#crat beer

[beerlovetoronto]

THE FACE OF TORONTO ( IDES OF MARCH) ~ HENDERSON

The Face of Toronto is Henderson’s Ides of March Beer, a one-off they do every month. It was made to celebrate Toronto’s birthday - many Torontian faces were used on the labels. The beer is a ‘truffle’ saison made with orange peel, cardamom, and chocolate. Sampled on draught the beer poured a dark ruby-brown (much like a porter) with a creamy beige head that lasted several minutes. The nose has notes of chocolate, and spice, with an earthiness and subtle fruits. The taste had notes of dark chocolate, coffee, caramel, spice, roasted malts, and fruit and florals. The beer has a medium full body, average carbonation and low bitterness on the finish. I enjoyed this one, a very interesting brew.

5.5 % from Toronto, Ontario

[folliauomo]

[lostluca]

[ ryan guzman, male, he/him ] have you seen ( LUCA GALVEZ ) hanging around? the ( 28 ) year old often hangs around ( SETTLER’S POINT ) when they’re not being a ( CHIEF OF STAFF AT MURPHY FISHERY). i’ve been told they’re ( RELIABLE ) but ( SELF SACRIFICING ) and when i look at them, i see ( A STRAY CURL OF HAIR BREAKING FROM THE REST, VIEWS FROM UP HIGH, LOCK SCREEN FILLED WITH LOVED ONES ). wellcliff wouldn’t be the same without ‘em! [ jen, 26, she/her, ACST ]

TW: death, drugs, crime

For all his life it has been Luca and his baby sister Maria against the world. Somehow came between him and his sister you know you’re about to get end up hurting. 

Their parents were absent at best, not because they wanted to be but because they needed to work seemingly around the clock to pay the bills.

It came to no surprise that their father died when they were kids from a heart attack, their mother swearing it was from stress. Luca stepped up to look after his family

But where he lived in Mexico work was hard to come by, so he looked at his options in the states towards the end of high school. With his grades, he managed to get a scholarship for a three-year college that his mother still brags to anyone and everyone about. He went to the States regrettably leaving his family behind. As he studied he worked and with every paycheck money was sent home to support them.

Life progressed well. It was hard work, he ended up taking on three jobs post-college to pay for rent in his small Queens flat, have his own life, and send money home. He felt like it was balanced though because he dated, had friends, felt like he was apart of a community even if his family was back in Mexico. His sister had a kid, a little boy Gabriel, which Luca never forgot to send extra money for. The dad was apparently unknown but Luca always suspected something was being left out of their weekly conversations.

Until it wasn’t. Around 8 months ago Luca picked up the phone to a distressed Maria who could barely form sentences for the first hour. By the second she could piece together small details which eventually formed into a messed up situation. Maria had fallen in with the wrong kind of people, and the worst of the worst was Gabriel’s father. In their time together Maria had done some things she wasn’t proud of, and somewhere along the line a lot of money had gone owing and now Gabriel’s father was demanding it back or who knows what might happen to her family members.

Luca’s first instinct was to fly back to Mexico to be there and handle it in person but with no income from Luca in the State paying the guy back wasn’t even optional. The only way they could even suggest paying the sum off was if he kept sending money. Except more than he already was. But Luca lived in Queens, with high rent and not enough money to send away for what Maria needed.

So life changed a lot in a short amount of time. He sold furniture until he only had a bed, looked for more work even though hours in the day didn’t give him time for it, he stopped buying the on-brand food and experimented with just how much ramen noodles he could live off. Still, the balance was off and he quickly realized New York wasn’t the place to be. He needed to go smaller, with lower rent but decent pay, so he started putting feelers out with any friends to see if they knew of any opportunities.

And then Bash contacted him. Bash had just moved to this town where his uncle had lived. The guy had died and left behind a fishery where Bash needed extra hands. The work was hard labor but decent pay, and there was a hole in the wall apartment that barely cost anything compared to New York rates. Luca didn’t need to be told twice, it was a sign and he wasn’t denying it. So after trying on his own for 2 months he moved to Wellcliff where he’s been for the last 6. 

Now he works at a fishery. Too bad Luca hates the smell of fish.

At the beginning, it was just two friends working long hours doing messy work. Except they weren’t the hours Luca needed, that he thought was up for grabs, so he started showing up for shifts he wasn’t assigned for, and well, it turned fish wasn’t the only thing being moved. If it had been any other point in his life maybe Luca would have walked away completely, not wanting to know what dirty Bash was in, but he needed money desperately, and passing through suspicious crats to even more suspicious people seemed like a much higher pay grade. So Luca talked Bash into cutting him in, saying he’d work harder than anyone else, he already was.

Now he turns a blind eye to drugs, guns, god knows what else that comes through their way and helps Bash keep things running with the real business of fish. He struggles a lot when animals come through in deliveries, often neglecting his work to make sure they were well fed and taken care of, almost like he was silently apologizing for what part he played in their probably doomed lives. It isn’t a job he’s proud of, guilt and stress seem into his veins every day that passes.

There’s really only one thing keeping him together. His boss. Maybe Bash saw the desperation that met his own, maybe he just took pity on him, but they were in this together now. They have shared too many secrets and worried thoughts with one another late at night to even turn the other away.

To everyone else Luca is kind, he looks out for people but also knows to mind his own business. He can be a bit quiet, too much on his mind to talk, but when he’s out socializing he does his best to be engaged with everyone.

He’s currently living in a bare-boned studio, if you’d even call it that, and tries to keep his spending down as much as he can so the money can go to Maria to keep her and Grabriel safe. 

He’s the type of guy to feed a stray dog by the docks and become its unofficial owner.

His favorite spot in town is the old lighthouse where he breaks in sometimes to go sit at the top, not caring how many holes he has to dodge. Sometimes he’ll sit up there and just scream when no one is around, hating the life he lives but feeling like there’s no exit for him in sight.

He’s everyone's friend yet if you hurt his family or friends he won't hold back. Been in plenty of fights growing up, not afraid to join another.

Connection ideas:

someone he’s hooked up with, not necessarily serious [ Carmen ]

other people at the fishery

friends who buy him beers at the bar without even thinking to ask to pay for them later

someone who showed him around town when he first arrived

food place owner where he usually picks up big orders from the fishery crew (burgers etc) - [ Teddy, Stacy ]

anything really

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

I

n the year since President Trump pulled off his stunning upset of Hillary Clinton, Democrats have blamed the result on all kinds of factors: James Comey’s letter, Russian hackers, voter suppression, Jill Stein’s candidacy and depressed African-American turnout, to name a few. The truth? In an election decided by fractions of percentage points, it’s easy to call just about anything a difference-maker.

But none of that gets at the heart of why so many people who cast a ballot for former president Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 — and who saw Trump as unqualified to be president — nonetheless voted for him. Although it’s far from a microcosm of the nation, there’s one place that I believe illustrates what happened in 2016 better than anything else.

In a nation increasingly composed of landslide counties — places that voted for one side or the other by at least 20 percentage points — Howard County, Iowa (population 9,332), stands out as the only one of America’s 3,141 counties that voted by more than 20 percentage points for Obama in 2012 and Trump in 2016. Democrats can’t credibly blame Howard County’s enormous 41-point swing in just four years on a last-minute letter to Congress, voter ID laws or Russia-sponsored Facebook ads.

Howard County, about 150 miles northeast of Des Moines along the state’s border with Minnesota, is 98 percent white. Only 13 percent of residents age 25 and over hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Median household income in the county in 2015 was $49,869. The largest employers in Cresco, the county seat, include the Donaldson Company, an air filter manufacturer whose local workers belong to the United Auto Workers union, and Featherlite, which makes aluminum livestock and utility trailers.

Barack Obama speaks to members of the United Auto Workers union during a presidential campaign stop in Dubuque, Iowa, in 2007.

AP IMAGES

Contrary to the “Trump Country” stereotype, Howard County isn’t drowning in manufacturing job losses, high unemployment or an opioid crisis. In fact, its unemployment rate the month before the election was just 2.9 percent. The main gripe? Stagnant wages — and a gnawing feeling that people have been working harder and for longer hours while other parts of the country reaped much bigger rewards during the recovery from the Great Recession.

“When Trump said, ‘What the hell do you have to lose?’ a lot more people heard it than just African-Americans,” said Pat Murray, a Democrat who worked 29 years as a press brake operator at Donaldson and now serves on the Howard County Board of Supervisors. “Our wages have been stagnant, and our insurance has gone backwards,” he told me, citing the union-sponsored health plan’s surging deductibles. “We work 50, 60 hours a week because there’s no one to hire.”

“[Obama] saved us from another Great Depression, but it never really got back to the working class,” said Murray, who calls himself “as anti-Trump as they come” but says Clinton’s campaign took places like Howard County for granted in the November election. “The average Joe Blow isn’t hung up on the stock market. Democrats always say we’re going to fight for the working people. The last few elections, we haven’t shown that at all.”

Howard County, Iowa, encompasses a number of small towns like Lime Springs (left), Cresco (center) and Chester.

Bill Whittaker / Jon Roanhaus / Bobak Ha’Eri

Autopsies of the Clinton campaign frequently cite her inattention to Michigan and Wisconsin as a cause of her loss. But her failure to connect in places like Howard County probably had less to do with which states she visited — after all, she spent plenty of time in Iowa — and more to do with her image and message.

Clinton came to be seen as establishment and dishonest in a year when a plurality of voters wanted change. But in a baffling display of obliviousness, she spent much of the fall jetting between big-city rallies, which were often followed by closed-door, high-dollar fundraisers. She spent precious little time making her economic case before people in midsize cities or small towns like Cresco. And even though she outspent Trump $6.5 million to $2.2 million on Iowa’s airwaves, her ads were more about Trump’s antics than about how she would raise voters’ wages or how Trump might lower them — effectively ceding that ground to Trump’s utopian jobs promises and inescapable slogan.

Neil Shaffer, a farmer and watershed conservation official who chairs the county GOP, credits Trump with flipping the party’s script on trade. “We’re skeptical of career politicians,” he said, likening Trump’s outsider appeal in the so-called Driftless Region to that of former-wrestler-turned-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura. “For however many years, Democrats and union leaders denounced NAFTA. All of a sudden, you had a Republican candidate saying that it’s all for big business. The average working person said, ‘Hey, here’s someone who’s not going by the party book, he’s breaking the mold.'”

As for Clinton? “She was elitist, was what I kept hearing,” said Laura Hubka, a Navy veteran and ultrasound technician who chaired the county’s Democratic party and knocked on doors for Clinton. “We’re a blue-collar town.”

Voters in Iowa show their support for Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump during the 2016 election.

GETTY IMAGES

Last month, Hubka resigned her post as chair and published a scathing blog post about Democrats’ aloofness to voters in places like Howard County and the party’s failure to come to grips with the election result. “Can we just stop and admit we’re part of the problem?” she vented to me. “People who were longtime supporters didn’t want to hear what we had to say anymore.”

Holly Rasmussen was one of those who had reached a breaking point. An Obama voter, Rasmussen cited the way that ill-tailored new federal rules applied to her tiny Cresco cosmetology school as a driving factor in her defection to Trump. “Honestly, when we founded the school, I got to teach. But the last few years, I had to spend all day in my office because I’ve had to file campus crime reports,” she said. “And if we had two people who didn’t repay their loans out of the eight students we had, [the Department of Education] made it tougher for us to get financial aid. Because of the regulations, we had to close. Now, we’re just a salon and spa.”

So why did Rasmussen vote for Obama and Trump? “Just to shake up Washington, to be honest. We’ve been in a rut for so long. People here don’t want to be multi-gajillionaires. They just want to get paid a decent wage,” she said, noting that her 2016 choice “might have been different” had Bernie Sanders won the nomination.

Howard County wasn’t always a train wreck for Clinton. Ironically, in the epic 2008 Democratic primary campaign, Clinton ran as the candidate of labor and small-town America, rallying union halls, downing whiskey and beer for the cameras, and blasting Obama’s speeches as “elitist and out of touch.” She came in third place statewide and only carried 22 of Iowa’s 99 counties in that year’s caucuses. But Howard was one of the 22 she won.

By 2016, however, Howard County morphed into Sanders territory. The Vermont senator struck a nerve with his calls for a working-class revolution and his attacks on Clinton’s Wall Street ties and shifting rhetoric on the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“I was shocked. I didn’t think a person would show up for Bernie,” said Murray, who chaired his precinct’s caucus. “But when I showed up, it was full of Bernie people.”

One such Bernie-crat was Mike Bigley, who spent 30 years as a Donaldson machinist and worked his way up from shop steward to president of UAW Local 120.1 “I liked his ideas on healthcare and free tuition,” said Bigley. “On caucus night, we had a majority for Bernie. Some of the union guys thought Clinton did crooked stuff to win [the nomination]. You hear a lot of things around the factory floor.”

“The Bernie people thought Hillary stole it,” concedes Murray, who said those voters’ distrust of Clinton carried over to November. “I’d say probably two-thirds of them went to Trump,” Murray said. Bigley, a self-described die-hard Democrat, said he wasn’t among them.

A Clinton supporter, left, and the candidate herself in Iowa in 2016.

GETTY IMAGES

By the fall, anti-Clinton fervor in the community had reached a crescendo. The week before the election, emboldened Trump supporters took out a full-page newspaper ad and rented out the historic, city-owned Cresco Theatre and Opera House — a long-ago vaudeville haunt — for screenings of conservative filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “Hillary’s America” and the Benghazi film “13 Hours.” To Democrats’ dismay, the theater was packed.

For years to come, pundits and political scientists will debate whether working-class white voters’ sharp turn towards Trump had more to do with economic or racial resentment. Incidentally, despite its nearly all-white population, Howard County occupies a unique place in the history of America’s attitudes on race.

Riceville, on the western edge of Howard County, happens to be where, in 1968, elementary school teacher Jane Elliott pioneered the famous “Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes” classroom exercise that’s still used in diversity training courses today. Elliott’s exercise caused an uproar in the tiny town, made her an outcast in the teacher’s lounge and even resulted in violence and racial epithets aimed at her family. Now 83 and living a few miles down the road in Osage, Elliott told me she blames Trump’s election on a backlash against “eight years of a black man in the White House.”

But neither Howard County’s party chairs nor its left-leaning labor leaders cited racial resentment as a driving force behind the community’s seismic shift to Trump in 2016. “That pail doesn’t hold water,” said Shaffer, the GOP chairman, who eagerly points out that the county voted overwhelmingly for the nation’s first African-American president — twice.

The idea that voters who previously cast a ballot for Obama could not have been motivated, at least in part, by race when they made their 2016 choice has been disputed extensively in academic studies. But in my conversations with Howard County voters of both parties, the common thread of support for Obama and for Trump was resounding: anti-elitism.

Presidential candidate Donald Trump arrives to speak at an Iowa campaign event in 2016.

GETTY IMAGES

Democrats’ next path to 270 Electoral College votes may not run through Iowa. After all, Trump prevailed by a slightly larger margin in the Hawkeye State than he did in Texas. But Democrats don’t have the luxury of simply writing off voters like the ones they lost in Howard County.

If Democrats want to retake the House in 2018, they’ll need to win congressional districts like Iowa’s 1st, which includes Howard County.2 The 1st District narrowly re-elected rough-around-the-edges GOP Rep. Rod Blum last November. More importantly, Howard County’s Trump-curious Democrats have countless analogs in states that will decide the 2020 election: not just in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, but in Minnesota and Maine as well.

One year later, Rasmussen, the cosmetology school owner who previously voted for Obama, doesn’t have “massive regrets” about her vote for Trump. “For the most part, he’s doing a good job. I wish sometimes he’d stifle his Twitter account, but I’m not surprised by any of it. If you watched it, that’s kind of how he was,” she shrugged.

To rebuild lost trust and win support, future Democrats face the twin challenges of, first, persuading voters that Trump is on track to negatively affect their livelihoods and, second, reclaiming the mantle of working-class hero that every successful Democratic nominee has embraced since vaudeville ruled the stage at the Cresco Theatre.

“My dad told me, ‘You’ll never be rich enough to be a true-blue Republican,’” Bigley recalled. “Now there’s too much darn money in politics, on both sides.” His advice to his party? “Get out here in the sticks and roll around with us common folks for a week or two.”

[robyncbrown-blog]

Beer Industry Targets Health-Conscious Women

What is sweet and bubbly that health-conscious women love to drink? Definitely NOT your standard IPA.

Big beer companies have recently had a great decline in sales due to the rise in trends toward more health conscious and self-conscious lifestyles, most particularly in women. With this shift, many companies within the industry have already begun to hop on the coattail of this trend by changing their strategies and introducing many new line extensions to find a way to satisfy that market to make up the revenue loss resulting from the decline in the purchase of beer products.

This has led way for conglomerates, such as Anheuser-Busch InBev and Molson Coors, to create a bunch of new products and hope that something will stick. MillerCoors is making wine spritzers, Natural Light launched boozy strawberry lemonade, Michelob Ultra introduced a keto drink; the list goes on.

As time went on, many news editors and journalists began writing on how these new spritzer-styled fruit drinks are “all the rage” or mentioning how they embody the “perfect taste of summer’ for the incoming season, to attract more consumers to indulge in the new trend. If women are desiring a drink that has a light and fruity flavor, that’s fine, but what is most concerning is the way they are marketing these products as “fairly guilt-free” fruity infusions.

There was even a bit, from Michelob Ultra itself that went on to say: “Now you can have a delicious flavored beer and eat your cake, too (after your spin class).”

The author of the article even mentions how “marketing like this has a fruit-infused, trickle-down effect. It reinforces negative stereotypes about women, what we drink, and why we drink it. It’s bad for us, and it’s bad for business” and I completely agree.

Yet, the kicker on top of it all is the idea that these sweet spritzer type, fruit-infused of drinks are a healthier option, considering it is nothing but a placebo effect on the consumer. In all actuality, these drinks contain a much greater amount of calories and sugar than that of any standard beer product on the market. This is unfortunate because the misconception for providing a healthier option will come to light fairly soon enough, only to harm these brands in the long-run if they do not fulfill this promise to their consumers. However, this may also help the smaller crat-brew markets who can actually follow through on this promise of a healthier option.

From this, what I’d like to know is whether or not this is just a fad or if spritzer styled/fruit-infused alcoholic drinks will be in for the long haul, and if so, how will these product lines transform to become more inclusive for the broader market?

[libertariantaoist]

Empires are continually confronted with the prospect of rebellions: that is  one of the occupational hazards of imperialism. The Romans had to contend with  those contentious Judeans, whose revolt arguably gave rise to one of the word’s  great religions. The British lost control of their American colonies to a motley  crew of libertarians. And now the Americans, in turn, are struggling with …  well, something quite different.

The historical pattern follows the old Roman/British tradition: the imperial  power launches a campaign to acquire territory, it conquers its enemies, and  occupies the vanquished nation(s). The goal is not only to take new lands and  spread the authority of the State beyond its traditional boundaries, but also  to extract wealth from the defeated in the form of taxes, raw goods, and markets  closed to competitors.

In the case of the American Empire, however, things have been turned on their  heads, and nothing dramatizes this bizarre inversion more than the conflict  now playing out between the US and, principally, Germany over the future of  the NATO alliance.

When President Donald Trump, on his first overseas tour, lectured the assembled  NATO-crats on their failure to pay their “fair share” of the alliance’s costs,  the looks on their faces were a study in contemptuous annoyance. When he failed  to reassert Washington’s commitment to Article  Five of the NATO treaty, it was as if the Pope had refuted the divinity  of Christ. The failure to reach accord on trade and “climate change” exacerbated  the split in the Western alliance, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was quick  to respond.

“Speaking in a packed beer tent in Munich on Sunday, after a Group of Seven  summit in Sicily and a NATO meeting in Brussels – both dominated by tensions  with Trump – Merkel spoke with surprising frankness.

"’The times when we could fully count on others are over to a certain  extent. I have experienced this in the last few days,’ Merkel said.

"’We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands, of  course in friendship with the United States, in friendship with Great Britain,  with other neighbors wherever possible, also with Russia,’ she continued.

"’But we must know that we need to fight for our future ourselves,  as Europeans, for our destiny.’"

Merkel’s contention that the US – and, secondarily, Britain – cannot be “counted  on” raises the question: counted on to do what? Since Germany has failed to  fulfill its obligation to increase military spending to at least 2 percent of  GDP, Merkel’s complaint opens her up to the charge of hypocrisy. Aside from  that, however, one has to launch a more fundamental inquiry: isn’t the destiny  of a nation always in the hands of its own citizens?

Well, no, it isn’t always so. A conquered nation, one that has been defeated  in battle and subsumed by a foreign occupier, has lost control of its destiny  – and that was certainly the case for Germany after World War II, when it was  divided into zones of occupation by the victorious Allied powers, and only half  reunited during the long cold war with the Soviet Union.

The fall of Soviet communism, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the reunification  of Germany ushered in a new era, one that is only now starting to be reflected  in the geopolitical arrangements of post-cold war Europe. It took a while –  politicians always lag far behind changing realities – but history has now caught  up with the NATO-crats, who find that the rationale for their existence has  evaporated under their feet.

Despite the barrage of Atlanticist propaganda disgorged daily from the media,the  thinktanks and the special interests that fund them, there is no possibility  that the Russians are about to march into Paris – or even Warsaw. The Russian  “threat” is a bogeyman, and not a very convincing one at that. When John McCain  opines  that Putin is a bigger threat to the West than ISIS, one wonders if the families  of those killed and maimed in Manchester – or any of the other dozens of European  cities hit by terrorists  –  would agree with him.

The original foundations of the NATO alliance were built on alleged military  necessity: now that this argument is no longer viable, the NATO-crats are struggling  to build new foundations that are fundamentally political – the creation of  a European super-state. Of course, these two concepts are historically linked:  the European project – aided and in large part originated by  the US – was born as a adjunct to and in support of NATO as a bulwark against  the spread of Soviet influence. Yet the campaign to create a European “patriotism,”  a sense of nationality out of the disparate peoples of the continent, was always  buttressed by the one factor that all nations depend on: fear. Fear, that is,  of conquest by outsiders, aliens who would ride roughshod over their lands and  traditions.

With the disappearance of the Soviet Union, this fear has largely dissipated.  After all, the Russians are arguably half-European, at the very least: they  are less alien than, say, the Turks, who enjoy NATO membership. During the cold  war, the prospect of being assimilated into the Soviet borg conjured visions  of the cultural transformation – and ruin – of ancient societies. Absent the  ideological other-ness of “Putinism,” whatever that may be, no one imagines  that Russian soldiers are about to rampage across Europe, burning  non-Orthodox  churches and forcing everyone to memorize Putin’s favorite aphorisms.

And so the European project is now reduced to a cold abstraction: the effort  to create a sense of “European-ness” over and above the traditional national  identities. This campaign was decisively defeated in Britain: Brexit buried  it, and populist insurgencies from Catalonia to Hungary threaten to upend it  once and for all. In Britain, the London-based elites marched with EU flags,  but this abstruse allegiance was rejected by ordinary people, i.e. the working  class, and the same pattern is persistent throughout Europe.

Merkel’s reassertion of Germany’s “destiny” as the product of its own exertions  may make her European neighbors nervous: after all, such invocations conjure  unfortunate historical allusions that may, in themselves, lead to the further  deterioration of the European project. Aside from that, however, her remarks  illustrate the trade-off that Atlanticism, so-called, involved: the Europeans  placed their destiny in Washington’s hands in return for what they imagined  to be military and economic security.

What this meant, in concrete terms, was the presence of American troops on  German soil – at a cost of billions, paid for by us – in exchange for Berlin  luxuriating under the US nuclear umbrella. The terms of this rather lopsided  bargain allowed them to pour resources into an extensive welfare state that  is now taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees from America’s wars in the  Middle East. It also meant favorable – i.e. one-sided – trade agreements with  Washington, which allowed, say, German cars to flood the US market while keeping  their tariff and regulatory walls high enough to keep out American competitors.

Similar arrangements were created in Eastasia, where the Asian “tigers” – South  Korea, Japan, Taiwan – traded their separate destinies for one-way “free trade”  and security guarantees.

This reversed the historical pattern followed by empires of the past: instead  of looting our conquered provinces, they looted us. Rather than exploiting our  conquests, we were exploited by them. It was a Bizarro World version of imperialism,  in which everything went out and nothing came in. In the process, dozens of  tripwires were erected, any one of which could set off another world war.

This was rationalized during the cold war era as the only alternative to subjugation  by Moscow, but today – despite the best efforts of the Democratic party and  John McCain to resurrect the cold war – that rhetoric rings hollow. The “empire  of the bottomless purse,” as the writer Garet Garrett dubbed our postwar  imperium, has reached the end of its supposedly limitless generosity: the purse  is empty, and the empire is facing foreclosure.

So I say: let Germany have its destiny back. It was never ours to begin with.  And let us take our own destiny back from the hands of our shiftless, lazy,  back-stabbing “allies.” The lesson of this chapter in our history – which is  coming to a close, despite Merkel’s tears and those of our Atlanticists – is  that empires oppress not only the conquered, but also the conquerors.

[tshirtshoping-blog]

Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt As most people are aware, Sunday marks my last day in a Crat jersey, something that saddens me. I want to take this opportunity to thank as many people as I can and also to tell you about some of my experiences, as my flight leaves straight after the game, with not even time for one more delicious Estrella Galicia and the Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt! Other than the beer, I will miss each and every one of you that I’ve met over the last four months and I appreciate how everyone has gone out of their way to look after the gringo. Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt, Guys tee, Ladies tee, Hoodie and Sweater

[musicalmelody]

Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt

Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt

Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt

As most people are aware, Sunday marks my last day in a Crat jersey, something that saddens me. I want to take this opportunity to thank as many people as I can and also to tell you about some of my experiences, as my flight leaves straight after the game, with not even time for one more delicious Estrella Galicia and the Burpees I Thought You Said…

[bantamsquash]

Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt

Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt

Burpees I Thought You Said Beer Please Shirt

As most people are aware, Sunday marks my last day in a Crat jersey, something that saddens me. I want to take this opportunity to thank as many people as I can and also to tell you about some of my experiences, as my flight leaves straight after the game, with not even time for one more delicious Estrella Galicia and the Burpees I Thought You Said…

[beerlovetoronto]

REGAL LAGER ~ ROYAL CITY BREWING

Regal lager is an unfiltered lager (wouldn’t that make it a kellerbier?) that has been dry-hopped with Hallertau. Sampled on draught the beer poured a clear bright golden yellow with a generous off white sudsy head, which left nice lacing. The nose was ready with some citrus and hops. This is more malty than I would usually expect from a lager, but it is nicely balanced with the hop bitterness. There are also some bright citrus notes before a slightly piney finish. Quite drinkable.

5% from Guelph, Ontario 12 IBU

[ritzenhoffdesign-blog]

New Post has been published on Ritzenhoff BV

New Post has been published on http://www.ritzenhoff.nl/geen-categorie/409/

Ritzenhoff op de Dutch Crat Beer Conference

http://www.ritzenhoff.nl/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Craft-Video.mp4

[belgianbeerday]

SABROSO Craft Beer, Taco & Music Festival Is this an all ages event? NO, this is a 21 and up event due to the unlimited tasting portion of the crat beer/wine portion of the festival.

[bevvcom]

Being a Craft Beer Brewer Is Just as Chill as You Think 

http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read/first-person-shooter-beer-microbrewery via @vicecanada @vicemedia

[texasbeernerd]

Santa's Private Reserve by Rogue Ales

Decembeer! You know Santa Claus is a beer drinker. Not only is he of Nordic/Germanic stock but also how better to unwind after a long night of delivering toys to the kids of the world? Santa's Private Reserve is an American amber ale but not exactly your typical one (by typical I mean something like Fat Tire) and that's a good thing. The beer has a good, robust malty body that reminds me of semi-sweet dark bread. But what lingers is the finish which is a nice and hoppy 65 IBU and with a piney flavor. The spruce-heavy aroma helps to accent this quality too and makes the whole package very Christmasy. Santa's Private Reserve is a good beer and I'm glad I decided to try it for the first time. When I think ambers, I usually think boring but this is definitely not the case here. I'll have to get a full six-pack next year. 

[brewgiehowser]

Sierra Nevada / Ninkasi "Double Latte" Coffee Milk Stout: I've been saving this one for the finale. I have high expectations for this beer because I really like Ninkasi and I really like my stouts. Nice bouquet of lactose and cocoa powder in the nose blanketing medium-roast coffee and roasted  malt. Creamy. Lactose makes up much of the flavor profile with support from chocolate and coffee. Sweetness upfront with roasted malt falling on the backend with a lingering finish. Medium-plus creamy body with a fair amount of carbonation. Well balanced and highly palatable. One of my favorites from the box.

[99bottlesblog]

Beer #51: Well, It's Certainly Not "Beer" –OR– Arrogant Bastard Ale

Vital Statistics

First Brewed: 1997

Bitterness: Classified (we’ll get to that…)

Alcohol by Volume: 7.2%

Brewery: Stone Brewing Co., Escondido, CA

I’ve talked a lot before about the decisions that breweries make to market their beer. Brewing good beer is only one part of the much larger equation when it comes to getting beer out into the world that people will actually buy. A good name and marketing strategy can make all the difference in the world, even if your beer isn’t that great (see: Super Bowl beer commercials).

Of course, not every marketing strategy needs to be complex and expensive. Over Christmas break, my uncle Shawn told me a story about a grocery store in his hometown of Tracy, California that carried its own brand of products. In order to avoid confusion, all these items were labeled the same: yellow packaging with plain black writing that simply stated what was inside. Imagine a box that just said “Rice” or a can that said “Beans.” You get the idea. You also can probably see where this is going.

Because this store (and I wish I remembered the name) had a version of virtually every product, they even had “Beer.” Just that. Imagine a plain yellow can with big black letters reading “Beer” stamped on the front. No more, no less. To me, this might be the single greatest marketing strategy of all time, simply because there’s no smoke and mirrors. You get a can of “Beer,” and you get a can of beer.

There’s beauty in that simplicity. For all the muss and fuss over legal rights to a beer’s name or the logo design, it certainly must seem worth it to put out “Beer” and just get it done with. “Whaddya want?” the gruff store manager says, “Beer? Yeah, we got it on aisle two. No, I don’t know the bitterness. Look, ya want beer or not? Then drink up, turkey.” Those were the days!

Nowadays we have the simultaneous blessing and curse of choice. You may remember beers that you liked from past tastings, or think of some styles you’ve heard are good from friends (or enemies), but there’s still the moment where you have to reach up to that shelf and take something home with you.

So since “Beer” has already been done, breweries have to come up with new and exciting ways to get you to pick their beers over the other options on the shelf. Mostly it’s interesting names, artwork or bottle design (I’ll never forget Lucky Buddha) that do the trick. All of this is designed to appeal to consumers so they’ll actually want to try the beer. But what if a brewery actively told people they wouldn’t like their beer? “That would be madness!” you exclaim, clutching your pearls and fanning yourself.

Well, keep clutchin’ and fannin’ because Stone Brewing Co. came up with Arrogant Bastard Ale, a beer that literally dares you to drink it. The beer-swilling gargoyle on the front of the label leers out with a challenging gaze, and the words “You’re Not Worthy” are emblazoned beneath. But it’s just a name, right? A clever gimmick? Well, it might be a gimmick, but Stone digs in deep with their gimmick. Like most Lagunitas beers, Arrogant Bastard features a lengthy bit of writing about the glories of their beer, and the superiority it has over us mere, weak-minded drinkers. I’ll spare you from reprinting the whole thing here, but some of it is definitely worth noting.

The whole message on the back contains thoughts like “It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth,” and “Perhaps you think multi-million-dollar ad campaigns made a beer taste better.” As you read the first paragraph of this little note, you’d be perfectly right in thinking that Stone had nothing but disdain for the brewing public.

But there’s a bit more depth to this beer, as the second paragraph indicates. It says “At Stone Brewing, we believe that pandering to the lowest common denominator represents the height of tyranny – a virtual form of keeping the consumer barefoot and stupid.” What’s this? Some affection for the common man? We must read on! “Brought forth upon an unsuspecting public in 1997, Arrogant Bastard Ale openly challenged the tyrannical overlords who were brazenly attempting to keep Americans chained in the shackles of poor taste.”

So with all the information in mind, Arrogant Bastard’s mission becomes all the more clear. It’s not that they hate the consumer; rather, they hate what the consumer has been reduced to. It’s a noble thought, and a spirit that courses through the veins of the entire craft brewing industry, though I find Stone’s style pretty off-putting. I have much of the same mindset about beer, but I don’t think there’s really a need to be so confrontational. Maybe I’m too soft, because I know plenty of people who love this beer and everything about it.

As I’ve said plenty of times before, nothing about this whole ethos matters one whit if the beer isn’t any good. Arrogant Bastard poured into the glass a dark reddish-brown, with a thick light tan head resting nicely on top. As it poured, the strong aromas of toasted malt became immediately present. Underneath the malt, there were hints of prunes and spices I’d normally associate with winter seasonal beers. Most notably, I didn’t detect any hops, though Stone says the bitterness of this beer is “classified,” so there’s a possibility they neglected to use them.

I was, of course, proven wrong. Bitterness is the name of the game with Arrogant Bastard’s flavor. Gone were any undercurrents of fruit. Instead, the flavor was extremely bitter, almost to the point where it wasn’t pleasant. At face value, this seems to be the only aspect of Arrogant Bastard’s taste, but if you’re looking for it you can find some underlying spices and the bready malt. Neither are present to any significance, however, so steer clear of this beer if you don’t enjoy a full serving of hops.

In the end, Stone’s aggression makes a lot of sense. Arrogant Bastard is definitely a beer made without mass appeal in mind, and rather than keep that implied like most breweries, Stone puts it right out front. It’s the same honesty we saw way back when with “Beer,” albeit a little more creative.

I don’t know if I’d drink Arrogant Bastard again, but that’s more because of my personal tastes than a knock on their quality. But Stone doesn’t really care what I think. The bottom of the label says “Questions or comments? If you don’t like this beer, keep it to yourself – we don’t want to hear from any sniveling yellow-beer-drinkin’ wimps, ‘cause this beer wasn’t made for you.” Fair enough. I’ll leave it on the shelf.

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