FOOLCiRCLE

I received th following email from the Brewer’s Association today and thought I’d pass it on to all my Delaware homies.

Dear Delaware Beer Activists and Homebrewers,

Delaware small brewers need your help! Please read the following information provided by the small, independent breweries of Delaware:

A proposal currently moving in the legislature would raise the state tax on beer almost 50%. The small brewers of Delaware are asking you TO CALL YOUR STATE SENATOR TODAY to ask him/her to oppose this unprecedented increase as an extremely harmful measure to the state’s small craft breweries.

At this point, this proposal has not been formally drafted as legislation, but will be amended into an existing bill and voted on Monday, June 30.

NOW IS THE TIME TO CALL YOUR SENATOR – CALLING IS THE QUICKEST, MOST EFFECTIVE METHOD AS TIME IS OF THE ESSENCE!

For contact information for your Senator, click here.
You will find links to the Senate roster of members. Simply find your Senator and click on their link for contact information.

Following are several suggested points to make to your elected representatives:

* Delaware has one of the most vibrant and varied craft brewing communities on the east coast.
* Delaware’s small breweries are good for the economy and very good for tourism. Thousands of visitors journey to the state every year to visit these breweries and experience their unique products where they are made.
* Small brewers are facing astronomical costs increases across the board – from malt and hops to energy and packaging materials – nearly 40% over last year. If a further tax burden is placed upon Delaware’s small breweries in this challenging economy it will surely put many of those small businesses at risk.
* A tax increase of this magnitude will deter start-up breweries from considering locating in Delaware, as it will affect existing breweries’ ability to expand, stalling job growth and possibly forcing Delaware breweries to relocate to states that have more competitive tax structures.
* The small, independent breweries of this state need their legislator’s support now more than ever.

Thanks for supporting Delaware’s small breweries!

Sincerely,
Charlie Papazian
President Brewers Association
charlie@brewersassociation.org

Gary Glass
Director
American Homebrewers Association
gary@brewersassociation.org
www.beertown.org

So I went online and looked up the local Senator. Of course I was a little bit stupid and tried to call Joe Biden the federal senator first, but eventually I found my man. He wasn’t there when I called, so I wrote the following email

To: ‘Harris.McDowell@state.de.us’
Subject: Delaware small brewers need your help!

Senator McDowell – I am a member of your district, so I thought I would bring this to your attention. I was just informed by the Brewer’s Association that there is a proposed tax increase of 50% on beer for the state of Delaware. Supposedly at this point this proposal has not been formally drafted as legislation, but will be amended into an existing bill and voted on Monday, June 30. That is this Monday. I tried to call you momentarily ago to make sure you were aware of this increase but was not able to reach you, so I am writing this email instead. Please do not vote to pass this tax increase. The local beer scene really can not afford to be hit with a huge tax increase like this. After one of the largest increases in raw materials , packaging material , and energy costs with an overall 40% increase to make the same product as a year ago, the last thing the local brewers need is to receive a huge 50% tax increase. Do you remember before we had local beer, before Dogfish Head started in 1995? I do, and look how much things have changed now! We have Dogfish Head, Stewart’s, two Iron Hill locations, Fordham and Twin Lakes. The local beer scene is only getting bigger and better, to the point of people choosing their vacation destinations based off our beer scene and others being presented the opportunity of starting new and growing beer businesses in our local community.

The small, independent breweries of this state need their legislator’s support now more than ever. Please do NOT vote for the 50% tax increase on beer. I thank you for your time.

Brian Moore

I suggest that anyone that reads this before Monday June 30th who is a Delaware resident do something similar. For all I care you can just cut and paste sections of this entry. This tax would be outrageous and ridiculous. Thanks for listening.

This isn’t my normal kind of thing, but it grabbed my attention all the same, and well…yeah.

Anyway, I was directed to this website and read the challenge: draw yourself as a teen. I’m not claiming to be a great drawer by any means, but I like to draw and used to do it all the time. I flipped through a couple people’s links (there are over 350 of them as of now) and laughed (in a good way) at what I saw and thought ‘I can do that.’ So I thought back to being a teen and all the different levels of Bri-Bri there were, so I kind of chose the book-end teen years (13 & 18) and now (30). Hopefully you guys will get a giggle out of this and maybe even someone else will give it ago.

So, I found an old 3.5″ disk the other day that was labeled with a bunch of my old class coursed from the University of Delaware.

 

These were from like 2001-2002 and saved in some wacky WordPerfect file format that I couldn’t get to open. Well, with the help of my brother he open up what was my Freshman English “term” paper which happened to be on Prohibition and how I tried to show how it was a failure. It’s not an awesome paper, but I share it with you all the same. I honestly remember getting an ‘A’ on the paper, though I think the teacher chewed it apart. She was a hottie young red-headed student-teacher who I think thought we were all idiots – whatever. Anyway, here it is in a PDF format, read it if your interested, don’t if your not.

So today is St. Patrick’s Day and I decided to let my Irish hang out a little, can you see it?

I went traditional with dinner with corned beef, boiled cabbage, mixed root vegetable medley (potatoes, carrots, garlic, turnips, parsnips), and soda bread. Karen actually made the corned beef and root vegetable medley on Sunday, I made the cabbage, and Sweeney’s bakery made the bread. For libations we enjoyed Irish whiskey from Jameson, Irish Cream from Bailey, and a stout from Fool Circle that pretended to be Irish today dressed-up in a Guinness glass. All was quite delicious.

So today was supposed to be the “official” release date of the new Honey Oatmeal Stout (HOS) that my brother and I brewed together. With the timing of it being ready just in time for St. Paddy’s we figured what better date then on the day. Well, we each got a case and I finished my last one tonight, I guess I wasn’t very good at waiting. At least I saved one for tonight. In all honesty, my friend had us over on Saturday for Irish supper and we drank over half of them that night, so at least it was in the right thread. Anyway, I thought the HOS we brewed turned out pretty good. It was about 6.5% alcohol, a little sweet, and a little roasty. The carbonation came up on it nicely, the honey was present in the aroma and apparently in the taste, though it could have just finished a little high. The roast, toast, and chocolate biscuits were all held back but available to add flavor. There could have possibly been more oatmeal to make it even creamier, though it was creamy regardless. It reminded me slightly of Garrett’s Black Honey Ale, and you all know I love me some black honeys. I’d say this beer was pretty good, but I bet we could brew it better.

Last Friday (03.07.08) was the fourth installment out of five for the ever so popular 128 “Whatever We Choose” of All Time Non-Seeded, Randomly Drawn Tournament. This time – – “Hot Chicks”!

Click on the image above for for a larger view.

So this was number four of five, what were all the rest? First was Front-Men, then there were Villains, followed by Heroes, and now Hot Chicks. Front-Men was first and was born by accident on the way to DFH one time. Hot Chicks was actually brought up at the same time as Front-Men but was put on the back burner. Then one day I was daydreaming about Venger from the D&D cartoon series and the Villains list began, and basically to “balance” the Villains list the Heroes list came to be. So that’s four, what’s the fifth tournament? Are you sure you want to know? Really?

The fifth is a monster, 512 of the Greatest of All Time Non-Seeded, Randomly Drawn Tournament. 512 greatest what? Well, all 512 players from the four tournaments are going to get thrown into one pot and we’re having the battle-royal-no-holds-barrel-tournament of the…day. When? Hell if I know, maybe Labor Day weekend and we can bring this one around full circle (Fool Circle!) to when it all began. A normal (128) one of these tournament take a long time, like six hours plus, so this jammy might take a full twenty-four hours…? Oh God I hope not, but I’d do it anyway!

Anyway, back to this tournament. We had a ton of names to start with this time and we had to wean them down to the top 128. Again the names were randomly drawn from a bowl to flush out the brackets, two at a time and then that was the match-up. After the initial 64 match-ups the tournament would run as a normal tournament would, well except for out “nah” rule. Here’s a re-cap of our “nah” rules in case you haven’t understood them yet; in the first round each of us were given two “power nahs” in which we were able to say “nah” to any match-up that was pulled out of the bowl. If we used a “power nah” then that match-up would be thrown back into the bowl to be re-pulled in a different combination later. This was typically used to keep heavy hitters from going up against each other too early. For example, if Superman and Optimus Prime went up against each other in the first round then someone might use a “power nah” to throw their names back into the bowl so a big decision like that wouldn’t have to be made too early in the game. After the first round each of us was also given two regular “nahs” that could be used in the second, third, and fourth rounds. What these “nahs” did was basically give the loser of a match-up a second chance. The winner of the match-up had to get a 2 out of 3 vote to stay in verses the normal 50/50 chance – make sense?

Now remember, none of us fully agree with this, this is just what happen when the three of us ran this tournament. It would probably be different with any three people and obviously with any random drawing. There were actually a couple really tough match-ups, a couple that some people totally disagreed with, and a couple that I looked at afterwards and thought ‘how did that happen?’ Regardless, I’m not going to argue with these results, but I am going to say there were a few surprises. If you don’t recognize some of the names go ahead and ask or look them up yourselves, you may be surprised who did and didn’t make the cut. Oh yeah, my spelling is extra extra bad this time. I’m horrible with spelling, horrible with names, and if I didn’t know there name (though I knew who they were) I was even worse with the spelling. Good luck, I’m sorry, enjoy!

So I am now officially a Certified BJCP Judge.

I received notice the other day that as of February 25, 2008 I was considered a Certified BJCP Judge – cool! Next up the ladder is a National judge, which is a judge with four times the experience of a Certified judge. I’m sure I’ll get there, just not anytime soon. So, I’ll enjoy being beyond Recognized for now.

So as of February 5th Karen has been cruising around in a new set of wheels.

It is a 2005 Saturn Vue with plenty of bells-and-whistles that was gently used that we purchased from our friends Aimee & Jace who just moved to the Bahamas (lucky bastards!). So far Karen has really enjoyed cruising around in her new wheels though she does reminisce about her blue Volkswagen Golf which she has had for the last 10 years and has served her well. Enjoy the pictures!

 

Oh, and if anyone knows if anyone is interested in buying a 1998 Volkswagen Golf K2 edition with approximately 130,000 miles and manual transmission let us know. This would be a great car for a new driver, college student, someone who wants to learn how to drive stick on a car they “won’t hurt”, or really anyone who just wants to bebop around town. This car is still in nice condition

So tonight I sampled four new beers that were brought back from GA for me from my bud Garrett.

First up was the Josephs Brau Double Bock Lager Winterfest – this was a big malty slightly sweet beer that I was expecting to be just OK but turned out to be a pretty good drinker. This isn’t an Oh Wow beer, but if it were local to me I would buy it at least seasonally.

Next was the Sweet Water Festive Ale – this was my least favorite out of the four tonight. Closest to an un-spiced (or lightly spiced) winter warmer style beer. Nothing was really wrong with this beer, it was just boring, and sometimes that’s all it takes.

After that was the Red Brick Winter Brew – this was a double chocolate porter is how I think they describer it. This was the beer that inspired the beers being brought back when I saw an empty 6-pack holder at Garrett’s and mentioned that looked good. And it was good. I drank it out of a snifter and slowly let it warm. As it warmed the flavors totally developed and came to the front, nice.

Finally was a beer I’ve wanted to try for a while, Terrapin’s Coffee Oatmeal Imperial Stout – (mmmmm, in a Homer Simpson voice). This beer smelt like what I remember the Opaque Espresso Stout smelling like, and it was quite good too. I wish they would have focused more on the base beer and a little less on the coffee, but I won’t complain. There wasn’t too much coffee, but a more developed stout could have helped carry this beer.

 Thanks so much Garrett for bringing me back beers. What can I say besides, you da man!

I got to try two of my favorite seasonal beers tonight, Weyerbacher’s Double Simcoe IPA and Troeg’s Nugget Nectar.

Both of these beers are huge hoppy beers, both very similar overall, yet completely different mainly in their hop profile. Weyerbacher labels their’s as a Double IPA while Troegs labels their’s an Imperial Amber. The Double Simcoe was way catty, even litter-boxy, with a definitive urine aftertaste and bite to it. The Nugget Nectar was similar in aroma at first, but the flavor was much more “traditional” citrus in its profile. The Simcoe grew to be way less catty and came across more piney. The Nugget developed quickly into an easy drinker. I bought a 4-pack of the Simcoe and a 6-pack of the Nugget, and I am already looking forward to my next 6-pack of Nugget Nectar. The next thing for me to find is a 6-pack (or case) of Sierra Nevada Bigfoot 2008!

I got a promotion at work, and today I start my new position.

Well, I officially start my new position. I enter the training period which is supposed to be only two weeks long. One week of soft training and one week of heavy training. But I’ll be moving from the Shipping and Receiving Regulator to the Purchasing Manager, a significant move. I’m actually quite excited to no longer be doing what I am doing, but also quite nervous about beginning the new position. I feel as if I could have a better training regime established I’d be more positive about the change, but for now it seems a little daunting. Change is good.