shared by Pizza Port and McMenamins.
Below are the rest of the top ten spots in the poll.
Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery | 43 Votes | 18%
Pizza Port Brewing Company | 29 Votes | 12%
McMenamins | 29 Votes | 12%
Iron Hill Brewery | 24 Votes | 10%
Gordon Biersch Brewery Restaurants | 17 Votes | 7%
BEIRUT: Graduation art exhibits are often forced affairs where distant and not-so distant family members are guilt-tripped into an evening spent trading niceties over sub-par abstractions of art.
I came way too late to the Google Analytics mania that is sweeping the globe. Forget Twitter and its limitations. Forget Facebook and those so-called friends. No, what people are really obsessing about out there on the information superhighways is actually what is actually happening on their websites. I've had it up for about 6 months now but was a little surprised when I rooted around for a bit today to find some facts to report your use of this site:
Facebook vistors from Oslo spend 7 minutes and 41 seconds on average reading these posts. Oslo based visitors coming via Knut's blog spend only 2 minutes and one second during their visit.
The most popular single post at the moment is the one I wrote last February called "So How Many Calories Are In That Beer Anyway?" It's been visited 11,661 times since it went up. You people are worried about that waistline, aren't you.
I have had three times more visits from Iran than Iraq in 2009.
Posts with search engine friendly words like "beer prices" and "buying beer in Quebec" do very well with 500-600 visits a month even though they are from 2004 and 2005... and probably not that current or even well written.
Berthoud farming family grows the Coors' special barley - the 'soul of the beer' BERTHOUD - Bill Markham picked the top off a stalk of barley and held it in his tanned, weathered hand.
Ask Brian Duax about Iowa's best-known, least-available whiskey, and one of the first phrases to spout from his lips is "a pain in the ass." Duax, co-owner of Central City Liquors in Des Moines, said he gets an average of 30 to 35 phone calls a day inquiring about Templeton Rye, a three-year-old whiskey brand made from a Prohibition-era recipe ...
Well, I finished the book on Wednesday watching kids softball practice. The short message really is that if you are reading this blog you should buy the book. Well written, informative without being stuffy, funny yet quite personal. Likely the best beer book of 2009.
And I checked. I didn't make the credits. I didn't think I would but you never know. You never know if you are going to see a note about the whack job who was emailing about the (Inter-)National Toast for Michael Jackson on 30 September 2007, a few days into the tall ship portion of the trip. But no. No, I got something better. On page 248, when he was ten days from Brazil, experiencing one of his lowest points of the entire trip what did he write?
...And even if I had been successful, so what? Who would actually have cared apart from a handful of blogging beer geeks? What was I going to do?
I was verklempt. When one feels like an utter loser and that one's mission is a dud who springs to mind? Beer bloggers, that's who. I am sure it was really thoughts of Knut rather than me that steadied our man Pete in that hour of darkness upon the high seas but it's the general idea, right?
PETALUMA, Calif. -- Pabst, a toothy Boxer mixed-breed stole the show at Friday's World's Ugliest Dog Contest at the Marin-Sonoma Fair, defeating a former world champion Chinese crested named Rascal to take first place.
City Hall will award grants to a whiskey maker and a startup on Main Street, deciding that both were worthy of taxpayer support but also denying the full grant requests from each of them.
This photo taken May 20, 2009 shows Jeff Arnett, the master distiller at the Jack Daniel Distillery in Lynchburg, Tenn., testing the aroma of whiskey taken from an aging barrel in one of the barrel houses at the distillery.
Adelaide Crows star Nathan Bock slapped his girlfriend twice on the cheek and threw beer in her face during a drunken altercation at an Adelaide hotel, a court has heard.
The gateway to the Whiskey Trail is at George Washington's Mt. Vernon estate where the founding father in 1799 was the country's largest whiskey distiller.
As a Haligonian ex-pat, I learned a lot about craft beer from Garrison in its early years in the mid-90s when it was one of the most reliable Maritime craft brewers that bottled. There was a more obviously Halifax centric naming of the brands back then. I seem to recall that I had a lot of their moreish Barracks Brown. These days I don't get back to old port town anymore - mainly because I discovered that (a) Allagash is in Portland and (b) the sea and the seafood is half the distance to drive.
But I got a few beers in the mailbox the other day from Brian Titus and it suddenly life was all funny blue tartan and touristy puffins again. I am stashing the Ol’ Fog Burner barley wines as to do anything else would be infanticide. This one, however, is the beer for now. It pours a clouded deep orange amber under a white froth and foam with orange marmalade and candied oregano aroma. In the mouth there is lots of green weedy hops with some mint and grapefruit as well. The malt is pretty bread crust-eous with a bit of sultana in there, too. A very fine take on a big hop bomb without the insane booze levels that too often go along for the ride.
At 7%, I do think it is a stretch to call it "imperial" but perhaps it's the great Scottish empire that they are referencing. A beer that could stand up to a deep fried haggis. BAers have the love.
Find out more about Kathleen: Katheen has worked as a bartender for the past six years in all kinds of bars such as: restaurants, dive bars, a nightclub, a rowdy college bar, lounges, a live music venue and even a few private parties.
This year's third trip to Oberschwaben begins! Follow along here, and check out the map.
Our flights — Omaha to Minneapolis to Amsterdam — were uneventful, which is always a good thing. Choo, having flown non-stop from San Francisco, was waiting (and by waiting, I mean sleeping) at the departure gate in Amsterdam, and we all flew to Stuttgart together. We had time for a couple of beers in an airport bar before the long train ride to Biberach. We arrived at our hotel around 6:00pm and had dinner and a couple of beers before hitting the sack.
It's officially happy hour, but forget about that vodka martini. Montclair author Pamela Redmond Satran is back at it -- sharing all the tells that reveal you to be neither young nor hip.
In the days back when I traveled in Eastern Europe, I had a guidebook that explained the grades of drinking establishment I might expect to find and learned there was a class of bar in Poland called a pivarnia or some such thing that catered to their manly but odd working hours - there was a gap between the end of the shift at around 3 pm and supper at about six. I learned men went to such places to stand and drink. They weren't recommended. The one time I did open the heavy door of the local example in the particular Baltic neighbourhood where I taught English, all the Daddies of the little darlings at my school turned to greet the vision of me at the door and, as one, swore at me at the top of their lungs. I was not welcome. I closed the door, stood for a moment still outside and then walked away.
I didn't fit in. I've often thought later how great it would have been to fit in that world, to have slapped the backs of the real menski Polski and shared a beer. But I couldn't. It could never be. For some reason, that feeling of dislocation popping into my mind when I read Eric Asimov's article in The New York Times today:
Studio Square was all too typical of a syndrome afflicting New York beer culture. Great beer abounds today in New York, and the choices keep getting better. Nowadays, almost every neighborhood bar has at least a few craft beers. The better beer bars offer an expanded selection, scouring the world for unknown brewers and new beers. And the mark of a top-flight spot is one or two cask beers, served unpasteurized and unfiltered with natural carbonation, rather than from a pressurized keg. Yet an imbalance exists that threatens to undercut the pleasure to be found in a perfectly drawn pint. While aficionados yearn to have beer taken as seriously as wine, too often beer is presented in a context that diminishes the respect it deserves.
Because, you know, respect is only possible in a context of "creative extensions of pub grub" or at a "small jewel, more atelier than bar." The thought of such a place makes me yearn for the reception back in Poland which I think I might prefer to face again than too precious a beer bar. Asimov hits - but then seemingly squirts foul - the real point late in the article. To install a high end kitchen and staff costs money. Which means more expensive beer. I don't want more expensive beer, thanks.
Don't get me wrong. I am really glad a place like beerbistro exists a few hours from here and that I get to end up there once or twice a year or so. Most days, however, if I want to try something really swell and beery in my food, well, I will make it, thanks. Learn to cook well if you can't - the beerbistro cookbook is a good place to start. Usually what I really want when I go out is a plate I can get a decent and modestly priced dinner for the family and have a good craft beer selection to daydream about as I sit and let life's concerns recede. Heck, my nearest to a local even has peanut butter and ice cream on the menu. Magic. Sometimes just one type of sandwich will even do. Other than that, food in a tavern is supplied so you can extend a session, so you don't have to run next door for supper and have someone else nab the primo seat you have occupied since 1:37 pm physically and mentally since last Tuesday. Pub food should be tasty and it shouldn't kill you but, really, are any of you pushing away the bowl of nuts in your favorite beer bar because there just aren't enough cashews in the mix?
The fact is beer may go with good food but good food need not go with beer. To think otherwise strikes me as something approaching an argument the temperance union may have tossed around when it moved into a new town a century ago. It says beer needs something else to make it OK. Like nicely dressed wait staff or small portions on big plates. Like the old rules which in some Canadian provinces that lingered long after prohibition including the one that said you can't get served if you don't have a seat. Last time I checked, good beer really didn't care what your betters thought.
NEW YORK : Broadcast TV networks are cruising for more alcohol ad dollars. The New York Post notes that CBS dipped its toe into the hard stuff this year, airing an ad for Absolut Vodka during the February telecast of the Grammy Awards.
I've had a Bear Republic stout, the red and the brown as well as a pale ale and liked them all... but then there's this one made with, you know, rye. You have to wonder about rye beer, that less popular and less interesting cousin on beery family tree. The only one that ever blew me away was Bittersweet Lenny's R.I.P.A. but that was a big 10% bomb with plenty of other things going on. With that one, you knew you were drinking a wall of beer with the rye crunched by the sweet malt and jangling hops of what I seem to have called "Messiahive flavour" - I was so clever back in 2006.
Hop Rod, by comparison, is still a stiffening 8% but it has the overall volume turned down a bit, letting the rye sit with the grapefruit and twiggy hops. It pours a cloudy reddish chestnut ale under a massive tan head that holds. There is malt with raisin and maybe apple but it sits in support of the bitter. The bitter sort of reminds me of Angostura, not just herbal but dry and barky. Not at all out of balance or fully arid by any stretch but a tad barky in its cumin spiciness. But barky may be exactly what you are looking for like the BAers who are in love.
So is there a Belgian yeastily spiced beer made with spicy rye?
More weird news as LCBO shelves in Ontario are getting bare a few hours before the impending strike. Favorite panicky line so far: "...people left with their arms laden with bottles and cartons as if preparing for doomsday." Sure, it's dooooom when you can only get domestic beer, right. See, the wonderfully named alternative monopoly, The Beer Store, will still be open but they can't sell spirits or wine. Other things to recall as we walk forward into the unknown:
The LCBO controls the wholesale trade as well so restaurants, bars and hotels would lose the ability to sell if this goes on enough.
The also have some weird snitchy data products which seem rather intrusive if they can drill down to the individual purchase combinations.
It's the first hot patch of the summer and Toronto city workers are already on strike. The grumpy don't like being dry.
I have to admit that my favorite media moment in strike 2009 is the item on the CBC's website this evening - displayed clickably above - which shows Ontario booze buyers in such a frenzy that they are wearing down coats and wool hats as they race to fill their cars with a summer's worth of gin and plonk.
Well, the LCBO is not quite yet on strike but when you are in a monopoly market these things can catch you unaware or, worse, unprepared. What's this all about you ask?
A trend toward part-time and casual jobs, and a management proposal to be able to issue 90-day layoff notices at any time - to any employee - remain the top two bones of contention, union leaders said. "This is about workers being poorly treated — part-time and casual workers," union vice-president and treasurer Patty Rout told reporters near a parked trailer ready to become a strike command centre. "Twenty years ago, all the jobs were full-time," she said. "Now, 60 per cent are part-time or casual, people making $10 to $17 an hour, making less than $20,000 a year.
See, as far as I know, the LCBO is the biggest buyer and seller of booze left in the world. Last year it made a profit of 1.35 billion dollars on sales of $4.13 billion which adds up to 33% annual profit. It also made $841 million in sales taxes in 2008 for a combined revenue flow to government of $2,191,000,000 or about 168 bucks for every Ontarian on purchases of $317.69 per Ontarian. Not bad.
So, OK, I panicked and did a semi-Yule-like spree on the first hot evening of the summer. But not for me. No. Not at all. For the wine drinkers in my life. Like I want them casting a thirsty eye upon the stash.
Everyone talks about using fresh ingredients, but it's not every bar where you can walk out back to a greenhouse and watch the bartender pick the herbs he's going to use in your cocktail.
OK, we have moved from page 145 to, what, 332? Yes, that's it. So, I've work through almost central half of Hops and Glory this weekend - still 50% off at amazon.co.uk by the way - and our lad, Pete, has gone on a cruise liner, a tall ship to Brazil and then a container ship to India. As before there is a patch of the life of Pete Brown, then a patch of the history of the English beer trade to service the East India Company's needs. Pete, beer. Pete. Beer. But then something funny happens. From 237 to 306 the pattern is dropped. Not much history. Mainly just Pete and his boaty bits.
"What was he doing?" thought I. If I use the hockey analogy and, being Canadian, I will - it gets a bit second period. A bit "boy not yet realized which girl he really should love" if we analogize to date movies. Which got me thinking about Tristram Shandy, that odd proto-novel-deconstruction thing from 1759 or so which I now know is just three years after "grog" was set out in British navy regulation. It's an interesting book, Tristram Shandy, because it is self-conscious and is a bit about what a novel would be if one could not suspend one's imagination or if one did entirely or something like that. Eighteenth century literature class was 26 years ago, you know. I'll let you can judge the value of the academic investment. It's also about the bleaker end of age of enlightenment as was, we learn, the East India Company.
Anyway, the point is that for 237 to 306, Brown takes us into his internal experience - into the doldrums of the sailing ship and then into the small heart of darkness that is the international shipping trade today - by seemingly forgetting to slip back into the history. It's a good technique. It weighs a bit, wears a bit. But it still takes us along as if to say "it's alright, Al, no need for you to ever go on a container ship from Brazil to India all alone for five weeks... I've done it... don't bother." Thanks Pete. I won't. It's off my to do list.
I have not really followed the server stats very closely for the last year or so but apparently on 4 June 2009 Ann Althouse had a Bitter Woman IPA from Tyranena Brewing and linked to my post from July 2008 at Instapundit to explain on June 5th. Result? Zero visits to my post the day before, then 4,484 the day of the post, then 557 the next day, then 105, then 31, 2 and back to 0. That one bump appears to have moved my whole domain from PR4 to PR5 on Google rankings leading to the false leap in standings for my political and general chit chat blog to #13 in the Canadian rankings.
A French triple. Bought on the zip into Quebec a few months ago, this one has me rubbing my left temple with a serious knuckle.
Nice website. Is it really a triple or is it a saison? It lacks the earthy thang that its fellow country brew biere de garde is known for. It has no triple bubblegum. It has pear. There in the malt. Plenty of pale malt graininess with pear under that seam of light yogurty acidity and slight pepperiness that I use as the marker of saison. Light straw floatie-filled ale under a fine foam of white. I say saison. Heck, I had a Fantome saison right before it as we watched the rather cheesy Revenge of the Cyberman. It's gotta be a saison. It all fits.
It's been a busy few weeks for the mail. Today, this book by Joe Stange and Yvan De Baets came. Sadly, I am not personally familiar with Yvan's work, though he seems to be very much the lad - but attentive readers will recall Joe from the 2008 Christmas photo contest and may even read his excellent and envy generating blog, Thirsty Pilgrim.
I think I've mentioned I spent a few weeks in Brussels half a life ago. I drank Guinness. I knew nothing. Had I only had this sort of guide, I could have been so much more insufferable by now...or at least less easy to satisfy. The book is formatted, after some introductions, on eighty bars, shops, restaurants and other venues with eighty accompanying beers with enough dipsography for even the most ardent beer porn fan. All you need to know is there - address, website, telephone, hours of operation, number of beer and how to get there by tram, bus and underground. On your bike. Away you go. You know you want to.
Still here? You know, the book is called 80 beers not 80 bars - and that's where the book works for the non-traveler. When you have a look at a book like Jackson's The Great Beers of Belgium it's engaging and authoritative but not that handy as a field guide. It's a bit lunky. What Joe and Yvon have done with the descriptions of 80 top Belgian beers and then providing an index of the entries by beer as well as bar has created an easy-peasy North American (or Antipodean for all I know) beer hound's field guide for introducing and developing an interest in these brews. Find some or most of these beers in your favorite beer store and you will be off on another sort of trip.
So, well done. Handy, attractive, clear and compelling. And now I know a "brown cafe" is the equivalent of a dive or community pub. Get it from the publisher or here or learn more on Facebook... or is it at Facebook?
Here's how it happened. Greg asked a very good question about buying a rhubarb lambic upon which I jibed to which Mr. Beaumont commented and then posted in full. I, of course, couldn't keep out of it myself when I added this:
I entirely agree with you on that… for the most part. It’s just that I find many other things including many other things of relatively more value for the price. [This seems to be your sticking point on this and if you have any chance of being Curmudgeo Numero Uno you may have to work through that. Once you have that down we can work on your lightening speed difficulties.] It is not that it is “just beer” so much as running after the increasing parade of the highly priced precious few dulls the true experience of the actually wonderful. And, just for the record, I would likely have been very tempted to buy the same beer at the same moment in the same wonderful place but, still, passed on other experiences you use as comparators. That doesn’t speak to you, just to me. As it can only be “my” relative valuation of things that matters to me as you must be guided by yours.
I think that sums it up very well. There is no absolute concept of "craft beer" that somehow sits as a holy standard against which our experiences as beer fans are measured. It is, in fact, not enough to say "respect beer" - it should be "respect good beer" with the fight sitting only within the meaning of "good" with each glass making its own case in the overall debate. The discussion of value as personal experience central to the understanding of overall market value as you and I have to figure out the greater context of the relative value of our relatives values to explain what one brew means to each of us. We do that through where we place our dollars as well as though the lingering impression each popped cap leaves with us.
To avoid or dismiss that discussion is to fall into some dream-like state where vendors can be seen as rock stars, we beer hounds are mere ticket holders and our only role is to do what we are told. No artisan, unless maybe he's your cousin, deserves that sort of free ride. You know, it is no wonder that it was brewing's "potentiality of growing rich beyond the dreams of avarice" that caught the attention of Dr Johnson. It couldn't have been the challenge of dealing with a complex and knowledgeable chattering clientele which might have its own idea of what was and what was not worthy.
Temp: 90.0 F Heat Index: 99 F Meridian, Key Field, MS The Mississippi Alcoholic Beverage Control unit has arrested Elbert "Al" Williams of 5286 Water Valley Road for possession of an illegal whiskey still.
The Beer Mapping Project wants to know what your favorite Brewpub chain is? Scroll down to vote in the poll for your favorite.
We’re using a fairly loose definition of a Chain Brewpub. We decided that the locations all need to have brewing equipment and a Brewpub Chain needs to have 3 or more locations in order to make our poll. Wikipedia’s definition of a chain store is:
“Chain stores are retail outlets that share a brand and central management, and usually have standardized business methods and practices. These characteristics also apply to chain restaurants and some service-oriented chain businesses.”
They don’t actually state a number, but we decided that if you have three or more brewing pub/restaurant locations under the same name or branding then we could classify them as a chain of brewpubs.
Anyway, enough with the fine print… Vote! (names in poll are randomly assigned)
This Poll has closed!
If your favorite Brewpub Chain got left off the list please post in the comments. If you want to see how we came up with this list, read this forums thread.
Join the Rogue Nation and EastBurn for the launch of Rogue's John-John Dead Guy which is Dead Guy Ale aged in Dead Guy Whiskey barrels, and named after Rogue Brewmaster John Maier and Rogue Master Distiller John Couchot , John-John's collaborators.Chef inspired specials using Rogue's John John Ale and Rogue Bourbon Whiskey.
There is a good article today in The Boston Globe about the brothers Alström and their baby BeerAdvocate. The article's alarmingly lax about the application of the umlauted "o" - the "ö" - but it's good anyway... yet when I got into it I started to get a bit verklempt:
"We definitely have haters. In my opinion, though, that's a true sign of success. If you're surrounded by just a bunch of people who agree with you, you're doing something wrong." As for critics who complain that BeerAdvocate is biased toward certain American beers - those that are "hoppy" and have a high alcohol content are often mentioned, he notes - it isn't the Alströms who prefer one style of beer over another; it's the "beer geeks" whose opinions they track.
Haters? I suppose that's what it might feel like but as far as I am concerned the Alströms are probably as important to my personal appreciation of beer as Michael Jackson, though I am not quite sure exactly why I think that. I have a different point of view with most things they write about and balk at the simmering cult of personality. I don't post to or even read the BA's forums much and find it just plain silly when they say things like "in Europe, brewers are treated like common workers. In the US, they're treated like rock stars." But they like beer. And they liked it enough to tell the world that what they think about beer is important, that you should like it and that they won't take no for an answer. If I look around the landscape of my digital world I can't find another source of that imperative, that assertion that if you don't like craft beer you may have something not right in the head.
That's one thing. The second is that they have harnessed the opportunity of the digital media better than anyone else. Sure, there are other digital meeting places but at this point in time, BeerAdvocate has won - and have staked that claim to victory through somehow perfecting the internet forum, a format that largely died off in relation to any other topic by 2002 and then leapt into the dizzying 1960s world of the monthly magazine. It's like they made the AMC Pacer somehow cool. I even suspect sometimes that the volume of material under their watch goes a long way to explain why the beer related topics on even wikipedia are so crap. They also leverage the power of the willing mob to achieve that presence, which makes their rejection of blogs in their first "Beer Smack" blog post both so funny and so telling. It is not enough to make digital media available and "user friendly" as the saying used to be. You have to make yours necessary and to do so you also need to make the alternatives implicitly less worthwhile.
Haters? These guys have framed the obsession, made a republic if not a democracy of it, beaten back the image of ever ticking Veg Stout and given us all a lifestyle choice whether we like it or not. And given the absence of an actual beer consumer organization in North America, the Alströms are the next best thing.
This next release is still in “beta” and it will be getting tweaked a bit in the future. Currently we have added a new feature on our Location Lookup page. When you search for a name, state, city or zip code you will now see a link to view that search on a google map.
A search for ‘rock bottom’:
A close-up of the Map Link:
Clicking on the link on a search results page will take you to a map that will attempt to display all locations in the results from your search. There are still a few bugs, but we are working through them and have this feature fully flushed out very soon. For now, play around with it and let us know what you think in the comments here or in the forums.
While at Marche Jovi a couple of months ago, I was directed by a gentleman who was clearly my better in the ways of beer to a number of selections once he noticed my tell tale beer hounding, the shopping cart filled with single bottles. I am pretty sure this one one of them. The brewery, Microbrasserie Charlevoix, named after its region of the province, sits at Baie-Saint-Paul on the north shore of the St. Lawrence about 100 salty km downstream - or northeast - of Quebec City and about the same distance due west of the most northerly point in Maine.
This dubbel is likely too young to drink as the 9% strength combined with the rich sweetness could easily take a year of breaking down to gain a slight acidification and other nuances. But it is still a wonderful thing. It pours a lovely light chestnut with a heavy thick cream head. One the nose there is nutmeg, plenty of brown sugared malt as well as a well hidden seam of booze. In the mouth there is a mass of sweet cream spiced with cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg. Cradled but not cut by twiggy hops. Some biscuit texture in amongst all that excess.
Monday, June 22: Brauerei Blank in Zwiefaltendorf and Zwiefalter Klosterbräu in Zwiefalten. The bus schedules are such that we might walk the 5 kilometers between the two breweries rather than wait for a bus to take us via Riedlingen.
Tuesday, June 23: Brauerei Gasthof Engel (Ausschank for Brauerei Stolz) in Isny im Allgäu and Mühlbergstüble Gaststätte (Ausschank for Steinacher Hausbräu) in Bad Waldsee.
Friday, June 26: We'll rent a car and drive from Biberach an der Riß to Hirschbrauerei Flözlingen; brewer/malter/distiller/owner Rolf Schittenhelm has shown us such a good time on our past couple of visits, I can't resist stopping by again. If time and sobriety allow, we'll try to stop at one or more of these breweries on the way to our hotel at the Stuttgart airport:
Saturday, June 27: Das grüne U is a series of parks in central Stuttgart that happens to be dotted with beer gardens. (Thanks to Choo for finding out about it!) We'll likely spend the day strolling from beer to beer if the weather is nice. If it's not, there are several brewpubs in Stuttgart Mitte that are worth a visit.
Sunday, June 28: Our flight leaves Stuttgart at 6:30am.
Well, I am up to page 145 of 451 and believe we have a romp on our hands.
Hops and Glory (now 50% off at Amazon.co.uk) is a very entertaining read as well as a better introduction to larger questions of British history in India than I had expected. The format of a chapter on Pete's travel and then a chapter on India keeps it lively. I don't recall whether the format is exactly what I recall from my reading of Brown's 2006 Thee Sheets to the Wind but the cheery tone certainly is. You know, I am not sure, now that I look back, whether I actually did a review of TSTTW as opposed to just the Norwegio-Canuck interview. But like his last book, well, the man may well turn out to be a pain in the arse were we ever to meet in the corporeal rather than digital worlds - but he sure paints a pleasant portrait of himself as well as his struggles to undertake the journey.
Which is an interesting point in itself. Most travel books are about journeying to another place. But this book is a little more self-conscious as it is in large part a book about the writing of this book given that the book is about a task and an education and a telling all wrapped up together. It also tells the tale, at least up to page 145, of one of my favorite parts of history, the British Empire of the 1700s. The later Victorians get all the attention as far as I can tell but living in a city which was created in 1783 as a key westerly outpost of the same Empire it is interesting to see the similarity and differences in how British North America developed compared to British India.
In particular the vast scale of alcoholic celebration simply stuns the modern perspective. One of my favorite guys is William Johnson, 1st Baronet of New York and Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the Northern Colonies, who may as well have set up my town though he died nine years before it was settled by refugee Loyalist troops and their families. His mastery of the New York frontier was based in large part on his ability to celebrate on a scale that the Iroquois nations could respect. Herds of Johnson's cattle and cart loads of his rum were driven up the Mohawk Valley in the 1750s when parlays were called for and days were taken in the consumption of it all. Similarly, Brown describes how the social lives of those in East India Company were lived on a scale really quite unfathomable - let alone repeatable - to our times. In 1716, we read, one outpost of 19 East India company staff over just one month consumed 894 bottles of claret, 294 bottles of Burton ale, 2 pipes and 42 gallons of Madeira as well as 6 flasks, 274 bottles, 3 leaguers, 3 quarters and 164 gallons of various other forms of booze. I would say it boggles the mind but I think the mind would have been completely boggled by no later of the ninth of that particular month.
But Hops and Glory is not just dipsography. Brown's struggles to figure out exactly why he's doing the trip are honestly and humorously told. Which is why I am about to go turn to page 146. More later.
When I was a kid I watched Hockey Night In Canada every Saturday night. I dropped it in my teens and twenties but in my thirties I was back. Not so much these days. I have drifted in and out of being a hockey fan and have the weird status of being a fan of both traditional rivals, the Leafs and the Red Wings. I toddled near the Leafs when I was a little kid before I headed to the Maritimes with the family and stuck with the rule that you owe allegiance to the nearest team - based on some absolutely arbitrary definition of nearness that you, frankly, have utter and total control over.
But I liked the Wings because the first time I saw colour TV in 1969 or 1970 when I am in grade one, the Wings goalie had my Dad's name. I thought that was cool and decided to like the Detroit Red Wings, too, just because of that. I told people and they'd laugh. "No, that's not the Wing's goalie," they'd say. "that's Roy Edwards." Well I knew Roy Edwards and had about 37 of his cards... but the guy in the Red jersey on the colour TV I saw had Dad's name. Years pass. I tell the story in elementary school and classmates laugh. Years pass and roommates, girlfriends and prospective employers in interviews laugh. I was rocked by Vladi but basked in the Cup but still no one believed me. Then... the encyclopedia of stats called Total Hockey comes out in 1998 and there he is on pages 1676-77. Eighteen games in the NHL including 14 for the Wings in 1970-71 with 3 wins and an average of over 5 goals against. The man.
Tonight, I am having Michigan beer and may even listen to my "Detroit Rock City" 45 by KISS. Puck drops in a minute.
It's been on of the most gratifying things since I took up the task of dealing with my malty dipsomania in the internet that the scourge of snobbery has been kept at bay. One of the funniest attempts lately is the oddly modestly priced Spanish fluid dubbed Inedit which has received this sort of response from Long Island NY's Newsday.com, apparently impressed by the beer's connection to some sort of swell fine diner as opposed to what is actually in the bottle:
Expect to pay about $10 for a 750 ml bottle of Inedit, which is available at Whole Foods. The yeasty, cloudy, lightly carbonated concoction definitely is versatile. You could enjoy it with hard-to-match foods, including artichokes and asparagus, sardines and herring, orange beef and seviche. There are floral notes and hints of fruit. You could serve it in a wine glass, slightly chilled. After all, the producers do consider it an alternative to wine.
Just ten bucks! Wow - swank don't pay like it used to. But I am little wary of all that "could" stuff. I "could" serve shoe polish with hard-to-match foods, too. Frankly, if your beer is going to be 5/6th of the beginning if the word "inedible" I would really like to know that what you could do with it includes drinking and enjoying it. Fortunately The Beer Nut of Ireland, eyeing the bottle with suspicion above, is on the job as today's post shows:
It presents as a cloudy yellow witbier, and the tag promises all the usual witbier things -- coriander, orange peel -- plus some extra bonus liquorice. The latter does add an interesting kind of herby flavour, but it adds it to something that is otherwise a really really dull, thin Belgian-style wit. More than any of the interesting ingredients, it's the suspended yeast which stands out as the most notable element in the flavour profile, making the whole experience amount to little more than yeast-infused fizzy water with slight herbal overtones. Maybe the methods of production are supremely artisan and the pinnacle of the gastrozymurgist's art, but it still comes out like diluted Hoegaarden at the end.
Mmmm... sardines and diluted Hoegaarden. That's what I'm talking about - that's what I'm having on Father's Day, baby!
The point? Sooner or later there is going to be someone reading the stuff that people like The Beer Nut write and they'll just say no to snobby packaging and marketing wrapped around the dull. Products will fail because of an informed marketplace and the good will overcome the branded. Mr. Beaumont made a similar point this week about journals finding journalists who actually know something about the beer stories but I think the same is equally or more important when applied to the marketers and branders who walk among us foisting the faux swank upon us as they go. If your beer can't be sold for what it is, don't jack up the price to sell it to me for what it isn't.
But there’s only one way to find out. Go visit tomorrow night, or throughout the weekend and see if their TVs are still working. If not, maybe someone at the bar would like to have a conversation instead? Plug in your address in our search engine to find out which bars or brewpubs are closest to where you are right now!
Visit your local Brewpub or Beer Bar on Friday afternoon to see if they still have TV (and good beer) available!
In the 24-hour news cycle it can be difficult to keep up. We have the solution. Check back on Valley Fever every evening for highlights from each of New Times' blogs.
Last night, a dozen local bartenders gatheredA at Scottsdale's fashion-forward CANAL restaurantA for an Iron Chef style competitionA which tested their cocktailA making prowess.A A few of the culinary scene's big names were also there, includingA chef James Porter andA emcee Dave Johnson, head of the wine and spirits program at Sol y Sombra.
Zach Galifianakis has been everywhere promoting The Hangover this week, and with upcoming roles in a prominent HBO hipster series , the already confirmed Hangover 2 and seemingly endless casting announcements popping up about him every day, it seems he's on the precipice of mainstream comedy fame.
The mixing session was sponsored by Neve and Grey Goose Vodka. After snacking on some tarte forestiere and tarte d'Alsace that puts Trader Joe's to shame , we sat down at tables that were fully appointed with all the tools of the bartenders' trade.
May 31--A year ago, Susan Fahsel of Lake Tapps was a freelance graphic artist designing magnetic signs for companies such as Absolut Vodka and Bacardi to advertise their new drinks in bars.
For the third time already this year, we're headed back to Germany! Biberach an der Riß will be the home base again, along with a couple of days in Stuttgart. We'll arrive on Sunday, June 21 and fly home early Sunday, June 28.
I'm hoping to be able to visit at least ten breweries, but we'll see how that goes. As always, I'm putting together a Google Earth map of the routes and targets; you can find that map at beerme.com.
It's time to move on: I gave my notice to Gottberg yesterday. Paris and I bought a house in Omaha, aptly-named "The Porter House". My last day at the brewery will be Wednesday, June 10, and our first day in the new house will be Tuesday, June 30.
I'll still have to make a thousand gallons of root beer before I go, and I should probably brew another batch of Pale Ale, but that's about it. As for the 715 pounds of Weyermann Rauchmalz in the cellar...well, I do regret that I won't be brewing the Rauchdoppelbock that I had planned.
Once we get organized in Omaha, I'll build a new half-barrel homebrew system* and start making beer again. I'll keep the blog alive for that process; it's still "A Brewer's Life" after all.
As for a job, I don't have anything in the works. There are a few groups of people there that are thinking of building new breweries, and I can maybe consult for them at first, and brew for them if the situation is right. There are also rumors of expansions of existing breweries, but nothing very specific. In any case, there will be a lot more opportunities in Omaha than there are in Columbus.
*Does anyone out there remember the one I had at the Big Pink House in Oshkosh and/or in Clear Lake? And do you have pictures? I don't think I actually took any.
We’ve added a new feature to the Location Review pages that may or may not be useful. But we think it’s pretty damned cool none the less.
The new feature is a little graphic that appears in what used to be some white space above and to the right of the location address information. This graphic is actually a dynamically generated image that is provided to us through one of google’s chart technologies. We’re using this technology to create what is called a QR Code (quick response code).
Here is an example of what the QR Code looks like on the review page (note the big red arrow):
These codes can be scanned via some special software that you can install on many different types of smart phones. Android phones can use the “Barcode Scanner” application to scan the codes. iPhones and Blackberries and other phones can possibly use an application provided by BeeTagg or possibly the Kaywa Reader.
After the image is scanned your mobile device will decrypt the QR Code and show you the information contained within. In our case, a scan will put the mobile version of that page onto your phone, allowing you to bookmark locations you want to visit or look at later.
An example of a QR Code containing the url for the mobile page for 21st Amendment Brewpub:
If you are still a bit confused as to what we’re talking about here, or if you just want to see this scanning technology in action, watch the following 45 second video. It is a bit blurry, but we hope it gets the point across!
Chicago is a great city to visit and a super city to drink beer in. We’re starting our theoretical trip on Friday around 5pm and we’re running it through Sunday brunch/lunch. We’re going to assume that you brought some money and we’re going to assume you don’t mind taking public transportation or cabs. And here we go!
Friday
5:00 pm Friday: Your cab from the airport has safely transported you and your belongings to some shanty hotel that you probably won’t see very much of. You have now made your way to one of Chicago’s best beer bars: The Map Room (beermapping link) at 1949 N. Hoyne Ave. The Map Room is phenomenal, the taplist consists of 25-ish taps always rotating and a very large list of bottles. Map Room does not have food on any consistent basis, but at 5pm you’re just getting started so you can settle into a fairly comfortable table near a window and enjoy a couple of great beers.
7:30 pm Friday: a half mile stroll south down Damen Ave would put you right in the middle of the trendy neighborhood of Wicker Park. We’re not here to look for “black frame” glasses stores or starbucks though. We’re headed to Piece Pizza (beermapping link), one of Chicago’s best brewpubs. Piece is well known for their award winning wheat styles and over the past few years they have started blasting palates with really hoppy beers with rather dirty names (Camel Toe IPA, Moose Knuckle Barleywine…). If you’re getting hungry, you may want to order a New Haven style pizza with bacon, mashed potatos and a white sauce. Or you may want to hold off on eating a bit longer until our next stop.
9:30 pm Friday: another short half mile stroll south brings you to East/West running Division Avenue. There are two bars down here that we will be checking out. If you neglected to grab some pizza at Piece, you will probably be in need of some food, so we’ll go east a few storefronts to Jerry’s Sandwiches (beermapping link). Jerry’s only has 100 sandwiches to choose from, but hopefully that will be enough. The tap selection here is usually very solid, and if there is nothing available there to please you, there are lots of bottles too.
Further to the west down Division, you will find Small Bar (beermapping link). Small Bar also has food so you could hold off for some fried cheese curds with honey mustard dipping sauce. The taps at Small Bar are often somewhat similar to Jerry’s Sandwiches, but there should be a few differences. Small Bar and Jerry’s both have nice patios, so if you are here with someone who doesn’t like sitting at the bar, you might find yourself enjoying some Chicago weather. You can easily kill 2 or 3 hours between Small Bar and Jerry’s, so this is where we will end our night and catch a cab back to our Hotel/Motel/Hostel. We’ll need our energy for Saturday!
Saturday
11:00 am Saturday: We’re making our way down to State and Grand and we’re hitting Chicago’s Rock Bottom (beermapping link). Pete Crowley, head brewer, makes some awesome beers here. Usually you can find a barrel aged beer or two on tap, make sure to ask your server or bartender for the special beers available. The food at this location is pretty good too, so we’ll be grabbing an appetizer to get our day started (recommended appetizer: Titan Toothpicks). Our next stop will also include many food options, so don’t go nuts and order a whole entree.
1:30 pm Saturday: We went underneath Rock Bottom Chicago and we caught the Red Line of the El (Chicago’s public transportation train). Headed north, we only travelled three stops to the Clybourn/North stop. From here we walked three blocks up Clybourn to Goose Island’s original Brewpub location (beermapping link). They usually have more than 15 Goose Island beers available for you to drink here and at least 1 cask at all time. The restaurant has recently undergone some changes and they are heavily focused on “gastropub” like fare. Pork is king at Goose Island Clybourn and we suggest you get a solid base for the rest of the day’s drinking by ordering the Cubano sandwich. Pair that with something from the cask engine and you’ll be thanking us, guaranteed.
3:30 pm Saturday: Next is a short walk up Sheffield to Local Option (beermapping link). Local Option isn’t well known outside of the Chicago beer scene, but it usually has one of the best taplists in town. The taplist doesn’t focus just on regional or American beer, it’s a strong reflection on what is happening in beer today. And if you can’t find anything on tap that excites you, ask the bartender if they have anything special in bottles!
6:00 pm Saturday: Our next stop is a bit further north. We have again jumped back on Chicago’s El (red line) to get to Sheffield’s Wine and Beer Garden (beermapping link). Sheffield’s is home to the Beer School bar (along with two other bars inside the building). If the beer school bar is open, you should definitely head back there and check out their available taps. You will not be disappointed at Sheffields in either the front bar or the back bars. Relax and enjoy. If the weather is nice, you can hang out in the beer garden, or if it’s nasty outside sit back by the fire and enjoy the warmth.
8:30 pm Saturday: We now have our name on the list for dinner at Hopleaf (beermapping link) in the Andersonville neighborhood. We have used the red line again to get this far north and by now we’re a pro at catching a train and avoiding eye contact with bums. Hopleaf is a belgian focused bar with some incredible food. I suggest ordering the CB&J (cashew butter, fig jam and creamy morbier cheese pannini) or just go with the Mussels Frites (Steak Frites is also one of my favorites). With 30 taps of Belgian and regional beer and a bottle list that may well blow your mind, you can’t go wrong at Hopleaf. Make sure you try a Metropolitan Brewery beer, brewed three blocks away.
We will end our night here, thumbing through the list and dreaming of a bottomless wallet and limitless time to enjoy it all. Head to bed. By now, you need the rest.
Sunday
10:00 am Sunday: We are now officially packed up and we’re doing brunch at the Publican (beermapping link). With a Publican Mimosa (Berliner Weisse and orange juice) in front of us, we’re waiting for dishes full of pork and egg to be delivered to our table. We have fond memories of the past few hours, some hazier than others. And we are in desperate need for another 36 hours before we have to return to work. We are also not 100% sure that we won’t be calling in sick on Monday.
In what has become an annual ritual, beer prices at Munich's Oktoberfest are going up again.
Visitors to Munich’s world-famous beer bash Oktoberfest will have to dig even deeper in their pockets for a one-litre Maß of delicious amber nectar this year, with prices set to climb up to €8.60 per mug.
The city’s tourist office announced on Wednesday that a Maß will run revellers a minimum of €0.30 more than last year. Prices for non-alcoholic drinks will also be more expensive, with water costing on average €6.63 per litre and soda costing a hefty €7.44.
From today through Memorial Day we’re offering a 25% discount on our GPS Point of Interest subscriptions. Normally a 15 dollar purchase, we’re offering it to you at a reduced cost, so that you’ll have the ability to plan your summer vacations a bit better. Gas prices are steadily rising; take advantage of this deal while you still can.
This is a feature we announced a few weeks ago in the forums. It was originally suggested in this forums thread, and then the feature went on to be fully flushed out and announced here.
Basically this feature adds the ability to hide any locations on the city maps that you have already reviewed. If you want to see only the places that you have reviewed, that option is available as well.
As you can see from the image here, we have added three new icons/buttons to the City Maps (and Proximity Maps) that you can use to change the visibility settings. These options are only available if you are a registered user and if you are logged in to the site. They can be found at the top right of the map and they can be used to toggle locations you have reviewed on or off of the map. Hover over the icons to see what each one does, or read more about their functionality here.
The goal here is to help you find new locations in an area to visit and at the same time offer some help finding which locations you may have visited but have so far neglected to review. Get out there and drink some beer!
We hope to have this functionality available on all maps in the near future.
Here's an interesting take on prohibitionism from an interesting source:
English musician and Berlin resident Joe Jackson explains why he’s delighted Germany’s smoking ban appears to be unravelling faster than a self-rolled cigarette.
Having lived in Berlin for the better part of three years, I’ve been asked to write something about my ‘right’ to smoke here. But I’m not sure I have one. The real question, I think, is: who has the right to forbid me to smoke, and on what grounds? Consider the following:
(1) Tobacco is legal in Germany.
(2) Smokers are adults.
(3) Smokers contribute enormous amounts of tax revenue.
(4) Pubs, bars, clubs and restaurants are private property.
(5) If some people don’t like smoke, this is a matter of taste and therefore for the free market to sort out, not the government.
(6) A decent modern ventilation system can render smoke virtually unnoticeable.
(7) ‘Second-hand,’ or ‘passive’ smoke hurts no one anyway.
Every aspect of our personal lives is being dictated, more and more, by unelected and unaccountable bodies like the WHO or various bit of the EU bureaucracy. If you don’t smoke, you may think it’s none of your business. But don’t kid yourself. If you’re a few pounds ‘overweight,’ or drink more than two government-defined ‘units’ of alcohol per day, or eat ‘unhealthy’ foods, then you’re next in line to be scapegoated and stigmatised, denied health care or insurance, denied jobs or housing, forbidden to adopt children...the list is growing daily.
One section of the site that very few people check out, are our statistics. We like to be open about things and we intentionally expose many of the numbers that show how active (or inactive) parts of the site may be.
On our Statistics Page, you can see how many approved locations we have in the database (almost 8,000 at the time of this posting). We break it down by our major countries (scroll down). And on this page we list location images count (2,827), location review count (3,323) and other interesting statistics like average review score (82).
We even offer more statistics about activity on the site on our Activity Statistics Page. This page will show you graphs from the last 31 days (not including today). They’re not exactly real time, but they do give you an idea as to the activity of the site.
If you’re still digging the numbers and you aren’t satisfied yet, you can also check out our Forum Statistics Page. You can see when our most active months for posting were, and you can track how many users registered over the lifetime of the forums. I enjoy checking this page somewhat often and there is even a thread started in the forums about these statistics.
At least 10% of Gottberg's annual root beer sales will occur this weekend. That's why there hasn't been much on the schedule lately, besides filling kegs and making root beer.
Things should get back to normal (whatever that means) starting next week.
American Craft Beer Week is coming soon. Next week to be exact (May 11th through 17th). If you haven’t already, you need to start making preparations to maximize your week to the best of your abilities!
If you already knew about Craft Beer Week, you might be unaware of the fact that May is not only “Drink Corona for One Day Month”, but it is also, National Hamburger Month! Because these two celebrations overlap, May just might be the best month ever.
In order to make preparations for finding flavorful craft beer and juicy hamburgers, you may need to consult some Beer Maps. You can plug in your address (or the address of your office if you need a 3 pint lunch). Or you can use our search and proximity features to find other craft beer serving locations nearby your favorite beer bar that might also be putting the special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun.
If you need help while in the car, we also have a GPS subscription service available that will allow you to download all locations on the site into a very easy to use POI file for your GPS navigation system. And the mobile version of the site, has a fully functional search system with tiny little maps that should work just fine on most mobile phones. Bookmark beermapping.com/m on your phone for easy access on the go.
For more information about American Craft Beer Week you can also check out the facebook page. For more about Cheeseburgers, check out the Cheeseburger Show thread in the forums.
Paris and I were in Green Bay this weekend to judge at the Titletown Open Homebrew Competition. We've been fortunate to attend the past eleven of their fifteen events, ever since my first year at Egan Brewing.
Before the first night's judging, we met some friends in Appleton at Stone Cellar Brewpub.
Left to right: Don Goen, Jon Jorgenson, Paris Cunningham, Richard Stueven, Loriann Andersen, Dan Pleshek
The Titletown Open, held at Titletown Brewing, set records this year with 159 entries and 20 judges over two days.
Scenes from Titletown Open XV
There were a lot of great beers entered this year. The Best of Show winner was a magnificent Eisbock. I gave it 45 points out of 50, the first time I've rated a beer that high at a competition. I noted that while it wasn't EKU 28, it was at least EKU 23.
Last week didn't go according to plan. Not even close. But then that seems to be the rule rather than the exception.
I had planned to brew three or even four times; I brewed a batch of All American Gold on Monday, and that was it.
The yeast wasn't active enough on Tuesday to kräusen a new batch, so I worked on my brewery record-keeping software instead.
I got a root beer order from Lincoln to be delivered on Thursday, so I spent Wednesday filling kegs, and dumping the disappointing Maibock. A busload of people came in for a not-really-a-tour; instead of actually walking through the brewery, they just wanted me to talk about what I do around here.
I forgot to mention that I ran out of root beer on Wednesday, so I had to steal some from the pub's tank Thursday morning before hitting the road.
I picked up 1300 pounds of sugar Friday morning, and made 14 barrels of root beer Friday afternoon to fill the two empty tanks in the cellar. Also, my Weyermann Rauchmalz arrived, so I need to schedule the brews leading up to the Smoked Doppelbock.
I probably should have brewed some Tin Lizzie Hefeweizen today, but the remaining 800 pounds of sugar was still in the brewhouse, so I made 21 barrels of root beer instead. A gasket failed on one of the holding tanks, and a barrel and a half or so ended up on the floor by the time I fixed it.
Tomorrow I'll clean the draft lines and brew the Hefeweizen. Wednesday I'll clean and fill kegs. No plans for Thursday yet. Friday, Paris and I are going to Green Bay for the annual Titletown Open Homebrew Competition. If you happen to be in Appleton, Wisconsin this Friday afternoon, come have a beer with us at the Stone Cellar Brewpub!
So I haven't posted anything about A Brewer's Life since ... (looking back) ... late February, it seems. So rather than catching up all the mundane details — and they have been mundane — I'll just provide the current state of the brewery and beers, and try to start again.
What's on tap? Seven beers, which is probably one too many.
Bugeater Brown Ale (3 barrels)
Uncle Ivan's Dunkelweizen (2 barrels)
Impromptu Pale Ale (6½ barrels)
Tin Lizzie Hefeweizen (7 barrels)
All American Gold (6½ barrels)
1916 Irish Stout (5½ barrels)
Papa Dale's Amber Ale (3½ barrels)
The Dunkelweizen is showing its age, and the Stout and Amber aren't moving at all.
What's in the tanks? Not a whole hell of a lot. Of the eleven fermenters, two of which are only used as holding tanks for root beer, ten are empty. The eleventh contains this year's Stüvenbräu Maibock, which didn't ferment out, and which is tasting pretty tart, and which I'll probably dump out early next week.
What's coming up? The problem with the Maibock seems to be that I underpitched the wort. So before I brew anything special again, I need to build up my yeast stocks. I figure that if I brew three beers on consecutive days, pitching each wort with kräusen beer from the previous day's batch, I can harvest one tank for future beers, and harvest the other two to pitch into a single strong beer. I'm leaning toward that strong beer being a Rauchbock. So next week, I'll probably brew a Gold, a Brown, and a (don't know yet), then brew the Rauchbock two weeks later. Which means I need to order the smoked malt, like, today.
What else is coming up? KJ gave me a list of beers he'd like me to brew.
Altbier
Amber/Red
Brown
Doppelbock
Dubbel
Dunkel
Dunkelweizen
German IPA
Hefeweizen
Helles/Gold
Hopfenweisse
Imperial Oktoberfest
Imperial Porter
Kellerbier
Kölsch
Maibock
Oktoberfest/Märzen
Pale Ale
Porter
Quad
Rauchbier
Roggenbier
Ryebock
Schwarz
Stout/Cream
Tripel
Weihnachtsbier
Weizenbock
Wheatwine
So, yeah, that oughta keep me busy for a while. I'm just wondering who we're going to sell all this beer to.
(The complete Google Earth map of this week's adventures is available here.)
Paris knew that her meeting would run late today, so rather than take the train to Munich and arrive around midnight, she decided we should rent a car and drive there. So this morning Choo and I picked up a Volkswagen Polo — with a handy TomTom navigation device — at the nearby Budget office and headed for Neu-Ulm.
Fine German Engineering
We zipped up the B30 to Neu-Ulm and found Brauerei-Gasthof Schlössle. The beers were excellent, the food was satisfying, and the coffee was necessary.
With several hours to kill, we drove into the heart of Ulm and wandered around a while.
This monument stands on the site of Albert Einstein's birthplace, which was destroyed in the firebombing of 1944. The Albert Einstein Memorial McDonald's is visible in the background.
We encountered the former Brauhaus Drei Kannen, which is now a Gasthaus and Biergarten. They commission a beer from Gold Ochsen that's served under the Drei Kannen name.
The B30 took us back to Biberach, where we picked up Paris around 7:00pm, then we were off to Freising. Most of the trip was on the Autobahn. For most Americans, Autobahn driving is exhilarating, the closest we'll come to driving a race car. It requires a great deal of attention and even more driving skill than on our freeways, and it's great fun. I got our VW Polo up to 180 km/h (110 mph), but the front end started feeling a little light, so I backed off to 160 km/h (100 mph) for most of the trip. We arrived at our hotel just after 9:00pm.
After checking in, we decided to visit one last brewery, the famous Brauerei Weihenstephan, just a couple of kilometers from the hotel. The oldest brewery in the world, founded in 1040, brews some of the best beer in the world. And the food here is pretty damn good too.
We didn't plan on leaving Biberach and starting today's brewery tours until 11:00am, so Choo and I spent the morning wandering around town and checking out the view from the Weisser Turm.
Weisser Turm, Biberach an der Riß
Biberach an der Riß
"Spring, he says." Choo was led to expect nicer weather than we experienced this week.
A half-hour bus ride got us to Berg. We passed the Warthausen malthouse along the way. There used to be a brewery here, but no more.
Warthausen Malz, near Biberach
Brauerei Berg is a bigger brewery than I expected, in a very small town near the Danube River. The beers were pretty good, and the Maultaschen were excellent.
The brewer, the 7th-generation of the family that has owned the brewery since 1833, happened to be there, and he gave us a quick tour. It's an 80-hectoliter brewhouse producing 3000 hl per year, 80% of which is sold for distribution.
The plan was to catch a bus at Ehingen Bahnhof and head back to Biberach, but nature called us instead to the nearby Brauerei Schwert, which I had visited last year.
And at the end of the night, we had a glass of Zwiefalter Pils with our fajitas at El Poco Loco in Biberach.
I really need to catch this blog up one of these days. No time now, though: the brewpubs here in Bamberg open in a few minutes, and today (Monday) is the only full day we'll have here. We arrived yesterday (Sunday) early in the afternoon. We're staying at Brauerei Spezial, and of course we had to try all of the beers there. Several times. We met a couple from Colorado and got into a Schafkopf game. Gaststätte Stilbruch for a couple of beers. Enjoyed a few Rauchbier at Schlenkerla. Meant to visit Brauerei Ambräusianum, but got there minutes after closing time. (They're not open Monday, so it will have to wait until next time.) Accidentally found zum Dominkaner and had plenty more beers and Schnapps before calling it a night.
The view from our hotel room at Spezial, facing the brewhouse. The keen-eyed observer will note the tub of spent grain in the lower-right of the picture.
Our train from Bamberg to Biberach was scheduled to leave around 1:30pm, so we had a whole morning to kill. Paris unfortunately had to work, so she headed to the nearby Internet cafe, while Choo and I went into the Altstadt for some last minute souvenir hunting. She dragged me into a shop full of beer steins and spent a great deal of time carefully picking out her gifts.
Then it was my turn. But on the way, we ran into Brian and Liz one last time, on the upper Altes Rathaus bridge. We all traded pictures and said goodbye. Again.
My first shopping-stop was zum Dominikaner, where we enjoyed some fine Gemütlichkeit late Sunday evening. They sell a "Bamberger Beer Basket" containing a bottle of beer from each Bamberger brewery, a commemorative stein, and some other goodies, and they even ship to America! So mine should arrive shortly after we get home.
Finally, just down the street from Schlenkerla, is the Bamberger Trachtenstadl. With Bockfest 2009 coming up in Omaha on Saturday, I wanted some appropriate garb. I think what I got will do nicely.
Richard's Trachten, von Hut bis Schuhe
Choo and I got back to Spezial at noon, an hour after we told Paris we'd meet her there. (I blame Choo's dawdling at the stein store.) Paris was fuming because it turned out she didn't have to work after all, but at least she had some Spezial Märzen to calm her down. We had lunch and trudged to the Bahnhof.
Four trains and five hours later, we arrived in Biberach. Our hotel, Drei König, is conveniently located in the Marktplatz, and they serve beer from Brauerei Berg. I don't have any pictures here, because we're going to Berg tomorrow already.
We did better here, and the beers were much better than they were when we last visited, six years ago. Then suddenly our new-found friends, beer drinkers, and card players, Brian and Liz magically appeared, and we had a few more beers and we played a few more cards. It got to be 5:00pm already, so we decided to eat at Klosterbräu too.
Choo, Paris, Richard, and Brian
There are a couple of beer bars in the area, so we headed up the hill to Tapas for a half-liter or two.
There used to be a bar at the top of the hill in Laurenziplatz called "zum Ösi"; Paris and I had visited it in 2003. The bartender at Klosterbräu told us that it was a wine bar that had closed some time ago, but I remembered seeing references to a "zum Ösi" in a different part of town. Since it was on the way back to the hotel anyway, we looked it up, and it turns out that they had closed the one on the hill and opened a new bar with the same name. The decor was much more subdued — no witches nor skeletons hanging from the ceiling — but it is a nice place with real good beers.
The owner was working the bar, and I told him that we had visited the old location six years ago, which he found amusing. When I went to pay the bill a little later, I found him looking at a moderately-popular beer web site.
I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout last night at the Brass Monkey, where we re-introduced our Impromptu Pale Ale to Omaha. More importantly, Chief Monkeys Kevin and Maria seemed pretty happy with the beer's reception as well. Kevin said he'll probably need a couple more kegs this week already; I'll have to take them Friday, since I'll be in town anyway.
Thanks to everybody who showed up! We'll do it again just as soon as KJ lines up another account for us.
After a years-long absence, Gottberg beer has once again found a regular home in Omaha! I delivered two kegs of Impromptu Pale Ale along with the last keg of Wrecking Ball Weizenbock to the Brass Monkey, located at 36th & V Streets in South Omaha. This is the same batch of Pale that Kevin and Maria (the Brass Monkeys themselves) brewed with me on January 29.
Appropriately, we're having an Impromptu release party there this evening, and with luck, we'll have an Impromptu polka band on hand as well. If you're in town, stop by for a pint!
The Wrecking Ball is the bad-assest tap handle ever.
Thanks to KJ Harnack for his persistence in lining up our wholesaler, and to Kevin and Maria for their patience!
In terrifying news for Weißbier fans, Bavarian beer brewers staged temporary strikes on Monday morning in an ongoing wage dispute with employers in the southern German state.
Some 40 workers at Munich’s beloved Augustiner brewery walked off their jobs at 5:30 am, along with 50 at the Spaten brewery and others at the Kulmbacher brewery, the union reported.
I didn't have anyplace else on the site to put this. It's supposed to be an animated GIF that rotates, but if it doesn't move, you'll just have to turn your monitor upside down.
Three brews last week: that's a lot, considering I brew on average every twelve days or so. Seven barrels each of All American Gold, Stüvenbräu Maibock (thanks to Tom for doing the hard work), and 1916 Irish Stout.
Papa Dale's Amber Ale got tapped last Friday. It's amber all right, and it's very hazy, and it tastes more like a Kellerbier than an Amber Ale. I guess that's not a bad thing, but it's not at all what I had in mind when I brewed it. They went through a whole keg of it this weekend, mostly due to our "buy one, get another for a penny" promotion. I'll have one out of the second keg with lunch today and see how I like it.
This morning, I took apart and scrubbed all of the beer faucets before cleaning the lines. There was lots of guck built up, so the beers should taste better now. And I'm just about done cleaning the three dozen or so kegs here in the cellar.
It’s Facebook. And I’m one of these anti-snowball, no-thanks-for-the-drink, keep-your-damn-pokey-finger-to-yourself kind of grumpy gus.
But then I noticed how much fun my friends were having with all of these games. Scramble. Word Challenge. PathWords. Poker. I thought, hey, I’ll give it a try.
It’s a weekend I’ll never, ever get back.
No, I can truthfully say I did not spend every single waking hour playing these games. But when I wasn’t doing something else… all of the TV-watching, web-surfing, miscellaneous-time-wasting… No. It was game time.
Wifey’s got it worse than I have. One of my friends had this totally unbeatable Word Challenge score, and I managed to best that. So I was able to hang up that one for a while. But then I discovered PathWords and it’s like Bubblet only with letters — it’s brilliant! And then I found myself having fun at the Texas-whatchamacallit-poker, and look, no money changing hands!
The kicker, of course, is that I would love to play with all of you. But you know that story. The genie is way too far out of the bottle, I think.
Anyway, if you haven’t tried this, go ahead and jump right in — try one, you’ll like it! Because addiction, like misery, absolutely LOVES company!!
I wanted to get around and visit friends and spread some holiday cheer, but… and I don’t even know what got in the way!
And since the ice storm, I’ve had this post idea and that post idea, and… well you know how bad I am, and how much improvement I’m going to need for the new year.
But today, it’s just about wishing you and yours a very merry Christmas! I hope you’re all safe and warm with the lights on and happy and healthy.
And whether you’re surrounded by friends and/or family, or you’ll be connected by phone or internets, what is more important, after all, than that? They are the real gifts we should be stuffing boxes and shoving under the tree.
Tap tap tap — ahem — is this thing on? It’s the only way I can do this right now. Power has been out since some time Friday morning — phone, cable, internet, too. Major ice storm Thursday, worst in recorded history, took out trees, utility poles, wires, you name it. We have a generator, so our sump pumps, water well pump, heat, refrigerator, freezers, even some lights, are running for only $1.65 a gallon, a bargain, priceless! But no internet, other than my phone here, and the coverage is very fringey. So no. I haven’t fallen off the posting wagon! I’m just in survival mode, lucky to be doing just fine, and lucky to be alive, but that’s a story for another day… Come to think of it, I don’t even know for sure whether this mobile post will make it through!!
I’ve been using e-mail for 27 years now, way more than half of my life. So this way of communicating, it’s all just second nature to me.
And I was on the Internet before there was a World Wide Web. I know, you’d never know it, because I didn’t make a bazillion dollars at anything.
So none of this technology amazes or surprises me.
But I was on Facebook this morning and found out that my friend’s father had passed away.
Now I have learned about deaths online before, but it’s only been people that I knew online, if you know what I mean.
Jimmy won his soccer game! Take a look at the snowman we made! Jane made honor roll this quarter! YES. That’s the kind of stuff I want to keep up with online.
Mr. Jones passed away last night. NO. This is about life, real life.
I’m in that holiday spirit — yes, NEW YEARS! Time to start making resolutions, I think.
1. Be a better blog visitor. I just flushed a couple thousand updates out of my Bloglines and I’m going to start over.
2. No more eating in bed. Candy corn, Triscuits… oh, and the animal crackers have been the worse offense-inducer. I think if I bring something upstairs, especially if it’s something healthy, then that’s different. But that’s it. This will be a tough one, but I’m really going to try.
3. Post more. I’ll think of something I want to write, and then I’ll think, nah, that’s dumb. I should just post whatever pops into my head, because really, that’s all I’m much good for. Yes, I’ll be going to quantity over quality, in case anybody’s wondering about that.
In the past I’ve done this as a Thursday Thirteen, but I can’t think of that many, and if I wait until I do, it’ll never happen… look, I’m on top of #3 already!! :)
That’s right, I’m not waiting until the new year, I’m getting started now. Wish me luck!
I just had the weirdest dream so I thought I’d write it down and see if it makes sense.
I’m sitting in this garage doing something on the computer. And there is this white horse, yes a horse, and I must have spooked him because he like flattens himself up against the far wall.
You see, I’m in the opening part and the door is open. Yeah, so he’s got his hooves up in the air at like ten-two on a clock face, up against the wall, and then he climbs up on top of the open garage door.
I don’t know where Wifey is at this point, but it seems to me we’re away at some event of hers — something horse related? I don’t know. She got out of horses a couple years ago, thank God, and we don’t have one anymore.
But I’m just there with the horse, and not like I’m watching him or anything, because he’s hiding up on the garage door.
Now do you have a picture of how this all is? Because the next part doesn’t really make much sense. Now he’s like on this shelf and really high up and am I sitting under the shelf? Wait, no, I’m like several feet away from it.
And what happens next is the horse falls from this shelf, and I see this long slow-motion fall, and it’s from this tremendous height, and he lands right in front of me.
My first thought is I check myself to make sure I didn’t get anything on me — blood, guts, whatever.
And now Cesar Millan comes in — yes, the dog trainer extraordinaire — and I tell him that the horse fell. Well I’m thinking it’s just dead, but he’s trying to revive it somehow.
So Cesar is on the ground shaking the horse, and the horse is talking gibberish, like English gibberish, and I can’t understand a word he (yes, the horse) is saying. But he’s alive and his head doesn’t look to me like a horse head anymore, but almost like an only slightly-elongated human head. But the gibberish, he’s just not in good shape, the horse.
And that’s where I woke up. Don’t know where Wifey was or where I even was, though the garage kind of looked like mine, but don’t they all.
Pretty weird, eh?
********
Now as I came here to post this (I had typed it up in the e-mail program) I realize I dreamed something last night about WordPress, that the — you know how it tells you your software isn’t up-to-date and you need to upgrade? Well that version number kept changing, to higher and lower numbers, right before my eyes…
Wow, totally bizarre! And no, no late snacks or anything like that! I did eat some candy corn before bead, so my body had plenty of sleep energy. No, I just made that up.
OK, I’m back. Figure it out? This morning, Wifey and I were watching last night’s Amazing Race (EXCELLENT) and there was an ad for something about the Blue Ray.
“What is Blue Ray, anyway?” she asked. And I told her it was like VHS and Beta, only with DVD and it’s like the difference between this (me, pointing at the screen) and high def and blah blah blah, and for people that care about really great pictures, well it’s just the greatest thing.
Doh, what if she got me one for Christmas, and I didn’t just jump and down and say it’s the greatest thing! Thing is, though, I don’t care, don’t need one, don’t want one, happy with the regular DVD’s, and all I want… hell, I really don’t even need a new iPod, the MP3 player I have is fine for what I use it for.
All I want for Christmas is __________… hmm, I’d have to think about it. What? You know what it is that I want? Go ahead, fill in the blank! :)
Are we still doing MM? I didn’t think so… but I was pulling into the Wal*Mart parking lot this morning to pick up my weekly supply of apples and bananas… usually I go in the other entrance, but the light turned red, so I made the right turn and then the left and ended up in that corner of the parking lot where eldest daughter and I worked on her parking skills.
Has it really been a whole year? It’s about eleven months since she got her license, so yeah, it must be about that — but weren’t there huge piles of snow already? Or am I thinking of some other time. We did a lot of practicing in snowy parking lots, I do remember that.
At W*M we practiced the backing into the parking space. She was all crazy about backing into parking spaces, and sure enough, it was something she had to do to get her license. It got busy there, though, what with all the holiday shopping… and ended up going to the big company parking lot where I actually did a lot of my driving practice, uggh, has it really been 28 years??
And then there was the elementary school where I invented this great parallel parking technique. I’ll have to diagram it and post that one of these days.
Well I just had to share these monday morning memories.
Was it really last week? I actually remember the day quite well. Looking back, I guess it was my *second* post, after the requisite “is this thing on” post.
Three years! No wonder I’ve got pretty much nothing left to say! Have I really said it all before, just with different names? Somehow it feels different now, I don’t know. I’ve changed, but then I haven’t, really. Not ever, I don’t think.
And going back even further… no, you really can’t. I don’t think I even have the archives from the old blog. It was a database and I saved it somewhere… I’ll bet it’s backed up to CD or DVD or magtape or magpie or pumpkin pie or pumpkin muffin or blueberry muffin or… OMG, could I go for a blueberry… no, a pistachio muffin right now.
I’m actually wearing my “I’m the blogger” sweatshirt right now. It doesn’t fit anymore. Not literally, not figuratively. But it’s nice and warm and has a pocket where I can put stuff. The metaphors just keep coming.
I have so much to say, I’m just bursting at the seams. In a way, though, you all know me too well now. I’m afraid of what you’ll say. I don’t know why. Not like you’re going to talk me into anything, or out of anything. Maybe I need more private posts and really tell you what the heck is going on. The problem with problems is sometimes they just have no solutions. I guess those are the ones you just vent and someone says, hey I’ve been there and you feel better. Or do you? But could I have problems? I mean, really — Uisce have problems? I really, truly lead an infinitely charmed life.
I can hear the dogs jangling about upstairs, and now my me time is over. Maybe I’ll get deeper into all of this in year four. Yes, it’s been three years already. Happy bloggaversary to me! :)
There used to be this car wash and lube place here in town where you could get inspected.
Yes, I meant cars.
Well now it’s changed and the coffee pot is gone. The TV is gone. Even the cashier window is gone!
“Still do state inspections?” I ask. “Yup, my inspection man will be off lunch break in a few minutes,” they tell me.
So I stand around and wait. I’ve left the keys in the ignition and the registration on the passenger seat. I’m starting to feel like I’m in the Soup Nazi episode of Seinfeld.
“Where is your front plate?” says the inspection man.
I can see this is going to be a very thorough inspection. “On order,” I tell him. I mean, the inmates only work so fast. “Got any paperwork on that?” he asks. I have to think about that one. “Well I’ve got a temporary plate on the back,” I tell him. “Yup, that works,” he says, nodding.
Having completed phase one od the rigorous process, he drives my truck inside and closes the see through garage door behind him. I’m left standing there.
“I’ve got a waiting room, so you can get out of the cold,” says a voice from a man in a Lubes-R-Us uniform.
Two chairs, about where the coffee machine used to be. A nice one, with the cups and you could get anything you… the K-cups, I mean. And then also the kind you drink out of. The place was nice. Now it’s just a little… I dunno, odd.
But my truck does appear to be in good, safety-minded thorough hands.
Anheuser-Busch strikes deal to distribute beer known as Czechvar in U.S.
Johnnie Walker Blue Label - $200 bottle of Scotch, this was an awesome night where we drank everytime someone said a curse word in the movies we were watching. At the heart of Blue Label™ is Royal Lochnagar™ a rare malt distilled near Balmoral, the Queen's holiday home. Around 15 other mature and precious whiskies are added to balance Blue Label™ perfectly - 'a blend that cannot be beat' (Alexander Walker, 1888).
Pierre Ferrand Excellence 1971 - $300 bottle of Cognac, This was my favorite bottle so far. This special Grande Champagne cognacs are bottled in a replica of the bottle used by Cognac Ferrand in 1900. The heavy glass bottle with a deep punt is etched with the words “Cognac Pierre Ferrand” and “Memoire”. A hand-written parchment label shows the vintage. Each small lot has been certified by a Huissier de Justice, the most respected level of authentication under French law. Each bottle is numbered and signed by the cellarmaster and comes in a dark mahogany box adorned with an etched brass plate. A certificate of authenticity accompanies each bottle.
Cragganmore 12 - "One of Speyside's greats. Elegant and austere. Gradually, almost reluctantly, reveals itself. The most fragrant of whiskies: delicate, herbal, flowery. A palate blossoming with flavours, and a long, lingering, finish." Michael Jackson, whisky writer and expert.
2008 scandalz.net
We wish you a Hare Krishna
We wish you a Hare Krishna
We wish you a Hare Krishna
And a Sun Myung Moon!
-- Maxwell Smart
From today through Memorial Day we’re offering a 
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