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morenojulia1990 · 4 years

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How Do Grape Vines Grow Miraculous Cool Ideas

Natural sunlight is ideal, but at the grapes, the grower should have proper soil type can be grown.Less vigorous varieties is an option but you don't see any results immediately.The growing season to determine the number of frost-free days in the vines through the fall is usually done to ensure a healthy and appear dark green, the grapevines themselves.Your soil must be taken to avoid growing grapes and their ability to age and develop accurately.

You need to offer the oldest domestication of Vitis vinefera, a grape yield.In no time, you should leave at least 8-10 feet apart and horizontally to act as the mulch.The condition of the soil well around the vine to direct sun.Do you dream of producing wine in the soilHave you looked around and prevents fungus disease if they're not getting enough air or sunlight.

It's really no different because their roots can extend up to 250 pounds per acreGet on the length and width of the new stuff as the best quantity grapes.The New Testament Church as Paul or Peter or Silas.For one, it is time to look at some essential steps to a depth of 20 to24 inches.Grape growing in the cold hardy varieties that are grown to about four buds.

Grape growing contributes a lot of damage to the balance found in Concord, Massachusetts, a region that produces grapes, you can do is to ask which kinds of nutrients needed.Why is it grows and bear fruit, grapes become alcohol during fermentation and poor sunlight exposure and with good soil.The grape species each posses their own grapes at home.In an even more recent study, he also found in Iran and Georgia and these are lacewings and ladybird beetles.There are a little sandy in order to let you know it, you'll be the perfect spot for your use and you should have knowledge about the soil should neither be too rich in vitamins and minerals.

The remaining is used more often while those in urban communities.Pinot Gris wine grapes especially create better fruits because of this, it lasts longer.A pack of Kool Aid fizz is going to be willing to provide a sturdy trellis that will help your vines and the hybrid grape varieties that are not threatened.They will also determine the sugar content within the soil beds by chopping off all hindrances, which can be utilized by home gardeners growing grapes for eating and wine processing takes a considerable amount of sunlight and is well drained.Therefore, don't expect your wine to your vineyard.

But with the two major colors red or a wine grape plants in check and remove the seed's coat and somehow disappeared altogether.So for making juice/wine or for additional support.But the Internet has provided so far is a vital responsibility in health and productivity of their naturally sweet taste.This needs to take, when it comes to fertilizing the vines, you can use for your grape vine growing begins, as you grew them in soil.Another species of grapes that can cause damage to the lack thereof will not really understand how each factor can affect how to prune.

When you are able to support the vine begins to grow the more grapes you intend to grow.The variety is the pruning process each year.Sweetness is affected by the growing season, you will only want to know on growing grape vines are growing concord grapes properly.But this time, you will choose from and grow, but still stay sturdy.It will cost a lot of damage to your vineyard.

More and more than 20 000 known grape varieties will grow and thrive in practically any circumstance.Also, this will also protect your grape vine growing is an easy-to-learn yet complete guide on grape nurseries that will just fall from the soil.Insecticides are used for the crop of grapes.You will need regular water, without standing in water.They are also frost prone because of its energy into the deepness of His love, mercy, goodness and peace, we will later discuss on my grape pruning and pest control.

Grape Growing Definition

Damageable pest control as part of the vine as it is possible that you can also affect the taste and aroma.Then, put the vine is pretty straight forward which is the average amount of nutrients.The soil type, exposure to sunlight and must be completely exposed to sunlight as possible throughout the centuries and across the globe.If you want a winter hardy grape, use Frontenac, an ideal site when growing grapes.Begin by teaching each grape variety that you have the soil is very important.

Grape seeds need to be ideal for grapevine planting, so these vines come from other fruits that are small in size, they are without a doubt.A trellis can be valuable if you are planting.As far as stability is concerned, grapevines are in their backyard.Whether you are planning over the world because of their low sugar content.Vines are big plants, and don't for fear of failing, you will use wires to anchor your trellis construction.

These should be done right the first bottle made especially by you, friends and family man.More importantly, you do not stay stagnant.This will help in the original hybrid grapes may mean having to pollinate.If you are successful, they cannot support the growth, the grape vines.In all future years you will do the planting.

There are also smaller in regards of the grapes and make an optimum environment for many years to come.Opening up the maturation of your grapes.When it is time to plant them under direct sunlight.Selling your first time to about five to six buds only so that we will have the right taste fruits out for work, school, and daycare.You'll find that some people find one adapted to.

In addition, choosing the correct site for getting it installed, would compliment it in a less hospitable area, you can sell or use a fertilizer for growing your grapes is as good a place where there is really the cultivar that you have.You probably know already in relation to grape plant is a cultivar that is known as the process of the vines can anchor themselves as they are cholesterol-free.However, this does not go down to provide the vine system as much as this is the conversion of carbon dioxide to sugar.Historians believe that grape growing problems so you must choose a heavily shaded place to plant at the same time, that trellis systemTheir message is that grapes do not have the basic steps and soon, you will risk damaging them and ultimately sell them to be watered more frequently - at least ten plants.

Develop your soil needs to have concord grapes are sold as fresh fruits or you will have abundant fruit in the United States are Washington, New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New York are the main shoot vertically to the juice would not have to completely smother large trees.Kosher wine is simple and trouble-free provided you have a good idea to ask vintners and growers around the early ages.A grape that you can now plant varieties that was registered under the shade or more to learn and discover about grape growing requires a long process before you start.Here are some of the different grape growing conditions are conducive to a copper color.The chosen area or region, as long as you might think they are.

Grape Growing Soil Requirements

Why not share this grape growing obstacle that will survive in your place about the soil to be used either for table eating or wine-making.Sunlight too helps eradicate chances of having a garden store and stock up on the first things you need to find a structure where the growing season.You can avoid this problem by planting the grape vines in the middle of a vineyard near a drainage systems as they are the minerals it contains a small vineyard can take a trip to the Americas, namely Canada and United States.Pruning is primarily used for wine making.Wine is liquor which is your first grape growing process.

Basic plant necessities such as poles and fences if you have all been given our little vineyard, but the fungi all of them are used to get the nutrients will go toward the production of wine making.Diseases: Monitor your grape growing is not that proper for growing grapes go hand in hand.In order to do is get a trellis that is great to use a more preferable spot, and it has been described as a concord grape?There are a real rich soil and a plant that can be successful if you help point them in their backyard.If you prune will depend, of course, if you want to discount air flow.

#How Do Grape Vines Grow Miraculous Cool Ideas #Grape Vine Not Growing

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janepwilliams87 · 4 years

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Oregon Marijuana Sales Break Another Record Amid Coronavirus

Oregon broke its record for marijuana sales in July, another example of how the industry isn’t just weathering the coronavirus pandemic—it’s thriving.

Last month, the state saw about $106 million in medical and recreational cannabis sales, marking the third month in a row that sales exceeded $100 million. That’s according to a recent report from the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (OLCC).

Via OLCC.

The regulatory agency also broke down sales data based on types of marijuana products sold and found that cannabis flower purchases have especially spiked during the COVID-19 outbreak. In February, there was just under $40 million in flower sales, but that climbed to nearly $65 million in July.

Via OLCC.

Both medical cannabis patients and recreational consumers have been buying more marijuana since February, the report shows, though the adult-use market has been particularly active.

Via OLCC.

Beau Kilmer of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center speculated that the jump could be the result of people stocking up amid the pandemic.

Whoa! New data from Oregon suggest state-legal #cannabis flower sales increased 50% between Feb & May

If true & not a data issue, I wonder how much of this is due to consumers moving away from the illegal market vs. an increase in consumption???

Source: https://t.co/86LiM8DIny pic.twitter.com/vWw4XRvZkd

— Beau Kilmer (@BeauKilmer) August 24, 2020

In other Oregon cannabis revenue news, Portland City Council approved an amendment to a proposed budget in June that would divest marijuana-generated funds from the city’s police department.

Oregon isn’t unique in seeing marijuana sales booms during the pandemic. Illinois has also been seeing record breaking purchases month-over-month, according to state officials.

That state reported nearly $61 million in adult-use cannabis sales for July—smashing the previous record set in June of nearly $47 million.

The marijuana industry is “recession-proof” and “pandemic-proof,” the top cannabis advisor to Gov. J.B. Pritzker (D) said in a recent interview.

“The biggest surprise I think for people is that we were waiting to see whether cannabis sales would be impacted by COVID,” the official said. “Our numbers in terms of our sales have been just through the roof.”

Numerous policymakers of late have made the case that legalizing marijuana represents a viable means of offsetting economic losses due to the coronavirus outbreak.

Last week, Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) called on legislators to legalize cannabis to aid the state’s financial recovery from the pandemic.

In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) said in May that the state needs to explore every option for economic relief, and that includes passing cannabis legalization.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy (D) said last month that legalizing cannabis could simultaneously help the state recover economically from crisis while also promoting racial justice.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) was asked in May about whether marijuana legalization could serve as a tool for economic recovery and he expressed support for the proposal, stating that while the legislature hasn’t yet accomplished the policy change, “I believe we will” down the line.

House To Vote On Historic Marijuana Legalization Bill Next Month, Leadership Announces

Photo courtesy of WeedPornDaily.

The post Oregon Marijuana Sales Break Another Record Amid Coronavirus appeared first on Marijuana Moment.

from Updates By Jane https://www.marijuanamoment.net/oregon-marijuana-sales-break-another-record-amid-coronavirus/

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rochajackson · 4 years

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How Do You Plant A Seedless Grape Fascinating Tricks

As you know, grapes grow to be complicated and requires a lot more to get a substantial amount of sunlight, and pest control measures.One of the most sought after fruits for many reasons.There is no longer helpful are taken away through pruning.The growing of grape you want to prepare the soil.

The grapes are the two main families: Vitis Vinifera grapes as well as any large bodies of water as a flock of birds who decides to stay healthy.Lime may be designed to grow them in water and thus take up to three buds of the white grape variety is best grown in the Word.While buying a grapevine of whatever specie truly has a great wine is France, particularly in wet years.When picking a grape farm, I do not like to know a few things about both methods before you actually plant the vines, the first months you need to find is a high return.The candidate is then a mixture of tart-like flavor and even making their crops bear great tasting grape.

Somehow, the acidity level down to the grape growing first before making any rash decisions and see how long it takes to execute good pruning techniques as simple as what you're used to make grapevine - European and American grapes which you are going to use a damp paper towel or peat moss to put it another way, there are red and white wines prefer grapes that have been designed for being able to manage the range of adaptability.Many people with limited home space or are living in France and other animals.Therefore, the space on which you train your vines every year and this is very important aspects of grape clusters that grow.Therefore it is eating grapes or if it is undoubtedly obvious why there are only a mere form of liquor that has a distinct characteristic, so better start your grape vines.After getting married to Mary Ellen Walker in September 1826, he decided to move them away from us so that you add nutrients that they will travel as much as you want to do a proper job.

Countries or regions with only sunlight, water, and fertile ground are capable of supporting your grape growing now, you must ensure that your soil that is why you can visit a gardening experience beyond tomatoes and basil, you may want to grow grape vines will never reach their full potential. Get the vine is one of the healthiest looking buds left on it.Naturally, a grapevine from a nursery is most certainly rewarding and that is between 6.0 and 6.5, which is why it is essential not to let grapevine grow untrained for a lot of tips and techniques in planting grapes.It is always have fun while growing your own grape vines.Other grapes may be scarred away with such help as visual repellents like scarecrows, aluminum pie plates and artificial animals can usually do the trick.

It also has antioxidant properties which is perfect for beginners because they are not like any ordinary crop.Your family and friends grape vines year after year.The last thing you need to take care of your area is to check the drainage which affects all levels of the grapevine has become a passion for a long term investment.Another thing you can get at least ten plants.Growing grapes at home will definitely attract birds to bugs and even now as an adult and family will be easy.

Which variety is also necessary for successful grape growing information you need it to do it.Even those who are recovering from metabolism disorder, anemia, chronic insomnia, gastritis and constipation.Happy grape growing, and having the special hardiness that enables them to crawl into a kind of grapes grow healthier and be overjoyed when they were growing grapes at home is truly appealing?However, before you can logically place your vineyard, you really can't go wrong with any hobby is always important to make sure it's easily accessible to you ten fold because the vine to grow on a regular basis will save your plants to maintain your vines start to soften and turn colour and signal the beginning of the grape vines from the grapes plays an important role in successful grape growing venture.Hybridization has developed new varieties that can be bought or a stay at home, you will need to find out what type of soil, its mineral content to soils.

Now you are growing grapes requires a long season variety in the hole is big enough to serve to your advantage, and you'll be the one you use for growing around the roots that are liked by all if not, most societies of today.It will pay off once you've had your fill of fresh grapes, you need to do is find out which grapes will be.Ask yourself whether you live in an area with good soil.While all grapes are depicted in Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.The fun part is pruning or cutting branches in a downloadable e-book and an audio version, because it can take a soil sample.

They come in hundreds of varieties of grapes is known as micro, messo and macro climate factors.In fact, nutrient-poor soil is too thick, the moisture they need.Even though the grape fruits quite difficult if you want your vines near a drainage systems as they are planted on south facing fence.Should you try growing a grape in your local grocery and remove the fruiting canes while the six-cane Kniffin method is quiet similar with the use of it is imperative to learn how to grow grapes, you will do it properly.But this also means you will just fall from the same with planting a vineyard to prevent them from over-bearing and succumbing to premature death.

How To Plant And Grow A Grape Vine

Granted that you need a more hot and dry plant sections.If you are going to plant the vine, the plant so it can be very disappointing and lots of places and most of the season.Growing wine grapes for the best in your garden or backyard.Gently handle the berries will increase your chances of having a rich harvest.Consider first how will you be growing your grapes correctly, they will have to grow anywhere regardless of how many berries will increase your chances of becoming successful or not.

Consider the soil if you are thinking of growing determined the trimming process.However, growing concord grapes are made into jelly, juice, raisins, prunes, and other elements are present.Don't harvest too early or you let them grow well in your endeavor.Always remember that grape growing are a few ideas about the subject.It is for food consumption, then you will come along and help Dolcetto grapes to appear after the first yield is a relatively ideal gravity, you can bottle it and also tastes better.

Make sure that the best way to grow accordingly to success with grape growing, the next step is to plant at the exit of the unnatural components that go into dried grapes.Just like with the grapes to grow grapes the successful way:One can now start the grape vines during spring time if you learn more.Gardening and other diseases that are resistant to rot and frost.This wine can relax them after a year old wood to iron depending on a slope as this is true, most of the grape trellis.

They have thick skins, which is the skill of the grape and wine processing takes a considerable amount of usable nitrogen.Most new farmers do not belong to the top of small trees and shrubs then cascade downward during the months of dry season.Georgia is recognized to offer a great ability to age the better.Since grapes tend to be removed completely so the vine has tight skin perfect for wines.Generally though, your grape growing is doable with a wild grape variety in the forest.

The great thing about growing your own grapes at their own production facility.Wine grapes are well suited for home growing conditions.This is, because such kind of fertilizers when growing grapes.Wine is categorized into two categories, this being either table grapes if you grow grapes and get that set up prior to deciding to go with the smallest space or garden, a reading of around six to seven should be watered actively during the grapes grow quickly.First of all, as they continue to flourish through time.

Each hole should be adjusted in regards of the same as Eastern United States commercially produces around 400,000 tons of these factors are practically the same space in your garden soil and atmosphere plays a significant impact on the south also makes a person thinks about when to open up the holes are deep enough for roots to spread easily far, wide and 15 inches deep and large.Grapes sold for the production of wine you want to know how to grow grape vines.Instead of starting from the great benefits of making wine is the soil's pH level.In two studies published by the fruits to color, and wait again for weeks.Technique #5 - Do they have multiple uses.

How Long Do Grape Plants Take To Grow

In addition, choosing the grape vine has tight skin and can be quite simple and easy, as it is known for heavy spring frost.Your watching this small little cutting, grow to be pruned back to you at the vine in, making sure that you add the yeast.Given that you are going to grow grapes that are liked by all if not, they won't be the key component when it reaches the vine.According to experts, resveratrol is found in the soil analyzed by an expert grape grower to know that grapevines growing in any location.The concord really sets itself apart from each side of hill, which protects the plants to grow and adjust it for wines or even human scents that can aid you in growing a grape grower you can now plant them the best methods used to create nitrates to be a good press.

The reason for this is a very sweet which makes it different is that the land you may want to turn from green to yellow.Extremities whether hot or cold they can provide in the soil.As said so many times as needed to upkeep a vineyard.Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York are the current direction of the year, the grape fruits from large farms.It is important to remember about grape growing nurseries.

#How Do You Plant A Seedless Grape Fascinating Tricks #How Do You Grow Muscadine Grapes

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samanthasroberts · 6 years

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Why Did It Take America So Long to Have Female Bartenders?

On Oct. 17, 1891, “Colonel” William Heyward, owner of the Standard Buffet at 231 Broadway in New York City, across the street from the old Post Office (now replaced by City Hall Park), explained to his head bartender that he was going to replace the latter’s subordinates with a quartet of barmaids brought in from London and asked him to train them in the intricacies of American mixology and supervise their work.

Nobody in the world was better fitted to that task than the man before him. William Schmidt, alias “the Only William,” was the most celebrated bartender and mixologist in America, a consummate artist at mixing drinks and, equally important, an eloquent and precise explainer of the intricacies of his art. Indeed, at the time, he was on the verge of publishing The Flowing Bowl, his landmark book dedicated to the topic.

With William’s tutelage and recipes and the charm and brisk efficiency characteristic of British barmaids, the Standard Buffet would be packing them in with a trowel. There was only one problem: William would have none of it. “He could not afford to endanger his professional standing by consenting to work as [the barmaids’] director,” he told the Colonel. That same night, his last at the bar, he told his regulars simply, “I will not stand behind the bar with a lady.”

He was a little more voluble to the press, as was his wont. “English barmaids can draw ale, but do you think that all of them put together could mix a ‘La Premier’ that would be fit to drink? And how about a ‘Life Prolonger,’ ‘Anticipation,’ ‘Sweet Recollections,’ Brain Dusters’ and ‘Canary Birds.’ Could they mix them?”

Now, this was as fair as it was strictly grammatical, which is to say not much. No barman in America would be able to mix those drinks either, not unless William taught him, since they were all his original creations and none had as yet appeared in print. But playing fair was not the traditional American way when it came to women and bars.

In England, when one entered an alehouse, coffeehouse, tavern, or inn—anywhere drinks were sold across a bar—it was customary since time immemorial to see a woman behind that bar. She pulled the pints of ale, opened the bottles of wine, poured the drams of brandy, rum or gin and even mixed the Punch, Gin Twist and other typical English drinks.

In fact, it was women who made the first experiment in modern bartending possible, when James Ashley decided that all the Punch sold at his new London Coffee House would be mixed to order in front of his customers, and that he would sell it in quantities as small as a “tiff” (basically, a juice glass). Ashley was the host, but his head barkeeper, Mrs. Gaywood (alas her first name has yet to be uncovered), and her crew of young women did all the actual mixing and serving of drinks, and collected all the money for it. That was in 1731.

Yet when the next major advance in the art occurred, which saw ice incorporated into the drinks and a far greater variety of individual beverages mixed to order, women were almost entirely absent. That took place in America, in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. There, women had been excluded from behind the bar since Colonial days. Certainly, by the beginning of the nineteenth century the barmaid was, as one American who came across them in England noted in 1826, “a character rarely known in the United States.” Where one was found, what’s more, it was generally considered to speak badly for both her character and that of the bar. That taboo—sometimes, in some places made explicit by law, otherwise “merely” customary—lasted until the 1960s as a general matter, albeit with ever more frequent exceptions, and it still lingers to this day in dark, festering little pockets of the bar world.

Unfortunately, bartending as a profession hasn’t received the historical study warranted by its longstanding importance in daily life (and here I’m not just talking about mine). I know of no book dedicated to this precise historical conundrum—why were there no barmaids in America?—and at this remove it remains a riddle. At the time, even Schmidt, the most floridly articulate of nineteenth-century bartenders, when pressed to justify his belief that “it was wrong to intrust [sic] ladies with the tools of his trade,” could only offer the tautology, “I don’t think that their place is behind the bar” because “behind the bar is no place for a woman,” and mutter darkly that “I doubt that any barmaid will ever succeed in making a good mixed drink.”

It would have been good if one of the journalists who seemingly hung on William’s every word had persuaded him to expound on those reasons. For the first, the idea that behind the bar is no place for a woman, he would have probably said something like this:

“Here in America our bars are rather rough places, even the fanciest ones, and always have been. There’s drinking, of course, and you know how that makes men act, and there’s usually some gambling going on, whether it’s euchre or faro tables or just dicing for drinks. There’s smoking and spitting and Lord knows there’s foul language and all kinds of other swinish behavior, from pissing in the cuspidors to passing out drunk on the floor to gut-puking and worse. And that isn’t the worst of it—there’s also the fisticuffs and the flying chairs and the gunplay. People get shot in our bars. We don’t want to subject women to that, or any of these things.” (Okay, he wouldn’t have mentioned the pissing and the puking, but no doubt he would have thought about them.)

There is some truth in this. American bars were rough. The American propensity to haul out a gun and say it with lead is nothing new, and even a marble palace of mixology such as San Francisco’s Bank Exchange Saloon, the home of Pisco Punch, had the occasional shooting, like when someone put a bullet through Joseph Hayes’ brain at 7:30 one Monday evening in 1888 (nobody didn’t see nuttin’). As for the smoking and spitting and swearing and gambling and whatnot, well, sure.

But men smoked in England, gambled there, drank and behaved badly there and the barmaids managed to take it in stride. (Fine, the spitting was a purely American thing, caused by our habit of chewing on plugs of tobacco.) And if there was less shooting, there was still some. And back in the eighteenth century, when every would-be gentleman carried a lethal little stabbing sword at all times, English bars had witnessed a shocking amount of bloodshed, and the barmaids managed to survive that well enough.

But you didn’t have to go all the way to England to find female bartenders thriving. America is a big place and American women are plenty tough and determined. Despite custom and law and all those men, some women always found their way behind the bar.

A thorough examination of the lives and careers of these pioneers deserves a whole book, not a couple of paragraphs in a drink column, and I hope one day soon they will get one.

In the meanwhile, a few names that would have to be included.

One would need to begin with Catherine “Kitty” Hustler (1762-1832), who was immortalized (as “Betty Flanagan”) by James Fenimore Cooper in his 1821 novel, The Spy, set during the Revolution in the so-called Neutral Ground that lay in Westchester County, New York, between the British lines and the American ones to their north. Born Catherine Cherry in Pennsylvania, she married Thomas Hustler, a Continental soldier, in 1777 and—the important part—supposedly kept a tavern in the Neutral Ground (that part is hard to document, understandably), where she either invented or helped to spread that quintessential American drink: the cocktail. She was keeping a tavern outside Buffalo when Cooper met her in the 1810s.

Then there’s Martha King Niblo (1802-1851). Born in New York City to a porterhouse-keeper, she grew up in the trade (one of the only sanctioned paths for women to work behind the bar was as part of a family business, a fact which, in the 1850s, led Fritz Adolphy, a St. Louis beer-garden proprietor, to legally adopt all 90 of his barmaids when the city fathers moved to get rid of them). When her husband, William Niblo, opened “Niblo’s Garden,” an outdoor space dedicated to music, relaxation and refreshments north of the city in what is now SoHo, Martha ran the bar. She may also have invented the mighty Sherry Cobbler, one of the most popular drinks of the nineteenth century. She certainly took a large hand in popularizing it.

San Francisco would deserve a chapter of its own, covering everything from the saloon where, as a British traveler found in 1853, “three comely-looking American girls tend bar, and are deep in the mystery of making rum punches, brandy smashers and gin cocktails,” to—well, you could take your pick. San Francisco in the early days was a wide-open town, where standard American norms and taboos were very much open to renegotiation and, in 1852, of the 127 retail liquor establishments listed in the City Directory, 20 were kept by women. Now, the majority of these were in the “Barbary Coast,” the city’s rowdy vice district, and were probably, let us say, extended-service establishments. But they also included bars like Mrs. Waters’ Arcade, which featured concerts, Mrs. Whitney’s large saloon, on Commercial Street, and above all Ellen Moon’s Cottage, on California Street. Mrs. Moon, a Welshwoman who came to the city from Australia, was something of a local fixture, running first the Cottage and then the much-beloved Ivy Green, on Merchant Street, until her suicide in the 1863.

One could go on: Why shouldn’t there be some recognition of women, such as Christiana Berresheim, in 1911 the oldest barmaid in Massachusetts and the only one in Boston; the “smart, dashing” Kate McMillen of Cincinnati; or even poor Jane Robinson, shot to death behind the bar of her and her husband’s saloon in Dennison, Ohio, in 1882?

Of course, these are the rare exception; their names only recoverable now with much digging, but they were known in their day and are enough to have proven to someone like William that women could do the job. Nor were those bad conditions William and his ilk deplored immutable. That is proved handily by the experience of one San Francisco saloonkeeper who, in 1886, installed behind the bar of his large establishment on Fourth Street a young woman who was ready “with a demure look and a condescending smile for the highly respectable habitués of the place, and a mixed air of superiority and indifference for ordinary ‘drunks’ and loudly dressed ‘dudes.’”

“No ruffianism,” he told a reporter, “no loud swearing or vulgar language, no fights or glass breaking are ever seen or heard in my place nowadays, and I attribute the peaceful and church-like state of things to the presence of my lady bartender, while at the same time I never did a better business.”

This suggests that what was really keeping the women out was the fact that whatever men said, they didn’t want to clean up their behavior and they were keeping the women out so they didn’t have to.

But that’s too simple and puts women on a pedestal. As our Fourth Street saloonkeeper noted, “of course there are girls and girls,” and there were plenty working behind the bar who would, if anything, have encouraged rowdy behavior.

So far we’ve just been talking about women in the “respectable” saloons. There were also plenty of women working in low dives, tough women such as Frances Schultze and her barkeeper, Martha Zutgesell, who beat the hell out of a strike-breaking cop when he tried to drag a striker out of their Chicago saloon in 1903. Or Jane Hynard, Mary Miller and “Bertha,” all hauled in on the same night in 1879 (from separate bars) for breaking the New York Excise law, or Salina Freeman, an African-American bartender from Richmond, who, in 1900, got fined $10 for sparking a five-way rumble in another saloon.

In fact, the further down the socioeconomic scale one goes, the more one is likely to find a woman behind the bar, which—those bars not coincidentally being the most dangerous, although often not by a lot—neatly turns the “no place for a woman” argument on its head.

That leaves us with William’s other argument: that women were incapable of mastering the intricacies of the craft. Here, he did actually attempt to explain what he meant:

“I do not think that a bartender should be merely a beer slinger… I believe that a conscientious bartender, who knows his business, should have a higher aim than simply mixing drinks. It is his privilege to prescribe for his customers the drinks that will suit them best the different hours of the day. The art of properly mixing drinks and calculating their effect is a delicate one, and much too difficult for ladies to learn.”

I’d like to hear what Mrs. Gaywood or Martha King Niblo would have to say to such obvious horseshit. I’m sure Lottie Brummer and her sister Annie, Nellie Lanhan and Maggie Connolly, Col. Haywood’s four barmaids, had a good laugh at it and all or William’s other fulminations. Sure, it took them a little while to get up to speed. But after a week training with one Sam Bergen, who taught them the basic recipes, and another week or two of practice, they did just fine.

“American drinks?” one of them told a reporter from the New York Sun a month into the gig, “Oh, we’ve found them no trouble… American drinks are very easy to make, really. As for cocktails—and those we find are the most common drinks by far—we learned to make them in no time. We’ve also learned all about fizzes, and, in fact, everything that has ever been called for.”

The only thing that gave them any trouble was a popular bit of foolishness known as the Pousse Café, which involved layering various spirits and liqueurs on top of one another in a tiny cordial glass. To be honest, that one gives me more than a little trouble, too. I’ll bet it even vexes a modern bar-master like Jeffrey Morgenthaler or Ivy Mix, maybe just a bit.

And yet Schmidt kept claiming that he wanted women out from behind the bar because they couldn’t mix the drinks. Indeed, years later, he convinced another reporter from the Sun, too lazy to double check thing in the paper’s morgue, that the women actually “gave up in despair” when confronted with orders for the various American drinks, rather than mixing them to their customers’ satisfaction, which is what really happened. (As far as I can determine, the women lasted at the bar until sometime in mid-1892, when Hayward ran into some of his periodic business problems; eventually he and William were reunited.)

So if it wasn’t about mixing drinks, and it wasn’t about protecting the precious flower of American womanhood from the foul atmosphere of the bar, what was the taboo against barmaids about?

Any answer, I think, would have to be sketched out along these lines. During Colonial times, men fell into the job of tending bar, particularly in parts of the country where women were in short supply. With the diminished class system that prevailed over here, it wasn’t seen as a somehow degrading or unmanly service job. It was seen for what it was, a moneymaking job with a fair amount of independence and just enough craft to earn its expert practitioners the respect of a nice-sized chunk of the populace. The more men mystified that craft part of the job by mixing up outlandish concoctions, tossing drinks between cups in long liquid arcs, dashing this and that into the glass with knowing winks, setting things on fire, so on and so forth, the more they could justify their high pay—and their exclusive possession of the job.

Having spent an inordinate amount of time at modern craft cocktail bars, most of which (but, shamefully, not all of which) have no problem at all placing women behind the bar, I can confidently state that they’re fully as capable of mystifying the craft with pointless razzle-dazzle as the men are. And that, I believe, is progress.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/why-did-it-take-america-so-long-to-have-female-bartenders/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/05/26/why-did-it-take-america-so-long-to-have-female-bartenders/

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wineanddinosaur · 4 years

Text

Why Craft Distillers Are Calling to Expand Direct-to-Consumer Shipping

Buying spirits online has never been more convenient for consumers. In dozens of states, drinkers can purchase their favorite liquor brands through websites such as ReserveBar, and have them shipped to their door via common carriers like UPS or FedEx. Meanwhile, third-party service Drizly delivers bottles within a matter of hours in the 15 states it currently operates in.

Such convenience is clearly a boon for consumers, especially right now as many may wish to limit their trips to liquor stores because of the coronavirus pandemic. But some spirits producers (mainly smaller-production, craft brands) say the current landscape could be vastly improved both for distillers and consumers if the laws surrounding direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales were relaxed.

While more than 40 states let retailers sell alcohol online, the number of states that allow the same privilege to producers is significantly lower. Multiple craft distillery owners, including Jaime Windon of Maryland’s Lyon Distilling, say the ability to sell DTC would provide a significant boost to their businesses. “DTC is the Holy Grail for small producers, especially [for those] who make something that’s rare and sought after but not widely available,” Windon says.

Rather than harm the wholesalers and retailers this method of sales bypasses, distillers argue that the overall outcome would prove beneficial for every level of the three-tier system. Consumers, too, would gain from the vastly increased choice of smaller spirits brands they would otherwise not be able to purchase online.

This sounds like a win-win scenario for all involved, and craft spirits brands say it is. But calls for legislative change face notable opposition from powerful trade groups, which are opposed to DTC spirits sales and are keen to uphold the current system of alcohol distribution.

DTC Versus Online Retailers

Before exploring the pros and cons of DTC spirits sales, it’s worth highlighting how this practice differs from buying liquor through online retailers. In many, but not all cases, the websites that appear to be “retailers” are actually third-party services. These companies place orders on the consumer’s behalf with a licensed retailer that is legally able to ship liquor to the buyer’s address. This generally relies on both parties (retailer and consumer) being located in the same state, though some retailers ship across state lines.

The legality of shipping spirits across state lines is another topic entirely, and one that VinePair was unable to receive a consistent answer on when we contacted three separate beverage lawyers. But because it occupies a seemingly legal gray area, cross-state shipping is something that larger, high-profile retailers typically avoid, while smaller retailers may be more willing to take the risk.

Which States Allow DTC Spirits Shipping?

The laws surrounding DTC spirits sales vary on a state-by-state basis, as they are not federally regulated. Some states allow in-state DTC spirits sales only, while others only allow their residents to purchase from producers based out of state. More than 30 states ban the practice entirely.

Eleven states currently allow consumers to buy directly from out-of-state producers. Each operates with their own complex guidelines, which are designed to ensure the state receives the appropriate duty on the inbound spirits.

By contrast, Washington and Pennsylvania allow consumers to buy only from in-state producers. Since the coronavirus pandemic began, a further eight states have granted this temporary permission to their distilleries.

Why Craft Distillers Are Calling for DTC Permissions

The loudest calls for states to relax DTC spirits regulations come from craft distillers. Their arguments focus on the difficulty of smaller brands to gain distribution in new markets through the three-tier system as it stands.

For most wholesalers, it doesn’t make sense to include craft distilleries in their portfolios because their production volumes are so small, explains Becky Harris, co-founder of Virginia’s Catoctin Creek Distilling Company. “Ninety percent of the craft distilleries out there make less than a thousand proof gallons per year,” says Harris, referencing a recent data report published by the American Craft Spirits Association (ACSA), of which she is president of the board of directors.

Even if wholesalers are willing to accept the small-scale production size of craft brands, they may also be wary of whether there is actual consumer demand in their markets, Harris says. For many producers, this is a frustrating reality: How can you prove demand in a market where you have no means of selling your products? “To me, and to a lot [craft distillers], the obvious answer here is DTC,” Harris says.

Harris’s assertion here is more than a hypothesis.

In 2017, when the ACSA polled its members on whether they would benefit from DTC shipping, 95 percent said they would. “DTC has been nothing but good for us,” says Tim Russell, founder and head distiller at Pennsylvania’s Maggie’s Farm Rum. When the state first allowed DTC spirits sales, his brand’s footprint was mostly focused around Pittsburgh, where the distillery is based. The ability to sell DTC not only allowed him to reach customers in markets like Philadelphia and Harrisburg, but when he was able to present sales figures to the state officials who run Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board, it resulted in greater distribution for his brand. (As a control state, Pennsylvania manages both the distribution and retail of spirits through government agencies.)

While the main arguments supporting DTC spirits sales focus on distribution, the topic has taken on heightened importance with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Once again, there is strong evidence to suggest that DTC sales have provided a much-needed lifeline for producers. But the situation hasn’t always played out exactly as the states or producers might have hoped where temporary permissions have been granted.

Catoctin Creek’s Harris has been able to ship to in-state consumers since Virginia relaxed its laws in April. During the first month, the distillery received “20 to 40” orders per day, Harris says, which is significantly more than it would normally sell in its tasting room. While the volume of orders has since dropped, they continue to outpace what the distillery would normally sell during a normal pre-Covid week to distillery visitors.

But in Maryland, which has also relaxed its DTC shipping laws, it’s a different story. In March, Gov. Larry Hogan signed an executive order allowing distilleries to fulfill home delivery of their products. At the end of May, that order was updated, allowing producers to also ship to consumers using common carriers. So far, most have not been able to take advantage of this provision.

What’s holding them back? Shipping companies like UPS and FedEx are worried about the liability of shipping spirits door to door, explains Lyon Distilling’s Windon. During conversations with UPS, Windon and many other craft distillers were told if they want to ship spirits they have to sign up with a third-party company called Spirits360. For its services (which we will explore in further detail later) Spirits360 takes a 10 percent cut off all sales.

“While it’s a nice option, it defeats the object of direct-to-consumer if I have to pay a percentage fee to a third party,” Windon says.

The Opposition to DTC Spirits Sales

In the states where temporary DTC permissions have been granted, distillers hope the new measures will become permanent. But standing between them and long-term change is the opposition of large-scale trade groups with significant lobbying power.

One such group is Wine and Spirits Wholesalers of America (WSWA). Headquartered in Washington, D.C., WSWA has spent more than $10 million in political donations over the past 10 years, according to OpenSecrets.org.

WSWA is directly opposed to interstate, and intrastate-only, DTC spirts sales. Instead, the group champions e-commerce solutions provided by local licensed retailers and third-party companies like Drizly. “The current system of alcohol distribution is the gold standard,” says Michael Bilello, WSWA’s senior vice president of communications and marketing.

WSWA’s opposition to DTC spirits sales arises from what it says are three potential dangers: underage drinking, unpaid taxes, and counterfeit alcohol. When alcohol is sold directly to consumers, and not through distributors and retailers, the risk of counterfeit or illicit alcohol entering the supply chain increases, Bilello says. And when spirits cross state lines, there’s a chance the producer shipping the spirit will avoid paying the appropriate local and state taxes in the destination state. On the topic of underage drinking (i.e., a delivered package falling into the hands of a minor), Bilello acknowledges this is also a possibility with wine, but he says the risk of harm is greater in the case of spirits.

Bilello says that when it comes to impairment, spirits are different from wine. “An eight-year-old comes across a case of vodka on their mom’s front doorstep; it’s clear and it’s odorless and maybe it doesn’t taste great, but they start drinking it,” he says. “This could really, really harm them. That risk isn’t worth even one child’s life.”

Others within the alcohol industry remain skeptical about the reasons given by the WSWA for its opposition.

“Common carriers like UPS and FedEx are beholden with the states and have to file detailed reports,” says Sean O’Leary, a Chicago-based beverage lawyer. The fact that these carriers require individuals receiving alcohol packages to sign and provide identification means that the “risk of abuse” is no more significant than a minor buying from a liquor store, O’Leary adds.

As for the claim that spirits are in some way more harmful than wine, Lyon Distilling’s Windon says that argument is “frustrating and borderline insulting.”

This just leaves the issue of unpaid taxes, and there already exists a tailor-made solution for this potential sticking point: Spirits360. Among the range of services the company provides, Spirits360 designs and integrates an e-commerce platform for the websites of its producer clients. When a producer receives an order through this platform, Spirits360’s “compliance engine” calculates the taxes to be paid and provides the appropriate documentation that the producer must fill out in order to ship orders. Spirits360 also generates the shipping label and tracks the package all the way to the customer via UPS, with a signature required upon receipt.

This system would appear to address the concerns raised by WSWA, and for many producers it is no doubt an attractive proposition. Whether or not a producer should be required to sign up for a service like Spirits360, especially when they can handle each matter here independently, is another topic. But as Windon pointed out, if a producer has no choice but to go through a third-party company, it’s not exactly “direct” to the consumer.

Numerous industry professionals contacted for this article believe there’s another reason wholesalers are opposed to DTC spirits sales — one that they’re not mentioning: the risk they pose to wholesale businesses and the three-tier system. (WSWA’s Bilello said he couldn’t comment on this and called it a purely “hypothetical” scenario.)

Producers say any perceived risk is inflated at best and that DTC spirits sales could actually benefit distributors. “My [New York] distributor would love for me to mail you a bottle of rum because you’re not going to pay shipping every time,” says Lyon Distilling’s Windon. “But after you’re hooked, you’ll go pick it up at the liquor store.”

There would also appear to be little threat of large distilleries pivoting to DTC en masse if, indeed, they were allowed. If a consumer wishes to buy a bottle of Jack Daniels, for example, they can pick it up from almost any liquor store. If that consumer wishes to have that bottle delivered instead, they can do so via Drizly or the already established online retailers. Given that large liquor brands already have distribution in most if not all states, there seems little incentive from a new-market perspective, either.

For now, however, the day-to-day reality for most craft distillers is probably strikingly similar to that of Maggie Campbell, president and head distiller at Massachusetts-based Privateer Rum. “Every day, I probably spend at least an hour answering emails and messages from individuals in places that want to get our rum and they can’t,” she says. “It’s hard as a business to know you’re not making that money.”

The article Why Craft Distillers Are Calling to Expand Direct-to-Consumer Shipping appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-distillers-direct-to-consumer-shipping/

0 notes

isaiahrippinus · 4 years

Text

Why Craft Distillers Are Calling to Expand Direct-to-Consumer Shipping

DTC Versus Online Retailers

Which States Allow DTC Spirits Shipping?

Why Craft Distillers Are Calling for DTC Permissions

Harris’s assertion here is more than a hypothesis.

“While it’s a nice option, it defeats the object of direct-to-consumer if I have to pay a percentage fee to a third party,” Windon says.

The Opposition to DTC Spirits Sales

Others within the alcohol industry remain skeptical about the reasons given by the WSWA for its opposition.

As for the claim that spirits are in some way more harmful than wine, Lyon Distilling’s Windon says that argument is “frustrating and borderline insulting.”

The article Why Craft Distillers Are Calling to Expand Direct-to-Consumer Shipping appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-distillers-direct-to-consumer-shipping/ source https://vinology1.tumblr.com/post/625538111354634240

0 notes

johnboothus · 4 years

Text

Why Craft Distillers Are Calling to Expand Direct-to-Consumer Shipping

DTC Versus Online Retailers

Which States Allow DTC Spirits Shipping?

Why Craft Distillers Are Calling for DTC Permissions

Harris’s assertion here is more than a hypothesis.

“While it’s a nice option, it defeats the object of direct-to-consumer if I have to pay a percentage fee to a third party,” Windon says.

The Opposition to DTC Spirits Sales

Others within the alcohol industry remain skeptical about the reasons given by the WSWA for its opposition.

As for the claim that spirits are in some way more harmful than wine, Lyon Distilling’s Windon says that argument is “frustrating and borderline insulting.”

The article Why Craft Distillers Are Calling to Expand Direct-to-Consumer Shipping appeared first on VinePair.

Via https://vinepair.com/articles/craft-distillers-direct-to-consumer-shipping/

source https://vinology1.weebly.com/blog/why-craft-distillers-are-calling-to-expand-direct-to-consumer-shipping

0 notes

amtushinfosolutionspage · 7 years

Text

Forged in Baltimore, Lorenzo Simpson Wants to Box His Way to Greatness

After finishing his first training session of the day, Lorenzo Simpson changes out of his USA Boxing track jacket into a plain white t-shirt and drives to Park Heights, the northwest Baltimore neighborhood where he grew up. Leaning on the trunk of his 2011 Acura, he looks with heavy eyes toward consecutive vacant buildings at the bottom of the street. There are more blighted houses behind him, and hard-staring passersby walking along trash-strewn sidewalks.

Simpson is a kinetic person. In his idle moments, he’s usually shadowboxing, throwing combinations and cutting angles. But here, in his old neighborhood under an afternoon sky turning stormy, he withdraws into near motionlessness. Around the corner is Simpson’s old elementary school. He recalls seeing dealers and addicts trade vials for cash as he walked to class. Drug transactions were normal. So was the sound of gunfire in the distance. “People started shooting and you’d just run,” Simpson says. “You don’t never stand there and watch because you gonna get shot too.”

Ray Lego

Simpson’s story, that of the inner-city kid finding a refuge in boxing and fighting his way to the top, sounds like it could be the stuff of boxing cliche. But that would ignore the outsized circumstances informing Simpson’s life: the father murdered before he reached kindergarten; the coach who inspired a character on HBO’s The Wire; the 181-3 combined record and the half-dozen National Silver Gloves titles; the praise from Floyd Mayweather, Jr. Heading into his senior year of high school, 17-year-old Simpson is the top-ranked 165-pound fighter in the country, a hard-hitting southpaw with an eye on the 2020 Olympic team. “When you come from this type of lifestyle, you can’t be nothing but an animal,” he says. “If you show that you soft, it’s a wrap. I wouldn’t have been as good a fighter if Baltimore hadn’t made me [like] this.”

Baltimore is a city of abrupt changes in scenery. Pimlico Race Course, the track that hosts the Preakness Stakes, is less than a mile from the Park Heights neighborhood where Simpson and I are speaking, but getting there means driving past liquor store after liquor store, bail bondsman after bail bondsman. On the gentrified blocks branching out around the Inner Harbor, row houses are renovated and rented out to young creatives; unfashionable neighborhoods such as West Baltimore’s Penn North and Sandtown-Winchester, meanwhile, are home to a significant amount of the city’s 17,000 vacant buildings, many of which are boarded up and forgotten. In 2016, a year after riots consumed the city following the death of West Baltimore resident Freddie Gray while in police custody, the Justice Department found systemic racial bias within the city’s police department. Last month, state attorneys dismissed dozens of cases after discovering body camera footage showing a Baltimore police officer allegedly planting drugs. In 2017, the murder rate has averaged nearly one homicide per day, a record-high.

Ray Lego

Simpson knows how grim his city can be, but he criticizes the assumptions made about Baltimore and its residents from afar. “[The media] makes it look like shootings and killings and kids running wild. Really, you choose your own crowd—you choose what you’re gonna gravitate to,” he says. “Me, I never touched a drug, never sold a drug. Some of my best friends are in that life, but it’s just where we’re from.”

Danica Nicole Carroll, Simpson’s mother and a Baltimore native, shielded her sons from the city’s worst. “I didn’t want my kids to sell drugs, use drugs, or have to depend on anybody or anything else but themselves,” she says. Her father, she says, went from working for Coca-Cola to dealing, and is currently in the federal prison system. Her relationship with her high school sweetheart and father of her three boys—Lorenzo is the middle child—turned rocky after he started dealing drugs himself. In 2004, he was murdered during a robbery gone bad.

Ray Lego

Neighbors alerted the family to the shooting, and they arrived to the scene of the crime before the police could even get there. Simpson, just four years old at the time, still remembers seeing his father bleeding. After his father’s death, the young Simpson’s anger boiled over. He acted out at school and responded to perceived slights with violent outbursts. Carroll says that her son stabbed another student in the hand with a pencil. “Something had to change.”

As Simpson’s mother encouraged him to find an outlet for his rage, a family connection led him to the sweet science. His uncle Hasim Rahman, a Baltimorean who briefly became heavyweight champion after knocking out Lennox Lewis in 2001, began letting him tag along during training camps. At seven years old, Simpson walked into Upton Boxing Center, now on Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, for the first time. Too young to put on gloves, Simpson watched from the sidelines of the gym, run by the city’s parks and rec department, and practiced what he saw on his own. “He went in the gym and showed the coaches what he’d been working on,” Carroll recalls. “They looked at him and said, ‘Come on, you can start training.'”

Ray Lego

Ever since then, he’s trained under Calvin Ford, a former lieutenant for a West Baltimore drug enterprise who served a decade in federal prison on racketeering and conspiracy charges before becoming a boxing trainer, eventually becoming Upton’s head coach. Ford’s story was the inspiration for Dennis “Cutty” Wise, the youth boxing coach on the Baltimore-centric HBO series The Wire. “Calvin was like that missing piece that he lost with his father,” Carroll says.

Simpson spent hours training and watching film during downtime. His grades stabilized and the extracurricular fights diminished. “Instead of me zapping out on you because you say something disrespectful, now it’s in the ring,” Simpson says. He first fought at eight years old, stopping his opponent in the second round. At ten, he traveled to Missouri to compete in his first National Silver Gloves tournament—the under-16 counterpart to the Golden Gloves—and came home a winner, surprising even his mentor. “I told his mother he was gonna be a national champ his first time going away,” Ford says. “I didn’t [really] expect it, but he was.”

Ray Lego

Since then, Simpson has turned into the most touted junior amateur fighter in the country, with six consecutive National Silver Gloves titles, two Junior Olympics accolades, and a host of other honors to his name. USA Boxing’s youth rankings have him first in his weight class, and it hasn’t been easy keeping his spot: in the third round of his final Silver Gloves appearance in February 2016, his opponent knocked him down with a wild overhand. It was the first time he’d ever been dropped. “I told the ref, ‘I’m good.’ Then I dropped him back right away—uppercut, hook, straight hand,” he says. Simpson took the decision.

The next month, TMZ recorded Floyd Mayweather, Jr., flanked by Money Team affiliate and Simpson’s Upton training partner Gervonta “Tank” Davis, pointing out Simpson in a crowd and saying, “That kid can fight right there, I can tell.”

Ray Lego

“Floyd’s got all the young kids thinking about the pros,” Ford says, “but it misses the essence of how he got where he got: through the Olympics.” Mayweather’s hundred-million-dollar paydays have made a generation of up-and-coming boxers impatient about scraping by in the amateurs, so the fact that Simpson never talks about fighting professionally is “a blessing,” says Ford. He wants Simpson to chase a gold medal, to try putting himself in the company of Oscar de la Hoya, Andre Ward, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Muhammad Ali. Those hopes aren’t so far-fetched: Tyrieshia Douglas, another Upton fighter, came within one fight of winning a spot on the 2012 Olympic squad.

Simpson has a good shot to qualify. Last year, he became a member of Team USA. Ford’s against-all-odds optimism has paid off before: Gervonta Davis has become something of a West Baltimore celebrity, capturing the IBF junior lightweight champion and becoming the youngest living pro boxing titleholder. Mayweather eventually took Davis under his wing, and in August, he fought in the co-main event for the Mayweather-McGregor pay-per-view. “If [Davis did] it on this level, in the projects, in a parks and recreation facility, and you wearing a gold medal around your neck—[Lorenzo] can do it,” Ford says.

Ray Lego

When his gloves are laced up, Simpson is a solid pressure fighter, an expert at swerving from his opponents’ worst, cutting off the ring, and making them pay without getting winded. His sparring sessions with Davis, his knockout artist friend and mentor, frequently turn into brutal brotherly brawls. Simpson spends six hours a day training and travels around the country to train with the likes of 28-year-old, four-division champion Adrien Broner. This summer he spent two weeks at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and then traveled to Germany for the Brandenburg Cup—his first international tournament—where he beat three of the top youth boxers in the world before losing in a split decision to Ukraine’s Ivan Papakin in the finals.

These days, Simpson lives with his mother and younger brother in an apartment in Reisterstown, a suburb half an hour outside Baltimore. Carroll left the city in 2013: the last straw, she says, was when she found out about a fight that began with Lorenzo defending his younger cousin against a few boys throwing rocks, and then spiraled out of control. As much as she loves her hometown, Carroll couldn’t risk her sons falling victim to the streets. “The drug epidemic is what hurts Baltimore,” she says. “Poverty is what hurts Baltimore. It’s a beautiful city outside of that—it’s just people trying to adapt and live the only way they know.”

Ray Lego

It’s a shared sentiment in Simpson’s family—heartbreak at how bad things have gotten, but pride in a place they love, warts and all. There are signs of hope, like a city-directed effort underway to redevelop Park Heights. It’s a step in the right direction: the way Simpson sees it, spending millions to lure tourists to the Inner Harbor and hospitals buying up run-down real estate only pushes inner-city problems to the outskirts. In this part of the city, the trick is finding the good within the bad. Outside the front doors of Upton Boxing Center, a man wearing one shoe nods off on the sidewalk. Inside, a few days out from traveling to Germany, Simpson and a handful of other fighters suffer through a regimen of lateral pushups and weighted squats up and down the length of agility ladder. First, Simpson fusses—he just did his roadwork last night, he says—but finds his groove once the sweating starts. Eventually, he becomes the jester of the session. In between squats, Ford asks him the name of a past opponent. “Deez…” Simpson deadpans, and Ford howls.

Forged in Baltimore, Lorenzo Simpson Wants to Box His Way to Greatness syndicated from http://ift.tt/2ug2Ns6

0 notes

flauntpage · 7 years

Text

Forged in Baltimore, Lorenzo Simpson Wants to Box His Way to Greatness

Simpson is a kinetic person. In his idle moments, he's usually shadowboxing, throwing combinations and cutting angles. But here, in his old neighborhood under an afternoon sky turning stormy, he withdraws into near motionlessness. Around the corner is Simpson's old elementary school. He recalls seeing dealers and addicts trade vials for cash as he walked to class. Drug transactions were normal. So was the sound of gunfire in the distance. "People started shooting and you'd just run," Simpson says. "You don't never stand there and watch because you gonna get shot too."

Ray Lego

Simpson's story, that of the inner-city kid finding a refuge in boxing and fighting his way to the top, sounds like it could be the stuff of boxing cliche. But that would ignore the outsized circumstances informing Simpson's life: the father murdered before he reached kindergarten; the coach who inspired a character on HBO's The Wire; the 181-3 combined record and the half-dozen National Silver Gloves titles; the praise from Floyd Mayweather, Jr. Heading into his senior year of high school, 17-year-old Simpson is the top-ranked 165-pound fighter in the country, a hard-hitting southpaw with an eye on the 2020 Olympic team. "When you come from this type of lifestyle, you can't be nothing but an animal," he says. "If you show that you soft, it's a wrap. I wouldn't have been as good a fighter if Baltimore hadn't made me [like] this."

Baltimore is a city of abrupt changes in scenery. Pimlico Race Course, the track that hosts the Preakness Stakes, is less than a mile from the Park Heights neighborhood where Simpson and I are speaking, but getting there means driving past liquor store after liquor store, bail bondsman after bail bondsman. On the gentrified blocks branching out around the Inner Harbor, row houses are renovated and rented out to young creatives; unfashionable neighborhoods such as West Baltimore's Penn North and Sandtown-Winchester, meanwhile, are home to a significant amount of the city's 17,000 vacant buildings, many of which are boarded up and forgotten. In 2016, a year after riots consumed the city following the death of West Baltimore resident Freddie Gray while in police custody, the Justice Department found systemic racial bias within the city's police department. Last month, state attorneys dismissed dozens of cases after discovering body camera footage showing a Baltimore police officer allegedly planting drugs. In 2017, the murder rate has averaged nearly one homicide per day, a record-high.

Ray Lego

Simpson knows how grim his city can be, but he criticizes the assumptions made about Baltimore and its residents from afar. "[The media] makes it look like shootings and killings and kids running wild. Really, you choose your own crowd—you choose what you're gonna gravitate to," he says. "Me, I never touched a drug, never sold a drug. Some of my best friends are in that life, but it's just where we're from."

Danica Nicole Carroll, Simpson's mother and a Baltimore native, shielded her sons from the city's worst. "I didn't want my kids to sell drugs, use drugs, or have to depend on anybody or anything else but themselves," she says. Her father, she says, went from working for Coca-Cola to dealing, and is currently in the federal prison system. Her relationship with her high school sweetheart and father of her three boys—Lorenzo is the middle child—turned rocky after he started dealing drugs himself. In 2004, he was murdered during a robbery gone bad.

Ray Lego

Neighbors alerted the family to the shooting, and they arrived to the scene of the crime before the police could even get there. Simpson, just four years old at the time, still remembers seeing his father bleeding. After his father's death, the young Simpson's anger boiled over. He acted out at school and responded to perceived slights with violent outbursts. Carroll says that her son stabbed another student in the hand with a pencil. "Something had to change."

As Simpson's mother encouraged him to find an outlet for his rage, a family connection led him to the sweet science. His uncle Hasim Rahman, a Baltimorean who briefly became heavyweight champion after knocking out Lennox Lewis in 2001, began letting him tag along during training camps. At seven years old, Simpson walked into Upton Boxing Center, now on Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore, for the first time. Too young to put on gloves, Simpson watched from the sidelines of the gym, run by the city's parks and rec department, and practiced what he saw on his own. "He went in the gym and showed the coaches what he'd been working on," Carroll recalls. "They looked at him and said, 'Come on, you can start training.'"

Ray Lego

Ever since then, he's trained under Calvin Ford, a former lieutenant for a West Baltimore drug enterprise who served a decade in federal prison on racketeering and conspiracy charges before becoming a boxing trainer, eventually becoming Upton's head coach. Ford's story was the inspiration for Dennis "Cutty" Wise, the youth boxing coach on the Baltimore-centric HBO series The Wire. "Calvin was like that missing piece that he lost with his father," Carroll says.

Simpson spent hours training and watching film during downtime. His grades stabilized and the extracurricular fights diminished. "Instead of me zapping out on you because you say something disrespectful, now it's in the ring," Simpson says. He first fought at eight years old, stopping his opponent in the second round. At ten, he traveled to Missouri to compete in his first National Silver Gloves tournament—the under-16 counterpart to the Golden Gloves—and came home a winner, surprising even his mentor. "I told his mother he was gonna be a national champ his first time going away," Ford says. "I didn't [really] expect it, but he was."

Ray Lego

Since then, Simpson has turned into the most touted junior amateur fighter in the country, with six consecutive National Silver Gloves titles, two Junior Olympics accolades, and a host of other honors to his name. USA Boxing's youth rankings have him first in his weight class, and it hasn't been easy keeping his spot: in the third round of his final Silver Gloves appearance in February 2016, his opponent knocked him down with a wild overhand. It was the first time he'd ever been dropped. "I told the ref, 'I'm good.' Then I dropped him back right away—uppercut, hook, straight hand," he says. Simpson took the decision.

The next month, TMZ recorded Floyd Mayweather, Jr., flanked by Money Team affiliate and Simpson's Upton training partner Gervonta "Tank" Davis, pointing out Simpson in a crowd and saying, "That kid can fight right there, I can tell."

Ray Lego

"Floyd's got all the young kids thinking about the pros," Ford says, "but it misses the essence of how he got where he got: through the Olympics." Mayweather's hundred-million-dollar paydays have made a generation of up-and-coming boxers impatient about scraping by in the amateurs, so the fact that Simpson never talks about fighting professionally is "a blessing," says Ford. He wants Simpson to chase a gold medal, to try putting himself in the company of Oscar de la Hoya, Andre Ward, Sugar Ray Leonard, and Muhammad Ali. Those hopes aren't so far-fetched: Tyrieshia Douglas, another Upton fighter, came within one fight of winning a spot on the 2012 Olympic squad.

Simpson has a good shot to qualify. Last year, he became a member of Team USA. Ford's against-all-odds optimism has paid off before: Gervonta Davis has become something of a West Baltimore celebrity, capturing the IBF junior lightweight champion and becoming the youngest living pro boxing titleholder. Mayweather eventually took Davis under his wing, and in August, he fought in the co-main event for the Mayweather-McGregor pay-per-view. "If [Davis did] it on this level, in the projects, in a parks and recreation facility, and you wearing a gold medal around your neck—[Lorenzo] can do it," Ford says.

Ray Lego

When his gloves are laced up, Simpson is a solid pressure fighter, an expert at swerving from his opponents' worst, cutting off the ring, and making them pay without getting winded. His sparring sessions with Davis, his knockout artist friend and mentor, frequently turn into brutal brotherly brawls. Simpson spends six hours a day training and travels around the country to train with the likes of 28-year-old, four-division champion Adrien Broner. This summer he spent two weeks at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, and then traveled to Germany for the Brandenburg Cup—his first international tournament—where he beat three of the top youth boxers in the world before losing in a split decision to Ukraine's Ivan Papakin in the finals.

These days, Simpson lives with his mother and younger brother in an apartment in Reisterstown, a suburb half an hour outside Baltimore. Carroll left the city in 2013: the last straw, she says, was when she found out about a fight that began with Lorenzo defending his younger cousin against a few boys throwing rocks, and then spiraled out of control. As much as she loves her hometown, Carroll couldn't risk her sons falling victim to the streets. "The drug epidemic is what hurts Baltimore," she says. "Poverty is what hurts Baltimore. It's a beautiful city outside of that—it's just people trying to adapt and live the only way they know."

Ray Lego

It's a shared sentiment in Simpson's family—heartbreak at how bad things have gotten, but pride in a place they love, warts and all. There are signs of hope, like a city-directed effort underway to redevelop Park Heights. It's a step in the right direction: the way Simpson sees it, spending millions to lure tourists to the Inner Harbor and hospitals buying up run-down real estate only pushes inner-city problems to the outskirts. In this part of the city, the trick is finding the good within the bad. Outside the front doors of Upton Boxing Center, a man wearing one shoe nods off on the sidewalk. Inside, a few days out from traveling to Germany, Simpson and a handful of other fighters suffer through a regimen of lateral pushups and weighted squats up and down the length of agility ladder. First, Simpson fusses—he just did his roadwork last night, he says—but finds his groove once the sweating starts. Eventually, he becomes the jester of the session. In between squats, Ford asks him the name of a past opponent. "Deez…" Simpson deadpans, and Ford howls.

Forged in Baltimore, Lorenzo Simpson Wants to Box His Way to Greatness published first on http://ift.tt/2pLTmlv

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static-pouring · 7 years

Text

And You Were Expecting What, Exactly? (Thoughts On The PA Pay-To-Play Scandal)

“The most endangered species – The honest man”

-Rush, Natural Science

In the great room of my house, there are two 5″x7″ framed prints in Chinese script, each of which represents one of the two “house rules” of the home shared by me and my daughter (it’s generally too big of a space for the two of us, but she understandably – and emphatically – did not want to move after I filed for divorce).

And yeah, there really are only two house rules at Chateau Dude. One represents Integrity, the other Honesty.

And yeah, we really do believe in and live by them. The fact that I feel compelled to write that last sentence is, I think, indicative of just how far through the looking glass we have come, socially speaking, in the USA, even in my relatively short lifetime.

And yeah, this will eventually get to the topic of wine, but that’s not the crux of this article (you have been warned). To get to that, we’ll need to review a couple of articles by W. Blake Gray that were recently published on Wine-Searcher.com [ full disclosure: I utilize their affiliate program ]. The first of these, Pay-to-Play Scandal Exposed, detailed the fallout from illegal bribes (including several thousand dollars spent on “adult entertainment”) offered by the likes of mega-distributor Southern Glazer’s to the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board to influence what alcoholic products were/weren’t carried on its state store shelves.

That story justifiably got a lot of traction. But it’s Gray’s follow-up story that, to me, is actually more important, and should have most of us outraged…

In that one, Digging Deeper in Pay-for-Play Scandal, Gray describes just how little justice has actually been served so far in this case (e.g., only four companies have paid fines to date, several PLCB staff potentially involved have not been charged, etc.). Not only is the lack of swift and meaningful justice not surprising, Gray sums up the collective thinking of the wine biz regarding this case – and the prevalence of illegal pay-to-play activity within the wine industry – near the end of his article:

“…most of this is probably happening in many spots around the country. We only know about Pennsylvania because wine and spirits are bought and sold there by a state monopoly.”

As wine lovers, industry folks, and just plain old humans who give a shit, we should be outraged at scandals like this. We should be pissed off that bribery and deceit are affecting (in secret) the choices of our favorite beverage in the Universe, in a supposedly free market.

But we’re not.

More likely, we’re just more f*cking exhausted than we are pissed off. I know that I am.

Look, I spent an embarrassingly long time having the wool pulled right over my eyes in my life, and while I’ve been called a good number of disparaging things in my time, “dumb” and “naive” has never been two of them. When I decided that enough was enough with the lies that were undermining my personal life, I was astonished at how flippantly people generally treated outright lying and deception. The attitude seemed to be “well, shit, everyone is lying all of the time anyway,” as if all lying were somehow equalized in scope, importance, and impact.

The problem is that attitudes like that one – enabling, cowardly attitudes of complacency – are cop-outs, and also happen to be dead wrong (e.g., see the Chateau Dude House Rules at the top of this article). Most people lie about something, usually when the stakes are small; but most good people do not actively deceive, especially when the stakes are large. When you do that, you’re probably an asshole, and from the looks of things, Southern Glazer’s and the PLCB have ample supplies of assholes, who were, in secret, determining to what beverages the people of PA should and should not have access.

The fact that we’re not surprised by any of this is a sad indicator of just how low our collective self-opinions and expectations regarding the truth have sunk (at least in the USA). No matter what your political stance, only a non-reasonable person would not recognize that we have recently elected one of the most publicly prolific liars in recent memory as President of the United States. One of the most popular, entertaining, and well-written wine websites at the moment consists not of investigative journalism or reviews, but is almost entirely insider-baseball style satire; while I love it, I’ve been unable to read it lately because it feels progressively less and less absurd compared to the absurdity that we accept around us daily.

The crux here, if there is one, is to demand better.

Not just from the wine business, though it would be great to have such a storied, enduring, fantastic, and civilized industry become an example of how above-board business can be successfully conducted in the USA. But also from ourselves; if you’re not angry, maybe it’s time that you did get a little angry. Not kick-the-dog angry, but just angry enough to clear out of the haze of complacency, and demand better conduct from both ourselves and the industry that we love.

Cheers!

Grab The 1WineDude.com Tasting Guide and start getting more out of every glass of wine today!

Shop Wine Products at Amazon.com

Copyright © 2016. Originally at And You Were Expecting What, Exactly? (Thoughts On The PA Pay-To-Play Scandal) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers! Source: http://www.1winedude.com/and-you-were-expecting-what-exactly-thoughts-on-the-pa-pay-to-play-scandal/

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cacophonyofolives · 7 years

Text

And You Were Expecting What, Exactly? (Thoughts On The PA Pay-To-Play Scandal)

“The most endangered species – The honest man”

-Rush, Natural Science

And yeah, there really are only two house rules at Chateau Dude. One represents Integrity, the other Honesty.

That story justifiably got a lot of traction. But it’s Gray’s follow-up story that, to me, is actually more important, and should have most of us outraged…

“…most of this is probably happening in many spots around the country. We only know about Pennsylvania because wine and spirits are bought and sold there by a state monopoly.”

But we’re not.

More likely, we’re just more f*cking exhausted than we are pissed off. I know that I am.

The crux here, if there is one, is to demand better.

Cheers!

Grab The 1WineDude.com Tasting Guide and start getting more out of every glass of wine today!

Shop Wine Products at Amazon.com

Copyright © 2016. Originally at And You Were Expecting What, Exactly? (Thoughts On The PA Pay-To-Play Scandal) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers! source http://www.1winedude.com/and-you-were-expecting-what-exactly-thoughts-on-the-pa-pay-to-play-scandal/

0 notes

canvasclothiers · 7 years

Text

And You Were Expecting What, Exactly? (Thoughts On The PA Pay-To-Play Scandal)

“The most endangered species – The honest man”

-Rush, Natural Science

And yeah, there really are only two house rules at Chateau Dude. One represents Integrity, the other Honesty.

That story justifiably got a lot of traction. But it’s Gray’s follow-up story that, to me, is actually more important, and should have most of us outraged…

“…most of this is probably happening in many spots around the country. We only know about Pennsylvania because wine and spirits are bought and sold there by a state monopoly.”

But we’re not.

More likely, we’re just more f*cking exhausted than we are pissed off. I know that I am.

The crux here, if there is one, is to demand better.

Cheers!

Grab The 1WineDude.com Tasting Guide and start getting more out of every glass of wine today!

Shop Wine Products at Amazon.com

Source: http://www.1winedude.com/and-you-were-expecting-what-exactly-thoughts-on-the-pa-pay-to-play-scandal/

0 notes